Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Hiya, folks, how are you?
Great to have you back.
Actually, you didn't go anywhere I did.
It's great to be back.
El Rushbo behind the golden EIB microphone here at the EIB Southern Command for a full three hours of broadcast excellence.
A thrill, a delight, and an honor.
Great to have you here.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program.
800-282-2882 and the email address, El Rushbo at EIBnet.com.
We had a great time in New York last night.
We was at Town Hall, which is just off Broadway.
Mine was the first sold-out Broadway show of the season.
And we had a great, I forget what the capacity of the place is.
It's a beautiful place.
It is a stunningly beautiful place.
And they had, during the day on Monday, I got my security people call up and say, hey, the Occupy people have applied for a protest permit across the street.
I said, okay.
And about 10 minutes later, hey, the Occupy people have applied for an audio sound permit along with a protest permit, meaning they wanted to have megaphones and a PA system to shout.
It's okay, because I'm not going to hear any of it.
So they showed up, and I guess about 10 of them, that the original application for their permits, it'd be 100 of them, between 6 and 9, 10 of them, showed up at 15.
Was it 15?
We had some people out there looking at 15 of them.
And it was raining.
We had delayed the start of the show by half an hour because it was raining, cats and dogs in New York, and the crowd arrived late.
And I vowed not to start till everybody was seated.
It was supposed to be a 7.30 curtain.
And I got kicked off about 8.
And the stragglers were coming in.
Hey, I was a little flight delay getting in because of the weather.
But it turned out fine because the 10 or 15 people showed up and they got a shower.
It was the first time apparently it had been clean in how many weeks?
Now, God works in magical, mysterious ways.
And one of them got in, one of them got in and walked right down the center aisle.
And I was in the middle of the presentation.
And it was a skinhead kind of guy.
And he was walking in, and security didn't touch him.
He just, he got within five feet of me.
So if you have any ideas of taking me out, folks, it can be done.
So this guy gets within five feet and he's got a bunch of newspapers and he's showing him.
Finally, security showed up and escorted him out.
And they told me he was a little intoxicated when the whole thing was over.
But it was a fun time.
The audience was electrified.
This audience was just, they, I don't know.
I had no idea.
I couldn't hear what anybody was saying.
I mean, one of the problems is there were people shouting at me all night.
I cannot understand what people are saying.
I can't hear myself in situations like that.
The first 10 minutes, I must have, if you were there last night, I'm going to apologize to you in the first 10 minutes, is I was distracted and disoriented because I could not hear myself.
I couldn't hear myself through my implant, and I was not getting any audio from the sound system in the hall.
So in a situation like that, I don't know if they can hear me.
If I can't hear me, is the sound system working?
Do I need to get closer to the microphone?
Shout, do I shout loud enough so I can hear myself?
Is that too loud?
I got all these thoughts running through my head.
And so it took me 10 minutes to adjust to it.
And the only way I could hear myself throughout the whole, it was not because there was any other noise.
It's just the vagaries of my hearing loss and implant.
I had to just eat that microphone.
I had to get real close.
That's the only time I could hear myself all night.
So I basically was deaf all night.
I was unable to hear what I was saying.
I could hear when somebody shouted from somewhere in the audience, but I don't know what they said.
I heard one, when I asked my question, what sets this country apart from all the others in the world?
I did hear one guy shout freedom.
That's the one thing that I heard.
But this audience, I mean, they were just electrified.
I walked out of there after being introduced, and it was just, they came to their feet.
Remember, these people are trudged through a downpour.
They have sat there much longer than they expected to because of the late arrivals.
And that was weather-related.
People at WABC, our flagship affiliate in New York, put this thing on and just did a magnificent and fabulous job.
It was a wonderful and magical night.
And I got home about 1:30.
And Catherine had left me an email saying the dogs are in the laundry room.
I said, Well, why?
Because I said, I'll let them out when I get home.
I'll leave them in the laundry room.
One of them, I don't know which one, got into one of the, we have a house vacuum system where you just plug the tube into the receptacle in the wall.
And one of the dogs had gotten in there and had chewed a bunch of the wires and so forth.
So Catherine figured, okay, I don't know which one of you did it, but all three of you are paying the price.
So they all got relegated to the laundry room.
And I said, even Abby?
You think Abby?
That's our first one, the oldest, the mature one.
You think Abby?
I don't know, but she's paying the price.
She didn't stop it.
Well, I said, it has to be the puppy doing this.
I don't care.
I don't know which one did it.
So they're all in there.
I don't have a chance.
They could have electrocuted themselves.
So I said, okay, well, I'll let them out anyway.
Then I got home, I let the dogs out, and they did not want to go back in the laundry room, but I had outsmarted them.
I had closed off all access, all other access to the kitchen.
So they had nowhere else to go but back into the laundry room.
Those dogs are smart, though.
You know, I said laundry room, they wouldn't go.
They would only follow me in there when I teased them and pretended I had food for them.
And I got them in there and I shut the door and a little puppy starts whimpering and whining.
I said, you're only in here because you did it.
Don't blame me.
They just barked.
Just barked and wanted out and so forth.
So I got up at 1:30 and I was exhausted.
So I just went up to bed, and here we are.
And I do this maybe probably once a year.
And everybody says, why don't you do more of them?
And I said, I don't know.
Well, no, don't even get me.
Don't get me started down that road.
There's some things I must withhold.
And, you know, I last night, last night's show, last night's performance, I told the crowd, I said, look, I would never say this on the radio a couple of three things.
I would never say this on the radio show.
And I launched, and there was a fairly lengthy story.
And I said, I will never say this on the radio.
But I'm deciding now whether or not I want to post the audio of last night's performance on the website.
They're leaving it up to me.
And so I don't know because I told some stuff there last night that I would never say on the radio.
Hmm?
What?
Well, I don't know.
I've got excerpts from it here.
You know, my problem is that after each one of these things, I always think it could be better.
And I walked out of there last night, I really had no feel.
I mean, the audience was electrified, but I had no feel for how I'd done because I couldn't hear.
I could not hear myself.
It was, you guys, I can't explain the disconnect.
If it's something that you, you don't know what it's like to not be able to hear.
You can try to imagine it, but when you're not getting any feedback from yourself, you know, trying to speak when you can't hear yourself, most people have no clue what that is.
In fact, when I had gone totally deaf and I was talking to the doctors at the House Clinic about getting an implant, I said, what happened if I just don't do it?
Well, what's going to happen?
You will not be able to talk, and it won't take very long.
If you can't hear yourself, your speech will fall apart.
No matter how good you are, no matter what great memory you have for the way your throat feels when you speak.
If you can't hear yourself, at some point, he said, there's a reason that people who have gone deaf sound the way they sound.
So if you don't get this implant, your career is finished.
Well, last night, and it's happened a couple, it's just, it's nothing anybody could have done to fix it unless I would have had a direct audio line like I have here doing the program and been wired in as though wearing headsets.
But who wants to show up wearing a headset on stage?
But that would have been the way to do it.
This is why, by the way, if you ever watch, if you've ever noticed announcers at football games or baseball where large, loud crowds are wearing headphones so they can hear themselves.
It's so they can hear.
And if they're not wearing headsets, they've got line-in little earpieces that you can't see, but it's because they can hear themselves over the crowd, over the white noise, over everything else.
And when you can't hear yourself, you don't know if you're speaking loud enough.
So the first 10 minutes were just distracting.
But after that, I felt like I got into a groove and it was great.
And I want to thank everybody who was there because you people in the audience were just fabulous.
I was feeding off of you all night long.
Okay, we've got, well, lots of stuff here.
I haven't shared with you my thoughts on this Herman Cain situation, the latest.
Well, this is a frustrating thing.
In fact, you know, the entire circus that is now, well, it's not becoming a circus, but this whole Republican race, it doesn't matter where you go.
I don't care what website you go to.
I don't care what network you tune in.
All we're hearing is all the shortcomings of all of these people.
I don't care if it's Herman Cain or Bachman or Romney or Newt.
All we're hearing is their shortcomings and the headlines, you know, Newt's health problems, Romney's flip-flops, for crying out loud.
What are we looking for?
Perfection?
And on the other side, what are we dealing with?
Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, all this stuff that never got vetted and is not going to get vetted now.
And yet, even as I look, sites, websites and networks, places I would consider to be on our team are nitpicking all this stuff.
It's a little maddening because there's no such thing as perfect.
The founders were not perfect.
The whole constitution was created on the basis that human beings are fallible.
The Constitution's premise is that human beings with too much power will abuse it and imprison and tyrannize people.
The whole point of it was based on the imperfection of people.
And yet here we are apparently looking for the perfect.
And I'm not running.
So it's not going to be findable.
All right, I've been overruled and I didn't even know it.
Coco has posted all the stuff from the New York appearance list.
It's already up there.
Even after saying, okay, well, wait for you to decide what you want to do.
Coco's posted it.
So if it's up there, it's too late to take it down now.
You can close.
Snerdley is staring at me with his mouth open in disbelief.
I know.
But it's up there.
It's posted.
Do you realize, you know, the Beatles, the Beatles stopped touring because they couldn't hear themselves.
This was before.
If I don't even go to concerts, you notice now the first time I saw this was at a Mannheim Steamroller Christmas concert some years ago, many, many moons ago.
And Chip Davis had an earpiece.
And I said, what is that for?
He says, that's helped me keep time.
That's the clicker.
That's the beat.
That's this, I know what's going on.
Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to hear myself.
The click track.
Yeah, that's what he called it.
Click track.
Exactly.
That's what it was.
Beatles didn't have that stuff back then.
That stuff didn't exist.
They stopped touring because they couldn't hear themselves.
Is that right?
Snerdley is yelling at me that at Shea Stadium.
You can tell they couldn't hear anything.
But they muddled through.
And a rush to excellence tour appearance has got to be the nearest thing to a 1960s Beatles concert that you can imagine.
And a crowd last night might as well have been at a Beatles concert.
You should have seen this.
Anyway, folks, we have to move on here.
There's a lot of stuff.
The economic news is continually bad.
Some of it's disheartening.
Well, I'm going to get to the hit.
Here's the okay, Snerdley said, how are we saving Europe?
Europe has kicked their problem down the road for another 10 days.
Here's really what you need to know, if anything, about Europe.
Can you believe that Poland has asked Germany to use its power to bail them out in our lifetimes?
Would you ever believe that that could happen?
Number two, the International Monetary Fund is not meant to be used as it is being used here.
Without going into great detail, the International Monetary Fund is not to prop up countries.
It's a temporary infusion to help at best currencies, but it's not meant as it's being used now.
The latest plan for the IMF, which is us, and we don't have the money either.
Nobody has any, but none of this is real.
In the meantime, in Great Britain, there's all kinds, folks, there are so many little stories out there today that alone, they don't say a whole lot, but after a passage of time, if you look at any one of them, they foretold a massive event to come.
There are two of them, actually.
This business of the British embassy in Iran being attacked and shut down.
It's a tiny little story, but it's not going to end well.
This is one of these things, just like the 1979 hostage crisis for the United States.
Our embassy was attacked and hostages were taken.
No hostages have been taken in Iran, but there were all kinds of things that led up to that 1979 taking of our embassy that didn't really register until after the fact.
And you put them all together and there was a pattern.
You could see that a story was developing.
In Great Britain, pensioners, public workers, their equivalent of the TSA walked off the job at the airports, which incidentally has caused operations at the airports to run much more smoothly.
With two-thirds of the bureaucratic employees on strike, everything's running better.
But they're on strike because they are being asked to contribute a measly 3% to their pensions.
And they are also objecting to a pay increase of only 1%.
Now, Britain doesn't have any money.
American Airlines has filed for Chapter 11 because they don't have any money.
They have been negotiating with their pilots union for five years on a new deal, and the union won't go along for it with it.
The other airlines against whom American is now competing have, in some instances, during some periods of their fiscal year, shown a profit.
Now, the airline industry as a whole, this may shock you.
The American, the United States airline industry as a whole has never shown a profit in a single year.
Individual airlines have, but the industry has not.
So now American is simply 31% of their costs.
I think I saw this yesterday is labor.
And they are now in a situation where they're not competitive.
They can't compete with the other airlines who have struck deals with unions that have lowered some of their labor costs.
So American had no choice here but then to file Chapter 11, which is a way to get out of some of the debt and to reorganize.
So I am not comfortable saying this, but the obvious is the obvious.
And I said this last night to that great crowd in New York.
You traverse our economy wherever you find a problem, you're going to also find a union.
And in most cases, it's going to be a public employee union.
In Philadelphia, this incompetent schools chief, I forget what her actual title is.
She might have been superintendent of the school district or some such thing, but she might have been citywide.
She was incompetent.
She got canned a lot later than she should have, but it took him a while to get up at guts to fire.
So she gets fired.
They gave her a severance package of close to a million dollars.
And the first thing she did was go out and apply for unemployment benefits.
And they were granted.
Meanwhile, a guy who is in charge of, I think, police officers who have also been laid off is having to fight tooth and nail to get them unemployment.
These people, you know, taking a million dollars of taxpayer money as a severance.
No, that's not enough.
No, now I got to go get more.
I've got to go get my unemployment.
There's no end to this.
In Britain, Europe, which I'm going to get back to as to what the IMF is doing in the crisis over there, but nobody has any money for.
Somebody just told me that Obama referred to the British embassy in Iran as the English Embassy.
Newsbusters chronicled this.
He called the British Embassy the English Embassy.
Meanwhile, we're told that Rick Perry is an idiot or that George W. Bush is an idiot or whatever.
The English embassy, the guy of 57 states, Barack Obama.
Folks, I don't know about you.
Are you tired of hearing things like, if the Republicans nominate and fill in the blank, then Obama wins?
Are you tired of hearing about fill-in-the-blank is not electable?
They're all electable.
Half of this country, I got a story in my stack.
Half of the country is afraid to buy Christmas presents because of the economy.
Half of the country is feeling bad because the holiday season is coming up and they may not be able to go out and participate in it.
And we're being told that our candidates are unelectable.
It's all BS.
If anybody, by all rights, by what's decent, should be unelectable, it's Barack Obama, the architect of all of this, which is not accidental.
This can get extremely frustrating as this quest, this demand for perfection.
Now, I don't know where this comes from.
I don't know who starts this.
I don't know where this catches on.
Somebody must be perfect when there's no such thing.
The founders were not perfect.
There is no human being who is perfect.
There's no perfect plan, just like there's no utopia.
Yet these standards that somehow end up being applied to us, our candidates, conservatives.
Where does this come from?
Where does this start?
You take a program like No Child Left Behind.
The liberals are saying, oh, well, there was a child left behind.
That program's got to be scrapped.
Really?
How about the war on poverty?
How about scrapping the whole liberal agenda on the grounds that it's imperfect?
It's not only imperfect, it's been a disaster.
But no, Mr. Limbaugh, we can't because the intentions were very good.
The intentions, the good-heartedness, and the desire to help people with the war on poverty.
Oh, save it, Mr. New Castrati.
Your good intentions have destroyed a great country.
You know, American Airlines, I have a, oh, I don't know, I have a sentimental attachment to American Airlines.
I flew American Airlines home from Dallas in 1967.
What?
What are you laughing at?
This is not a commercial.
American Airlines isn't a sponsor.
They don't have any money.
Oh, haven't flown Comaneau.
I haven't flown commercials in 1990, but what's that got to do with anything?
I have a sentimental attachment to American Airlines.
I flew them anytime I could.
I flew home from 1967 after I had passed the test and got my first class FCC broadcast license, which you had to have it back then.
Was a big deal.
And I was 16 years old, and a flight attendant offered me some champagne when I told her what I was flying home from, flying home to St. Louis.
I met one of the great CEOs in CEO history, used to run the airline, Bob Crandall.
I didn't meet him, but I had a couple of emails back and forth with him.
One of the more innovative airlines we've had, they invented SABR, which is the computer reservation system.
American Airlines came up with frequent flyer miles.
They invented the whole program.
American did.
And now they've filed for Chapter 11, and it's just systematic.
It's almost axiomatic that this is all starting to happen.
And here in this country, of course, you saw what happened in Wisconsin and then in Ohio.
People who are living off the public, people who are feeding at the public trough, refuse to do with any less.
And meanwhile, the people who pay them are losing their jobs and losing their homes.
But the president of the United States comes up with stimulus plans and lies to the American people and tells them the money is going to be spent on creating jobs.
And all it's done is create or cement and sustain a financial lifeline from public employees to the Democrat Party via union dues.
And that can only happen if they keep their jobs.
And I hear that our candidate, candidate X, isn't electable, or that if we nominate this guy, Obama wins, and so forth.
And who says there hasn't even been a vote cast yet?
Everybody's going off polling data.
The Hawkeye caucus are in January, the New Hampshire primary.
This is still up for grabs.
Take a look at it.
Just last week, or the week before, Romney was up 30 in New Hampshire.
Now that number is dwindling.
Newts picking up steam.
There hasn't been a vote cast yet.
There's nowhere, this is nowhere near over because it hasn't even begun.
And the people out there pronouncing it over are those who want it to be over in both parties, by the way.
You have the Republican establishment who wants this whole early nominee to be done with and have it cast in stone so there's nothing else left to do.
The Democrats and the media want to pick our candidate for us.
In the meanwhile, polling data at this point are about as accurate as the computer models for the climate 10 years from now.
They don't mean anything.
None of these polls mean Jack, you know what, right now.
Not in terms of the outcome.
Now, they matter in terms of energy, enthusiasm, fundraising, and this kind of thing.
Leadership is a curious thing.
You try to spot it in advance.
Sometimes you can't.
Sometimes it's really not known how somebody is going to behave until after they're elected and get office, get into office.
It's why it's important to have some kind of a track record of people involved so you can maybe make some kind of a judgment.
That's all anybody's doing right now.
All everybody's doing is trying to assess these people.
Honestly and forthrightly.
This is serious.
There are people in our country who think that this election will determine in the long run whether we remain a free people or not.
And by free people, we're not talking about dungeons and political prisoners in cells and this kind of stuff like you find in Cuba.
That's not what people mean.
That doesn't have to happen in order for you to lose your freedom.
Your freedom can be taken away from you with an increased tax rate.
Your freedom can be taken away from you with your private property rights being infringed upon.
You own something, but you can't do anything with it.
You can't do what you want with it.
You can't even own it.
There's any number of ways that you can lose, that we can lose our liberty and freedom without being thrown in jail and without a police state, per se.
So a lot of people really do think that America as a nation of free people is at stake here and that this election is about that.
But it's not just this election.
One election is not going to be a magic elixir.
It's just the first step of many that are going to have to take place.
We have arrived where we are slowly and steadily over 50 years, if not more.
The left did not wave a magic wand and get us to this point.
Now, they've been building to it and building to it, but look how quickly they were able to get us to the tipping point with their right candidate being elected president of the United States.
A total sham candidate who ran on a series of lies and hoaxes and frauds, but people fell for it.
It doesn't take much.
All you got to do is run around and say, you know what, I'm going to lower the sea levels and I'm going to raise the sunshine and I'm going to give you health care and it's not going to cost you any.
You're going to get the best health care you've ever had.
It's not going to charge you.
I'm going to get rid of all insurance premiums.
I'm going to get rid of all screening.
I'm going to get rid of all pre-existing conditions.
You want health care.
You're going to get it.
And that millionaire down the street is going to pay for it.
Who would say no to that, especially when you have a population that has been educated to think that that's just?
We actually have a president of the United States.
Folks, this is this is, I made a big point of this Monday.
I made a big point of it last night.
We have a president of the United States who announced, essentially announced on the op-ed pages of the New York Times on Monday that his reelection effort will not include working white families.
They are jettisoned.
They are not a factor.
The Obama campaign says we're not going to even try to get their votes.
Who are we going to go for?
We're going to go for the losers in life.
We're going to go for the people who don't think they should work.
We're going to go for the people that we have conditioned to hate this country because they've failed.
The other people have succeeded and they've stolen from them and it's time that the other people give it back.
We're going to go for those and then we're going to get the elites in academia and the artistes and the songwriters and the actors and the actresses and all this.
And that's going to be our coalition.
But working white families, sorry, we're not interested in their votes.
Well, what does that tell you?
Forget, it's not racial, folks.
I'm only throwing working white families in there because that was in the op-ed in the New York Times by Thomas Edsel.
This is not a racial thing.
It sounds like the working white families are the old Reagan Democrats of the 80s.
But the bottom line is they are working.
Now, in common Democrat Party parlance, working people, working families has always meant union.
They don't mean that in this iteration.
They're not talking about union people.
Union people fall into the elite category that they described.
They're artists, they're people in academia.
They know that they've got the union leadership wrapped up, wrapped around their little fingers.
Hell, the union leadership is probably more left than Obama is, if that's possible.
And here's a guy that is president of the whole country.
You are president of the United States of America.
And one of the great seductions of 2008, remember the world hated America because of George W. Bush.
And so Barack Obama was going to make the world love America.
We were going to be loved and respected.
And everybody wants to be loved, right?
And we were going to be appreciated.
And America was going to love itself once again.
And America was going to understand its place in the world.
And all was going to be right.
And we were going to be unified like we had never been unified before because we've got a candidate unlike any we've ever seen in American history, right?
All of that.
He even says they're going to lower the sea levels.
And now not even three years later, this same Messiah has it proudly written about his campaign in the New York Times on Monday that his campaign can't win with working white families.
And again, don't focus on the racial part of this.
They don't mean that either.
Just focus on the working.
They're the ones defining the terms here.
When they say working white families, they have a specific group of people in mind that they're not interested in.
And we'll be back.
You don't need prisons to lose your freedom.
Look at political correctness.
People stifle themselves.
People will refuse to exercise their own First Amendment rights out of fear for what might be heard.
Somebody might be offended.
Somebody might be upset.
So people willingly, willfully give up freedom every day of the week.
Political correctness has resulted in self-policing of your thoughts.
I got a story here in the New York Times about how hard and patient and long liberals will be committed to something.
Do you know when the school lunch program began?
1946.
The school lunch program began in 1946.
And now we are at a tipping point.
In many states, more than 50% of kids now qualify for a free or subsidized school meal.
And there's a New York Times story today.
And here's the headline, Line Grows Long for Free Meals at U.S. schools.
Millions of Americans screw children receiving free or low-cost meals for the first time as their parents, many once solidly middle class, have lost jobs or homes during the economic crisis, qualifying their the New York Times is happy.
Obama's happy.
This kind of news makes him happy.
Mission accomplished.
Obama's still managing to make more and more people dependent on the government.
But notice in this story, notice how high family income can be to qualify for free or subsidized meals.
Are you ready?
Your family income can be 130% of the already high poverty level and qualify for free or subsidized meals.
Families making over $40,000 can qualify.
And the New York Times admits here at the bottom of this story that it's not just because of the economy, but because of the new way of certifying students as qualified put in effect in 2004, because the whole point here is to create as many people as possible dependent on government for not wants, not desires, but needs.
We all need to eat.
You cement the notion that your daily sustenance comes from your Democrat politician, your local politician, your congressman, your president, or whatever.
That is a bond that becomes very, very tough to break.
Very tough to vote against.
You want me to vote against a guy feeding my kids?
This is insidious.
It is destroying the foundation of self-reliance and rugged individualism that has led to the greatest country in the history of humanity.
And it's all being done on purpose by people.
I said last night, and I'll have to hold it back because I got to take a break, but I'll remember.
Don't worry.
Obama's job approval numbers are below those of Jimmy Carter's.
Eight points below Jimmy Carter's.
And they tell us that our candidates are unelectable.