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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 got to show people this on a DittoCam.
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 that.
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, most listened to, most talked about, and most feared radio talk show hosts the country.
This is the most listened to radio talk show, the most talked about.
And as I say, I've been here 20.
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, and 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, no, it's the cigars that's causing the sniffles here.
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 even 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 because of that, 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 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, it wasn't that long ago, 25, 23, 20 years ago, you start talking about the budget, and there go to 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 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 news media.
The one-party news media is reporting the news of the Ryan budget, AP calling it an election-year budget.
You see, these venal Republicans never do anything except for political advantage.
Yes, it's an election-year budget.
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 the 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 an architect.
Speaking of budget, Mark Knoller of CBS News has committed another random act of journalism.
Mark Knoller 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 a sane 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 I'm talking to 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 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 and 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 little controversy swirling around, not so much Apple.
I guess it is Apple, but some guy who does a stage show, some theatrical performer named Mike Daisy.
I'll get into it in just a minute.
But in the process, there have been a lot of blog references to this.
And in the process of keeping up with this, I saw a little blog post about Apple's announcement yesterday, what they're going to do with their nearly $100 billion in cash.
100 billion, one company, Apple Incorporated, has $100 billion 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 going to 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 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, that is $100,000 million.
That's what I wanted to get to.
$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: $17,000, $18, whatever, trillion dollar national debt, an annual budget of over $3 trillion.
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 cash hoard.
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, $60,000, $70 billion.
Apple has $100 billion.
That is $100,000 million in cash.
Now, most of you, when you think, what would a lot of money be to me?
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 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 $3 trillion.
And of that $3 trillion, close to $2 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 $2 trillion.
$100,000 million is just $100 billion.
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?
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 10 Boeing 747s.
Go ahead and buy 10 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 $2 trillion 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 silly question.
This is the New Castravi speaking, folks.
This is the silliest 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. Limbaugh.
The universe is everything.
It's got to be someplace, Mr. New Castravi.
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 in debt.
You couldn't spend it.
$100 billion, which is a thimble compared to $1.8 trillion.
Because a trillion is $1,000 billion.
We're being sold such a villain.
Goods.
It's outrageous the amount of money that's being spent.
And what little we're getting for it.
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 $2 trillion in debt, the federal budget is $3 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 existing, tax rates were what they are today, your grandkids' lifetime taxes have already been spent.
What do you think their ultimate real tax rate's 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, they get shouted down by the media, shouted down by the Democratic 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 $1 trillion.
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 era's 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 going to work.
The country wants to be spoken to like adults, not pantered 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 all this budget talk that we engaged in yesterday and the debt limit increase and the controversy surrounding that.
This was at the press briefing and 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 recovery has now reached a level where it's kind of inevitable?
The president absolutely does not believe that recovery is inevitable.
We need to do everything we can here in Washington to ensure that the recovery continues.
It is certainly within the capacity of Washington, as we have seen in the past, most recently last summer, 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 Limbaugh 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, $100,000 million is 0.006% of our national debt, $15.5 trillion.
Six one thousandths of a percent, folks.
There is a six one-hundredths.
I always get confused with the decimal point and the figure to the right of it.
0.006%.
It's infinitesimal.
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 inevitable?
Nothing that can stop us now.
This recovery is solid.
And Carney's, oh, no, no.
The Republican Congress could screw us again, just like they did last summer.
Utter irresponsibility from this administration.
And here are a couple soundbites of this regime reacting to Paul Ryan's budget.
This is Gene Sperling.
He's the National Economic Council director.
He was on Scarborough's 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 costs 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 responsible man.
This it is Obama who has threatened Medicare.
It's Obama who cut Medicare.
It is Obama who is seeing to it that healthcare costs are skyrocketing.
They just, the news last week, that the actual cost of Obamacare is going to be double what the original projection.
This guy dares to go out there 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 1%.
The Republicans, 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 budgeteers, 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.
They 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 asked Gene Sperling after that rambling bunch of BS as an answer: well, is your position in Mr. Sperling, the 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 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 verbatim and then listen to Obama's announcement.
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 if it is not going to be treated, 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 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 going to 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 going to help.
Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking 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.
Here, just take the percocet.
That's what the president said.
That, I don't know, folks, this is not the country in which I grew up.
isn't.
So who's the party of no?
Who is the party of no?
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 her 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 pain pill.
We're going to hear this 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.
Some private insurer may give that woman the pacemaker.
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.
And they call us the party of no.
This is how they're going to argue against private insurance.
It's unfair that people who can afford private insurance are going to get 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 this program.
I happened to be watching the Fox Business Channel this morning, Fox Business Network.
It was up there accidentally.
I normally have something else on a net 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, I mean, he's got this down, Pat.
He's exactly what's going on here.
And I wanted to play these two soundbites 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 America and with Rush.
This is a terrorist action.
We have had people in our company, 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 pulls herself up by her own bootstraps and went to law school on her own dime.
It's 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 operatives.
We've been tweeting this out.
If you've joined Twitter and are following at Limbaugh or at Rush Limbaugh, no space between Rush and Limbaugh, then you've seen the tweets that we've put out explaining that.
And 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 in 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 gone on.
He's going to 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 buy ever.
They're not going to get to me.
But 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 for you.
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 a million dollars a year just in New York advertising alone.
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 is descending on people, on businesses that are advertising 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, a column today by Charles Gasperino, the New York Post.
It's about Jeffrey Imelt, the CEO of GE, who, when asked by Obama to join his jobs commission, did so.
And now Imelt, according to the Gasparino piece, a lifelong Republican, by the way, Imelt 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 Immelt 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 DittoCam.
I'll zoom in on it in the next hour to see a better version of it.
Be right back.
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