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Aug. 5, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:52
August 5, 2011, Friday, Hour #2
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By the way, folks, Obama did speak about the economy today on these wonderful job numbers, and he actually blamed the Arab Spring and the tsunami in Japan as two leading contributors to our own economic woes.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's open line Friday.
One of the greatest career risks taken by a major figure in media.
Me, Rush Limbaugh.
When we go to the phones on Friday, the show is yours.
It's up to you what we talk about.
I am a highly trained broadcast specialist.
You aren't.
You are rank amateurs, lovable rank amateurs.
And that's the risk.
Whatever you want to talk about, 800-282-2882 is the number.
Email El Rushbo at EIBnet.com.
Speaking of email, okay, Smarty Pants, how do you explain the market rally now?
And the market, it is seesawing.
Let me check here real quick.
It's up about 100 points now.
We're around that number.
Now it's plummeting at 80.
But still, it's up.
One of the things that's going, it's all due to Europe.
You wise acres, you think you're going to be able to trick me with these questions.
What's happening is the European Central Bank did decide to buy Spanish and Italian bonds.
Pure and simple.
European Central Bank is, and they're doing it with dollars.
They're right there at the Fed window.
They're buying Italian and Spanish bonds.
It's kind of like putting bubble gum in a dam that's cracked.
But that is what is going on.
Folks, do you realize, here's another, you know, we're full of numbers today and statistics.
And the numbers associated with the earnings of the 8,000 people who earn $10 million a year or more, that was confiscating all of their wealth.
That's like, I got a question.
Does that mean everything they own?
Yeah, if you take everything they confiscate what they have, you get $240 million, what they've earned.
And you can only do it one time.
You've wiped them out when you do that.
Do you realize that the United States economy, our GDP is smaller today than it was in 2007?
Think about that.
That is a stunning fact.
Now, probably just a coincidence that the Democrats took over Congress and thereby the economy in January of 2007.
And our economy, and when I say economy, I mean the private sector.
Economic growth.
GDP has gotten smaller every year since.
And it's, of course, joking, it's not a coincidence.
The Democrats take money out of the private sector.
They grow the government.
There is no way raising taxes on anybody is going to cause economic growth, which will lead to people being hired.
Raising taxes takes money out of the economy.
It simply does not mathematically work out that that will create economic growth.
How can you take money out of the economy and have it grow?
It doesn't.
Our GDP today is smaller than it was in 2007.
It's just another way of illustrating the utter disaster, the utter disaster that the Democrat Party is on private sector economics and people who are in the private sector.
And here's another number for you.
U.S. Our country added $239 billion in debt in a single day yesterday.
$239 billion in debt in a single day.
May I put that in perspective for you?
$239 billion in debt in one day is about five times the real cuts scheduled to occur over the next 10 years under the bipartisan debt deal.
By way of comparison, we are supposed to get, as a result of the debt deal, $900 billion in cuts, but they are spread out over 10 years, meaning most of them are unlikely to ever happen since they are scheduled for the out years and cannot be enforced on future Congresses.
But the regime was given $400 billion in new borrowing authority for this week, and they ate up 60% of it in a single day.
So you balanced $900 billion in cut.
Remember now, this was bipartisan.
This was Boehner and McConnell and Krauthammer Online and the Crystal Standard and the Wall Street Journal.
I mean, they were all in on this.
Oh, wow, Zowie, what a great deal.
This is the best we can do.
Golly, we got to do this.
We got to avoid default.
We got to avoid losing the AAA rating.
We got to do this deal while it's real spending cuts.
That will never happen.
More in debt in one day than the spending cuts over 10 years in the debt deal.
It's comical.
It's comical because it's the same old, same old.
It's the same old bag of you-know-what.
Right, Wendy.
That's exactly right.
Wendy uttered the word in there.
Obama, speaking to the veterans today at the Washington Navy Yard, we have two sound bites.
The bipartisan compromise on deficit reduction was important in terms of putting us on sounder fiscal footing going forward.
But let's be honest, the process was divisive.
It was delayed.
And if we want our businesses to have the confidence they need to get cash off the sidelines and invest and hire, then we've got to do better than that.
We've got to be able to work together to grow the economy right now and strengthen our long-term finances.
Both parties share power.
Both parties share responsibility for our progress.
This is not even worth comment, but this next one get this.
I'm directing the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs to design what we're calling a reverse boot camp.
Get this, Ned.
The problem is that right now we spend months preparing our men and women for life in the military, but we spend much less time preparing them for life after they get up.
So we'll devote more time on the back end to help our veterans learn about everything from benefits to how they can translate their military training into an industry-accepted credential.
In addition, we'll make it easier for veterans to go to their local one-stop career center and get help pursuing a career that fits them best.
The one-stop career center, where is the one nearest you?
Wendy, do you know where your one-stop career center is?
Snurdley, where's the one-stop career center?
Did you know the first thing Obama said that the returning veterans needed to learn about was benefits?
Benefits.
But the assumption that these people are so stupid and unqualified that they don't know how to get a job when they get home from service.
What an insult.
You military veterans, you're such idiots that you need Obama teaching you about benefits and how you can translate your military training into industry-accepted credentials.
Join a drug cartel.
Well, what do we train people to do?
Kill people and break things.
That's the credential.
He's so full of it.
By the way, John F. Kerry, who served in Vietnam, he's on television right now.
He said that the media has a responsibility not to cover the Tea Party.
Honest to gosh.
He said that the media has a responsible not to cover the Tea Party.
No, snurdle, they haven't lost their minds.
They never had minds.
And they're losing whatever they didn't have.
Or they're just, they're in an utter state of panic.
Pure and simple panic.
Let me get a call here.
Let's get a call in.
We never do this.
We never take a call in the opening segment.
But I want to do it.
We'll go to Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
Drew, thank you for waiting, sir.
You're next on the EIB network.
Hello.
Yes, hello, Rush.
Hayseed Higgs, Jesus, loving gun code and dittos to you.
Well, thank you very much, sir.
Rush, I hear all this talk about not, you know, we've got to go further.
We've got to have a plan to fix this.
And I know you're much too humble to acknowledge it or admit this or bring it up yourself, but there was a plan brought forth a couple of years ago with the first stimulus.
It was published in the Wall Street Journal.
And I would like to challenge our lawmakers to name that plan the Limbaugh Recovery Plan and to bring it up for a vote.
That is a common sense fix to the economy that nobody's talking about.
You're talking about my op-ed where I have a plan here for economic recovery.
Exactly.
How to use the stimulus.
That's it.
I tell you, I'm flattered that you recall that.
I really am, Drew.
For people that don't remember it, what I wrote in the Wall Street Journal is very simple.
Because Obama said he was open to any idea.
And this is early on in the days of the stimulus.
I said, you want bipartisanship?
Let's do real bipartisan.
You're going to spend a trillion dollars in your stimulus, and you got 53% of the vote.
So you get $530 billion, and you do with it what you want, but I get $470 billion, and I get to do with it what I want.
I'll cut taxes with mine, and I'll get rid of some regulations with mine, and I'll do a bunch of and let's compare notes and see.
Well, I never expected Obama to take anybody up on it, but what Drew here is suggesting is that maybe some lawmakers, some elected officials, go back and review that op-ed and call it the Limbaugh Recovery Plan and bring it up for a vote.
It had every ingredient in there, it had everything anybody could possibly want.
Working together, compromise, bipartisanship.
It had it all.
Plus, I had the added benefit of an idea that would work.
So I checked the email and a bunch of people, I don't believe you.
You're making it up.
Just like you make everything up.
Obama didn't blame the tsunami and he didn't blame all that other stuff that you said.
Okay, here he is this morning at the Washington Navy Yard, President Obama speaking about the roaring economy, the great unemployment news, and a bunch of other BS as well.
Let me start by saying a few words about our economy.
There is no doubt this has been a tumultuous year.
We weathered the Arab Spring's effect on oil and gas prices.
Golly, I. Japanese earthquake and tsunami's effect on supply chains.
Oh, yeah, ours, right?
Extraordinary economic uncertainty in Europe.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And recently, markets around the globe have taken a bumpy ride.
There you have it.
Arab Spring disrupted our oil and gas prices.
No, your drilling moratorium does all of that.
The Japanese tsunami's effect on supply chains, not ours.
His policies, those of the Democrat Party, have led us to where we are.
And this, this is happening.
In America, nearly 15% of the U.S. population relied on food stamps in May.
Food stamp use has risen to a record 45.8 million people.
The number of Americans using the government's supplemental nutrition assistance program, that's what food stamps are officially called.
SNAP is the acronym.
Shot to an all-time high of 45.8 million in May.
That's up 12% from a year ago, 34% higher than two years ago.
And these people want to try to tell us there's some kind of recovery going on.
Again, folks, our GDP, our economy, is smaller today than it was in 2007.
Okay, back to the audio soundbites.
It's fun time now.
I've told Cookie, just so you people know this, that we have a moratorium on any audio soundbites from hosts at MSNBC for a host of reasons.
But every moratorium is lifted occasionally now and then, even if temporarily.
Today is one of those days.
Last night, on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC, she talked about me and President Obama's birthday, and she played an audio clip of me.
On the president's 50th birthday today, it is now just the dead enders and the profiteers at this point still flogging this thing.
There is nobody who has any poll at all in conservative politics or in Republican politics at all.
Seriously?
Are you sure this is not from last?
This is this is this week.
This is from yesterday.
Okay, play it.
Tomorrow is Obama's birthday.
Not that we've seen any proof of that.
We haven't seen any proof of that.
They tell us August 4th is the birthday.
We haven't seen any proof of it.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Apparently it's not over.
Rush Limbaugh is still a birther?
I mean, isn't birtherism over now?
So she played a clip of me from a year ago that they said I said yesterday.
And I think they've got to be called on that.
This is no different than these people making up all those phony quotes during the NFL St. Louis Rams business.
Plus, taking it out of context, all of that has always been in context of a joke.
You know, the one that really got him.
Obama does have something in common with God.
He didn't have a birth certificate either.
Oh, that one got, folks, I remember that one, and that just ticked him off.
You can't believe how mad that one made him.
I'm surprised that she didn't go get that one.
As long as they're going to play clips from years ago.
So still, on the Rachel Maddow show, the guest is Mother Jones Magazine bureau chief David Korn.
Maddow says Rush Limbaugh is still a birther.
Isn't birtherism over now?
I think you put it well a few moments ago when you said it was really relegated to this realm of dead enders and people who just are, you know, one step away from Area 51 Roswell conspiracy theorists, or even maybe one step beyond.
You played Rush yesterday, but today, what did he do?
He compared Barack Obama to Robert Mugabe, the dictator, leader, thug corrupt leader of the Zimbabwe.
And he said Mugabe is his new role model.
And why?
Because Mugabe took away white people's farms.
Now, that's like racism, otherism, birthism, you know, the Kenya-African connection, all rolled into one satellite.
I don't know how he does it.
It's called talent.
David.
T-A-L-E-N-T.
Look it up.
You'll see my picture next to the word.
These people are so easy to tweak.
I knew this would be the media tweak of the day, comparing Obama to Robert Mugabe.
Of course, everything I said about Mugabe is true.
And what is Obama doing here?
He's not taking farms away from white people, but he's taking as much wealth away from everybody he can.
He is destroying as much wealth as he can.
And he continues, and every time he talks about wanting to raise taxes on people, it's another attempt to take some of their wealth.
Brief time out.
More phone calls from you when we get back.
Back to the phones, to the woodlands, Texas.
This is Ken.
It's great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
I did, Old Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
You bet, sir.
I'd just like to get your thoughts on the upcoming fiscal year 13 budget and what the GOP's role is going to be in getting this thing done.
I am not convinced that the Democrats are going to have a budget.
I haven't seen any evidence that they're willing to commit anything to paper.
Well, that's been my take on it, too.
But with 56 days left, and I suppose they think they can get by with another year of continuing resolutions.
Wouldn't it be great if our Republicans could step up for once and just call a press conference as soon as they get back to town and say there'll be no continuing resolution?
You've got time to get your budget put together.
If you haven't done it by October 1st, we will begin appropriations according to the Ryan budgets.
The only one anybody's ever passed around here.
Well, we can sit here and dream all day long.
But what is no, wait a minute now.
I'm just trying to use intelligence guided by experience.
Where is there any evidence in the recent past that that would happen?
You mean that they would pass a budget?
No, that the Republicans would say, hey, look, guys, you got 56 days.
If you don't come up with a budget, no more continuing resolutions.
We're just going to implement the Ryan budget.
Where is the evidence that they behave that way?
Well, I haven't seen any evidence.
I'm hoping that we can change some behavior.
Well, that's my point.
You're asking me what I think about it.
And I'm, it's going to be fascinating to see.
I think that the Democrats actually think they're despite what you're hearing in the media, despite what their crazed supporters think, the Democrats think that they are winning.
Look at this debt deal.
Just look at it.
I just explained more debt in one day than we will get in spending cuts over 10 years in the debt deal.
And we were heralding that.
We were heralding that as a victory.
And all the smart people on our side said this is the best we can do.
And we had to do this to avoid default.
And we had to avoid doing their triple-A.
All the Democrats have to do is start blaming whatever Armageddon or catastrophe is down the road on the Republicans.
And it seems that's how the Republicans will respond.
Well, let's start a countdown or something.
You remember in the days of counting down for the end of the Clinton presidency and all that?
We could start a countdown until we finally get a budget and just keep putting it on the air every day, every minute, until somebody gives in.
Well, that'll be fascinating to see who does.
At some point, you know, there is going to end up being a factor in all of this that has not yet surfaced, and that is the presidential primary race.
There will be debates, and these guys running for president, running for the nomination on the Republican side, are going to have to get involved in this as part of the campaign.
They are going to have to start specifying what they would do and providing a little leadership.
That'll be a factor in what Republicans in Congress do.
But, you know, Ken, in all honesty, the Republicans have tried what you suggest.
I don't want to be too hard on them here.
I'm trying to make a point, but they tried that.
The Senate just ignored the Republican budget.
They tried it.
They've ignored the Ryan budget.
Why do you think we got all those continuing resolutions?
The Democrats just decided as a matter of policy not to present a budget.
They did this in 2008 as a campaign tactic.
They knew damn well what putting forth a budget would do to their electoral chances.
2010, rather.
They knew what it would do.
They probably will continue the same ploy.
The Republicans passed a budget last year.
The Democrats just ignored it.
810 days.
We've been keeping track of it.
810 days.
It's in more than 810 days.
More than 810 days without a budget.
And where's the media on it?
Media doesn't, you know, if it were the other way around, if it was the Republicans that didn't do a budget and were trying to get along this continuing resolution stuff, you know how it would end up being played in the media.
There'd be pressure being put on them.
But there isn't.
So, but look at what happens.
Who do they call when they want something done?
Me.
You people have no idea the pressure.
You have no idea.
I'm a guy on the radio.
I know I'm more than that.
But still, here's John Kerry.
Grab Soundbite 14.
And then the emails are filled with this smart Alex today.
John Kerry never said anything of this sort.
Boy, you're really on a roll today just making things up like you always do.
Okay, here we go.
It was this morning on PMS NBC on Morning Joe.
John Kerry, who served in Vietnam, the guest panelist there was a Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein.
He said, you mentioned $25 billion or $22 billion in cuts in the debt plan next year, but what wasn't in the plan was talk of unemployment insurance or of the payroll tax cut.
If those expire, that sucks $170 billion out of the economy in 2012.
Folks, this is it.
This explain, this kid, Ezra Klein, I call him a kid's in his 20s.
This kid is considered one of the brightest stars in the Democrat universe.
This Ezra Klein kid is a wonder kid.
I mean, this kid has it all, they say.
And look what he just said.
Unemployment insurance ending sucks $170 billion out of the economy.
What sucks $170 billion out of the economy is unemployment.
And then when you print and borrow money that we don't have to give it to people not to work, you incentivize them not to work.
You increase the debt.
And you aren't.
How in the world do these people think that suspending government benefits sucks money out of the private sector?
It is tax increases that sucks money out of the private sector.
But this is how they think.
It's like Nancy Pelosi tried to say once that unemployment benefits actually create economic growth.
I forget what her stat was, but she said for every dollar of unemployment benefits, there's a dollar and 10 cents or $1.25 or whatever it was of economic growth.
I mean, this is just striking.
So the government stops borrowing and stops printing, and this takes $170 billion out of the economy.
Uh, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's amazingly convoluted.
And this kid's a rising star, has been for a while.
So anyway, he's asking Kerry, he says, what are the prospects for those two policies to get extended through 2012 this year in Congress?
Extending unemployment benefits beyond 99 weeks and the payroll tax cut.
Congress was taken hostage.
The country, the economy was taken hostage.
The media in America has a bigger responsibility than it's exercising today.
The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it, or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual.
It doesn't deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do.
And the problem is everything's put into this tit-for-tat equal battle, and America is losing any sense of what's real, of who's accountable, of who is not accountable, of who's real, who isn't.
So he's talking about the Tea Party there, and he said the media shouldn't give the Tea Party equal time because they're not factual.
They're wrong.
They don't deserve any attention and the credit they're getting because they're wrong.
And this, you remember I cited Marco Rubio's Senate floor speech where he talked about the two competing visions.
This illustrates it.
What in the world do we have in common with this?
Where is there compromise?
This is just raging lunacy that John Kerry just said here.
The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion.
Well, we believe Barack Obama is an absurd notion.
We believe that federal government stimulates, we believe in every policy that has been put into place ostensibly to grow the economy by the Democrats.
It's an absurd notion.
We can prove it.
Our economy is smaller today than 2007 when John Kerry and his Democrat Party started running things in Washington.
We think communism and socialism are discredited ideas.
They don't deserve any respect.
Socialism, what have you.
So this is the great divide.
This is, I mean, the two views of the future of this country and how it ought to be structured are so different from one another.
Rubio, again, he said, one is not more moral than the other.
I respectfully, again, disagree with that.
I think liberalism is immoral by definition.
Socialism immoral by definition.
Regardless, there's no way to compromise here.
One of us has to lose.
That's the only way this gets solved.
There's no compromising with people.
He actually is a statist here.
The media, he thinks, is an arm of what he believes, which it is, actually.
And they shouldn't be giving people he disagrees with any coverage because he thinks they're wrong.
And if he had the power to enforce it, he would.
So this guy didn't believe in the First Amendment.
John Kerry doesn't even believe in the Constitution.
But he thinks he does.
But he has no clue.
Here's what Pelosi said about unemployment benefits.
It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name.
Unemployment insurance, the economists tell us, return $2 for every $1 that's put out there for unemployment insurance.
Well, see, if that were true, then nobody should work.
Everybody should be on unemployment insurance, and the economy would be doubling in growth in geometric proportion, if she's right.
If you get $2 back in growth for every $1 put into unemployment, why should anybody work?
That would be the fastest way to grow the economy known to exist in history.
That's how wrong she is.
And other things, too.
Be polite.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have Rush Limbaugh with half my brain tied behind my back.
Just to make it fair.
I have more brain cells than I need.
That's why I can constantly go on diets and my brain cells will eat each other and my IQ still goes up.
There aren't very many people who can say that.
We just have that scientific news.
This is what happens, explains Hollywood.
People go on diets and their brain cells eat each other.
And if you don't have enough to start with, and most people in Hollywood don't, then that's what you get.
You end up with Matt Damons and Robin Williams's and Ben Afflecks.
In my case, you get me.
Much, much, much better.
Liberals are up in arms over my analysis of Keynesian economics.
And when they cry like stuck pigs over something like this, you know, you just know I've gotten it exactly right.
Last night on Hardball, Chris Matthews spoke with Time Magazine senior correspondent Michael Crowley and Chicago trib columnist Clarence Page about the unemployment rate in a Tea Party.
And Matthews said, Michael, the stimulus program, about $800 billion to $900 billion was a waste.
It didn't bring the economy back.
And they got a good argument with that because when you have a 9 plus percent unemployment rate, how can you claim you turn the economy around?
It's simple, crayon-level thinking.
It works, doesn't it?
The Tea Party argument.
The experience of the stimulus was a big setback for Keynesian economic theory because it's hard to explain to people that it might have really prevented things from getting a lot worse.
And so the Rush Limbaughs of the world point to the unemployment rate and say that the thing was a complete waste that didn't work.
But I think there's also another trademark there.
It's a kind of conspiratorial aspect.
It's that this is a cover story for eliminating capitalism and big government running amok.
It's a lie, basically.
It's a valid economic theory, but Rush Limbaugh is turning it into they're trying to hoodwink you and lie to you.
No, no, no.
All I said was that Keynes is being bastardized by you people.
Keynes didn't set out to destroy the U.S. economy.
Obama is.
Keynes, his idea was not to destroy capitalism.
Obama is.
Obama's professed as much.
Clarence Page.
Crowley finishes with that.
Clarence Page jumped in, said this.
Rush is making up facts like he often does.
The fact is, we didn't spend enough money on the stimulus.
So what's the Tea Party solution?
Pull more money out of the economy.
Obviously, this is going to bring more recession, possibly depression.
And Rush Limbaugh is completely oblivious.
Where is the Tea Party saying pull more money out of the economy?
You know what he means by that?
What?
No, no, he means spending cuts.
To him, spending cuts are taking money out of the economy.
He is.
I'm telling you, he is that wrong.
He is that uninformed.
The Tea Party wants the private sector flooded with money, their own.
They want to keep what they are earning and they want more people to start working and keep what they earn.
The Tea Party is desperate for the private sector to have gobs and gobs of money.
They don't want to take more money out of the economy.
It is the government taking money out of the economy.
But to Clarence Page, remember this is a discussion of Keynesian economics.
To Clarence Page and his Michael Crowley guy, government spending is money in the private sector.
And it's not because for government to put it in the economy, it has to first take it from the economy.
Because government doesn't produce anything.
Government doesn't have a dime until it takes it from somebody.
So maybe they're this stupid.
I just profess to believe that they've just been ill-educated and it's wrong and don't know it.
And a frightened headline here from CNNmoney.com.
Gasoline tax may be next Tea Party target.
Why, the Tea Party wants to starve government of everything.
Why, these people are absolute monsters.
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