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March 20, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:11
March 20, 2012, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of The Rush 24 7 podcast.
Hey, Brian, run in there and grab me one of those new iPads.
I forgot to bring one in here, and I gotta show people this on a Ditto Cam.
I don't know what I was thinking.
Maybe it was the rest of the show I have to do.
There we go.
That's right.
Just give me a That's right.
Let me brought a white one in, but that's okay.
No, it's fine.
That's fine.
That's fine.
It's okay for the first effort.
Boy, folks, I am sitting here and I've been hosting this program a little over 23 years.
I'm Rush Limbaugh, the most popular and most listened to, most talked about and most feared uh radio talk show hosts the country.
This is the most listened to radio talk show, the most talked about.
And as I said, I've been here 20 years, we're into our 24th year now.
Is that right?
20, yeah, we're in our 24th year because we're 23 plus.
24th anniversary is August 1st.
So there were three and a half years of doing this program pretty much the same way in Sacramento before it started nationally, so that's 27, 28 years.
And I gotta.
Now it's the cigars that's causing the uh the sniffles here.
So it's uh the cigar smoke is one of the best decongestants that I have run into.
Anyway.
I can remember when this program started back in Sacramento, and and even uh moving forward, the early 90s, it was death.
It was talk show death, it was guaranteed turnout or tune out to start talking about the federal budget.
That was so minutia-like.
It was such boring drivel.
It was numbers, it was inside baseball congressional stuff, and today it's pretty much the lead item that we're going to talk about today.
And I think it's interesting to note that uh because of that.
We have a we have a clear illustration of just how much the American people have become concerned about such things as federal spending, the debt, the deficit, what it means to them.
It really is striking as a as a host of a program profoundly concerned with tune out.
I mean, it's the last thing that you want.
You want people to listen.
And I can tell you wasn't that long ago, well, 25, 23, 20 years ago, you start talking about the budget, and there go the buttons being pushed in the car, going to a different station.
Today, Paul Ryan's new budget is out.
He's the budget expert in the Republican side in the House of Representatives.
And it's a it's a it's a budget that deals with the problems that we have.
The really shocking thing about Paul Ryan's budget, which is the Republican budget, is that it does many of the things that voters sent the Republicans to Congress to do back in 2010.
And that really ticks off the uh the news media.
Now, one party news media is reporting uh the news of the Ryan budget, AP calling it an election year budget.
You see, the the these venal Republicans never do anything except for political advantage.
Yes, it's an election year budget.
Paul, you never hear Obama and his election year budget, or Obama and his election year.
Whatever.
We've never heard from the AP or anybody else in a state-controlled media how the Democrats have refused to come up with any kind of budget for three years because they're afraid it'll hurt them in the elections.
The Democrats haven't submitted a real budget.
Obama has, but it's one the past two to three years that's never had a prayer.
The last Obama budget that was voted on lost 97 to nothing.
So he's not even serious about it.
And here is the here is an architect.
Uh speaking of uh of budget, Mark Knowler of CBS News has committed another random act of journalism.
Mark Noller of CBS News is reporting today that the national debt has now increased more during Obama's three years and two months in office than it did during eight years of the George Bush presidency.
The national debt has increased more during Obama's first term than in all of Bush's two terms.
And we're not even through Obama's first term.
In the real world, in a world of sanity, there's not a soul.
There's not a single person.
There is not one individual in the Obama administration who can attack the Ryan budget with any credibility whatsoever.
Not in the same world.
The Obama budget team are the architects of an abysmal failure.
The Obama budget team are the architects of a debt crisis that threatens the very foundation of our country.
And yet they are all over the place, because it's an election year, don't you know, responding to Ryan's budget and belittling it and poo-pooing it, and talking about how it doesn't do enough for the poor and how it's going to take away benefits from the poor.
The architects of an absolute literal disaster are the first out of the box to rip Paul Ryan and a studious responsible budget effort.
It's just laughable.
The whole thing is virtually laughable.
These people do not know how ridiculous they've become.
And on top of the Obama people, they don't know how ridiculous they sound.
They don't know how incompetent people know they are.
So this Ryan budget, let's listen to Paul Ryan.
Let's go to the audio sound right here.
We'll start here at the very top.
This uh is this morning in Washington, up on Capitol Hill, Paul Ryan, Republican from Wisconsin, held a press conference to introduce the Republican budget.
It's called a path to prosperity.
We propose that we repeal the president's disastrous health care law.
We propose to save and strengthen Medicare by taking power away from government bureaucrats.
We believe competition and choice should be the way forward versus price controls that lead to rationing.
We also propose, as one of our hallmark issues to get to economic growth and job creation to reform the tax system.
We propose to collapse the six different tax brackets into two rates.
A 10% bracket in a 25% bracket for individuals and a 25% bracket for corporations, which is at the international average, and going to a territorial system.
Right.
$5.3 trillion in cuts to tax rates of 10 and 25%.
$5.3 trillion in tax cuts.
I ran across something the other day.
There's a there's a little controversy swirling uh around not so much Apple.
I guess it is Apple, but some guy who does a stage show, some theatrical performer named Mike Daisy, who uh that into it in just a minute.
But in the process, there have been a lot of blog references to this.
And in the process uh of the keeping up with this, I saw a little blog post about Apple's announcement yesterday, what they're gonna do with their nearly 100 billion dollars in cash.
One hundred billion one company, Apple Incorporated, has a hundred billion dollars in cash just sitting around, and they've had it for a while, it keeps growing.
Investors, a lot of people say, what are we gonna do with this?
Should we pay dividends?
Should we do stock buybacks?
Should we do nothing?
Steve Jobs didn't want to do anything with it.
Steve Jobs wanted to keep it.
It was security for him.
It was the uh all kinds of flexibility running the business.
Being able to prepay shipping, for example, being able to lock up every airplane shipping cargo from China to the United States for a new product introduction like the iPad so that no other competitor could ship their stuff at the same time.
Use it for that.
Anyway, I want you to listen to this little post about that aspect of this.
Apple CEO Tim Cook will host a special conference tomorrow.
They did it yesterday.
The topic, the outcome of the company's discussions concerning its cash balance of 100 billion dollars.
That is 100,000 million.
That's what I wanted to get to.
Just 100 billion is 100,000 million.
They could buy Walmart with just their cash reserve.
But my point here is finding a way to illustrate in understandable terms the kind of money we're talking about here.
17, 18, whatever trillion dollar national debt, an annual budget of over three trillion dollars.
There was just done a survey of spending in the UK.
They found that one third of all tax revenue goes to the welfare state.
One third goes to people on welfare.
The way these things are presented is the way you get people's attention with it, and the way you then are able to start persuading them.
So here's a company with a 100 billion dollar cash horde.
They're trying to figure out what to do with it, and it's described here as 100,000 million.
Now the richest guy in the world has 50, 60, 70 billion dollars.
That is a hundred thousand million dollars in cash.
Now most of you, when you think what would a lot of money be to me, what would you what would you say if you had it would make you rich?
And that answer differs from person to person.
Now what I'm trying to convey here is Apple's 100,000 million dollars.
100,000 million would not even show up as an accounting error in the federal budget.
And yet they tell us we're not spending enough money and we're not taxed enough.
And every year this country's government spends over three trillion dollars.
And of that three trillion dollars, close to two trillion we don't have.
That's above and beyond what's collected from tax revenues and other income sources for the government.
Folks, it literally is insulting for us to be told that this country can't be run on two trillion dollars.
100,000 million is just 100 billion dollars.
That's considered part of the largest market cap company in the world, in the country, actually.
And it's nothing, it's nothing compared.
What do you think you could do with 100,000 million dollars?
In addition to never having a working, what do you think you could do with it?
Could you possibly spend it all?
Go ahead and buy ten Boeing 747s.
Go ahead and buy ten of the biggest yachts in the world.
Go ahead and buy Walmart, and you're still going to have money left over, and you're still being told by your government that we can't get by as a nation on two trillion dollars a year.
This debt is out of control, it's out of sight, it is incomprehensible, except in one way, it's destructive.
It is so large it cannot be understood, the debt.
It is so massive it cannot be quantified.
It's like the universe.
Have you ever tried to picture the universe?
We humans are not capable of that.
We don't have enough data.
And then if you want to get really tied up, ask yourself, where is the universe?
Mr. Limbaugh, that's a thilly question.
This is the new Castradi speaking folks.
This is the thillieth question you have ever had.
Where is the universe?
Everybody knows the universe is everything.
You know, well, where is that?
Where is it?
Where are we?
If you could step outside the universe, where would you be?
You can't step outside the universe, Mr. Mr. Limbaugh, the universe and everything.
It's got to be someplace, Mr. Ducan Strady.
We all have to be somewhere.
Where are we?
It's the same thing trying to understand this debt, folks.
You can't comprehend even 1.8 trillion dollars in debt.
You couldn't spend it.
A hundred billion, which is a thimble compared to 1.8 trillion.
Because a trillion is a thousand billion.
We we're being sold such a bill of goods.
It's outrageous the amount of money it's being spent, and what little we're getting for.
All we're getting for it is the empowerment of the Democrat Party and the destruction of our culture.
The destruction of our society.
And it's so much money.
We can't comprehend it.
100,000 million is just 100 billion.
When people start talking about, well, we're at two trillion dollars and debt at the federal budget three trillion.
We're here to number three.
Small number.
We don't have any trillionaires, so it's not possible to relate to some individual who has that kind of money.
No individual does, except Obama.
It's all his.
But it's a long way around getting to the point that we've got to start going the other way on the spending of money that this nation doesn't have.
Because we are getting the money that we don't have from the tax payments that will be made by your grandkids.
Do you realize the annual federal budget for when your grandkids become 20, 21 years is already spent?
The normal tax rate, if they were tax rates, what they are today, your grandkids'lifetime taxes have already been spent.
What do you think their ultimate real tax rate is going to be if we don't get a handle on this?
And every time somebody comes up with a responsible way to get started and they get shouted down by the media, shouted down by the Democrat Party, ridiculed, it's just an election year trick.
Meanwhile, the authors of this debacle continually are praised and held up in the highest regard as people with compassion and caring and big hearts.
And they are the destroyers.
It just offends my sensibilities to have the architects of an absolute national disaster come out now and dare comment on the competence, the quality, and the relevance of Paul Ryan's budget.
They have no right to say a damn word about it because they are the problem.
And we'll be back.
I want a couple more sound bites squeezed in here.
Here's one more Paul Ryan on the whole Medicare thing.
And here he is pointing out who's really cut it.
Obama has cut Medicare.
That's fundamental.
That was part of Obamacare.
It was how they got the price tag under one trillion dollars.
The President's health care law does that already.
The President's health care law puts 15 bureaucrats in charge of rationing the program and he rage over half a trillion dollars from the program to spend on other government programs.
We preserve the benefit for people in and near retirement.
The president doesn't do that.
But in order to do that, you have to reform the program to save the program and prevent it from going bankrupt.
That's what we do.
Scare tactics, I don't think are gonna work.
The country wants to be spoken to like adults, not penteed to like children.
We owe the country a choice.
We owe them leadership, we think.
And if you want to save Medicare and prevent it from going bankrupt, you must reform the program.
That was Paul Ryan this morning on CBS this morning with Charlie Rose.
Let's move forward.
Jay Carney, the White House press secretary.
This is from yesterday afternoon, and this was after all this budget talk that we engaged in yesterday, and uh uh the debt limit increase and the controversy surrounding that.
This was at the press briefing, and uh correspondent Ann Compton said, Governor Romney says that the economy is coming back.
I don't think you disagree with that.
Does the president think the economy uh recovery has now reached a level where it's kind of inevitable?
The President absolutely does not believe that uh recovery is inevitable.
We need to do everything we can here in Washington to ensure that the recovery continues.
Uh it is certainly within the capacity of Washington, uh, as we have seen in the past, most recently last summer, uh, to take action that can harm the recovery.
We can't let that happen.
That is the White House press secretary blaming the Republicans for the debt deal last summer and saying they could do it again and destroy precious Obama's recovery, and that again is an out and out lie, much as Obama's lie to the country about the debt limit deal.
Hi, welcome back, Rush Limboy and the excellence in broadcasting network.
I don't want to spend a whole lot of more time on the budget.
Just want to make a couple of points and move on.
Every one of you are totally up to speed on this.
100 billion dollars.
100,000 million is.006% of our national debt, $15.5 trillion.
Six one thousandths of a percent, folks.
There's a six one hundredths.
I always get confused with the decimal point and the figure to the right of it.006 percent.
It's infinitesimal.
It would it's a thimbleful compared to the national debt.
Another way to illustrate the size of the national debt, put it in perspective, is to remember that for the first time in our history, the national debt is now larger than the entire economy.
We owe more than the annual economic output of this country, of everything that generates economic output, revenue, money, whatever, we owe more than the entire economy of this country.
That has never, well, in the modern era, it hasn't happened.
And of course, the one-party media already aligned against Paul Ryan.
We have an irresponsible, non existent budget from the Democrat Party.
The only budget we get from them is Obama's.
It's not even serious.
The Democrats in the House and Senate don't present a budget.
They don't dare.
They don't want people to see what their spending plans are.
So they leave it up to the Republicans to put a responsible budget out and thus become the only target.
There's only one budget to shoot at.
Obama's isn't real.
Nobody believes that it is.
The Republican budget is real, and it becomes the target that everybody else starts shooting down.
And this Jay Carney soundbite from yesterday afternoon, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out just why that Washington Post story on Sunday, pointing out how Obama lied in a national address to the people of this country about the debt deal last summer.
The Republicans did compromise.
They did work with him.
They gave him some tax increases.
That scared him off.
He wanted to run against a do-nothing Congress.
So we're living in this false notion that there's an economic recovery going on.
And Carney was asked yesterday, is this inevitable that we're going to keep going now and recover?
Is that uh is that inevitable?
Nothing that can stop us now.
This recovery is solid.
And Carney's, oh no, no.
The Republican can uh Congress could screw us again just like they did last summer.
Utter irresponsibility from this administration.
And here are a couple sound bites of this regime reacting to Paul Ryan's budget.
This is uh Gene Sperling.
He's the National Economic Council director.
He was on Scarborough show today.
And he was asked for his reaction to the Paul Ryan budget.
What I find most disturbing.
It takes this basic Medicare guarantee and essentially creates a two-tier system in which people in health care plans have a fundamental economic incentive to try to siphon off the healthiest and youngest workers, thereby raising cost more for people who want to stay in Medicare.
That drives more people out of Medicare, making the cost even higher for those who remain.
So this process risks creating an actual death spiral for the basic guarantee of Medicare as more people are forced out of the system and those who remain face higher and higher costs.
I honestly do not know how to deal with this as a as a responsible man.
This is Obama who has threatened Medicare.
It's Obama who cut Medicare.
It is Obama who is seeing to it that health care costs are skyrocketing.
The news uh last week that the actual cost of Obamacare is going to be double what the original projection.
This guy dares to go out there.
They're playing class warfare again?
The Ryan budget?
Yep, that's what they need.
Democrats are going to use the Ryan plan to gin up their class warfare again.
Yep, that's right.
Republicans are going to take their Medicare away from you.
Republicans are going to take your benefits away from you.
Because all the Republicans care about is the one percent.
The Republicans said Medicare into a death spiral.
It is Obama who has the death panels.
It is Obamacare, which will allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to determine who gets treated and for what and how extensively.
If we do nothing, Medicare is going to completely fail.
Just like if we do nothing, so the same thing will happen to Social Security.
You've got one, I wouldn't even say a full party, but at least Paul Ryan and his budgeters, as in the three Musketeers, he's at least tackling this seriously and responsibly.
He's going to get killed for it.
He's going to get decapitated for it.
They're going to set out to destroy him.
From the people compassion and understanding, want the best for everybody.
It appears they're just against anything that will bring responsibility back to the finances of this country.
So Scarborough asks Gene Sperling after that rambling, bunch of BS as an answer.
Well, is your position in Mr. Sperling, the uh White House position, Medicare will survive over the next 20, 25 years, save Medicare for the next 20 years?
You know, you can say that it's unfair to say the death spiral phrase, but it really refers to something in economics that I think you understand that if you put everybody in one common insurance pool, and then you allow people to siphon off those who are healthiest and youngest, those who remain in Medicare, instead of being part of a large pool of seniors, are now just the sickest and the oldest.
Of course, that means their costs are going to go up.
Creating a two-tiered system does create a serious risk of a death spiral that undermines the basic affordability of Medicare that we have today.
The audacity of these people, they are clearly relying on the fact that 95% of the people will not know what the hell he's talking about.
And they're just going to accept it.
So to help people understand, I want to go back to June 24th of 2009.
ABC did a primetime special questions for the president prescription for America.
And in this special, a woman stood up and asked the President of the United States if he would allow her elderly mother to basically live once she needed a pacemaker.
Stop and think just that for a second.
A citizen of this country goes to the White House for an ABC Network TV special, stands up and asks the president If he and his government will allow her mother to survive.
And the president said no.
The woman talked about her mother's will to live, her spark her energy.
Obama says we can't take that into account.
Her name was Jane Sturm.
Let me read her question for Batam and then listen to Obama's Annie.
You remember what Sperling just said.
It's Ryan and the Republicans are going to send old people into a special pool where they're going to get sick and it's going to be so expensive to treat them that it is not going to be treated and they're going to die.
The Republicans are going to kill them.
That's what Obama's economic advisor just said will be the result of Ryan's budget.
But we already know that that's Obama's plan.
Question.
June 24, 2009.
My mother is now over 105.
But at age 100, the doctor said to her, I can't do anything more unless you have a pacemaker.
I said, go for it.
She said, go for it.
But the specialist said, no, she's too old for a pacemaker.
But when another specialist saw her, saw her joy of life, and so on, he said, I'm going for it.
That was over five years ago, Mr. President.
She's 105 now.
My question to you is outside the medical criteria for prolonging life for somebody who's elderly.
Is there any consideration that can be given for a certain spirit, a certain joy of living, a quality of life, or is it just a medical cutoff at a certain age?
Can you believe this question is being asked in this country?
Can you believe it?
A citizen has to go to the president or the government to ask if her mother can get medical treatment.
This woman's already thrown in the towel.
She's already accepted the premise that Obama will be totally in control.
I don't know about you.
When I was growing up, and even 20 years ago, I mean, I might have had a hint of it.
I never dreamed that I'd have to get permission from a government official for a member of my family to have medical treatment.
Here's Obama's answer to this woman's question.
I don't think that we can make judgments based on people's spirit.
That'd be uh a pretty subjective decision to be making.
I think we have to have rules that say that we are going to provide good quality care for all people.
End of life care is one of the most difficult sets of decisions that we're gonna have to make.
But understand that those decisions are already being made in one way or another.
If they're not being made under Medicare and Medicaid, they're being made by private insurers.
At least we can let doctors know, and your mom know that you know what, maybe this isn't gonna help.
Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking uh the painkiller.
Hey, mom, I just talked to the president.
He said no on the pacemaker.
But I'm to tell you that you're probably better off not getting the pacemaker.
And here, just take the percocette.
That's what the president said.
That I don't know, folks.
Uh this is not the country in which I grew up.
It isn't.
It isn't.
So who's the party of no?
Who is the party of no?
Who's who told the woman, nah, your mother can't have a pacemaker?
It doesn't matter how badly she wants to live, doesn't matter what a spirit is, we can't take that into account.
Probably tell her she'd be better off not having the surgery, the pacemaker, and here give her a paint pill.
We're going to hear the same exact argument when Obamacare kicks in.
Everyone has to be in Obamacare.
That's going to be the law of the land.
Or it'll only cover the sick and the poor.
Everybody's going to have to be in it.
And this is how they're going to argue against allowing private insurance plans once Obamacare really takes hold.
We can't let private insurers.
If some private insurer may give that woman the pacemaker, we can't have we can't have some people getting something somebody else can't have.
So we're going to run the whole show, and we're going to determine who gets what, and we're going to not tell you how we decide, none of your business.
They call us the party of no.
This is how they're going to argue against private insurance.
It's unfair.
Is that people who can afford private insurance and pacemakers and other people it's not fair?
So everybody has to be equally sick, equally miserable, so that everything is fair.
A brief departure.
Continue to get emails from those of you who want to help with this continuing assault on me and uh and this program.
I happen to be watching the Fox Business Channel this morning.
Fox Business Network.
It was up there accidentally.
I normally have something else on on that monitor.
And it was about 20 minutes until 11.
And I don't even know what made me look up, but I looked up and I saw a graphic that said some guy talking about advertising on this program.
And I looked and I looked, and I finally hit the mute buttons, I listened to it and reading the closed captioning.
It turned out that it was an advertiser, this program by the name of Mark Stevens.
He's CEO of a company called MSCO.
He was on Varney and Company, Stuart Varney and his gang, Charles Lane on the Fox Business Channel.
And this guy said a I mean, he's got this down pat.
He's exactly what's going on here.
And I wanted to play these two sound bites for you.
Here's the first.
First of all, this is not a boycott.
This really surprised me, and I'm not a Pollyanna about what's going on in uh America and about with Rush.
This is a terrorist action.
Uh we have had people in our company, uh we have a female vice president, for example, a 30-year-old woman who's an MBA and a lawyer who was told that she was called repeatedly that she is a woman hater.
This is a young woman who pulled himself up by her own bootstraps and went to law school on her own dime, is called a woman hater.
This story has not gotten out.
This is not a boycott.
This is an organized terrorist attack and they're coming from all over the country.
What he's talking about is local advertisers, local radio stations are being bombarded, or were with complaints made to look like average ordinary angry consumers.
They're not, they're Democrat operatives.
Democrat operators, this is we've been tweeting this out.
If you've uh if you've joined Twitter and are following at Limbaugh at Rush Limbaugh, no space between Russia and Limbaugh, then you've seen the tweets that we've put out explaining that.
We have more coming.
There's no boycott.
There's no secondary boycott.
There was a plan in a drawer at Media Matters for America back as 2009.
Stop Rush, just waiting for some opportunity to put it into action.
And it involves literal harassment of advertisers in cities large and small, radio stations large and small, and they try to make themselves look like angry listeners, angry consumers.
They're not.
They're all Democrat operatives using multiple fake email addresses and so forth.
And this guy Stevens is being hit up by it.
Now he's he's gone on, he's gonna triple down on his advertising.
He's saying, my gosh, there's never been more attention paid to this show than ever.
This is the greatest advertising by ever.
They're not gonna get to me, but he's I think people this is a terror attack, and it's not just on Limbaugh, it's on all of American business, and it's on all of radio.
It's not just Limbaugh, but that's the focal point for it right now.
Here's the next soundbite.
I don't have the evidence to absolutely say that, so I don't want to, but it's the usual suspects we think are orchestrating these things.
So I have a business to run.
We spend the million dollars a year just in New York advertising alone.
I'm and I'm willing to boost that because it works for us.
We're a business.
I will double down and I will triple down.
But I just want to the reason why I want what I'd like to say is that what is not known about this is not a boycott.
That is a polite term for an organized terrorist activity that's that that is descending on people, on businesses of advertising a web on Rush, and it's part of the larger war on business in America today.
Part of a larger war on American business today.
There's a fascinating piece, the column today by Charles Gasparino, the New York Post.
It's about Jeffrey Emelt, the CEO of GE, who, when asked by Obama to join his uh jobs commission, did so.
And now MLT, according to the Gasparino piece, a lifelong Republican, by the way, M. L says here, has had it.
He thought that he could moderate Obama, thought he could turn him away from the business bashing, private sector bashing, socialist tendencies, but now he's realized he can't.
He's voting Romney if Romney gets a nomination.
Thought he could moderate Obama.
Can't believe that Obama is still as anti-business and anti-private sector as he is.
Can't believe he couldn't be moderated on that.
We could have told him before he took the gig.
We did.
And I have to take a break.
It's an obscene profit timeout, by the way.
We'll be back in just a second.
Still a whole lot to go here with more details on the MLT situation with Obama.
And we start today giving away our first engraved new generation iPads, holding one up for you to see now on the ditto cam.
I'll zoom in on it in the next hour to see a better version of it.
Be right back.
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