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March 16, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:55
March 16, 2012, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And you are listening to the de facto boss of the Republican Party.
As stated yesterday afternoon on CNN.
Actually, last night on CNN by Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod.
I, El Rushbow, once again back to being the de facto head of the Republican Party.
According to Axarod, Bill Marr is a nobody.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
Unbelievable.
Two weeks.
Two weeks dominating the news cycle.
And yesterday, folks, the fact that I have now gone on Twitter, made news.
It made news at Reuters.
It made news at CNN.
It made news at the political.
It made news every have you seen how many stories there are in a news medium about my announcement yesterday, and I'm going to be more active on Twitter.
And we are going to be posting at least one more, a couple more things more like more than likely today on Twitter, but Politico, CNN, Reuters, a bunch of other outlets picked up that news.
Some even mentioned that my handle is at limbo.
That's C that's that's that's little citizens man radio lingo.
You're probably, Brian, you never did CB, did you?
I did.
I had CB radio when I was a kid.
I forget what my handle was, but everybody had a handle back then.
Your dad was the dill pickle on uh on on CB radio.
Yeah.
I convinced my dad to get a CB radio in our car.
I'm driving around talking to people on it.
We had a base station.
It's what you call the uh unit you had your big antenna up on top of the house, about five times bigger than a TV antenna.
Um Twitter is uh is almost like digital CB radio now.
But I in all of this social networking, this non-stop texting and tweeting, it's it's it is.
It's it's like the modern day CB radio uh craze.
At any rate um now that I'm on Twitter, that's been validated just as I made Facebook when we announced going to Facebook.
And so though these things are now officially big since I am on both, and we will be tweeting as I said yesterday, though, folks.
I'm not gonna tweet such stuff.
Hey, just got up day looks wonderful.
I'll let you know how the drive to work is, Stan, but none of that kind of stuff.
We're just gonna be tweeting things that uh you'll be interested in and that you will want to retweet.
Anyway, welcome to Open Line Friday.
Telephone numbers 800-282-2882, the email address uh ilrushball at eIB net.com.
What do you mean am I gonna be doing my own tweeting?
Ha!
Of course I'm going to be doing my own tweeting.
I'm not gonna be like Obama and hire somebody to be my tweeter.
I will be my own tweet.
I can't believe anybody would ask me that.
I don't I don't even farm out paying the bills.
Well, I've never turned it over to somebody outside the family to do.
Anyway, folks, open line Friday, you know how it works.
Monday through Thursday, you have to talk about what I care about, or we don't let you on.
It's not that we're mean, and it's not that we're any of that.
We just don't want the audience to be bored.
And if I'm bored talking about something that I don't want to talk about, then the audience will get bored, and then they won't listen.
That defeats the purpose.
So on Friday, though, we we break with that and allow anybody to pretty much say whatever they want to say.
It's a golden opportunity, and it's a great career risk.
There are no other major media figures that would turn over the content portion of the program to rank Amateurs, not knowingly.
Now, a lot of major networks hire rank amateurs and put them on and call them broadcasters, but they're not.
But in this case, if you call and talk about something I don't care about, I will either fake it or I won't.
But it's still a golden opportunity for you.
There is lots of news again today.
We'll get to the phones as soon as we can.
President Obama's 2013 budget.
And remember, just this week, let's review the important things of this week.
The first two days of the week we had the polling data from the New York Times and the Washington Post, polls, which were devastating to the regime.
Devastating to Obama.
The New York Times poll has his approval at 41%, an all-time low in that poll.
These polls were so bad that pollsters and Democrats and media people are now insulting the respondents by calling them stupid and questioning themselves as to whether or not their own polls are broken.
But these polls had a devastating impact on the White House because last week was supposed to produce Obama in the upper 50s, this uh this mythical non-existent Republican war on women.
There's a reason, there are many reasons actually, but there's there's a I think the primary reason why this so-called Republican war on women doesn't work, isn't working, and won't work, is that for three years there has been an unmitigated nonstop Democrat war on Sarah Palin alone.
And then you throw in Michelle Bachman, any other prominent conservative woman, and there's been a war on all of them.
The Democrat Party with their comedians, uh, with their elected officials, I don't care.
There were no boundaries on this one.
There has been an unmitigated war on Sarah Palin.
And even people who pay scant attention to politics during the course of a week, as opposed to people like you who are immersed in it, couldn't help but notice that.
So all of a sudden they hear the people who are literally trying to destroy Sarah Palin for three years, maybe make it four, because let's let's count the uh year of 2008.
Trying to destroy Sarah Palin.
Now, all of a sudden, they come up and say that there's a Republican war on women.
It just doesn't fly.
Sort of like the Democrats fail to dynamically score economic proposals, budgets, they use a static analysis.
And by that, I mean they'll they'll propose a tax increase and they'll just assume this is the static analysis, that everybody will just sit there and pay it.
And that the amount of money they raise in taxes is what they're gonna get flowing into the treasury.
Well, dynamically that doesn't happen.
Dynamically, people take action to avoid paying the taxes.
And so raising taxes never raises the revenue that they project.
Well, just as in this case, they have a static circumstance, they go out, create this mythical Republican war on women, and they just expect everybody to believe it.
And then for there to be the appropriate fallout.
Uh no more limb, uh, no more Republican nominee having a chance, blah, blah, blah.
And then when Obama's own polls plummet, and nobody buys into the so-called war on women mounted by the Republicans, the Democrats scratch their heads.
What happened?
Just like they scratch their heads when they raise taxes and no money flows into the treasure.
Well, well, what happened?
Because they don't account for the dynamics.
And the dynamics of the Republican war on women are that they're the guys that have been waging war on Republican conservative women for three and a half, four years, primarily Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman.
So dynamically, people say, wait a minute, you guys claim that somebody's running a war against you?
These are average Americans that assess this.
So the the they they never factor the dynamics into anything, be it economic proposals or other things.
So you have the two polling numbers, and and they were devastating.
We also had the um gas price going Up.
With Obama making speech after speech about it, we had the confusion yesterday over whether or not there was going to be a release of oil from the U.S. strategic reserves.
Other big news this week was we learned that Obamacare is going to cost twice as much as we were promised.
Just two years ago.
Two years ago, they told us Obamacare was going to cost $940 billion over 10 years.
The CBO this week revised the number to 1.4 trillion over nine years.
And when they factor a full 10 years of spending in Obamacare, then the total cost will be over $2 trillion.
So that's a brief review of what's happened this week.
Now here's the latest within this timeline.
President Obama's 2013 budget would add $3.5 trillion to annual deficits through 2022, according to a new estimate from the CBO.
It would also raise the deficit next year by $365 billion according to the CBO, which is said here to be nonpartisan.
The CBO estimate is in sharp contrast to White House claims last month that the Obama budget would reduce deficits by $3.2 trillion over the next decade.
Sharp contrast.
Sharp contrast, the CBO says Obama's budget will add $3.5 trillion.
The Obama White House said that it would reduce deficits by $3.2 trillion.
That's a swing of $6.7 trillion, and they call that sharp contrast.
This is a lie.
So we have the Obama administration lying about the cost of health care, now lying about the cost of Obama's budget.
Not to mention the President lying about oil and green energy and uh all of that.
It's stunning.
Phony numbers.
CBO estimate in sharp contrast to White House claims last month the Obama budget would reduce deficits by $3.2 trillion, and instead they're going to raise the deficits by $3.5 trillion.
Now, this is from the Hill.com.
Let me read another paragraph.
The differences between the estimates from CBO and the White House budget office are attributable to different baselines and economic assumptions.
And a big reason the CBO expects the deficit to spike sharply under Obama's budget is that the CBO's baseline assumes all the Bush era tax cuts will expire at the end of 2020.
Well, you have to assume the Bush tax are going to expire.
That's what the law says as of today.
And Obama has made it clear he wants them to end.
Obama wants higher taxes.
He said so.
He is campaigning on repealing the Bush tax cuts.
That's what his base wants to hear.
So the CBO's got no choice in the matter.
Obama wants to continue the middle class tax cut, something reflected in his budget.
So the bottom line is that virtually every set of numbers that we get from the Obama administration simply are not true.
And that's why I would like to posit an idea.
A question for perhaps Republicans in the House of Representatives.
Why not investigate the unemployment numbers?
I mean, if they're lying to us dramatically about the cost of health care, and if they are lying to us dramatically about budget deficits coming down, isn't it likely that they are lying to us about their unemployment numbers every week?
If those numbers are as phony as the original CBO Obamacare reports on cost and coverage, if the unemployment numbers are as phony as the promises what the stimulus bill would do for jobs.
If the unemployment numbers are as phony as recent poll numbers showing Obama with a 50% approval number, if the unemployment numbers are as phony as Obama's budget deficit numbers are, then the unemployment numbers got to be a lot worse than it really is.
And I might add, ladies and gentlemen, the CBO, the sacred nonpartisan, oh, what magic words those are.
The nonpartisan CBO just reported yesterday that uh up to 20 million Americans may lose coverage under Obamacare.
Their earlier estimate was that only one million people would lose their employer coverage due to Obamacare, but yesterday's CBO snuck it out.
I'm surprised they didn't wait for a document up today to do that.
But the CBO reported up to 20 million may lose coverage under Obamacare.
I have the story right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers.
And I'll give you the details of that when we get back.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have Rush Limbaugh, a de facto head of the Republican Party, except when I'm forgotten and I'm just an entertainer who doesn't matter, who doesn't count, but that's not the case now.
Right now, I am the de facto head, the Republican Party.
As many as 20 million folks, are you getting all this?
I run through this stuff pretty quickly.
It's easy for me because I've got it right here in front of me.
I have been blessed with a nice good memory.
And all of this will be up at Rushlimbaugh.com.
You'll be able to see all of this.
And we'll tweet some of this stuff out too.
But are you getting this?
This week has been incredible.
It's been profound.
All-time low Obama approval, New York Times.
You people are stupid, John Harris at Politico says, Stupid.
Polls are broken.
The poll respondents are stupid.
Obama making it up about energy and oil bombing out in every area of green energy, wind, solar, bombing out.
Steadfastly opposed to progress.
Steadfastly committed to this silly notion that oil is somehow a poison.
When it's as natural as sugar, it's as natural as anything else that comes from the earth.
Why is oil so bad?
Why is oil such a filthy thing?
A lot of things much worse.
And oil has been, like me, a godsend.
Well, it's a feminazi said I was a godsend this week at their convention.
I'm not saying that.
They are.
They said I was a godsend.
That makes me a gods gift of women.
Really, what why is every why why does anybody even accept the notion that oil is it?
Oil spills now and then?
Convince everybody it's rotten to the core.
Who dies?
It's just silly.
So we're gonna look into alternatives that don't exist.
For what purpose?
We've got budget deficit, three and a half trillion dollars higher than anybody thought.
We've got health care twice as expensive.
And now as many as 20 million Americans could lose their employer provided coverage because of Obama's health care reform law.
You're not going to be able to keep your doctor despite Obama saying you could.
You're not gonna be able to keep your plan despite Obama saying you could.
And now 20 million Americans are going to lose their employer provided coverage.
If I may say so, folks, this is not news to me.
If I wanted, I'd have Coco, who is our webmaster, go back to the archives of this program starting three years ago or Over and over, I said that the first casualty of health care in America is going to be your employer provided health plan.
The Obama, the entire Democrat Party, that the American left dream of national health care, single-payer health care, by definition shifts it all to government.
The specifics in the Obamacare law are going to make it impossible for the private sector health insurance company to stay, or companies to stay viable by design.
We've got Obama on tape from 2007, maybe earlier than that, admitting that the health care of this country transferred to the government can't happen overnight.
It's going to take five, ten years for the people to accept it.
And the way it's going to happen is they're going to make it impossible for your employer to afford it as a benefit, make it impossible for private health insurance companies to stay in business.
The last option will be the government.
That's where you're going to have to go.
So 20 million going to lose their employer provider.
Try 50 million.
That's what it's going to be.
On the cutting edge of societal evolution, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network.
Happy to be with you here on Open Line Friday.
I'm chomping at the bit here.
I got my new iPad today.
And Don just said if you used it, if you use it, does it really look as good?
I have done nothing but plug it in and charge it.
I can't do anything with it till I get home because that's where the master computer is.
And until I get home, uh really can't update it, restore from a previous backup or any of that.
Plus, I have to do four new commercials after the program today.
I should have done them yesterday.
I should have anticipated I was going to want to skate out of here today, get home and set up my new iPad, but no, I got to do these four commercials after the program today.
So I'm sitting here, you know how it is on Christmas morning you get something and uh your parents made you eat breakfast before going to the tree to open the that's how I feel here.
But never fearful, it will not, it will not take away from the total commitment and professionalism that I bring to the execution of this program each and every day.
You would never even know had I not told you.
I've got the transcript of me on this program March 5th of 2010.
This is before Obamacare passed.
Now, remember the story that we're bouncing off of here.
Congressional budget office report says health care law could cause as many as 20 million people lose coverage.
It's going to be more than that.
It's going to be everybody eventually, and that's the plan.
And I told everybody.
I hate being an I told you so.
It's I'm but I I remembered talking about it, is the point.
And I'm digging up from our archives right now, Obama himself talking to his union buddies at the SEIU in March of 2007, explaining to them the strategy of moving health care in totality to the government.
We'll have that here in just a second.
But this is what I said on March 5th of 2010.
Once Obama signs the bill, Obamacare is law.
There are several things which happen immediately that will force businesses, large and small, to offload their employee benefit health care plans.
If, for example, a small business, medium-sized, large business, any business has health care costs of 14% or 10%, whatever, as the cost of doing business.
It's around that or higher.
In this bill, in the Senate bill is an option for employers.
They can continue their own employee benefits plan, health care plan for a while, or they can drop employee benefits and just pay the government 8%.
Pay the government eight percent instead of whatever their health care benefit expenses are.
Just pay it to the government, And thereby all of them, and it could be that within two years, 50 to 100 million Americans could lose their employer provided health insurance because there's this big come on in the bill.
An employer can pay the government 8% per year off the top instead of whatever it's costing the employer to provide health care for all of their employees.
And then where do the employees go to get insurance?
If you happen to be enrolled in a health care plan at your company, when this bill gets implemented, your company is going to have the option of offloading all employee health care benefits and paying the government 8% off the top of their business rather than spending whatever it costs to provide you health care insurance.
Now, what are they going to do?
They're going to pay the 8% eventually.
It's the same as this.
When health care is originally implemented, and it isn't yet, but when it is, when it's fully implemented, there is a fine for people who do not buy health insurance.
Because you see, health insurance is mandated in Obamacare.
You must go have it, buy it.
You must get it somehow.
You either have to get it from your employer, or if you're self-employed, you have to provide it to yourself and your employees, or you have to find a pool to join.
You have to have it.
It's the law.
And this is what the constitutionality of the bill is all about before the Supreme Court.
Can the government mandate that citizens buy anything?
That's the argument.
If the bill is found to be constitutional, then the government can force you to buy anything at any time it wants, including charge you a fine if you don't buy health insurance.
Now, the first couple of years, guess what?
The fine is 400 bucks.
Well, you know that the cost of a health insurance policy is a lot more than 400 bucks.
So if you're new to the workforce, if you're 25, 35, whatever, and you you're really, you're not worried about becoming deathly ill.
Your only concern is a catastrophic accident.
But you're not, you don't have the same health concerns as somebody who's 65 or 70.
You have immortality, you're not gonna get sick, you're not gonna die, he's gonna have why spend all that money when you're young, vibrant, healthy, all that, looking for women at Georgetown Law School, why would you go spend money on health care?
Especially when all you have to do is pay a fine of 400 bucks.
But what happens after a couple years is the fine becomes more expensive than the cost of a health insurance policy.
This is all in the bill.
So eventually, you're going to have to have it, and you're going to be paying through the nose.
And if the Supreme Court doesn't do anything about this, then Katie by the door, it's all over.
And this is the plan.
So to the same token, if a business is faced with two spending options, the 14 to 15% that it costs them to provide health insurance for their employees, or 8% as a penalty payment for the government for not providing it.
What are they going to do?
Again, they're going to call you and they're going to say, you know what, it's just gotten too expensive.
We can't afford it.
We know you don't want to pay for it yourself.
So we're ending the program.
And here are some options for you where you can go to get health insurance.
And it's going to be your state exchange or your federal exchange.
It's going to be government provided somehow somewhere.
That's the plan.
So it isn't 20 million, folks.
It's 50 million, and eventually everybody, if Obama gets his way, will lose employer provided health insurance.
Let's go back.
This is March of 2007.
Barack Obama speaking at a Service Employees International Union Health Care Forum.
He's not a candidate For president yet.
He's on the verge of it.
But here he explains how his health care plan will lead to the elimination of private insurance.
He ought to be asked about this at every appearance because here he is, and we've aired this multiple times before.
That here is President Obama explaining how he wants to end private health insurance.
My commitment is to make sure that we've got universal health care for all Americans by the end of my first term as president.
I would hope that we can set up a system that allows those who can go through their employer to access a federal system or a state pool of some sort.
But I don't think we're going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately.
There's going to be potentially some transition process.
I can envision a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out.
I don't think we are going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately.
Is he not suggesting that that would be preferable?
He wants to end employer coverage, but he knows he can't do it immediately.
There's going to be a transition, a decade, 15 years, because he knows that you wouldn't accept this if it happened overnight.
But if it's parceled out, if it happens so gradually that you're not even aware of it because it doesn't happen to you, when it eventually does happen to you, most everybody else will have already been gone and there's nobody to help you.
There'll be nothing left but for then you to join the government's health insurance program.
And once that happens, they get to determine whether or not you get covered, whether you get treated.
It's totally up to them using all the devices at their disposal.
Are you Republican or Democrat?
Are you old or young?
Does it make any financial sense to keep you alive if you're 80 years old?
All those things come into play, and the government's gonna be the only place you can go, and the only people making those decisions as to who gets treated and uh how thoroughly.
It's where we're headed.
He just said that's what he wants.
And that's what his bill does.
By the way, you know, a lot of people think that if they pay the fine for not having health insurance that they get health care.
No.
You do not get health care if you pay the fine.
Paying the fine is the penalty for not having health insurance.
And you get covered if you go to the emergency room, but you have to pay for it.
You'll get a bill, somebody will, if you don't have insurance.
And by the way, these fines and the eight percent option offered to government.
Notice that none of that is oriented toward expanding health care coverage.
All that is is revenue generation for the government.
The businesses that offload their health insurance programs in lieu of or instead of in exchange for paying the government eight percent off the top.
That's eight percent off the business top.
That's just money to the government for nothing.
And did owe the fine.
The fine goes to the government.
Nobody gets anything for it.
You do you know you're not covered.
You don't have insurance when you pay the fine.
To the phones we go on Open Line Friday, starting in Santa Barbara, California.
Hi, Diane, you're up first.
Hello.
Hi, Rash.
Um, I was wondering if you notice a pattern starting with um Georgetown University, who's um heavily funded by um federal money, and how they abandon their principles.
And I noticed that the law student, the reproductive health or reproductive justice was um it started like in 09.
And so it's just kind of crazy how um the there's just a lot of pressure to abandon their principles.
I was talking to somebody about this the other night, Diane.
This is actually a very brilliant point that you've come up with.
Somebody was asking me, what are they mad at you for?
You're not the one denying them contraceptives.
Georgetown is.
Except Diane, you should know this.
We looked into this.
Georgetown University does provide contraception when it is prescribed for medical conditions that have nothing to do with birth control.
Contraceptives sometimes have other medicinal benefits.
And Georgetown will allow the coverage for the prescription of contraceptions in those circumstances, but not to be used for birth control.
So I'm not the one denying anybody birth control.
And Georgetown is, but that's that's why these activists enroll there.
One of the questions that came up was, well, why would you enroll if if if you're a big birth control activist, and if for some reason you think that your country is denying you all the birth control that you want, why would you enroll at a place that doesn't offer it?
Well, duh, if you're an activist by definition, you are enrolling to stir it up there.
You are enrolling to tear down the moral and conscious or conscience policies of that institution.
That's the express purpose.
The Catholic Church is under siege.
The Catholic Church is under attack.
It's a huge target.
And the Catholic Church finally knows it.
The Catholic Church finally standing up against some of this stuff.
Diane, uh you should know, and the rest of you too.
I learned a lot during this uh this whole fiasco.
One of the things that I learned was the reason the Catholic Church, all the way back to the days of FDR, got roped into the liberal socialist agenda, is that they became convinced that welfare was charity, and churches are big on charity.
And they thought that it would sound good for them to support massive government wealth transfer programs, welfare programs, under the guise that it was charity.
And so the Catholic Church and its hierarchy in this country slowly but surely migrated to socialism in terms of its political preferences.
Now, not so much the way it dealt with its flock, but outwardly, with its uh political associations and attachments, i.e., people that they voted for, supported, under the notion that liberalism is charity, under the notion that welfare is charity.
Well, it isn't.
Welfare is the willful absconding of money owned by others and giving it to other people for your benefit, not theirs.
Liberals give money to people wanting a payback, the payback's the vote.
Liberals are not giving people money to increase in increase their lifestyles or improve their lifestyles.
It doesn't happen, does it?
The poor are still poor.
The homeless are still homeless.
Despite all these great liberal programs, the numbers, the percentages never change.
Liberalism doesn't solve problems, doesn't fix anything, just exacerbates them.
So it isn't charity.
Real charity is targeted at people in genuine need who cannot help themselves.
The purpose of welfare is not to help people who can't help themselves.
If I may be blunt, the purpose of welfare is to create as many people as possible who refuse to help themselves because they don't have to anymore.
They've got welfare plans.
Welfare is robbing Peter to buy Paul's vote.
It's insidious.
It destroys people's humanity and their dignity.
It takes away their ambition, their desires.
It gives them a life of squalor.
Under the guise of big heartedness and charity and so forth.
And what it comes down to, Diane is that the left, the Democrat Party, however you want to describe them, they never want to be judged on the results of their so-called good works.
They want credit for their good intentions.
Well, we want to end homelessness.
We want to end poverty, and that makes us good people.
They never do end homelessness, and They never do end poverty.
You're never supposed to point that out.
You're just supposed to talk about how big their hearts are.
But Catholic Church got that roped into this whole notion that all of that is charity, so they became big supporters of it.
This is now causing some lights to go on at the upper levels of church, and they're starting to see things the way you do, Diane.
We'll be back.
Okay, folks, we just tweeted another piece.
It's from Commentary, the website, the blog commentary by Alana Goodman called The Anti-Rush Campaign was in the works.
It's a great piece.
We just tweeted it at Limbaugh is the handle, or Rush Limbaugh with no space between the two names.
That's how you find the real one.
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