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Jan. 5, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:00
January 5, 2012, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 247 Podcast.
Oh, I oh geez, I just heard something.
I You know, I I really like Dana Perino.
Maybe I ought to stop there.
Greetings, ladies and gentlemen, welcome.
It's Rush Limbaugh from High Atop the EIB building at the EIB Southern Command in a hidden location, heavily fortified here in South Florida.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program 800-282-2882, the email address Lrushmore at EIBNet.com.
Well, she just said she's listening to Huntsman.
She thinks she was singing huntsman's praises.
She's listened to Huntsman yesterday.
She had heard huntsman say that the country is screwed.
She says, nah, that's not presidential.
That's not the way we want to talk.
They say the country is screwed.
It's live TV.
And you can screw up and you can say the wrong thing, but it really is not the kind of discourse.
And then she said, watching uh uh TV today, and I saw John Huntsman add, and he says right in the end that the country's screwed with Obama.
That's just not the way we want to talk.
It's just not the folks.
We are screwed.
This recess appointment stuff, it's extra constitutional.
It is lawless.
The Senate is not in recess.
Who's gonna stop the guy?
That's the question.
Nobody's got if we're gonna sit around and say you can't say screwed.
You got McCain out there, McCain ripping Newt for saying that Romney's a liar.
John McCain slammed Newt Gingrich yesterday.
Uh sorry, today.
I can't believe it's already Thursday.
John McCain slammed Newt Gingrich Thursday for calling Mitt Romney a liar, accusing him of crossing the line of something we don't do in politics.
McCain was on the uh was on the early show on CBS, and he said, I just I I don't think I don't think it's appropriate to call your opponent a liar.
It's just it's just something that we we we don't do in politics unless unless you have overwhelming proof.
Really?
No, we they tell us.
Who knew that something we don't do in politics is call our opponents liars.
Unless we have overwhelming proof, which we do.
If we're talking about Obama.
Anyway, um, so this also McCain, here's the guy's we're not we're not gonna pronounce Obama's middle name.
That's just not how we do things in politics.
It's just it's not gonna happen.
If you say it, you're out of here.
You understand.
As I say, I like Dana Perino, but I I just folks, you haven't heard anything.
You you just you I I've been waiting.
I have been waiting to see if this gets reported.
It has not been reported, it's not gone beyond where I first saw it.
Well, I take it back.
It has appeared in one other place.
Our old buddy James Pethacukis, who um writes at Reuters and some other places, has discovered that one of the objectives Obama has with all these recess appointments, is to brace yourself here.
Essentially, when you strip it all away, if this happens, what Obama is planning on doing is essentially forgiving all mortgages.
There are some requirements.
You have to be paying on your mortgage.
You have to be three months current, but Obama is going to just wave a magic wand and allow people to refinance their mortgages, essentially cutting hundreds of dollars off of the monthly Payment.
This will cost 1.2 trillion dollars, and as always, it is those of you who don't have a mortgage or uh who will not qualify for this uh this this plan who will be paying for it.
This is buying an election in one fell swoop.
This is what quote from yesterday.
Oh, well, everybody's saying, even Rove, even Rove is out there saying it's not a smart move to spend 20 minutes on stage with McCain if you are Romney having McCain endorse you.
It's really not a smart move.
It wasn't that 20 minutes on Hannity last night.
I don't know who they think.
I I I don't know.
I I just don't know.
I I don't I don't know how they think they're helping them.
But that's don't get me sidetracked here.
This folks, it may not matter who the nominee is.
It may not matter about the primaries.
It may not matter about any polling data.
We have a president who is cutting the defense budget now.
Uh his priorities are winning the future, paying off his wacko donors and weakening national security in the process, proudly saying that it's about time we pared down to the point where we can only fight one ground war at a time.
The idea that we should be able to fight two ground wars at a time is excessive and unnecessary.
So we're cutting the defense budget, major, all of this predictable, by the way.
There is a plan afoot by virtue of these recess appointments.
But the the bottom line is in terms of perception, the perception is going to be on the part of people that Obama is forgiving their mortgages.
The perception and the way it's going to be reported, this is not really what's going to happen, but the way it's going to be reported, and the way people are going to be made to feel is that Obama is fixing their mortgage.
He's fixing the fact that their house is underwater.
He is going to lower their monthly payment.
The banks, the rich guys are going to take the hit on it, millionaires and so forth.
Your house is going to have value again.
Uh in one fell swoop with an executive order, we are we're going to fix the housing problem.
We're going to we're going to bring value back to everybody's number one asset.
Now, if that happens, and if it's reported that way, then all the rest of this is irrelevant.
You go out and basically as president make it possible for people's mortgages to be paid much cheaper, the value of their home restored just with a wave of your magic water.
Who's going to vote against that?
Who is going to vote against the guy that makes that happen for them?
That's the plan.
Now, it's not guaranteed that it's going to happen.
The if it does, the the monthly mortgage payment of people affected would fall by an average of $355 a month for Obama's constituents.
That is not insignificant.
That's that's for a lot of people that's close to the payment we're talking about here.
For a lot of people, it's half the payment.
It's not insignificant.
You reduce people's monthly payment by 400 bucks just by waving the magic wand.
And there's one guy who did it, Obama.
Now I want to take you back to some of the early town halls after the guy was elected over in Tampa.
There's this woman saying, I, well, where's my new kitchen?
You know, where where's my new car?
Well, here it comes, election year 2012.
But instead of a new kitchen, new car, hey, guess what?
You know what?
Here's your mortgage.
Refinanced, totally affordable, as it should have been in the first place.
The banks were ripping you off, the banks are overcharging you, but I am making your mortgage affordable, and your value of the home is now worth something.
Um who's gonna stop it?
Who's gonna but nobody?
No, of course they're gonna have to.
What do you mean the bank's gonna grab the ankles on this?
The banks have been grabbing the ankles ever since a community redevelopment act.
The military's grabbing the ankles on cutting themselves.
Um uh McCain's grabbing the ankle.
We don't call anybody liars.
Politics.
It's not how we do it.
Unless you have incontrovertible.
And we don't really want to say the country's screwed.
That's just not presidential.
So while we're sitting here worried about semantics, sounding president, we've got a guy who is living and behaving outside the Constitution.
We have a lawless regime here.
We have a banana republic taking place.
We have a dictatorship unfolding here.
This mortgage thing, and I'm I'll give you the details here as the program unfolds.
But remember, folks, it's not the details here that are going to matter.
It's the perception and how this is reported and when it's all over, the beneficiaries of this program are going to be told that Obama is basically forgiving their mortgage, forgiving alone.
Obama is basically giving them a house.
Giving them their house.
And they deserve that because the rich banks have screwed them all these years by overcharging them and so forth, and Obama finally cut these people down.
This is how it's going to be reported.
It's the same thing with the jobless numbers.
I I warned you.
I warned you back in December.
Get ready.
And lo and behold, all it's taken is one month for it to come through.
The new jobless numbers is look, oh, gee, are we in fat city?
Why everybody's going back to work, the economy three bent.
So it's it's it's uh it's a lot to deal with here.
Um I well, let's let me take a brief time out.
We'll come back and I'll put all of this uh in a in a in a semblance of uh of order and give you the details of this.
The the mortgage thing's not guaranteed to happen, and I don't want to say it's a fate of compli.
I just want to tell you it's what's planned.
Uh this would be the mother of all stimulus bills.
This they're calling this the home assistance refinancing program 2.0.
Uh the home assistance refinancing program, HAP, HARP 1.0 failed.
It didn't work.
The mortgage adjustment didn't, they're going back and they're going to do it again.
They're calling it HARP 2.0.
So we have a president who has gone rogue.
Even yesterday in Ohio, just set this up.
Obama at his town hall meeting repeated his lie that the banks tricked people into getting bad mortgages.
The banks tricked people, lured them in.
And that's not at all what happened.
The government is responsible for the subprime mortgage crisis, as you well know because you're a devoted and regular listener to the program.
But this is all set up yesterday with Obama in uh in Ohio.
I got to take a brief time out.
You'll sit tight.
I know you will.
I know you're not going anywhere.
We'll be back in mere moments, right after this.
Welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh here on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network at the cutting edge of societal evolution.
After receiving a bailout, ladies and gentlemen, General Motors may move their coal-powered automobile manufacturing to the uh to the Chicoms.
What do you mean, Mr. Limbaugh?
There's no such thing as a coal-fowered powered car.
Yeah, there is it's called a Chevy Volt.
And it's uh it's it's powered by by coal.
No, Mr. Limbaugh, powered by a battery.
Everybody knows that the the electric car just like the Fitzgerald and just like the Tritger and just like uh the other that the No, Mr. Newcastra, uh, yeah.
Where's the electricity come from?
You dingbet.
Coal-powered fire plants.
So the coal-powered Chevy Vault.
After receiving a bailout, General Motors may move vault production to China.
They don't have to deal with the unions in China.
And in the process, we get to uh share whatever technology is in the vault with the ChICOMs.
Well, that's one bit.
The Democrats can't decide if Mitt Romney is a flip flopper or a hard right extremist.
This is from Toby Harndon at the uh uh it's a Daily Mail, UK Daily Mail.
It's been interesting to listen to the spin from Democrats about the Hawkeye Cockye.
Clearly they think that Mitt Romney will be the GOP nominee for weeks.
They've been attacking him general election style, which has probably helped the former Massachusetts governor in the eyes of Republican voters.
So how are the attacks going?
Judging by the CNN appearance of Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz, Florida, not so well.
In a comically confused broadside, she accused Romney of being the Tea Party lunatic, but also she said he's somebody who doesn't believe in anything.
The Democrats don't know how to go after Romney.
They don't know whether to call him a flip flopper or a hard right extremist.
They'll do both.
Well, uh what what's the big mystery here?
By the way, they're taking Centaurum seriously.
Did you see that uh Axelrod sent a couple of Occupy Wall Street types out to uh to a Centaurum appearance?
The Pentagon chief Leon Panetta says the U.S. will have to make some trade-offs, take some extra risks under the new military strategy laid out to absorb federal budget cuts.
Leon Panetta unveiled a strategy today in a news conference with uh President Obama and Chairman of Joint Chiefs, General Martin Dempsey.
Panetta said that future budgets will mean smaller U.S. armed forces and greater risk.
But he said the country doesn't have to choose between national security and fiscal responsibility.
He said at this point in history in a changing world, the Pentagon would uh would have been forced to make a strategy shift anyway.
The money crisis merely forced the government to face the shift that's taking place now.
So that's gonna happen.
We're gonna cut the military, we're gonna increase our risk in a dangerous world.
It's gonna happen anyway.
May as well do it now when the budget numbers are what they are.
Want to go back to me on this program, December 20th.
On this program, remember this.
I have warned you this kind of thing is going to happen.
The unemployment number is going to precipitously drop, and it's going to get close to 8% by next November.
Just mark my words.
That's in the can.
It's in the cards.
I'm just telling you that the unemployment number is going to get down to close to 8%, however, they have to do it.
If they have to reduce the overall universe of jobs, which they have been doing.
For example, if the same number of people were looking for work today as were looking for work when Obama was emagulated, the unemployment rate would be 11%.
And now it's what is it, 8.9?
And that's because they have simply wiped out two million plus jobs.
And they have wiped out, accordingly, 2 million plus people who are no longer looking.
The job market has just shrunk.
Therefore, the number of people out of work as a percentage of available jobs, obviously that number's going to come down.
So that's going to happen.
That was all part of a warning I gave you to get ready to get into this year now, 2012, and the economic news is all going to be reported as great and good.
Uh that Obama's policies are finally taking root now.
Uh the economy was so much worse than anybody knew.
Uh Bush Cheney had lied to uh the Obama transition team.
This is the story.
Had not uh been honest when forthcoming, with just how rotten the economy was.
So Obama didn't deal appropriately his policies were not powerful enough.
But now they've been in place long enough, finally starting to take hold.
And this is going to lead into the argument that we shouldn't change horses in the middle of the stream.
And so, right off the bat, as predictable as the sun coming up.
Here is this from the AP Christopher Rugaber, the number of people seeking unemployment benefits fell further last week, ending the year on a three-month run of declines that point to stronger hiring.
In 2012, weekly applications dropped by 15,000.
CNBC has a story out there just over the top, how wonderful this.
We are back, folks.
We're back.
Now the question we all need to ask ourselves is this what did Obama do to create these jobs?
What Obama policy?
We know what Reagan did.
We know what the Reagan policies of the 80s.
What has Obama done?
What Reagan policy or what what Obama policies have been put into place recently to create all these jobs?
The answer's nothing.
And the answer is that we are still in horrible shape in the job market because we have reduced the universe of available jobs.
And in typical AP fashion, they neglect to mention that last week's new unemployment claims number was actually up by a whopping 21,000.
Last week, holiday week, nobody pays much.
Do you know that application for unemployment went up by 21,000?
It's not a three-week run.
It's not a three-month run.
That terrible news got practically no attention last week since it was reported over the Christmas holidays.
So it's all smoke and mirrors, exactly as predicted.
Dishonesty on parade from the state controlled media.
We'll be right back.
Stand by now by 24.
Welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network.
This is uh what's this uh ADP?
It's investorsplace.com, but it's it's it's it's news from ADP and uh, you know, automatic data processing, payroll people.
And they're out there with a totally different story than the unemployment news today from AP and elsewhere.
And so is, by the way, Gallup.
Gallup is still saying the real unemployment number is up around 17, 18%.
By the time you factor in people who've given up looking, there isn't any improvement.
And when you ask, what has Obama done to improve the economy if the only thing I can think of is extending the Bush tax cuts.
Over a year ago, it's about the only thing Obama has done that might be indicative of any job creation.
None of his policies have created jobs.
His policies have destroyed jobs.
Yeah, and nobody in the media ever credits the Bush tax cuts for lowering unemployment, if it's been lowered.
But look, Wall Street seemed upbeat today thanks to positive jobs numbers and a private sector payroll report from ADP specifically, jobs increased 225,000 in December, led by the service sector and the small business additionally, November's employment numbers were revised slightly higher.
But lest you think everything's coming up roses, keep in mind that many big corporations in America are still reluctant to hire.
In fact, they're continuing to cut back based on recent headlines.
There's PepsiCo, Boeing, the list goes Lockheed Martin, uh Kodak filing Chapter 11.
The idea here that jobs are being created is absurd.
And as you drive around your town, you see boarded up, closed-up elements, economic uh storefronts, whatever.
But I just I wanted to remind you, this is an election year, and there is no news.
The news, the fact that the media does news is a misnomer.
The media is an arm of the Democrat Party of the Obama administration.
They have an agenda, and the whole point here is to spread propaganda now.
And I was I was talking to uh friend about this last night.
I said, Russia ain't gonna work.
I said, Don't tell me they're gonna work.
Can I take you back to 2006-2007 when unemployment was 5% and they had people convinced that we were in a recession?
Remember you've you heard people call this program and ask them how you doing that?
Oh, I'm doing great, but but my my neighbor's not doing well.
How do you know?
Why hear it on the news.
We had people in 2005-2006 feeling guilty about how they were doing economically because they heard on the news that there was a recession and people were losing their jobs.
They didn't see it, they heard about it.
So unemployment, 5%.
Media tells us we're heading toward a recession.
It's and they and this was bombarded with part of the Iraq war news with all the casualties and the deaths and uh the criminal aspects of the war, all this.
It was a constant, never-ending drumbeat against the Bush administration against the country.
And so, yeah, if if if the if the regime comes along and if all the news media reports all the jobs being created, whether you see it or not, you're gonna believe it.
Just like you believed your neighbor was hurting when you didn't know it.
So they can have an effect.
Now, it's gonna be tougher because people are living this downturn.
They are living their unemployment.
But even the unemployed, if they hear a never ending drumbeat that jobs are being created and people are being hired, they're going to think, well, it's my turn's right around the corner.
I'm just warning you, be prepared for it.
It's going to come.
And I don't want to get any calls in June.
Rush, what are we going to do about all this crap in the media?
Because I'm going to say to you, I warned you six months ago.
And you're going to go, well, why don't the Republicans do something?
I don't know.
Asking me this for 23 years.
Why don't the Republicans do something here about, I mean, we got a guy, recess appointments when there's no recess.
The Senate is not in recess.
We've actually got Republicans saying it's not that big a deal.
We don't want to make a big deal.
It's not that really big a deal.
Oh, it isn't.
Behaving outside the Constitution is not that big a deal.
When's it going to become a big enough deal to do something about?
When's it going to become a big enough deal to try to stop?
That's the question that we all have.
January surprise, here it is, folks.
James Petakukis at a blog, the American.com.
This could be just the beginning.
If Obama's legally dodgy appointment of Richard Cordray to head the consumer finance agency should stick, it may open the door to more such actions.
Here's Jarrett Seiberg of the Washington Research Group.
To us, it's a think tank bunch.
To us, the most important takeaway of recess appointment of Cordway is that the president could use this same maneuver to put a housing advocate in charge of the FHFA.
Federal Housing Finance Agency.
Why is that important?
Well, the Federal Housing Finance Agency is the regulator and conservator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
And the Federal Housing Finance Agency currently has an acting director, Edward DeMarco.
If Obama replaces DeMarco with a quote unquote housing advocate via the same recess appointment process, here is what might happen next, according to Cyberg.
That could lead to a mass refinancing program for agency-backed mortgages.
That would go well beyond the existing HARP program.
That could hurt agency MBS pricing and result in higher financing costs, more mortgage-backed security pricing, and result in higher financing costs going forward, yet it also could be a big boost for the economy and housing going into the election.
Well, hell yes, it could.
You let people refinance their mortgages, effectively cut them in half, lop almost $400 off the monthly payment, have one guy said to be responsible for it, Barack Obama, getting even with the banks or overcharging everybody.
Restoring value to people's homes.
Mr. Pathacoukas writes, indeed, my sources tell me that the Obama regime has been eager to implement just such a plan, but it needs to have its own man heading the Federal Housing Finance Agency to make this happen.
The plan would be modeled after one originally devised by Columbia University economist Glenn Hubbard, who's a campaign advisor to Romney, by the way.
Yes, let me read this to you again.
The plan that Obama wants to implement would be modeled after one originally devised by Columbia University economist Glenn Hubbard, a campaign advisor to Romney and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Christopher Mayer.
These are the two guys that have come up with this refinancing program.
Is another, I mean, you think they don't want to run against Romney?
So you've got Romney advisors that were hijacked to help put together Obamacare.
And now you've got Obama who's about to institute a mortgage refinance plan that is the idea of a Romney advisor.
And yet we're being told they're scared of running against Romney.
They really don't want to run against Romney.
I don't see it that way.
In recent congressional testimony, Mayor, one half of the team that came up with the idea, described how the mass refinancing plan would work.
He said, under our plan, every homeowner with a GSE mortgage can refinance his or her mortgage with a new mortgage at a current fixed rate of 4.20% or less.
To qualify the homeowner must be current on his or her mortgage or become so for at least three months.
Other than being current, we would impose no other qualification or application except for the intention to accept a new rate.
That is no appraisal, no income verification, no tax returns, no nothing.
That's you heard right.
You heard right.
All you have to do to qualify is have a GSE mortgage and be current for three months on your payment.
GSE mortgage is a Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac mortgage.
Government-sponsored enterprise.
You're just you got to show up and say redo, you've got to show up, you've got to be three months current.
You have to have a mortgage that's approved by but that's been governed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac.
GSE is a government-sponsored enterprise.
That's that's Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac.
Um other than being current, the two guys that came up with the plan, one of whom's a Romney advisor said we would impose no other qualification or application except the intention to accept the new rate of 4.2%.
There would be no appraisal of your house.
There would be no verification of your income, there would be no tax returns looked at.
They'd simply say if you're current for three months.
Basically, Dawn, G S E means everybody because uh uh Fanny Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack pretty much uh purview over practically every mortgage that's out there.
And if they if yours isn't yet under Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, it will eventually be packaged and sold to them, so it eventually will be a GSE.
Or if you have an FHA loan.
Mayor estimates that some $3.7 trillion of mortgages would be refinanced.
That's that's right.
You heard right.
That would be the mother of all stimulus plans.
The mother of all mortgage refinancing plans, $3.7 trillion to be refinanced.
It would help 30 million borrowers save $75 to $80 billion a year on payments, aggregated.
As Mayor puts it, this plan would function like a long-lasting tax cut for these 25 or 30 million American families, which is essentially what Obama making it, Obama cutting your taxes by 500 bucks a month on your mortgage.
400 bucks a month on your mortgage.
You snurdley keeps yelling at me the banks are going to just roll over for that.
The banks have nothing to do with it.
No, it's Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac.
These are GSE mortgages.
They're already in debt.
There's a taxpayers paying this, not the banks.
It's the tax, the banks are not in on this.
This is this is everybody else who renters are paying for this.
People that don't have mortgages are paying for this.
People who've owned their properties outright will be paying for this, not the banks.
On his website, Hubbard, who is the Romney advisor, says the plan would have an immediate fixed cost to the government of $121 billion.
And he calculates the economic impact as follows.
There's four points here.
A lot of numbers, and that just gets confusing on the radio.
But point number one is that we estimate 72% of owner occupant homeowners would be eligible to refinance at no cost to them.
Their monthly mortgage payments would fall by an average of $355 a month for a total national fiscal injection of $7.1 billion every month paid for by the taxpayers, not the banks.
Now, if this happens, it'll be one man doing Obama as a result of getting his guy in at the Federal Mortgage or Federal Housing Services Administration, and one guy will get the credit.
And as I told you earlier, those people that went to the town hall meeting shortly after Obama was elected, inaugurated, say, where's my car?
Where's my new kitchen?
Obama's gonna say, here is your house.
I have made it possible for you to stay in and afford your house.
So it won't matter who the Republican nominee is.
It won't matter whether our nominee says the government's screwed or not, or worse, none of that stuff will matter.
The polling data won't matter.
This will be the single largest election purchase in uh in our lifetimes.
And it coincides with Defense Department cuts and so forth.
So the bottom line is it's a political and economic game changer in a presidential election year.
Obama could offer a trillion dollar stimulus as measured over a decade that would directly and immediately impact millions of Americans suffering from the housing depression and just wipe it out.
We'll be back.
Don't go away.
Now let me sum it up for you.
In real language, not journalism language.
The plan that I just described, formulated by an advisor to Mitt Romney, in part, would turn the conventional banking standards that we have upside down.
The government would force banks to give lower rates to risky borrowers with bad mortgages, because it this is after, folks, the plan.
Once you uh institute the program, you have to carry it forward with new lenders as well.
Otherwise, the whole thing goes out the window.
So at that point, it does impact the banks.
So the government would force the banks to give lower rates to risky borrowers with bad mortgages.
Now, how do the banks make that up?
They go to people like Snerdley, who are responsible borrowers, who pay their mortgages, and you will have a higher rate than what, because these people will be the poor.
The people who are having their mortgages refinanced are the poor, uh, the disadvantaged, the uh the victims of the predators who charge them more than they could ever afford.
So responsible mortgage holders will have to pay higher rates in order to make up the difference for this reduction that the poor are getting.
This is a massive redistribution scheme.
It may be the single largest income redistribution scheme we've seen, if it happens.
And I hate to tell you this.
This is the second mortgage adjustment program that's being talked about.
The first one is HARP 1.
HARP One didn't work.
A whole lot of people didn't apply for it because there is a lot of red tape.
There's still, there is still gonna be a lot of bureaucracy and hoops that people are gonna have to jump through.
It's not guaranteed to work, but even if it doesn't, you may never know.
It's an election year, and all that's going to be Reported is the intention.
The compassionate intention of Obama to help people who've been screwed by predatory lenders make their mortgages affordable.
Whether it ever happens or not will be irrelevant.
In terms of the impact on the campaign, the way it'll be reported is Obama cares.
His intentions, his big heartedness, he wants to help.
And if it doesn't happen, you go to the over-reliable, you blame the Republicans for standing in the way of it.
Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do.
Okay, folks, I just saw it on the news.
General Motors has announced a recall of every Chevrolet Volt ever made.
It's a fire risk.
They need to do something to strengthen a compartment around the battery.
Every GM volt recalled.
It's a fire risk.
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