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Feb. 17, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:45
February 17, 2012, Friday, Hour #2
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That's right, ladies and gentlemen.
The media, the American left.
They want to try to convince you that the party of Michelle Buckman and Sarah Palin and Liz Cheney hates women.
The party of Bachman and Palin hates women.
And the party of the Kennedys and Bill Clinton and Chris Dodd love women.
How does that work?
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
The Gallup poll is out.
Presidential approval poll.
Barack Hussein Obama.
At 43% approval.
How can that be?
Why Obama just promised free contraceptives to everybody last week.
Barack Obama just told everybody last week that he's going to make sure that the Catholic Church and then insurance companies are going to give you free contraception.
And look at the great news on unemployment.
Why?
The unemployment number is down and the economy's on the way back.
And Barack Hussein Obama is in charge of all these wonderful things.
And yet his approval numbers at 43%.
How does that work?
CNN says 50% of the American people do not support the free giveaway of contraceptives.
Why, they're reporting that as though it ought to be 80% of the people in favor of it.
Life in reality, life on the ground, is far different than the picture being painted by the drive-by media.
Obama just gave everybody an extra $40 in their paycheck.
And this is the thanks he gets.
He just gave everybody 40 bucks.
He just spent a lot of time setting up a website where people could tell him via Twitter what $40 meant to them.
And you know what?
Not one of them said they could buy a vote with it.
They all talked about paying off their student loans.
Paying off the student loan, filling up the gasoline.
Well, halfway.
He just gave everybody an extension unemployment benefits.
And this is the thanks the Messiah gets a 43% approval rating.
That's not fair.
Grab soundbites 25 and 26 first, and we'll get back to Foster Freeze here in just a second.
I mentioned the top of the program that Geithner appeared on Capitol Hill House Committee on the budget yesterday.
The 2013 budget.
Paul Ryan said leaders are supposed to fix problems.
We have a 99.4 trillion dollar unfunded liability.
That's everything we owe everybody.
99.4 trillion, not a 16 or 17 trillion dollar national debt, but all the promises and all the IOUs.
99.4 trillion dollar unfunded liability.
Our government's making promises to Americans that it has no way of keeping, no way of accounting for them.
And so you're saying, Secretary Geitner, yeah, we're stabilizing it, but we're not fixing it in the long run.
That means we're just going to keep lying to people.
We're going to keep all these empty promises going.
And so what we're saying is in order to avoid a debt crisis, you're the Treasury Secretary.
I mean, if we can't make good on our bonds in the future, who is going to invest in our country, sir?
We're not disagreeing in the sense that I made it absolutely clear that what our budget does is get our deficits down to a sustainable path over the budget.
Over the budget window.
And why?
Let's let's talk to the why do they take off again?
Why do they do that?
Because we got 10,000 people retiring every day and health care costs going up at the end.
We have millions of Americans retiring every day, and that will drive substantial further rate of growth and health care costs.
And so you were right to say we're not coming before you today to say we have a definitive solution long-term problem.
He admits it.
He told Paul Ryan, we're not the regime.
We're not coming before you today to say we have a definitive solution to the long-term problem.
And then he went on to say what we do know is we don't like yours to Paul Ryan to the Republicans.
We don't we don't have a solution, but we don't like yours.
Well, wait a minute.
What happened to compromise?
What happened to working together?
What happened to crossing the aisle?
You notice how that only goes one way.
So here comes this little twerp who cheated on his taxes.
And he says we don't have a solution for this.
But we don't like yours.
Acknowledging that Ryan and his boys have a solution.
But the regime doesn't like it.
And you know why?
Because they don't want a solution.
Tom Harkin, affectionately known here as Dung Heap, Senator from Iowa, last night on the Senate floor, said something that he deserves credit for.
He said something that in many ways the Republicans ought to be saying.
He was talking about the payroll tax cut.
He doesn't like it.
Here's a Democrat, a member of the president's own party, saying he doesn't like the payroll tax cut.
This Congress will be making a grave mistake.
A grave mistake.
And reinforcing a dangerous precedent by extending the payroll tax cut.
And adding another negative without paying for it.
And I'm dismayed that Democrats, including a Democratic president and a Democratic vice president, have proposed this and are willing to sign off on a deal that could begin the unraveling of Social Security.
Did you hear that?
He's making our point, ladies and gentlemen.
You and I are scratching our heads and wondering why, in the course of the payroll tax cut debate, Republicans are not pointing out, hey, his underfunding Social Security.
Hey, ladies and gentlemen of America, the payroll tax is the only way Social Security gets paid for.
It's the only place money for Social Security is collected.
The Democrats are cutting that tax.
They're reducing it.
They are reducing the amount overall of money collected for Social Security.
This to me has always been a no-brainer.
Where are the Republicans on this?
For all of my lifetime, I have had to hear that as a Republican, I want old people to have to give up their social security.
We've all heard that.
We've all, as Republicans been accused of wanting to kick seniors out of their houses, take away their social security, take away their Medicare.
It has never been true.
Here comes Barack Obama, the Democrat Party, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi.
They're doing it.
Thank you.
They're actually cutting Social Security revenue by 105 billion dollars a year minimum.
And I guess the Republicans are so scared to point this out because it's a tax cut, and they can't afford to be seen opposed to a tax cut.
And that's not what this is.
Harkin's right.
He's worried about the unraveling of Social Security.
And what he means is they're taking money away from it.
And it's by no means solvent as it is.
What he didn't say is the only reason Obama's doing this is because it's the only place that Obama can talk about tax cut.
And that's the one area of this campaign where Obama is trying to hide who he is.
Everything else about this campaign, Obama is making it perfectly clear.
He's a big government, socialist, statist, liberal, whatever term you want to use.
He is banking on the fact that a majority of slothful, lazy takers outnumber producers, and that they have enough clout to elect him.
He is campaigning.
He is waging a campaign at life's losers.
In large part, not all of them.
And he's trying to create even more life losers because I'm telling you, you get caught up in government dependency, and you are a loser.
You have no future.
Your dignity, your humanity are robbed, taken from you.
So here's the payroll tax cut, and it's the two-word tax cut.
That's what Obama wants to say he's for.
And he knows the Republicans don't have the guts to oppose it because they are the tax cut party.
Meanwhile, Tom Harkin is exactly right.
And it's a Democrat saying it, going against his own president.
I don't care what his reason is.
No, no, I don't care.
The fact of the matter is that he's making an argument the Republicans could make.
And in so doing, forever rid the country of this notion that they want to take social security away from senior citizens.
It's never been true.
It is now happening.
Barack Obama is defunding Social Security with this payroll tax cut.
It's the only mechanism Social Security is funded with.
Still have a couple sound bites left on the foster freeze business, the media going ape going bananas.
We're up now to Santorum himself on CBS this morning.
He co-host is Charlie Rose.
He said, Foster Freeze comments.
What have you, what do you said to him about those comments, other than what you've said to the press?
You know, this creepy, crazy stuff about women in an aspirin between their knees.
What have you said?
I'm not responsible for every comment that's uh a supporter of mine makes.
If it's a bad joke, it was a stupid joke.
It's not reflected of me or or my record on this issue.
You know, it's funny that I've been criticized uh by Governor Romney and by Ron Paul for actually having voted for something called Title X federal funding of contraception.
So this is the same gotcha politics that you get from the media, and I'm just not gonna play that game.
I'm not responsible for any comment that anybody who supports me make, and my record stands for itself.
Okay.
Um then we uh go on.
Charlie Rose said, Well, you've been identified as a as a social conservative.
Those issues have been part of what you have said to the country.
So this isn't gotcha.
What this is is trying to understand exactly what Rick Santorum stands for and what he might say or do as president.
Charlie, when you quote a supporter of mine who tells a bad off-color joke, and somehow I'm responsible for that, that's gotcha.
This is what you guys do.
You don't do this with President Obama.
In fact, with President Obama, what you did was you you went out and defended him against someone who he sat in a church for for 20 years and defended him that, oh, he can't possibly believe what he listened to for 20 years.
That was a double standard.
This is what you're pulling off.
And I and I'm gonna call you on it.
The fact is I'm here in Detroit, and we're focused on economy and the jobs.
So that's a good recovery.
I like that.
I the point that I made just moments ago, it's Reverend Wright, Obama's in his pew for 20 years.
He didn't hear what he said, and even if he did, it doesn't matter.
You can't, you can't tie Obama to Reverend Wright.
That's guilt by association.
You can't, you can't do that.
I just wish Rick hadn't thrown Freeze overboard.
That's all, but that's just me.
Let's go back and let's listen to Reverend Wright, since we're since uh all these women have got their panties in a wad over Froster foster freeze and an aspirin.
Let's go back and let's listen to Reverend Wright, just a little bit of it.
And keep in mind as you hear this again, that we were supposed to ignore this, that we can't tie this to Obama.
Obama, he never heard Wright say this in all 20 years.
He was in the church.
Reverend Wright married him, Reverend Wright baptized his kids, his kids have gone to the church, his wife went to the church.
None of them ever heard Reverend Wright say any of this.
And even if they had heard him say it, you can't tie that to Obama.
You can't say that he's accountable for everything, uh supporter of his.
They went to the wall to protect Obama from Reverend Wright to protect Obama from this.
Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people.
Hillary ain't never been called a nigga.
Bill did us just like he did Monica Lewinsky.
He was riding dirty in white America, US of KKKA, black men turning on black men.
I am sick of Negroes who just do not get it.
Not God bless America.
God America that's in the Bible for killing innocent people.
God America.
And now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards.
America's chickens coming home to roost.
Yeah, we're supposed to ignore that.
They can't tie Obama to that.
There's none of his supporters.
It's a guilt by association.
He never heard him say that kind of stuff.
That we were supposed to forget.
This is creepy.
It's filthy.
It's trashy.
It's dirty.
It's insulting.
It's repulsive.
It's stupid.
It's off color.
It's profane.
It's all the rotten, worthless stuff in the world that we're supposed to never hear.
Back in my days, they used bare aspirin for contraceptives.
The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn't that costly.
Excuse me, I'm just trying to catch my breath from that, Mr. Freeze, frankly.
Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country in a culture that's controlled by rich white people.
Hillary ain't never been calling the N-word.
Bill did it just like he did Monica Linsky.
He was riding dirty.
I paid no attention to that, folks.
Barack Obama never heard that.
We're gonna get ticked off over a man of virtue talking about an aspirin between women's knees.
That's stuff we're supposed to ignore, and we laugh at Bill Clinton ruining Lewinsky's life and JFK ruining who knows how many other women's lives.
While we're told we are the party that hates women.
Now, Reverend Wright's okay, he's fine because he's pro-abortion.
And that's all it takes.
If you are pro-abortion, you get a gold star, you're a Democrat in good standing, and you can do anything and be defended.
You can do anything and remain a ranking member of the tribe.
You just have to be pro-abortion.
I'm thinking about Obama here and cutting social security.
It's really what he's doing.
He's defunding it.
But then looking at it from his perspective, why not?
Those angry old white people aren't going to vote for him anyway.
He's not, he's not aiming at the votes of social security recipients.
He's not aiming at them.
Those just a bunch of bitter clingers anyway.
AP State controlled Associated Press.
A story by two women.
This is illustrative of the chicken of American news.
Listen to the first paragraph of a news story, ladies and gentlemen.
A news story.
Most Americans don't share Rick Santorum's absolutist take on abortion.
He's out of step on women in combat.
He questions the values of the two-thirds of mothers who work.
He's even troubled by something as commonplace as birth controls for married couples.
That is an AP news story by Connie Cass and Jennifer Agiesta.
This is supposed to be a news article.
And most Americans, I think by now realize the AP is no longer a news outlet.
It's just part of the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party.
The next thing they write is even among a Republican presidential field anxious to please religious conservatives, Santorum's ideas stand out.
Which is to say, he's even crazier than the rest of the Republicans.
A Catholic father of seven whose kids are homeschooled, they write.
See, we told you he's crazy.
Santorum may seem to wear his conservatism as comfortably as his sweater vests, but he's walked a careful path, keeping the more provocative opinions that helped sink his reelection in 2006 mostly out of his presidential campaign.
Now, this is a twofer from the AP.
Santorum has not kept his conservative views secret at all.
It's open line Friday and time to hit the phones.
I really, you know, I I told Snerdley, the top of the show, look, start screening, buddy, because I got nothing here.
Nothing floats my boat.
I don't care.
So he's had calls ready to go since about ten after the start of the show.
And normally he doesn't start screening until about 1230 Eastern to give the show time to start so that calls have something to do with what's happened.
I always try to start screening earlier on Open Line Friday anyway.
So let's see.
We're going to start Edmonds, Washington.
This is Tony.
Glad you called, sir.
You're up first.
Hi, Rush.
Thanks for taking the call.
Say, uh, I was hoping to mention about the necessity of making a mandate in elections.
And when we forget about Reagan that he was building a mandate uh for cutting taxes and was, you know, lambasted by the Republicans for being voodoo economics.
And you know, the economy and Obama and the leftism of this government is the primary issue we have to face.
Yet uh one of the underlying issues of of why this this uh government is exploding is the social unraveling of our fabric.
And Santorum has enough guts to to mention this.
And you know, we can't lose focus that it's the economy and dealing with this ballooning butt government, but at the same time uh we have to address some of the underlying causes, and Santorum has enough guts to mention this stuff, but yet he's being lambasted by our side.
Well, our side, everybody on our side's been lambasted by our side.
I mean, there's nobody on our side that's immune from being lambasted.
Now, our side has tried to destroy everybody else on our side since this whole process began.
But you know what?
You raise a great point.
And that is the role that our value uh value-based culture and its its uh decay, the role that plays in a faltering economy, the role it plays in lack of education, the role it plays in in uh people being ill-prepared to work.
You really are more right than you know about this.
Now, I I do have to correct you.
I know you were trying to make a comparative point.
Reagan never mandated a tax increase in the sense that we're talking about mandates today.
He proposed tax increases, but he never mandated them.
You can't.
The only president that's ever tried to mandate stuff extra constitutionally and uh without the legislative branch, well, not the only one, but the most recent one's Obama.
Yet FDR do it.
Woodrow Wilson.
But you're right, Santorum is pointing out that there is more wrong with the United States than the economy.
And he is also pointing out that a portion of our economic woes are directly traceable to the decay of our culture.
And the government is the major factor.
The government is the major player in this decay, because the government, as run by liberals, has furthered the notion that life decisions and behavioral matters have no consequences.
So there's no question is a cultural rot taking place, and there has been for a long time.
The culture war is always going on.
In fact, that term, culture war, in its modern incarnation can be traced back to the uh early nineties.
Robert Bork wrote a book about it.
So did Pat Buchanan.
A number of people have commented on the culture wars.
I remember interviewing Bork for the Limbaugh letter about it with his book, and he was insistent that you couldn't separate economic problems and the cultural decay that's been taking place.
The Democrats need cultural rot.
The Democrats need a society where there are no consequences for your actions.
Because they are there to pick up the pieces of broken lives that they break.
It really is a hideous thing.
And Santorum does have the guts to talk about it.
And I'll I'll tell you, folks, there's a segment of the Republican Party that doesn't want to go there.
They don't want to hear about it.
The Republican establishment, for the most part, if they could, would simply excommunicate every social conservative Republican they could find.
They kick them out of the party.
And they would gag them.
They'd find a way to make sure they couldn't speak.
That's how much they hate them, detest them, are embarrassed by them.
And it's based on one thing.
Primarily.
It's based on the fact that these establishment Republicans and others who don't like the social conservatives are primarily singularly worried about what people are going to think of them for being in the same party with the social conservatives.
It really is no more complicated than that.
I mean, there are other things.
They think social conservatives lose elections.
They think social conservatives make the whole Republican Party a big target.
Like what's going on now, this contraception business.
They are, the Republican establishment is blaming not so much Santorum.
They'll get to that.
They are blaming social conservatives for this even being usable as an issue by Obama.
They blame social conservatives for in their minds empowering Democrats to make an issue out of something that doesn't exist.
In this case, there's not one person.
Not one person, including Santorum, nobody has advocated banning contraception.
Not one person.
Nobody.
And yet, the House does hearings on whether or not Obama has the authority to demand that insurance companies provide them.
And the Democrats create a dog and pony show where a couple women walk out after failing to get a college student female permission to testify.
The media steps right in and tells the unsuspecting idiots that watch the news and don't know what's going on that there was a congressional hearing on banning contraception.
And these brave Democrats are not going to stand for that.
They brave Democrats walk down.
They're not going to let these Republicans get away with that.
They're not going to let these Republicans get away with making people stop screwing.
It isn't going to happen.
The Democrats are going to make sure if you want to screw, you can do it as much as you want.
And we'll provide you the contraception for it.
And these Republicans, they're the ones that want to deny you fun.
They're the ones that deny you freedom to be whoever you want, and we're going to make sure they don't give it a.
And that's how this all works.
And the establishment Republicans sit there and they cringe.
They don't have a desire or the wherewithal to enter this fray and help properly frame it and refute it.
They just sit there embarrassed and angry over what people are going to think of them.
But Tony here is right.
You can't separate cultural rot from economic problems.
Two go hand in hand.
This is Sam and San Diego.
Glad you waited, sir.
Your turn on the EIB network.
Hello.
So I hate to think that I threw away the good education that my parents paid for, but I don't understand how downgrading the number of jobs available increases or also decreases the unemployment number.
It would be like McDonald's saying they sold one and a half billion fewer hamburgers than they previously said, and so have ended unemployment or uh hunger.
I don't I don't see the correlation.
Okay.
I just want to make sure I understand the question.
You don't understand my point when I say they reduce the overall number of jobs available in the universe to the relationship the relationship of that to the unemployment number.
Correct.
Well I should both go down.
If fewer people had jobs available to them, the same number of people exist, they still don't have jobs.
It didn't make them less unemployed.
Well, I don't uh I don't know what's so hard about.
Let me try it with something that doesn't have nothing to do with jobs.
Now let me stick with jobs.
Let's say that four years ago there were 10 million jobs, and the certain number of people didn't have jobs that wanted them, and the unemployment rate was let's just say eight percent.
Okay.
Now you reduce the 10 million jobs to eight million.
You don't change the number of people haven't changed.
It's still the population still, people haven't died.
You saw the same number of people pursuing fewer jobs, it means that the percentage of people unemployed is going to be expressed as being much less than it actually is.
You got the same number of people chasing fewer jobs, the percentage of those out of work has got to come down because there are fewer jobs to have.
Okay.
Did they just become terminally unemployed because of the mass?
Well, there's three levels here.
There are people that are looking.
There are people that have that have uh that that are still looking but have gone beyond their 99 weeks of unemployment, and a third group of people have given up.
Those people are not counted in the unemployment number that's reported, the unemployment number that's reported by the government's called U3.
And that's the number that you see on the news.
Right now it's like 8.2 or 8.3%.
Okay.
The U6 number counts everybody.
And that number is about 17%.
People that have quit looking for jobs, people that are still looking for jobs that their unemployment extensions run out, and people who are still on unemployment.
Just adds them all up.
But you've got that universe of people chasing fewer jobs.
I mean, it just it it by it stands to reason.
The scam of you what you're not understanding is the scam here.
I I'm not trying to say this is legit.
The scam is to simply say there are fewer jobs.
The labor force participants they just erased 1.2 million possible jobs in December alone.
They just said those jobs are gone.
They're not fillable.
So the total number of potential jobs to get has been reduced in one month by one and a half million or one point two million it was.
Well, if you've got a smaller universe of total available jobs pursued by the same number of people, the percentage of people out of work is going to be lower.
This is why if and James Pethacucas at the American Enterprise Institute has run the numbers.
He said, if the number of jobs available today were identical to what they were when Obama was immaculated, there were 2.2 million more jobs available to have in this country in in uh nine than there are today.
If the same number of jobs existed, the real unemployment rate that's reported would be almost 9.8%.
So you're just not understanding the scam.
You're examining this as a legitimate math problem.
They're just lowering the universe against which the number of people looking for work is compared.
And it has to come down.
The percentage has to come down because the unemployment rate is based on jobs available.
Labor force participation rate, there's a whole bunch of factors involved in it.
But they just, believe me, the labor department, it was in the numbers that came out in January.
They just said that they discovered in December that 1.2 million jobs basically went poof.
Now you can visualize that as boarded up small businesses, shut down factories.
However, you want to visualize that.
But jobs that used to exist, they could be firefighter jobs, they could be information technology jobs, whatever.
The regime just said they're gone.
For the express purpose of having a smaller number of available jobs against which to compare the number of people looking for a job.
I want to try this unemployment business with numbers.
push.
But I must acknowledge that following numbers on the radio is admittedly tough to do.
You can't see them.
But I'm going to give you two examples.
Twenty jobs and five people filled them.
So 15 of the 20 jobs unfilled.
That's an unemployment rate of 80%.
20%, you got a you got a universe here of 20 possible jobs.
Five of them are filled.
That means 20% are working, 80% are not.
Now let's reduce the 20 to 15.
There are 15 jobs.
That's what the regime has done.
They've simply erased, in my example, five jobs.
Same number of people.
Five people working, but now fifteen jobs available.
That is an unemployment rate of 66%.
It has come down from 80%.
When five people fill 20 jobs, there are 15 jobs unfilled that people are looking for.
Unemployment rate, 80%.
Now that 20 becomes 15 jobs, Same number of people work at this place, but now there are only 10 positions to fill instead of 15.
That means the unemployment rate is 66%.
So with the same number of people working and the same number of people looking with five fewer jobs available, if you want to express those working versus the jobs available, the percentage is 66% versus 80%.
unemployment rate.
You could look at it the other way around.
Five people working out of 20...
I mean 20% are working.
Five people occupy 15 jobs, 33% are working.
You simply make smaller the universe of possibility.
And keep the number of people chasing that number the same.
And by simple math, the rate of unemployment, unfilled jobs, will go down.
Not because no, not because new jobs have been created, by the way, not because this is the point of it.
The unemployment rate in this country is coming down, but there aren't any new jobs being created.
This is the scam.
They're still unemployed.
They're still applying for unemployment compensation.
They're still running out of their 99 weeks.
They're still giving up looking.
Everything's the same.
So how can the unemployment rate be coming down?
Well, it isn't.
What's happening is the regime is simply reducing the overall number of jobs that are possible to be filled.
I don't know.
Look, I am lousy at math, and this makes perfect sense to me.
This is this is undeniable, and this is the scam.
Unemployment rate is coming down, but the employment rate's not going up.
So what explains it?
Well, I just did.
folks, look it.
For those of you who are apparently believing that the number of available jobs doesn't matter to the unemployment rate.
You have to answer something for me.
If the number of jobs doesn't matter, then why in the name of Sam Hill is everybody from Obama on down worried about creating jobs?
If the number of jobs don't matter in terms of measuring unemployment, then what does it matter whether we create any new ones?
We have to create new ones because there aren't any jobs to fill.
I thought, isn't that what they're trying to tell us?
That's why the economy's slow?
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