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March 26, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:46
March 26, 2012, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
I told you I'd be back today, and here I am.
Back here in the air chair, the distinguished and prestigious Attila the Hun chair, where I am the senior fellow of all fellows at the distinguished and prestigious Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Happy to be here, folks, and we've got broadcast excellence for three hours straight ahead.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program, 800-282-288 to the email address illrushbo at eibnet.com.
Six hours of oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court began today on Obamacare.
And it can be somewhat confusing if you do not have me to make the complex understandable.
The first thing that happened today was basically an argument, a hearing, on whether or not the court even has any say-so in this.
This is at the court's request.
And it's all about the fact whether or not the mandate could be called a tax.
Now, the regime is, they're in a precarious position on this, no matter how the ruling goes down.
And I just got a note that I don't quite understand.
I mean, literally, as the theme of the program was playing, this note, I'm being told that it looks like the Supreme Court will not invoke the whole concept of this being a tax and therefore not hear the arguments.
My note is even before the court reaches that subject, it must broach the issue of the Anti-Injunction Act.
This is a 145-year-old federal tax law, which could bar the court from even hearing a challenge to the individual mandate.
Now, the heritage, I'm told here that it looks like the Supreme Court will not invoke this, which means they'll go ahead and hear it.
What this is about, the Heritage Foundation has a great explanation of this today.
And the first thing on the agenda was to try to determine whether or not the official mandate is a tax.
And if it is a tax, then the regime can go ahead and say it's not a mandate.
We're levying a tax on people.
We have the authority and they're forwarding funky-dory.
Well, fine and dandy as far as that goes.
But if that were to end up being the ruling, then the regime has a challenging political problem.
And that is Obama promising all this time that nobody's taxes to go up and nobody's premiums would go up.
And here they've just argued before the court that it's a tax and they have every right to levy it.
Therefore, the Republicans have a built-in campaign issue regarding this.
But I'm told the court's not going to invoke this, but we'll see.
As I say, I just had that note handed to me, and I'm probably remiss in even mentioning that to you until I can confirm it today.
So the first thing on the order of business was the court determining whether or not the individual mandate qualifies as a tax.
And if it does qualify as a tax, then under the provisions of the aforementioned Tax Anti-Injunction Act, T-A-I-A, the mandate can't be challenged in court until it's actually been collected.
Meaning, you can't sue for being taxed before you've been taxed.
So if the court had determined that this is a tax, then they would have been saying, get out of here, everybody.
There's no case.
And that's what I'm told that they are not going to invoke.
That would take the merits of the case off the table.
And the Heritage Foundation really go into this at great length here.
But as I say, the regime would not win in this case.
And probably on the whole notion of a mandate, I think they're on thin ice.
I find it fascinating, I'm sure you do too, that all of the news reporting on this is focusing on whether or not a conservative justice will change his thinking on this.
Implicit in that is that the four liberal justices are already etched in stone.
They're not open-minded about it, and they're going to vote a certain way.
It's a fait con plea, and it probably is.
But it's fascinating to me that the media and all this, all the focus is on the conservatives, and therefore whether we can change their mind, whether we can pressure them, whether we can force Anthony Kennedy or Scalia or maybe Thomas or Alito or even Chief Justice Roberts to see this the right way.
So the arguments are already over for today.
The court would have to wait until 2015 to hear this case if they had decided to accept the argument that Obamacare is a tax.
The polling data on this, ladies and gentlemen, continues to be bad for the administration.
72% of Americans see the individual mandate as unconstitutional.
72% believe Obamacare will make things worse or won't help.
This is Gallup information.
Americans overwhelmingly believe the individual mandate, as it's often called, is unconstitutional.
The margin is 72 to 20.
Even a majority of Democrats believe that that provision is unconstitutional, USA Today, Gallup.
Americans are less optimistic that the law will improve their families' health care situation in the long run.
38% expect the law to make their situation worse compared with 24% who say that it would make it better.
From the get-go, ever since this law was passed, the polling on this has been overwhelmingly against Obamacare.
Overwhelmingly.
It's been in the high 50s to the mid-60s.
And like in this Gallup USA Today poll even got up into the low 70s.
That was back in February.
Of people who find it unconstitutional and don't want any part of it.
And this should be reassuring in one sense, and that is where the public's mind is on this.
Now, as we know, we have an administration and a Democrat Party ruling against and governing against the will of the people.
In this case, a public opinion poll won't matter to them, even in an election year so much.
But you can take some comfort in the fact that a vast majority of the American people don't want this, and the numbers of people who find it unconstitutional and therefore undesirable is increasing as information about the law leaks out.
And there have been sporadic implementations of the law which are negatively impacting people.
And even though the administration likes to say, as they have on a couple of occasions, that somebody in the hospital's life was saved because of Obamacare, nobody believes that.
It's too outrageous a claim, especially when it's made about one or two patients.
Purely political.
And health care to most people, at the end of the day, is not political and they don't want it to be, and yet they realize in order to repeal this and roll it back, they're going to have to be involved in it politically.
Now, on CBS this morning today, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean broke with the Democrat Party, and he did it in terms of how he thinks the Supreme Court will view the law.
Charlie Rose asked him if he thought the individual mandate would ultimately be declared unconstitutional.
And Howard Dean said, I actually think that's what they're most likely to do before, of course, we've heard any arguments is predict, he predicted that the Supreme Court will declare the individual mandate unconstitutional.
So just to review here, six hours of oral argument today, and it's already over, is the mandate a tax?
And what you had was the administration's lawyers and the 26 state challengers opposing the argument from an outside attorney that the 1867 Anti-Injunction Act, which prohibits anyone from challenging a tax in court before it's been enforced or collected, thereby prevents the court from deciding on health care reform legality before 2015.
They had to do that first.
There was some possibility that the court might decide that it was a tax and just punt.
I mean, these guys read the election results too, and they read the opinion pages.
They read the papers.
And they're like everybody else.
If they have a chance to punt, you never know.
They might take it.
But they didn't, from what I'm told, in this case.
The National Federation of Independent Businesses and the 26 states argued that the health care mandate penalty is not a tax, therefore does not fall under the Anti-Injunction Act.
The Justice Department, interestingly, was also going to oppose it, but its argument was much more complex since they are claiming that the mandate is a kind of a tax.
They're really, the regime, when you boil it all down here, they're really on thin ice.
It's the politics of this that give them a chance.
If this were a straight up and down review of the law, we wouldn't even be here.
And the thing wouldn't have even been signed into law.
But of course, that's not where we are.
We're in a purely political world with the Obama administration of the Democrat Party doing everything they can to expand the size, the scope, the power, and the reach of the federal government.
So tomorrow, the mandate will be argued.
Administration lawyers will defend the individual mandate.
They will argue that Congress is well within its rights under the Commerce Clause to compel Americans to buy health insurance.
It's interesting.
Graham, Audio Summit 28, we've played this for you a couple of times in the past.
Well, actually more than that.
When Obama was a candidate, he opposed the mandate that his Justice Department is now up before the Supreme Court arguing in favor of.
He opposed it.
This is in 2008, February 21st, Austin, Texas, during a Democrat presidential debate, Obama versus Hillary.
When Senator Clinton says a mandate, it's not a mandate on government to provide health insurance.
It's a mandate on individuals to purchase it.
Massachusetts has a mandate right now.
They have exempted 20% of the uninsured because they've concluded that that 20% can't afford it.
In some cases, they're people who are paying fines and still can't afford it, so now they're worse off than they were.
They don't have health insurance and they're paying a fine.
In order for you to force people to get health insurance, you've got to have a very harsh, stiff penalty.
And he went on to say in another soundbite that if he defeated his own argument as a candidate, he went on to argue that, well, if you can force people to buy health insurance, what's to stop you from forcing them to buy anything else?
Obama himself made that argument.
And so we have irony and hypocrisy and politics all wrapped up in this.
But that was back when he was opposing Hillary and had to do something to differentiate himself and also win an election.
Even back then, look, the Democrats know the American people want no part of this, and that doesn't matter.
The fact that the American people want no part of this makes the Democrats and Obama even more firm in their resolve to ram it down our throats.
It's just the way they are and the way they treat us, look at us, and act toward us.
Got to take a break.
We'll do that.
We'll be back and continue in mere moments here on the EIB network.
Don't go away.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have rush limbo.
As usual, half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
One correction.
There is a healthcare poll that shows a number under 50%, CBS News.
And their headline is this.
47% disapprove of Obama health care law.
Oh, okay.
47%.
It's not 52.
It's not the 72 in Gallup or USA Today.
It's 47% in the CBS poll.
Well, okay, well, what's the number of people that support it?
See, the headline here, very misleading.
47% disapprove of Obama health care law.
If you read the story, you find out that only 36% approve it.
That's not their headline, however.
Their headline, 47% disapprove of Obamacare.
The American people do not want this.
And despite their best efforts, CBS has a poll that once again proves it.
But they advertise their poll with the wrong headline.
Only 36% of those questioned said they support the law either somewhat or strongly.
Now, take away the 47%.
Here you have, in an administration, House organ poll, CBS News, two years the regime has had to sell this thing.
Two years the media has had to sell this thing.
Two years the Democrat Party's had to sell this thing.
And only 36% of those questioned in the CBS poll said they support Obamacare.
That's stunning.
With two years to sell this, two years to explain it.
And barely more than a third of the American people support it.
There is no public sentiment for this law.
There's no public sentiment for national health care in this country.
And that includes the braindead generation that lives and dies on YouTube and e-entertainment, television, and entertainment and all this pop culture stuff.
It includes them.
In fact, this generation, why the young people, they're the ones that are responsible for killing global warming.
They're the ones not buying into it.
I've got that in the stack, too.
I've always mentioned that every, when things are going wrong and the country's trending downward and it looks like everything's falling apart, cultural rot seems unstoppable.
Every third or fourth generation in the midst of something like this finally says, you know what?
We're not going to live this way.
We're not going to live the way our parents and grandparents have given us.
And they stand up and they simply reject all of this.
I think we're at the early stages of that happening in a number of, not all, but a number of cultural issues such as global warming and I think even this health care bill.
Now that Fox News is reporting that the Supreme Court has said, well, they've signaled that Obamacare will not stall over this technicality, meaning the 1867 Anti-Injunction Act.
They could have invoked it and punted this thing to 2015.
The word is officially now that they're not going to.
George Will on Friday had a column about Obamacare.
And it's interesting.
He looked at all the Amicus briefs, friend of the court briefs, which have been filed.
And he focuses on one from the Institute for Justice, libertarian public interest law firm.
Their focus is the individual mandate is incompatible with centuries of contract law because a compulsory contract is an oxymoron.
The brief's primary authors are Elizabeth Price Foley and Steve Simpson of the Institute for Justice.
They say that Obamacare is the first time Congress has used its power to regulate commerce to produce a law from which there's no escape.
And coercing commercial transactions, compelling individuals to sign contracts with insurance companies, quote, is antithetical to the foundational principle of mutual assent that permeated the common law of contracts at the time of the founding and continues to do so today.
In 1799, South Carolina Supreme Court held that so cautiously does the law watch over all contracts that it will not permit any to be binding but such as are made by persons perfectly free and at full liberty to make or refuse such contracts.
Therefore, we're looking here at what these people call a compulsory contract, which is against the law.
You can't be forced to sign a contract.
And that's what their amicus brief argues, that the mandate is a forced signing of a contract between you and your insurance company.
It's a little bit different play on the whole constitutionality of the mandate, a different way of illustrating it, for example.
Sit tight, folks.
Barely scratch the surface here.
So Obama tells the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, hey, just tell Vladimir, just tell him to wait till I get re-elected.
I'm going to have a lot more flexibility.
I'll be able to get rid of a whole bunch of nuclear weapons once I get re-elected.
Tell him to cool it.
And Medvedev says, we're with you, Baruk.
We stand with you.
We're all for you wanting to get rid of your nukes, and I'll make sure I pass the message on to Vlad.
Then we got Bernanke, Federal Reserve, saying the unemployment rate, the decrease, the drop in the unemployment rate cannot be sustained.
That unemployment's going to go back up.
Now, one of the reasons why, theoretically, is if people who are not now looking for a gig decide that the economy is improving enough they might be able to find a gig, then they re-enter the workforce.
At least they re-entered the tabulated workforce of people trying to find a job and therefore get counted.
Right now, people who have given up looking for work don't get counted in the unemployed numbers.
When they start looking for work again, they'll get counted.
And thus, theoretically, before the government plays any games of the numbers, the unemployment rate goes back up.
Santorum in a knockdown drag out with Jeff Zelamy at the New York Times over comments he made about Romney and Obamacare and RomneyCare, all of that coming up.
But this Institute for Justice Amicus brief before the Supreme Court, it's interesting to extrapolate what they are arguing here.
Basically, what we have is a coerced, forced contract, compulsory contract, which, as George Will points out, is oxymoronic.
There is no such thing as a compulsory contract.
If you're made to sign one, then you don't really have a contract at all.
And that's an eye-opener into how this regime works.
It exposes the whole core of community organizing for collectivist purposes.
Coercion, intimidation are required to destroy both individualism and free markets.
Individuals will not give up on themselves willingly.
Not a majority.
And people in the free market are just not going to lay down and give it away.
People like Obama and the Democrats understand this, and they know that they will have to be coerced into giving themselves up, into sacrificing their individuality.
They'll have to be coerced.
They'll have to be forced into abandoning free markets.
Just as they are required to keep in place the proven failed policies of all this liberalism in the past, all of these social programs that have caused more problems than they have solved.
But when coercion is used to compel free people to enter into contracts is a big problem.
But as my buddy Mark Levin has pointed out, that's precisely how statists operate.
Statists dominate private sector businesses until they succumb to intimidation.
Regulations follow.
Resistance to organized thugs normally would be celebrated in a free society where private property is respected and in fact necessary to preserve freedom and liberty.
The problem comes with a massive state-controlled media who work overtime to mask gentle brutalities of those who favor government-controlled everything.
Coercion is the only way Obama can get what he wants.
Forcing us, mandating us to sign contracts that we otherwise would not sign.
That's a great theory.
By the way, folks, a couple of more tweets we put up at Limbaugh or at Rush Limbaugh today.
One right as the program started, one about a half hour prior.
We are continuing to give away free iPads one a day, the new iPad, and chosen randomly from all of the new tweeters who follow me at Limbaugh or at Rush Limbaugh.
Now, the rules of this, I don't want to waste your time here, are explained fully at rushlimbaugh.com.
Basically, if you haven't done it yet, just get a Twitter account, and that's easy.
You go to twitter.com.
And if you have an email address, use that, sign up, have an account.
Nothing happens to you until you do something.
You're following anybody you want to follow.
Anybody else who tweets, you can follow them.
We want you to follow us at two places, at Limbaugh, at Rush Limbaugh, and then retweet what we put up.
It's that simple.
And we buy geometric proportions and geometric proportions or retweet all this stuff out, and hundreds of thousands of people will end up seeing it.
And we continue on this little fun project, and you could win a new iPad.
We chose another one today, and we're not going to announce winners' names here on the air, but they are notified.
And we've got a bunch of these, so I don't know how long we're going to go with this, but it's working out well, and the number of followers is increasing, and therefore the retweets are huge.
In Florida, Sanford, Florida, the leader of the New Black Panther Party called for a $10,000 bounty for the man who allegedly shot and killed Trayvon Martin.
A $10,000 bounty.
When I first heard of this story, the first thing I thought of was the Duke La Crosse case.
Everything here lined up perfectly, just as the Duke La Crosse case did, for a stereotypical situation or cliché to be fulfilled.
And before anybody knew the facts, look indeed what had happened.
That stereotype was filled in.
All the blanks were filled in, and everybody got into gear just as they did during the Duke La Crosse case.
Now others are coming forward.
The New York Times referred the alleged shooter here, George Zimmerman.
New York Times referred to him as a white Hispanic.
That's what I mean by reminding me of the Duke La Crosse case.
We looked it up.
It was the fifth time in the history of the New York Times they'd referred to an Hispanic as white.
A white Hispanic.
You've got to fill in the blank circumstance here.
You've got to fill in the blanks the right way, just as the Duke La Crosse case was.
So the bounty, New Black Panther Party, offered $10,000 for George Zimmerman.
Why did they decide on $10,000?
Why not 20?
Why not 5?
How did they decide on $10,000?
How would the death of Trayvon Martin be viewed if the accused party was a female or gay or white or Hispanic Jew?
So situation continues to unfold.
By the way, the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the New Black Panther Party.
What is that guy's name at the New Black Panther?
Mark Mark Plot.
I can't remember his last name.
The guy at the Southern Poverty Law Center Classifies the New Black Panther Party as a virulently racist and anti-Semitic organization whose leaders have encouraged violence against whites, Jews, and law enforcement officers.
So that's who the New Black Panther Party is, according to a left-wing group, the Southern Party.
Yeah, Mark Potok, P-O-T-O-K, is how can you do a bounty with no warrant for his arrest?
How can the New Panthers do a bounty?
Well, if nobody stops them, you think the New Black Panther Party should be in trouble for putting a bounty out?
Well, you know, the New Orleans Saints head coach had just been suspended a year for having bounties in the National Football League.
And the defensive coordinator of the Saints at the time, Greg Williams, been suspended indefinitely.
And the general manager of the Saints, Mickey Loomis, has been suspended for eight games.
All this starts on April 1st.
Yeah, I'm just reporting what's going on out there.
New Black Panther Party with a $10,000 bounty on a man who hasn't been charged.
I think that's why there's the bounty.
They're upset that the legal system is not being fair with them here.
But still, it is a.
I have to admit, I was shocked when I saw that, and I was shocked that, see, I was shocked that there hasn't been anybody stand up and say, whoa, can we cool this down a little bit?
Everybody's speaking on this.
Well, not everybody, but the people making hay out of this are inflaming it and making it bigger.
I mean, all the way from the White House on down, rather than trying to cool this thing off and slow it down and wait till we find out exactly what happened here.
But a $10,000, a New Black Panther Party, don't forget, that's the group that intimidated voters in 2008 in Philadelphia and a number of other places.
And lawsuits were filed against them for voter intimidation.
And the Obama Justice Department, the chief, the Attorney General, Eric Holder, just threw the investigation out, just brought it to screeching halt.
And the assistant Attorney General, J. Christian Adams, who was prosecuting the case against New Black Panthers, quit.
He resigned and wrote a book.
And we interviewed him about what was going on in the Obama Justice Department, miscarriages of justice, justice not being blind, colorblind, or anything of the sort.
Now, you have, by the way, it's not just the New York Times referring to George Zimmerman as a white racist.
I think the whole media is doing this now.
All of the mainstream media are now calling him a white Hispanic.
As I say, I had never heard that before, and we checked, and we can only find five previous such references to a Hispanic as being white in the New York Times.
So the New Black Panther Party, with their bounty, they're calling for this guy to be kidnapped or rounded up and brought to them for justice.
Anyway, brief timeout here, folks.
Sit tight.
El Roche Bo and the EIB network back after this.
So I'm getting emails.
People want to know what the bounty is for.
Here's what I've got.
The leader of the new Black Panther Party called for a $10,000 bounty for the man who shot and killed black Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, a case that continues to spark explosive emotions and strain the country's racial tensions.
Black Panther leader, New Black Panther leader Mikhail Mohamed, said an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth on Saturday when he announced the reward at a protest in Sanford, a suburb of Orlando.
Members of the new Black Panther Party call for the mobilization of 10,000 black men to capture George Zemmerman.
Now, Zimmerman has gone into hiding due to the death threats and the bounty.
And the offer of the $10,000 reward, according to his legal advisor, Craig Zahner, he should be fearful for his life, Muhammad said.
The new Black Panther leader who issued the bounty said he should be fearful for his life.
Now, this is a bounty.
Where is the president on this?
Where is the Attorney General on this?
I would think that somebody in authority would try to do something to calm this down, to quell this, until we find out what really happened.
There are too many competing stories.
Nobody really is sure of what happened here, but we've got a stereotype that people are eager to fulfill.
That's the same stereotype that existed in the Duke La Crosse case.
But I've been expecting the president all weekend long to stand up and say, you know, put this bounty issue in perspective.
Say, we can't, this appears to me to be open, sanctioned, vigilante justice.
I know the president's in North Korea, but he could still say something about this.
And when he doesn't say anything about it, we're left to question why.
And we don't know the answer to that either.
But I remember the Rodney King circumstance.
Boy, I was back in the 90s when the police officers in Simi Valley were found not guilty.
Remember the riots that ensued after that?
George H.W. Bush went into action.
He mobilized the Justice Department to do a civil rights violation investigation into Rodney King to find out whether the Simi Valley police, of course, that caused its own set of circumstances.
It riled people up.
But at least there was an effort back then to quell some of that.
It wasn't successful.
The riots, Reginald Denny, got yanked out of the truck in LA when the helicopter camera buddy saw that.
But it's just, it's a puzzling thing to me because it's just by virtue of asking the question, where's the leadership?
Where's the effort to slow this down, to cool this off, knowing full well it's a powder keg?
I wouldn't think anybody, any reasonable person, would want this powder keg to explode any further than it already has.
Some people say that this speaks volumes about the kind of leadership that we have.
We have an election year.
And could it be that the administration is restrained here because of that?
Remember, Obama's got trouble with his base.
That's what this non-existent but alleged Republican war on women is all about.
Obama is not doing well with the female vote, and he's trying to improve his circumstances there.
And throughout polling data, his base is not that firm because they're not happy with the slow speed with which they thought they were going to get a new kitchen or a new car, at least have a job.
So he's a little tenuous here.
So that could be one of the explanations.
But that's what the bounty is for, $10,000 for the capture of George Zimmerman.
And Muhammad, Mikhail Muhammad, of the New Black Panther Party says he should be fearful for his life.
Sanford, Florida.
New Black Panther Party, they've called for the mobilization of 5,000 black men to capture George Zimmerman.
And they claim they're getting donations from black entertainers and athletes.
And they're trying to raise a million dollars here off of this incident.
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