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March 22, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:47
March 22, 2012, Thursday, Hour #3
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The views expressed by the host on this program documented to be almost always right 99.7% of the time.
And here we are meeting and surpassing all audience expectations on a daily basis.
Great to have you here, folks.
It's always a thrill and delight to be with you.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882.
The email address, lrushbo at eibnet.com.
You know what's also ironic about this gasoline price business is that since he was inaugurated, Obama has done everything he can to de-emphasize oil.
He's had his energy secretary testify on a couple of occasions, and Obama himself has said that $4 a gallon gasoline doesn't trouble them.
Obama, the only thing that troubled him about it was how quickly it got to $4 a gallon.
He would have preferred that the price increase take a little longer to get there.
His energy secretary, Stephen Chu, said in congressional testimony, we're really not concerned about the gasoline price.
We want to get people off of oil.
So what's Obama doing?
Today, yesterday and today, the total 180-degree shift in direction.
All of a sudden now, Barack Obama wants you to think that the price of oil and the price of gasoline is the most important thing on his agenda right now.
And if by some miracle, now here's the irony, if by some miracle Obama did see the light and he did try to lower the price of gasoline, he would be undoing everything he and the Democrats have worked so hard to accomplish over the last three years.
They want high gasoline prices so that you'll eventually go buy a Chevy Volt.
They want high gasoline prices so you go buy a hybrid or an electric car or you'll take mass transit.
They want you out of your internal combustion engine machine.
They've made no secret about it.
They're not even really concerned about high gas prices, except now it's an election year.
And now what the American people want is what we have to pretend that we want.
And that's where Obama is.
So the lack of a moral core is as apparent and obvious in Obama as it is in anybody else who has no moral core.
He's just paramountly obvious here.
And I think it's a profundity.
For three years, they have been working on raising the price of energy.
Look at what Obama said in the 08 campaign about coal.
Well, you go ahead and start a coal plant if you want, but you're going to go broke because I'm going to tax it and I'm going to make it so expensive.
Traditional forms of energy, Obama wanted to wipe out.
He's bankrolled all these losers in wind and solar.
And now, just in the last two days, and for the first two days of his three and a half year term, or nearly three and a half years, all of a sudden the price of oil matters most.
Price of gasoline matters most.
And this is an election year, again, so he'll listen to what you want in an attempt to fake you out into believing that's what he wants.
But it isn't.
A Virginia middle school, that's junior high for those of you in Rio Linda.
I don't know that they have schools in Riolinda, so I don't know that they even know what a junior high is, but it's where you send the kids during the day.
Get them out of the house.
For those of you in Rio Linda, a Virginia middle school teacher recently forced his students to support Obama's re-election campaign by conducting opposition research in class against Republican presidential candidates.
The eighth grade students who attend Liberty Middle School in Fairfax County were required to seek out the vulnerabilities of Santorum, Romney, Gingrich, Ron Paul, and forward them to the Obama campaign.
An eighth grade teacher assigned as a class project, Republican opposition research, and then were instructed to send their results to Obama.
The assignment was creepy beyond belief, like something out of East Germany during the Cold War, said one frustrated father who asked for his family to remain anonymous.
The assignment was for students to research the background and positions of each of the GOP candidates for president, find weaknesses in them.
From there, parents, by the way, are the source for this.
From there, students were to prepare a strategy paper to exploit the weaknesses in the Republican candidates that they found and then send their suggestions to the Obama campaign.
Liberty teacher Michael Denman is the culprit here.
He declined to comment.
He's the guy who unveiled the assignment in mid-January when he broke the civics honors class into four groups, one for each Republican candidate.
The students were then to collaborate as a group and research the backgrounds of their assigned candidate.
The teacher, Denman, assigned two kids to write a paper revealing the identified weaknesses, two to write the attack strategy paper, and two others to locate an individual inside the Obama campaign to whom they could send the information.
One of the students told the Daily Caller, my classmates don't actually know a lot, but a few of us tended to agree that the most recent instruction on this project just didn't seem right.
Mr. Denman didn't tell us where to find the information, just to do research on them.
As a result, the school received multiple phone calls from parents frustrated with the political nature of the assignment, according to a father, who said, I was shocked that a school teacher would so blatantly politicize the curriculum of a middle school classroom, the parents said, why are you surprised, sir?
I asked my child if a similar assignment had been handed out to examine the background and positions of Obama to see if the teacher was at least being bipartisan.
No similar assignment was given to research Obama's history or to identify his weaknesses or pass them along to the Republican candidates.
Josh Torrey, a spokesman on behalf of the Fairfax County Public School System, insists students were never instructed to actually send their results to the Obama campaign.
Instead, the teacher simply asked his students to find out the name of the office that will receive such information.
Oh, what?
The teacher was going to send it?
So the teacher's being backed up by the superintendent and the principal, but they're not saying much beyond that.
So let's see, first it was making students recite chants.
And then students were singing creepy songs for Obama.
And now the schools, or a school, has assigned opposition research as a class project.
I think every parent needs to stop and consider what happens when a political party puts children to work for free.
That's what's happening here.
This teacher, this Denman, obviously a liberal Democrat, decided to have these kids do some opposition research for the Democrats at no charge.
And turn this around.
If this had been a conservative teacher seeking opposition research against Obama, can you imagine the explosion once that had been learned?
Teacher had been fired.
He'd be gone, never to work again.
Students would be sent to re-education camps.
That's just doesn't surprise me any longer.
By the way, folks, we've got another tweet going out very soon at Limbaugh on Twitter and also at Rush Limbaugh.
And again, no space between Rush Limbaugh.
We have two places that you can go to follow me: at Limbaugh, at Rush Limbaugh.
Another tweet going out.
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So it's a tweet that's in response reaction to this silly announced effort today by Media Matters, a $100,000 radio campaign to get me off the air.
And they're running commercials in some select cities across the country.
And I think it's a sign they're in trouble.
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Get a Twitter account, follow at Limbaugh or at Rush Limbaugh, retweet what we put up there.
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We'll be back after this with much more.
Don't go away.
Back to the phones we go on the EIB network.
Dave in Bay City, Michigan.
Great to have you, sir, with us on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hey, Rush.
Rush, I cannot believe how short the American public's memory is on this.
We've lived through this just three and a half years ago, August 15th of 2008.
Oil hit an all-time price high of $147 a barrel.
The next day, George W. Bush lifted the offshore drilling moratorium.
Oil went from $147 straight down to, in the first quarter, under $40 a barrel in 2009.
We went from $4.25 at the pump to $1.80.
And who is talking about this?
We've just lived through this, not even four years ago.
We know what works.
Just the threat of drilling from a guy who meant he would do it gets it done.
I don't think that most people have forgotten it.
Don't forget now.
I know I sound a little frustrated today, but it's not because I don't think people aren't going to get it.
I think it's a great opportunity.
It's a fabulous, teachable moment.
And I think people's memories are clear on this.
And I think the polling data all shows this.
If I sound frustrated, I'll just be truthfully and personally with you, personally truthful.
The reason I sound frustrated is because in the 23 and a half years of doing this, and I guess I've got an unrealistic expectation, and that is that they'll stop this, that they'll stop lying.
And I know that's silly.
I know that's an unreasonable expectation.
That's who they are.
They can't tell the truth and survive politically.
And I'm the one who's told everybody this.
But there are times where even I descend to childlike naivete and assume, like happened when you were in the first grade, liars were dealt with.
They were punished.
They didn't do it anymore.
And if they did, they got punished again.
When we're talking about the Democratic Party, they get rewarded for it, or at least they're not significantly punished for it.
So I don't think the American people are missing any of this.
I look at Obama's approval numbers.
He's at an all-time low in the New York Times last week at 41%.
He's not fooling anywhere near a majority of the people anymore.
But then if the media stopped lying, they'd be out of jobs.
If they stopped telling lies, if they stopped supporting, they'd be out of jobs.
They'd be worthless to the Democrats.
They'd be useless to the Democrats.
And the Democrats turn their ire on them.
So if the AP and all these other news organizations don't chill for Obama, they'll be unemployed too.
It's a little too late for them now to go back and actually do their jobs in the right way because they've blown the trust.
They've squandered the trust that they maybe used to have with their customers, i.e. the American citizens.
Tony in Oklahoma City.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Megan Sooner Dado's Rush.
I have a question, a comment.
The question is: the gasoline being exported to other countries, are these countries green countries and the refineries have the green countries to thank for the high prices for higher profits?
I must admit, I don't know where the gasoline is being exported to.
And my comment is: I'm in the natural gas business here in Oklahoma, and all I know is that we're drilling like crazy and drilling more and more, and the gas are the natural gas prices are low and remain low and are steadily dropping.
Will you repeat something for me that you just said?
What do you have to do to get natural gas?
You have to drill.
Drill?
Yes, it's a how many people know that you have to drill for natural gas and it just doesn't come out of the rear end of a cow.
How many people know you got to drill five?
So here's Obama.
We can't drill our way out of anything.
No drilling.
And yet Obama is touting natural gas as some clean.
And it is.
But you have to drill for it.
I'm so glad you called, Tony.
Thanks much.
I'm going to find out where this exported gas is going.
There's any number of reasons for it to be exported.
One of the reasons is you sell it to people going to pay you the most for it.
Sorry, that's the market.
So if the Europeans are buying it at prices they're accustomed to paying, prices that are way, way above what the American people will pay, fine.
That's the way it works.
That's the market.
You call European green countries and so forth.
We'll do our best to figure out where it's going.
And that'll tell us quite a lot.
This is Wendy in Las Vegas, next up on the EIB network.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
You're the greatest.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate that.
I want to get back to this conservation issue and gasoline.
They don't care how high the price of gas goes.
The state and federal taxes are at a certain amount per gallon.
It's not to do with a rate.
What they're doing in 16 different states in the country is now, because of all the conservation and the alternative fuel vehicles, they're losing a ton of highway revenue.
So they are looking here in Nevada and a bunch of other states into a fuel tax replacement study called a Vehicle Miles Traveled Fee.
Yeah.
I know they're doing that in California, too.
Yeah, yeah.
A lot of the western states, even Texas, but the first phase of their study even involved tracking, putting a tracking device on people's cars to see where they went.
You know, you had to participate in the study.
People did not like that.
Now, the study is up to pulling up to the pump and based on your odometer, charging you two cents a mile.
Another great example here, folks.
We've chronicled this, predicted it, in fact.
It's not just with gasoline as is happening.
This is happening with water.
In North Carolina, in Florida, there are droughts, and there are then mandatory cutbacks in the amount of water you can use, watering your lawn, who knows, whatever.
Then they figure out, wait a minute, we've cut the amount of water, the tax revenue is going down.
So they come up with a way of recouping what they're losing.
They tell us to conserve, get smaller, cheap little cars, don't drive as much, use less water.
Then they realize, this is where they don't score things dynamically.
They do a static score.
They realize that conservation, which they've urged, which they've demanded, which you get penalized if you don't conserve, results in less tax revenue for them.
So they have to come up with temporary or additional, not temporary, additional ways of raising revenue to make up for their loss.
And then out the window goes the whole reason for conserving, and that's making things cheaper and saving us money.
That's how they sell it.
Conserve less, you'll have more disposable income.
Conserve more, rather, and you'll have more disposable income.
Conserve and save the planet and all that.
And then you find out the minute they discover you're saving money, they figure out it's from them, and then they come get it back from you.
Ha, welcome back.
Great to have you, Rush Limbaugh.
Talent on loan from God.
This is Curtis in Columbus, Ohio.
Thank you for waiting, sir.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Well, good afternoon, Rush.
It's an honor to talk to you.
I've listened to you for a very long time.
Thank you very much.
My question is: when we talk about the president saying, you know, all the domestic drilling and stuff we do here won't do any good.
Well, what's the price of gasoline in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Venezuela for that matter?
If it doesn't do any good, how much are they paying?
Well, that's not quite a perfect analogy because they don't have to ship it anywhere.
They, of course, we don't either, but they don't, it's, we, well, we do.
We provide oil and now gasoline exports.
By the way, our gasoline exports, I looked it up, basically to Latin America.
Most of our gasoline exports are to Brazil, Mexico, and Chile.
But most of it's going to Latin America.
Don't know why.
Find that out later.
They could assume using market theories that they have a need for it and they're willing to buy it.
But if there's more to it than that, we will find out.
I don't know what the price of gasoline is in Saudi Arabia or Venezuela or whatever, but they don't have near the restrictions on themselves that we place on us.
They don't have to deal with environmentalist wackos or any of that.
And they own the oil.
That's all state-owned.
We don't have that.
We have evil big oil that owns our oil here.
But look, still a good point, because whenever the price of gasoline goes up, what do the Democrats always say?
Saudis ought to pump more.
The question is, what the Saudis pump more, and it will affect the price by bringing it down.
Why won't us drilling and pumping more not bring the price down?
Which is what the Democrats say.
The price of gasoline in Saudi Arabia is 91 cents.
91 cents.
Which ought to tell you what it's costing them to pump it and refine it.
It's 91 cents a gallon in Saudi Arabia.
Now, I don't know what the price is for women in Saudi Arabia.
By wait, they're not allowed to drive, are they?
Never mind.
Curtis, thanks for the call.
Kristen in San Antonio, great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Oh, Rush.
I thank God for the blessing of being able to speak to the voice of truth.
We really need you now.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
Well, I'm a physician, and my whole life has been focused on the doctor-patient relationship, and we are under siege by the government takeover of medicine.
So after being betrayed by the AMA, physicians are coming together and we have spoken out and we have come out with a response to the infamous granny ad from last year.
And I hope you will please see it, particularly the four-minute video, because we...
I have.
Is that your ad?
I've seen it.
Yes, that's it.
And I'm in it in the end.
These people have done an ad with Obama pushing Granny off the cliff, as opposed to Paul Ryan.
Well, because we had to give him credit for his signature legislation.
And we used his own words.
Our patient is absolutely in context with the town hall where he tells us that government will let us know what they deem the patient's hat should have as treatment.
And then the thing that's in the four-minute video is that we catch Granny at the end as the doctors, and we educate our patients about what is actually in the law, which I have read.
So in your ad, in your ad, Granny doesn't die like in the Democrat ad.
Oh, absolutely not.
We save Granny and say, don't worry, Grandma.
We will take care of you.
Let me ask you a question.
Do you think the do you agree with Nancy Pelosi that the founding fathers would approve of Obamacare?
Oh, my God, goodness.
The founding fathers were.
That's what she's saying.
Okay, well, you know, two years ago today, she did her, two days ago yesterday, she did her gavel walk when she forced this down the throats of the American people.
And the founding fathers had just finished turning over from that, and now they're turning over from her implicating them in supporting something that they designed the Constitution to avoid.
This is the exact sort of legislation that they created our government and Constitution to avoid.
That is just laughable.
In fact, I think we should make a parody of that.
Yeah, you should.
You ought to do another parody with Pelosi saying that the pursuit of happiness means that we have to provide everybody with free birth control pills.
Well, I really want to call you back and talk to you about that one from a physician's perspective.
But I'll tell you, Rush, if you will please spread the word to the American patient.
I'm a doctor, I'm a patient, I'm a mother, I'm a small business owner.
And my goodness, we are under the gun here.
And, you know, earlier, on your earlier hour, you said truth is not powerful enough to stop these people.
And I fear that you are right.
So we, the people, must be powerful enough to stop them.
And as a physician and as people, we've got to resuscitate the truth.
Well, the reason why it doesn't, it's not that there's anything wrong with the truth, is that we're up against people with no moral core.
Truth is a relative floating point to them.
Truth is whatever they happen to say that day.
And they have no compunction.
There's no conscience.
There's no restraint whatsoever.
And so the truth up against somebody or some organization without a moral core needs assistance.
But I tell you, you told me to keep talking.
I think you should, by all means, keep doing what you're doing.
I've got a story here.
Kristen, from the L.A. Times, Obama health care law not yet resonating with the public.
Let me read to you a first paragraph and I will translate it for you from the Los Angeles Times.
As President Obama and his allies gear up to defend the landmark health care law he signed two years ago, they confront an unforgiving math problem.
Just a tiny fraction of Americans has experienced a major benefit from the law, and that's because it hasn't been implemented.
And the major benefits.
They have delayed the benefits so they keep the cost down.
Anyway, at the same time, tens of millions have continued to see insurance premiums and medical bills rise as they did before the legislation was signed.
That reflects the design of the complex law in which many of the key provisions were delayed in a bid to hold down costs and minimize disruptions while new systems are put in place to expand coverage.
The law will not guarantee insurance to all Americans until 2014 and may take many more years to rein in health care costs.
But the president and congressional Democrats had nonetheless hoped that a handful of early benefits such as allowing adult children, adult children, to remain on their parents' health plans until age 26 would rally the public behind Obama's law now.
But that hasn't happened, surveys say.
The law is still not real for the vast majority of Americans, said Molly Ann Brody, polling director for the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation.
Can I translate this for you?
You idiot hicks in flyover country in the deep south, just don't realize what an incredible gift your benevolent president and all-knowing government are giving you.
Since you're clearly not capable of making health insurance decisions and choices for yourself, we are taking care of that for you now.
Just trust in the president and Kathleen Sebelius, who will take care of you so that you can go back to clinging to your guns and religion and leave the important stuff to those of us who know what's best for you.
The Los Angeles Times admits that the Obama health care law is not yet resonating with the public, but it's because you are too ungrateful to understand just how much they have done for us.
And you are too ungrateful and maybe stupid to see how much they care for you.
And you are too dumb and disengaged to understand that, yes, prices may be going up now, but they will eventually come down.
It says so in the bill.
So you dumb hicks, if you would just start telling our pollsters that you love Obamacare, we wouldn't have to write stories that disappoint us like this.
So please, would you start trying to understand how wonderful Obama is and how wonderful Kathleen Sebelius is and how wonderful the health care plan is and how it's never ever going to be a problem for you ever again.
If you get sick and if you die, you will be taken care of, maybe.
That's the translation.
LA Times, terribly upset that you don't get it yet.
But the real news here is that you're not buying it.
And they're all flabbergasted by it and they're upset and they're pulling their hair out because they look at it as themselves being ineffective.
They haven't yet, with all the power they've got, turned you into big supporters.
And of course, that's your fault.
You're too stupid to understand how wonderful all this is.
Quick time out, folks, back with much more after this.
Tim Tebow to the New York Jets.
Now, we told you this yesterday.
It then became subject to change because after the program ended, it was discovered that Tebow's contract had a provision in it that whoever traded for him had to pay $5 million in salary that the Broncos had somehow advanced him or already paid him or whatever.
So the Jets balked at that.
That put Thibault back on the market.
And the Broncos said, okay, Tim, we're going to let you choose where you want to go.
It's between two teams, St. Louis Rams and the Jets.
And they got this $5 million ironed out.
I think the Jets paid $2.5 million.
And now Tebow is a member of the New York Jets.
There's a column in the L.A. Times today by Bill Plaschke, which I, frankly, was shocked to read.
Pretty interesting.
Sadly, Tim Tebow's class act may not play in the National Football League.
It disappeared almost as quickly as it had arrived, the breathtaking autumn spectacle vanishing in the mile-high air on a march afternoon.
Denver Broncos gathered for a news conference regarding a Ballyhood quarterback Tuesday, yet nobody dropped to one knee or raised his hands to the sky.
There were no miracles here, only old-fashioned football men, Peyton Manning and John Elway, on a national stage filled with Hall of Fame pedigree and stocked with championship promise.
One of the most magical, mystical runs in National Football League history is indeed resoundingly, resolutely over.
Tebow time is up.
Five months after he captured a nation's imagination by pulling out five last-gasp victories, throwing a bomb that gave the Broncos an overtime playoff win against the mighty Pittsburgh Steelers, Tim Tebow has seemingly lost everything.
His job as a Bronco starting quarterback is gone.
The NFL's least accurate passer benched for one of its greatest passers ever.
His chances of becoming a starting quarterback on another team are slim because most NFL personnel people don't believe games can be won with the sort of powers that Tebow's presence seemed to summon him.
Frankly, most NFL people think he stinks.
His chances of becoming a full-time backup quarterback aren't great either because who wants a season swirled by the quarterback controversy wins that will accompany his every sideline twitch?
Remember, this is a guy so beloved that in Denver, people bought billboards urging the Broncos to play him.
And if his team doesn't employ the sort of running attack that works for Tebow, how would he ever get on the field?
His best opportunity is to go to a place like New England where he could back up Tom Brady, where there's no question who the quarterback is.
But that didn't happen.
They went to the Jets.
Plaschke writes, I wish it weren't true, and maybe it won't be, but right now, the sad irony is that for Tim Tebow to continue to exist as a contributing member of an NFL team, he probably has to stop being Tim Tebow.
Now, that deserves a little analysis.
Tim Tebow, even Elway said, if there was ever a guy I would want my daughter to marry, it's Tim Tebow.
But he's got to change to fit in with today's NFL.
They can't change all the bad actors in this game, but Tebow has to stop being himself.
In other words, Tebow has to become corrupted like he's not in order for everything to be okay for him in the NFL.
When Peyton Manning was asked about Tebow, he began by being politically correct and then became one of the first quarterbacks in history to talk about an active teammate practically in the past tense.
He describes what Peyton Manning said, and Plaschke writes, The only thing more crass would be to immediately strip the Broncos facility walls of the Tebow action photos that were hung.
Oh, wait, they've already done that.
Tebow would bid farewell with the same odd dignity that accompanied his every move.
Tebow might understand, but I don't.
I don't want to understand, writes Plaschke.
I don't want to face the truth that a quarterback can engineer four consecutive game-winning drives in the fourth quarter or overtime and still get fired because he wasn't pretty enough.
I don't want to believe that if the same quarterback makes religious gestures and references afterward, everybody forgets his victories and focuses on his beliefs.
Do you know that in the last five years, Peyton Manning has exactly one more playoff win than Tim Tebow?
Plaschke concludes this way: I want to believe that in a sport littered with all the second chances given former convicts and miscreants and Hall of Fame quarterbacks with troublesome necks, that Tim Tebow will get more than just one chance.
Bill Plaschke in the LA Times.
Aren't many sports writers who are going to write that story that way?
By the way, Funk, I got a couple of tweets going out today, and I will be off tomorrow.
Another charity commitment that I, El Rushbro, have Mark Stein will be here hosting the EIB network tomorrow.
But I will be back on Monday, raring and ready to go.
And we have had a ball this week, and we will continue to do so.
Thanks very much for being with us.
It's always the highlight of the day for me to be with you, and I look forward to being back here on Monday.
Have a great weekend, folks.
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