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March 9, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:53
March 9, 2012, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
It is time for some mind over chatter.
Which is exactly what happens here on the Rush Limbaugh program.
It's Friday.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line.
And there are probably a lot of people today who don't know what open line Friday is for you insiders.
For those of you who are regular, for those of you who have been here for all 23 plus years.
24 years in August.
Please indulge me while I explain this to the new arrivals.
First, here's the telephone number for everybody.
You want to be on the program 800-282-2882.
Email address, and we check the email now.
And although it's it's so voluminous, had to add servers to handle it.
Lrushball at EIB net.com.
Okay, here's how it works.
As you know, this program is a benevolent dictatorship.
I'm the dictator.
Uh there is no First Amendment here.
Except for me.
I determine, along with my screener staff, who gets to say what on actually Monday through Thursday, that's the way.
On Friday, we throw all that out.
That's the whole point.
Monday through Thursday, we talk about things I care about.
Otherwise, I'm going to sit here and be bored, and nobody is going to want to listen to that.
And Friday, we throw all that out, as I say, and I take one of the greatest risks known in major media ever.
And that is turning over the content of the program when we go to the phones, we start taking calls to the audience to uh rank amateurs.
I, as you know, am a highly trained broadcast specialist with tremendous broadcast instincts.
And the audience is not.
We love them.
They are rank amateurs, but they are as lovable rank amateurs as you'll find anywhere.
And the thing on Friday is that whatever you want to talk about's okay.
If you think something has gotten short shrift, if you think something hasn't been discussed that needs to be, if you have a question or a kind, it can be about sports, it can be about whatever.
That's the whole point of open line Friday.
It can be politics too.
It can be cultural rot.
It can be whatever.
I've always thought it's a golden opportunity for those who feel restricted by subject matter Monday through Thursday.
So again, telephone numbers 800-282-2882, the email address illrushbow at EIBNet.com.
Also, I normally don't get the phone calls in the first hour on this program, sometimes barely into the second hour.
Try to speed that up on Friday.
Try to take phone calls, start taking phone calls in the first hour, which almost never happens.
I mean, it does occasionally, but rarely.
So that's another thing about Friday.
We'll probably take more phone calls than uh than we usually do.
There's an interesting story to start with today.
This is a political story, and it's out last night.
Obviously, this story was written before this morning's unemployment report came out.
Now the unemployment number, what is it, uh 8.3%.
No change.
And you would not believe the way this is being reported.
Why we are in a roaring back economy.
We have got a recovery that's unprecedented.
I don't care where you have you noticed it, Don.
No, I mean the reporting.
Wherever you look on radio television in print, you would believe that we are sitting atop the greatest powder keg of an economic recovery that there ever has been.
It is universal.
Folks, uh addressed yesterday, the reason that there seems to be uh back and forth up and down mood changes in this country.
Really, if the media in this country were as suspicious of Democrats as they are of Republicans, if the media treated powerful Democrats with the same suspicion and curiosity and doubt, And dare I say dislike and hatred as they treat Republicans, you'd have an entirely different media landscape.
You'd have an entirely different national mood.
That would be profoundly different.
But that's not the way it is.
The media is now just willing accomplices of the Democrat Party and particularly Barack Obama.
And so you get a distorted view of life in America as seen by and reported by the vast majority of what's called the mainstream media.
We call them here the drive-by media, the state controlled media.
And today is a great example.
No matter where you look, this 8.3% unemployment and all the robust other economic news that isn't happening is being reported as it's an abject lie, basically, the stories.
Here are some sample headlines just from Google.
Unemployment steady at 8.3%, but job market improving.
That's U.S. News and World Report.
How can that be?
How can unemployment not have gone down?
How can there not be any new jobs?
But the job market's improving.
Some FM radio station.
Economy adds more jobs than experts forecast?
For those of you just tuning in, the experts in economic matters are always wrong because every week, every month, whatever reporting period, the experts are always surprised.
The experts are always shocked.
Hiring up unemployment, steady economists upbeat, Christian Broadcast Network, CBN.
US U.S. adds 227,000 jobs in February, Orange County Register.
If we added 227,000 jobs, why did the unemployment rate stay at 8.3%?
Well, you have to get you here's the number.
If you want to return unemployment to 6%, which it was roughly there the year prior to Obama being immaculated, you're going to need 600,000 new jobs a month for years to be created.
That's the point.
There's a new normal here that's been defined.
And this is it.
That's the new normal.
That's why we're celebrating.
The new normal has to be defined in such a way by the media so that it is not in any way detrimental to Obama.
You know, we're down here from 9.5%, 9.9, 9.3%.
So that's how this looks good.
New normal.
Just remember, folks, in 2005, 2006, unemployment in this country was at 5%.
Under the hated, despised, and dreaded George W. Bush.
Job growth remains brisk in February.
Health care continues to lead employment growth, the Hill.com.
Employment growth solidly, or grows solidly for third straight month.
So the new normal is more than twice as high as unacceptable unemployment done under Bush.
The new normal, what the media says is just point.
What the media says is a roaring economy.
What the media says is a steady economic upbeat.
What the media says is job market improving.
What the media says is brisk job growth.
8.3% unemployment is more than twice as high as what was unacceptable unemployment during George W. Bush.
So, the political story.
The headline, Obama's New Hurdle, Jobs Report Optimism.
President Obama has a new challenge with the jobs report due out Friday, rising expectations.
Oh, the poor guy.
What a real challenge.
Several months of improving numbers filtered Through an election year prism, have bolstered Obama's standing, but also have fueled anticipation that the uh employment outlook will continue to improve.
If new jobs aren't added at the same rate, Obama's political opponents will attack him for not doing enough to sustain the economy.
This is the political writing for a third grade anti-bullying class.
Obama's political opponents will attack him for not doing enough.
If they go up, he'll almost certainly be slammed for the economy not improving enough.
And if they tick down or the unemployment rate rises, expect searing attacks about a president leading the country into a double dip recession.
Poor Obama boohoo.
He just can't catch a break.
Even the news media talking up the economy for him might backfire on him.
Oh yeah, it's so fraught with danger out there for Obama.
Why, even if his sycophant slavish media talk up the economy, that might backfire.
Remember how the media fretted about all the problems of perception that President Bush faced?
Right, we don't either.
So obviously, this this piece in the Politico, from which I was just reading, was written before this morning's unemployment report came out, and it is clear that the news media and the rest of the Obama campaign were sweating bullets over this number.
You remember how the media fretted about all the problems of perception that Bush faced.
Poor Obama go can't catch a break.
These venal Republicans are just waiting to pounce on any uptick in the jobless rate.
Those bullies.
You notice that everything Republicans do is venal.
Everything is calculated for political advantage.
Everything is done to try to harm our little boy President Barack Obama.
Republicans never have the country's interests at heart like Obama does.
In fact, this article sounds like the Obama campaign was using the politico to tell their lick spittle minions in the news media to dial back their boosterism a little bit.
Sounds to me like this whole story is the White House calling politicals, hey, to dial it back.
We don't want to make it sound too good out there.
I mean, it's going to be a couple of dips between now and election.
It can't be that because we got this poll from Greenberg, don't forget.
Stanley Greenberg, James Carville's partner, big time Democrat polster, last couple of weeks, puts the poll using Mr. President, don't go to town on this big story of a reviving roaring back economy because it isn't going to work.
They're not feeling it.
The reason a story based on a virtual economic recovery won't work is because people are living in the economy and they don't have jobs, and the jobs they're getting are not career jobs.
A lot of the jobs that were added in this report are people taking second jobs.
Our all buddy, the old reliable James Petha Kucas.
Occasionally is published at Reuters, will forgive him for that.
Also a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute says if you're going to compare, let's compare apples to apples.
If the labor force participation rate were the same today as it was when Obama took office, the unemployment rate today would be 10.8%, not 8.3%.
What does that mean?
What is the labor force participation?
Every time I try to explain this, I am met with people who tell me I'm wrong and don't know what I'm talking about and that it's irrelevant, but Mr. Pethacukas continues to report it.
The labor force participation rate is essentially the entire universe of jobs available in the country.
And there are over two million less jobs.
Two million fewer jobs.
They just don't exist anymore.
Whereas there used to be an ABC window washer outfit, for example, when Obama was immaculated in 2009, the place is shut down.
So the ABC window washer jobs are gone.
That is why people talk about creating new jobs.
If we need to create new jobs, we need new jobs.
It means there are fewer jobs to fill.
So if the same number of jobs existed, if all the ABC window washer outfits had not closed down, if they were still open, and those jobs were still available.
Based on current numbers, the actual unemployment rate would be ten point eight percent, not eight point three percent.
So the universe of available jobs matters.
There is no way you can tell me that the American economy with two million fewer jobs today than three years ago is it's anyway upbeat.
Is anyway you've got the same number of people looking for fewer jobs.
That's why the percentage changes.
The same number of people looking for fewer jobs.
Like musical chairs.
Every time the music stops, somebody's left out because there aren't enough chairs.
It's the same principle here.
So the 8.3% unemployment rate is meaningless.
It's bogus because we're not comparing apples to apples.
Part of the Obama economic record is that there are two million fewer ABC window washer jobs than there were when he was immaculated in 2009.
Here's a great illustration of that that I was just discussing along the lines of what I was just talking about.
There was a Reuters, a Reuters report from yesterday.
U.S. jobless claims rise, but labor market healing.
More people applied for unemployment checks, but the labor market is healing.
Healing.
You would ever get a definition like that of healing with a Republican in the White House.
Thank you.
Jobless claims rise, country going to hell would be the headline if George W. Bush.
We're in the oval office.
Reuters said the uh the number of Americans filing for jobless benefits unexpectedly rose last week.
Damn it, but not enough to change perceptions that the labor market was strengthening.
That's how the story opens.
This is journalistic malpractice.
This is utter irresponsibility.
This is what we're up against, folks.
It has always been this way.
I'm spending a little bit more detail on this stuff that you know left and right for our new audience arrivals this week.
This is actually a golden opportunity.
The left has driven so many new bodies here that it would be foolish not to take advantage of their arrival.
So please indulge me as we go back to the first grade for some of them.
And I don't mean that an insulting way.
I mean first grade for you was 23 years ago.
You now are super duper graduate students here at the Limbaugh Institute.
The first day arrivals are essentially the first grade.
The number of Americans filing for jobless benefits unexpectedly rose last week, but are enough, not enough to change perceptions that the labor market was strengthening.
Not one perception is cited.
We don't know whose perceptions we're talking about here, other than the infobabe or the reporter, whoever who wrote the story with tongue hanging out.
Eager and panting away for Obama's success.
I'm gonna tell you this this is so blatantly one-sided, this kind of stuff would make the old Soviet commissars blush.
If our media existed in Russia today and they reported on Putin this way, Putin would call them and say, look, you guys, you gotta hit me now and then, otherwise nobody's gonna believe what you say.
You can't continue with this nonstop love affair with me.
You gotta dislike me now and then.
You gotta criticize me now and then.
This is getting embarrassing.
Khrushchev would say that.
Even Mikhail Gorobachev would say that.
Certainly Putin, certainly KGB.
Obama probably says, uh, keep it up.
The number of Americans filing for jobless benefits unexpectedly rose.
Means there were more of them.
Went up.
But not enough to change perceptions, the labor market's strengthening.
This is uh their revised story.
Payrolls up solidly, jobless rate at 8.3%.
Employment grew solidly for a third straight month in February, a sign the economic recovery was broadening and in less need of further monetary stimulus from the Federal Reserve.
Oh, thank the Lord.
We don't need now, thanks to Reuters, we don't need any more stimulus.
We don't need any more federal spending because finally all that Obama spending, finally kicking in a little late, but starting to work now.
Obama's policies are creating jobs.
That's the big lie.
We'll be back.
Open line Friday, great to have you, Rush Limbaugh, serving humanity.
Simply by showing up.
Now the reason I've spent time on this is that everything that I'm explaining to you about the media lying about misreporting unemployment news happens in virtually every other story they do.
And for those of you new to the program, the real purpose of this program is to create the largest number of informed voting participants in the country in the arena of ideas.
That's that's how we believe in effecting change here is at the ballot box.
And an informed number of people voting equals a mandate when their elections result in victories.
And that's what this is really all about.
I so much disinformation in the media that I believe there really are a number of Americans who have been led to believe whole lies, untruths.
And it's it's frustrating and it's maddening at the same time.
Because we have a business here that has a constitutional charter.
The media, they have in the eyes of our founders, a key role in maintaining liberty and freedom in this country.
They have now become participants in an effort to erode freedom and liberty among individuals and transfer it to government.
It's a very hideous thing.
And we simply like to illustrate how it works.
So that when you watch media, read media, you're more equipped and better equipped to be skeptical yourself.
To be doubting yourself.
Find out for yourself, because most of the time, in the mainstream media, what you're told is propaganda or a variation of it.
It's just part of the agenda orientation of the Democrat Party.
It's true, and there's no more complicated way to say it than that.
Another example from the Reuters story on unemployment and the economy.
Hiring up solidly.
Hiring up solidly, yet the jobless rate holds steady, 8.3%.
How does that happen?
Well, Reuters explains in the story that the unemployment rate held at the three-year low of 8.3% because more people returned to the labor force.
Now, isn't that a handy excuse?
What that means, the labor force doesn't mean that those are people that found jobs.
The unemployment rate consists of people who are looking for jobs.
There is another unemployment number for people who've looked so long they've given up.
Well, you hear this number, 8.3%, the government calls the U3 number.
But there is a number that is also reported called the U6.
The U3 number is made up simply of people who are receiving unemployment checks who are actively looking for a job and can't find one.
The U6 number includes all those people plus those who have exceeded their 99 weeks of unemployment and have given up.
The number that's reported, the 8.3 does not include the number of people who can't find work after 99 weeks and have given up.
However, some of those people do reenter the job market.
Not with jobs, but by looking for jobs.
Remember, you look for a job, you are counted as being unemployed if you don't have one.
Well, what Reuters is saying here, even though a lot of people got hired, you people screwed it up because you came back from not looking for a job to looking for a job.
More people returned to the labor force.
So the administration, via Reuters, is now blaming people for looking for work to explain why unemployment's not going down.
And again, it's the same universe of numbers, the labor force participation rate that Pathakukas talked about earlier.
It's all coming into focus now.
So Reuters explanation.
We got people being hired left and right.
Why are jobs being created left and right?
What's the problem?
Why is it staying at 8.5%?
Well, because people who previously had given up are now back in the market looking for work.
Damn it, that means they've got to be counted.
Damn it, and that means the unemployment rate stays at 8.3% when it ought to be coming down.
Damn it.
So you people who were out of work and quit looking for jobs now have decided to start looking for jobs, you're the ones that are screwing up Obama's economic report.
Because if you would just stay out of work and not come back to the labor force looking for jobs, we could get that number down to 8.1%.
Now you don't care about Obama.
No, you're so selfish, you have to come back to the labor market, start looking for work, and that's why we can't lower the unemployment number.
And I am not making up a word of that.
I may be adding, shall we say verve and color to the way I explain it?
But everything I told you is factually true.
And Reuters here explains the unemployment rate held at a three-year low because more people return to the labor force.
So that's that.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that there are 12.8 million unemployed persons.
When Obama's stimulus bill passed, there were 12.5 million unemployed persons.
Obama spent over a trillion dollars to lose an additional 0.3 million jobs.
That's almost as impressive as awarding 10 million dollars to some outfit to create a $50 light bulb.
That story is coming up.
You ever noticed?
The Democrats are always said to be the ones who care about the little guy.
The Democrats, the American left, they're the ones that really have the compassion for the poor, for the near poor, for the lower middle class, the downtrodden, the stomped upon, the hungry, the thirsty, the women that can't get contraception at law school.
That's who the Democrat Party cares for.
The Republicans, of course, want them to be poor.
They want them to be downtrodden.
They want them to be hungry.
They want them to be thirsty.
Democrats love them.
Democrats care for them.
Right.
So what happens?
Democrats get in gear and come up with a car that's going to save the planet.
But you have to buy it.
Problem is, this party that cares so much about the little guy ends up creating a car that costs $50,000.
That nobody wants.
So they have to pay you $10,000 in the form of tax credit to buy it.
Or they have decided the light bulb, as invented by Thomas Edison is also destroying the climate, is destroying the planet.
We got to get rid of it.
We have to replace it with something called compact compact fluorescence, which are filled with mercury, which is a chemical and hazard in your home if one of them breaks, and those things cost through the roof.
Isn't it amazing how all of these wonderful creations and inventions to save the planet and to protect the little guy from big business and big Republicans end up breaking Their bank when they have to go out and buy them.
Light bulb?
$50 for a light bulb?
To save the planet?
Who do you think benefits from that?
Even with all the manipulations of the workforce, the regime still has failed to stop the longest streak of eight plus percent unemployment since the Great Depression.
Investors Business Daily is pointing out today that the United States is stuck in the longest jobs recession since the Great Depression.
Now measure that against all of this.
Happy, joyous, boy, we're roaring back stuff that you get in the rest of the media.
Investors Business Daily.
America stuck in the longest jobs recession since the Great Depression.
It has been 49 months since the United States hit peak employment back in January of 2008.
That's a year before Obama was elected.
The average job recovery time since the Jimmy Carter recession of 1980 is 29 months, not including this current period.
The labor market will not return to health until some 10 million new positions are created to rehire all of those who lost their jobs and to absorb the new workers.
But as we mentioned yesterday, under Obama, the country has lost two million jobs.
The labor force participation rate, there are two million fewer jobs in America today than there were when Obama was inaugurated.
And the labor market will not return to health until some 10 million jobs are created.
And we're going the opposite direction.
We are losing jobs.
There is no massive uptick in employment.
There's no massive downturn in unemployment.
It is all a lie.
It's all a carefully crafted story designed to make you think that something that is happening or is not happening is.
it's Alice in Wonderland.
It really is journalistic malpractice.
I've got to take another time out, and we will continue when we get back.
Don't go away.
Now, in addition, ladies and gentlemen, to the fact that it has been 49 months since the U.S. hit peak employment back in January of 2008.
That's a year before Obama.
And since I told you that it will take some 10 million new jobs being created to rehire all of those who have lost their jobs and to absorb new workers coming out of college, for example.
It's massive what we have to do here.
To re-employ the people who've lost their jobs and take care of those coming out of school, either high school or college, who want work.
We're going to have to create some 10 million new jobs.
We've lost 2 million jobs since Obama was inaugurated.
Right?
There is no economic recovery.
There is no economic growth.
There is nothing to write home about.
And yes, the media knows this.
Because this stuff I just gave you is in the media.
It's in a part of a media that the mainstream media ignores and poo-poos and doesn't consider legitimate.
Like the way they see Fox News, or the way they see this program, or any other conservative talk show, or anything else that isn't ABC, NBC, CBS, a local newspaper, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, USA Today, you name it.
In fact, as I've always said, if you miss the New York Times, no biggie, read the Washington Post.
If you miss that, no biggie, read the LA Times.
Miss that, watch CBS.
Miss that, watch NBC.
Miss that, watch ABC.
Miss that, watch CNN.
Miss that, watch MSNBC.
I mean it's all the same.
Same stories, same agenda, same opinions.
But you miss this show one day, and you won't find it anywhere else.
There are two stark separate media worlds today.
Ours we think and try and strive for is the truth.
Although we do have opinions here that we're honest about, and we have cares and interests, outcomes that we like to affect.
So do they.
They just won't admit that.
Anyway.
We've lost two million jobs.
We need 10 million jobs.
Investors Business Daily also points out that the country's gross domestic product hasn't risen 4% or more in any quarter since the first quarter of 2006.
This is 2012.
In six years, we have not had economic growth exceed 4%.
The ChICOM's economic growth right now is 9%, for example.
There are other countries in the world, India growing much faster.
We can't even muster two straight quarters of 4% growth.
This is the longest such stretch on record going back to 1950.
That's how bad it is.
And this is why the Democrat polster, Mr. Greenberg is trying to warn Obama, the Democrat, don't try to tell people that the economy's roaring back.
Don't try to tell them that this recovery is headed on full steep, because they're not living it.
It isn't going to work.
And Obama's numbers on the economy are appropriately unsatisfied.
We were promised if Congress passed Obama's stimulus package, it would keep the unemployment rate under 8%.
He told us that.
President Obama himself passed this stimulus and will keep the unemployment rate under percent and uh 8%.
And yet after more than three full years in Orifus and spending, Allah knows how many trillions of taxpayer dollars.
We haven't gotten unemployment any lower than it was the first month he was in office, 8.3%.
And that needs to be tied around his neck like a Nobel prize.
This is utter, complete total failure.
Where we're concerned.
For him, it's success.
And that's another story.
Let's start on the phones.
We're going to go to Columbia, South Carolina.
Hi, Irene.
Your first big responsibility being first caller on Open Line Friday.
Hi.
Hi, Ross, how are you?
Very well, thank you.
Uh glad that I could get to.
I I so agree with what you've been saying on your whole monologue that you started.
Just wanted to add to that.
I'm so frustrated Rush, I can't even see straight.
I scan all the news agencies on the website to see what's going on, and just to compare.
And I caught the video of Solidad O'Brien from CNN with the Breitbart fellow, the representative.
And it was absurd.
The lack of journalistic integrity was so unprecedented on her behalf that it just made me sick.
This is the uh confrontation where she makes it very obvious and apparent that she doesn't think that this Obama video and his possible tie to this radical Professor Derek Bell is even a story, right?
Yes, that's correct.
That's one.
Not only that, but she goes out of her way to present this man as an esteemed Harbor professor.
Which which just as a side note, if you caught Andrea Mitchell with um then um uh what was the last name?
I can't remember.
Uh she did the same thing on on their show.
But look at Irene, that's what Ed O'Brien really thinks.
There's nothing you're gonna be able to that's what she she thinks any professor at Harvard, Harvard is distinguished.
By definition, all you have to do is be there and you're distinguished.
All you have to do is is be at Harvard or Yale, Princeton, and you are distinguished.
Uh there's there's no changing her mind on that.
Those guys in the video got the right observation.
They made the right observation.
You know, she's she's saying, I don't I don't know what you guys are doing.
I don't see any big news here.
I don't see where the blockbuster, and they said that's the blockbuster.
And the blockbuster is that you don't see Anything here that is of any note.
The blockbuster is you're not interested in finding out who Barack Obama is.
And that's the only point we're trying to make.
And thank you, Ms. O'Brien, for making it for us.
That's what happened.
See, we did it every day.
We got everything done I wanted to get done.
Plus, we got a phone call in on Open Line Friday.
And seriously, those of you who've been with us for 23 years, I really appreciate your indulging me as I turn back the hands of time to uh acknowledge the millions of new listeners to the program and the opportunity that presents.
But remember, for them to start where we are 23 years into all of this might be confusing.
So I'm going back a little bit, make it a little bit more basic in my explanations in order to enlarge the army.
I appreciate your indulgence on that, and we'll be back.
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