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Sept. 2, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:59
September 2, 2011, Friday, Hour #3
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Yeah, it's amazing.
And at last hour, Open Line Friday.
Let's go.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
One big hour left, and then we head into Labor Day weekend.
And we've got a best of show on Monday.
People say, how do you select your best of shows?
Throw a dart at the calendar.
They're all best of shows.
Standby audio soundbite number one in addition to audio soundbite number 27.
800-282-2882.
Okay, the Politico today, Roger Simon, White House furious over speech delay.
And all of this, this whole story is based on one anonymous source.
And we don't know whether he even exists.
We do know that Politico is a stemo pool for the White House.
I don't know this, but I'll bet you that, you know, in every news organization, you have some stragglers.
And I'll bet you if we worked hard, I bet we could find a political reporter frustrated, not allowed to say anything critical of the president.
I'll bet you they're there.
They have to be.
The New York Times, you've got to be somebody over the New York Times that's frustrated.
They turn in stories.
The editor rejects them if they're critical of Obama or of the regime.
Probably same thing at MSNBC.
So I'm sure they exist at, well, maybe not at MSNBC, thinking back.
At any rate, Roger Simon, White House furious over speech delay.
Really?
Ed Henry is reporting that what could be a way of lowering expectations for next Thursday's big speech, aides to the president are privately spreading the word he's not going to present his entire jobs plan in his speech to a joint session of Congress.
Then why do it?
Why do it?
That just confirms that this is a political slash election speech.
It's not a plan for Congress to debate.
You know what I think?
I think that the White House, they're constantly doing polling focus groups.
I'll bet you they've got some real negative reactions to this whole thing.
And I will bet you, I don't know what I would bet, but I'm pretty confident in suggesting that if Obama could find a way out of this, he would now take it.
I mean, if they're putting out, they're leaking, they got somebody leaking to Fox that not going to present the entire jobs plan.
It's just part of a bigger plan the president's going to be rolling out throughout the fall.
The move could be a way to try to lower the stakes for the joint session appearance.
We just had a sound bite from Frank Rich saying, hey, this guy better hit a home run because if he shows up and drops a mouse, it's already a farce.
So the expectations for this thing are not high anyway from Obama's fans.
And now expectations, which are pretty low, are being lowered even further.
But now that the regime is putting it out there that Obama's not even going to present the whole plan, members of Congress have to be asking themselves, why should we even show up to listen to this then?
Wow, I think this is quite interesting to me here.
So let's go to the audio sound bites.
This is Jay Carney.
Now, this is yesterday.
This happened before yesterday's program ended around 2.40 or 2.45 in the afternoon.
And it was a question from Ed Henry of Fox to Jay Carney.
Why doesn't he give a speech from the Oval Office tonight?
Saying, here's my plan.
Why wait until next week?
He wants to speak before Congress because he recognizes that while there are things he can do without Congress, and he will do them, there are actions that need to be taken with Congress that require legislation to grow the economy and create jobs.
And he wants to go to Congress, speak directly to members of Congress, and lay out his proposals.
Okay, so that's yesterday, 24 hours ago.
Now we have a report out.
Eh, they're going to present the whole plan.
Maybe lowering expectations out there.
One proposal the president may highlight down the road is reorganizing different economic offices of the federal government.
That's going to be part of the jobs plan?
That's something that they're releasing.
They're leaking that.
That one proposal he might have is to reorganize different economic offices of the federal government.
You know, maybe the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies ought to call for suggestions for Obama's plan since he obviously completely incapable of coming up with any ideas that will really help.
You and I together could come up with a jobs plan in the next five minutes that would create instant enthusiasm if people in the private sector thought it had a chance of being implemented.
Why didn't Obama give his speech in Martha's Vineyard?
You know, Ed Henry's right here.
Why not do this in the Oval Office?
One of the things that the regime said in answer to that question, well, you can't do a 30 or 40 minute address in the Oval Office.
Now, I had a caller want to know about Paul Ryan.
Why isn't Paul Ryan going to run?
He actually explained it last night.
He was with Wolf Butcher in the situation.
Take it back.
He was with CNN political chief analyst Gloria Borger.
She interviewed Paul Ryan.
She said, you've been getting pressure from people like Bill Bennett and Bill Crystal and others to get into this race.
And you've decided in the end that you didn't want to do that.
Why?
A lot of people try to convince me that I should jump in this race.
As you can tell, that the race has not formed fully yet.
My answer really hadn't changed.
If I really wanted to run for president, I would have done it months ago.
And I think in any job in politics, you can have balance with your family, but I'm not so sure you can do that with this particular job.
And so I just couldn't get over that.
And when other people want you to run for president more badly than you yourself do, I think that kind of says something.
Yeah.
So he said family.
Can't balance family with this gig.
Just can't do it.
I'm trying to think.
Some of you Reagan veterans are going to have to tell me, but I do remember the Reagan kitchen cabinet gathered Reagan and persuaded him to run.
They said, we need you.
I think Reagan was in part talked into it.
I'm not saying that Reagan had no desire to do it, and the kitchen cabinet did all the heavy lifting in persuading him to do it, but I do know that there was a loyal cadre of people.
I also know that that kind of arrangement would be illegal today.
Not that it was illegal then, just that laws today are such that you couldn't get people together with money like that back then in those days to set up an organization necessary to do it.
Laws have changed in such a way.
Now, one thing on this political piece, White House furious over speech delay.
This White House source blamed me at 11:55 a.m. on Wednesday.
The White House tweeted the news about the joint session.
Then Rush Limbaugh beat Boehner up.
The source told Roger Simon at Politico.
The conservative talk show personality was in his familiar state of high dudgeon.
And then they quote me as saying it's a pure campaign speech to give it the imprimatur of a speech before joint session at Congress.
There's no way he doesn't deserve that, Limbaugh said.
Boehner's got to say no.
Now, whether he will, I have no clue.
Then Boehner said no, and now they're blaming me.
At least one source is to the Politico, blaming me.
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Back to the phones here on the EIB Network, Jackson, Mississippi.
This is Robert, and I'm glad you waited, sir.
Great to have you here.
Hey, Rush, thanks for taking my call.
You know, I wanted to, you know, I tell your listeners about a study that may or may not have seen this week.
I just read it yesterday.
Showed that, you know, several multi-billion dollar corporations paid their CEOs more than they paid the federal government in taxes.
Now, I know how you feel about folks, you know, individuals who don't pay their taxes, but I wanted to know how you feel about corporations who don't pay taxes.
I mean, do you harbor the same antagonism for them?
How do I feel about individuals that don't pay their taxes?
No, corporations.
You said that you know how I feel about individuals who don't pay taxes.
How do I feel about that?
Well, I mean, I've heard you refer to the, you say the 47% of Americans who don't pay taxes, you know, and well, that's, but they're not illegally avoiding taxes.
They don't have to pay taxes because they're being exempted.
Their votes are being put.
They're going to pay a third of their income in sales and property and payroll and excise taxes.
The only major corporation I know not paying U.S. taxes is General Electric.
GE, eBay, Verizon, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Bank of America, Citibank.
I mean, I can go on.
Are you trying to tell me that every one of those corporations pays zero U.S. taxes?
Zero taxes, Rush.
Sometimes they get money back from the federal government.
Sometimes there are tax credits.
Your companies have a tax credit for exploration, but I'm not aware that Exxon's not paying any federal.
I thought GE was it.
Well, I mean, Exxon actually got $100 some million dollars back from the government last year instead of paying taxes.
I mean, that's putting a big economic drain on your fair.
You know what?
Let me answer your question.
I don't know where you're going with this, but where we are right now, as much money kept in the private sector, the better.
We have a federal government out of control.
We have demonstrated that sending all this money to the federal government bankrupts and ruins and destroys the economics of this country.
The federal government is not God.
The federal government is not the best user of money.
So are you saying nobody should pay taxes at all?
No, I did not say nobody should pay taxes.
I'm saying that a lot of people are overtaxed.
A lot of people are undertaxed.
The whole purpose of taxation is out the window.
The tax code is no longer...
The tax...
I don't care about it that day.
The tax code right now is not written to raise money to run the government.
The tax code right now is written for political patronage purposes.
Exactly.
That's why the richest and corporations always get the breaks while middle class and the poor always get the biggest hits.
That's how the taxes pay.
The middle class and the poor are not paying any income taxes.
They're paying plenty of taxes.
47% of Americans who work pay no income taxes.
The top 10% are paying close to 50% of all income taxes, sir.
You don't know what you're talking about.
You're filled with a bunch of liberal misinformation.
And you got yourself worked up here into a lather over what you think is a totally unfair system where the rich aren't paying anything.
The rich Are the ones supporting this country right now?
And Obama's taking aim at them.
And if you were listening yesterday, you know that in the last two years, the number of millionaires and people who earn over $10 million is down by 39%.
Now, if that makes you happy, I'm sorry for you.
Because that's not helping anybody because those are the people that hire people.
And I'm going to tell you this.
The number of millionaires and people who earn over $10 million is down 30, 39%.
And is any of that money ending up with you?
A lot of people think, yeah, soak the rich.
Give me my share.
You're not getting it.
Where's it going?
We're still in massive debt.
Deficits, national debt skyrocketing out of control.
Wealth is being destroyed.
I know a lot of people on the left think wealth ought to be destroyed because somehow they think that with socialists and utopian redistribution, they're going to get their share of it.
Nobody's getting it.
The government is out of money.
It doesn't have any.
And so the only place they can go to get money is where people who do have it and they're taking it from them.
What's going on in this country is an absolute outrage.
And instead of being all worked up about five or six individual cases here, by the way, the biggest culprit in what has you exercised is General Electric, Obama's best friend, you've been poisoned about taxes and who pays them and who doesn't.
And you think the tax code ought to be used for punishment?
You think the tax code ought to be used to be getting even with people?
The purpose of the tax code is to raise sufficient revenue to run the government and the country.
It's no longer for that purpose.
If it were, we would be lowering everybody's rates.
We'd be trying to create as many new jobs as possible, as many new taxpayers as possible.
That's how you create more revenue to run your precious government.
But tax collections are down because there are more and more people out of work, more and more people not paying taxes, corporations, individuals, I don't care how you slice it.
And so what's the government doing printing and borrowing and spending anyway?
Irresponsibly.
And they're spending the money of yours and your children, your grandchildren.
They're spending money of sperm cells that haven't even found an egg yet to fertilize.
Cry it out loud.
You need to redirect your anger here and you need to change the definition of what's going to make you happy because I'll guarantee you, every one of these corporations that you think that you've been told is not paying taxes, let's go just take everything they've got.
Let's shut them down.
Let's shut down ExxonMobil.
Let's shut down every oil company.
Let's shut down all these people.
And I guarantee you, you're not going to be a penny wealthier after that happens.
You're going to be worse off.
You vote for people who want you to be made happy when somebody else gets screwed.
By screwed, I mean having their taxes raised.
You want, you're voting for people who think you should be satisfied and happy when you hear that somebody else has their taxes raised.
It doesn't help your life.
It doesn't change your life except for the worse.
Because for every corporation taxed out of existence or taxed out of profit, that's another corporation for which you have no chance of ever getting a job.
But if you think that these corporations ought to be taxed out of existence because for some reason they're nothing but a bunch of giant thieves, I'm going to tell you that if it all ever happened, you would still be as miserable then as you are now.
ExxonMobil paid $78.6 billion in taxes worldwide.
In the United States, they paid $7.7 billion in sales taxes and duties.
But our caller was exploiting one technically correct point because the company can deduct foreign taxes.
And it did get a refund on federal taxes.
But Exxon's effective income tax rate was 47% worldwide, the highest in three years.
But they can deduct taxes they pay around the world, so that's why they got a federal refund.
And GE is doing the same thing.
GE, $5 billion in profit, and they pay no tax in the United States because it's earned outside the United States.
Now, corporations pay a 35% tax rate in this country.
It's the highest in the world.
They pay a ridiculously high federal corporate tax for the most part based on what other countries tax their companies.
And after they pay their corporate tax, then the shareholders who cash out their investments pay a capital gains tax on top of the corporate income tax already paid by the corporation.
And the people who work for the corporation pay an individual federal income tax on top of what the corporation already has paid its corporate income tax.
A dollar earned by a corporation is taxed not once, but at least twice.
But this is how successful the left has been in their anti-while their enemies list is every corporation.
They've got people believing that they don't pay taxes.
The people who work at those at these companies pay taxes.
The corporations do.
But here's the dirty little secret, Mr. Dumkopf.
The dirty little secret really is that corporations don't pay taxes.
They build the taxes into the price of the product you buy or pay for.
All of those costs are built into the cost of the product or service the corporation is producing for the consumer.
Now, maybe Warren Buffett's company is disputing its tax bill since 2002 with the federal government, but many companies have been paying on time what they are said to owe.
Warren Buffett is in arrears.
Warren Buffett, who wants you paying every dime of your estate tax, is fighting the Berkshire Hathaway or Berkshire Hathaway income tax.
And while we are at it here, what of the hundreds of billions of dollars a year that the federal government misuses or pays in fraudulent schemes every year?
Imagine if individuals and businesses could keep the money instead.
Why is this never considered when we talk about taxation?
Hundreds of billions of dollars every single year.
The General Accounting Office puts out endless reports on this waste.
Where do you people get off?
I get so ticked off at you intellectually lazy people who think that the government is God, that every dollar they get or spend is somehow sacred.
There is more fraud and waste and misuse.
If the federal government were held accountable to the law, as corporations are held accountable, half the federal government would be in prison.
But no, the government is good.
The government's taking care of poor people.
The government's caring for people with health care and Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security.
Fixing fraud, waste, and crime in the government seems to never be a priority.
Instead, whether we are screwing some individual or class of individuals or companies is the priority.
Warren Buffin hasn't paid taxes for his company for four of the last 10 years.
He's disputing it.
But when it comes to the estate tax, he wants you to pay as much as you can be made to pay.
Claims that ExxonMobil did not pay taxes in 2009 are just plain incorrect.
All these other companies as well.
ExxonMobil paid $78.6 billion in taxes worldwide.
But the president's U.S. government didn't get it fair fair of this because why should they?
They're trying to put them out of business for crying out loud.
The United States government under Barack Obama is trying to make it impossible for ExxonMobil to do business in this country.
God, some of you people are stupid.
You're just plain you people on the left are just plain, dangerously ignorant.
Running around all wound up, kicked off, angry.
You don't even know why, and then you make yourself believe you're going to be happy if somebody gets screwed.
What kind of life is that?
To run around wanting your happiness to be dependent on whether somebody you supposedly hate gets screwed and you don't even know the people being talked about.
Screw social justice.
I'll tell you what.
You ain't ExxonMobil and all that.
You go try to get gasoline on you.
You go do what it takes to put gasoline in your tank yourself.
Or your hybrid or your stupid electric car.
You go whatever it takes to power that.
You go do it yourself.
If the people making it possible for you to drive your car are such creeps, SOBs, and whatever else worthy of your hatred, born of your own ignorance.
Yes, nerdly, I'm ticked at them.
This is one of these days.
It doesn't take much.
I'm not suffering fools gladly today.
Doom cup sniveling little nasal wheeny boing.
Take it somewhere else.
I'll tell you what ticks me off about this, and I think this is the key.
These liberals, like this last sniveling little guy that called me, they love the products and services that businesses provide.
They love gasoline.
They may run around and say they hate the polluting aspects of them, but I don't see any of them taking the Hoof Express to get where they're going.
They all drive.
I don't see them driving around horse and buggy.
They may think they're doing some good by driving a hybrid, but they're still putting gasoline in whatever vehicle they use to get around in.
They use all these products, all these services.
They use them as much as anybody else does, but they hate the people that provide it.
These people drive into a gas station seething with rage, but they buy it.
This is how irrational they are.
They don't have one speck of appreciation for the work necessary to make their lives easier.
They've somehow been convinced to hate all these companies, corporations, people that work at them or what have you.
It's just we, folks, we face an irrational, insane, delusional enemy.
Talking about here in a political sense, I mentioned a piece, The Baltimore Sun, by a TV writer earlier, and I want to excerpt this before we get out of here.
It's by David Zerowic.
It's called Interesting Perspective.
President Obama still covets TV time, but the medium is no longer loving him back.
The first is yet another reminder of how wrong conventional wisdom can be, especially when it involves a major media change, such as the generally unexamined bromine that TV is a dinosaur.
With this week's skirmish over whether Obama or a debate among Republican presidential candidates would dominate primetime Wednesday night, a couple of observations seem impossible to ignore.
The first is yet another reminder of how wrong conventional wisdom can be when it involves major media change.
Next time somebody tells you how yesterday TV is when it comes to politics, how all the actions now in social media, the internet remind them of the fight this week over who and what would be showcased in primetime on network and cable TV Wednesday night.
Team Obama, Team Boehner, otherwise known as the presidency in Congress, weren't squabbling about Twitter or Facebook, are they?
No, they're fighting over who does prime time TV on Wednesday night, starting at 8 o'clock.
Now 7 o'clock.
So for better or worse, we are still primarily a TV culture.
The bad news, that's why we're overweight and have been overspending for years, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But here's another observation.
Not only isn't Obama the gifted TV performer he seemed to be during the 2008 campaign, TV is now one of his worst enemies.
My first fuzzy notion of this idea came while I watched Obama address the nation after the debt ceiling compromise.
Obama had performed pitifully during the crisis, and yet here he was on TV thinking he could spin the economic embarrassment as good president battles bad Congress or responsible adult reins in mean, selfish children.
But as I looked at the screen, I couldn't help thinking how diminished Obama looked and how thin his voice sounded because there was no godlike reverb.
And I wondered if there actually was something happening physically with him.
So I went back to a DVD that I have of Obama speaking on election night in Grant Park in Chicago.
And I lost myself in a flood of memories as I watched.
I remembered how that TV moment sent thousands of college students and others into the streets of Baltimore celebrating in it.
It was the TV moment, not just the election victory.
Young viewers watching him on screen wanted to share that energy in a communal physical sense with others.
Viewing him on TV now in his promise not realized persona made me both sad for what might have been and angry for letting myself believe in the TV imagery of a night in Grant Park in November.
Knowing something about shared memory and the way the national psyche intersects with media, I believe millions of viewers like me unconsciously associate the Obama they now see on TV spinning and dodging and looking like a worried man with the giant they thought they saw in 2008, the one we kept comparing to Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Reagan as great media presidents.
I admit, I admit, I thought he was going to be a great TV president.
In fact, the last great TV president to book into JFK, given the way the media were headed.
But I now know I was looking at neither greatness nor the end of the TV era.
This, again, is Bob or David Zerowick writing in the Baltimore Sun.
Now, remember, ladies and gentlemen, there is an axiom here that's important to remember for any of you who want to be stars.
Now, I would dare say, sadly, that a good percentage of you want to be stars.
Many of you want to be famous.
Many of you want to walk into a room, everybody know who you are, because you think that there is automatic adulation, love, respect, all that stuff that happens.
Just remember this: if it's the media that makes you, then it's the media that can destroy you.
Now, the media, just to use myself as an example here, make this point.
The media did not make me.
They have tried for 23 years to destroy me, but they can't because they didn't make me.
I'm not the product of marketing, imaging, packaging agents, public relations people, or any of that.
But Obama is.
Obama is the product of all of that.
He is a total image that was made by people who created it for TV and now it's not working.
If you let the media make you, they will eventually destroy you.
Never forget that.
Well, that's it, folks.
Another exciting week of Broadcast Excellence in the Can.
It is the Labor Day weekend.
That means that we will not be here on Monday.
We have a best of show.
And if you missed it, don't miss the preplay because it's going to be great.
I don't know what it is, but I can always count on it being great because I did it.
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