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April 23, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:41
April 23, 2012, Monday, Hour #2
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Woo!
Well, that was nice.
That was wonderful.
I'm filling in for the Great Rush.
Nobody can fill in for the Great Rush.
He's back tomorrow.
You can see him all the time, though, at RushLimbaugh.com.
I loved when he started his new Twitter account.
I can read his twits, tweets, whatever they are.
As I was saying before the break, my personal theory for me is if you're over 30 and enjoy a glass of wine at night, you shouldn't have a Twitter account.
And too many friends of mine have proved that to be a good philosophy.
We're at 800-282-2882.
We'll be joined by Congressman Paul Ryan and Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn this hour to talk about policy principles and the campaign.
We've been sort of focusing on the first virtues, the first principles before we even get to policies.
And if we understand those, then we can develop good policies.
If we don't understand those, if we're detached from our first principles, from virtue, from humility, we ain't never going to get across the finishing line.
It doesn't matter who we go with.
Let's take some calls before we get to Congressman Ryan and Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn.
Oh, let's go to the swinginest of the swing states, Ohio.
If you love politics, you should move to Ohio because it is the epicenter of all things, always has been.
They have a great new governor, John Kasich, who was one of the original, God, he was one of the original freedom fighters way back there.
So welcome, Gary.
Say hi to John.
Rob Portman, a great senator.
You grow them great there in the heartland, don't you?
Oh, we grow them real great.
And I'll tell you, Mary, Rush couldn't have picked the most gracious host as he is today.
Did Snerdley tell you to say that?
I think Snerdley's constraining me.
No, no, no.
I'm getting right to the point.
As far as virtues and American values, you know, we fought a civil, I'm a white guy, and I have a lot of black friends, and I love them.
I love them dearly.
But you know how Obama has played the race card to split this nation between black, white, Hispanic.
Okay, you know, we fought the Civil War to free the slaves, and it took the slaves another hundred and so years to get their civil rights straightened out in this country.
But what my black friends out there in Radio Land probably don't understand that Obama, though he's a black man, sold them back into bondage with over the $5 trillion debt, which is growing even larger, and put not only every American into bondage this time, to the Chikoms, but their children, their children's children, and so on and so on.
And if we don't break these chains, Obama reminds me of this, the blacks that would capture the villages, villagers, and bring them to the white slave traders and shipped them all over Europe and to America.
If we don't break these chains in this election and elect a Christian president or somebody who believes in God, this nation is in big trouble because when he spoke to Medev.
Yeah, but before we branch off into Russia, which we know is a godless and always hasn't been, and the first way they got to their country was to eradicate faith in religion.
I want to make a point about what Gary said.
This is not a black issue, a white issue, a brown issue, a girl issue, a boy issue.
It is an all-American issue.
Debt is bondage.
Structural debt of the magnitude we have is deferred taxation.
It is going to, for your children, for your current future, I mean your present tense, your future, your children's future, as we sit here today, every American is burdened by about $140,000 of tax debt or debt goes to each person.
So magnify that.
We can't go through any ⁇ we just cannot do four more years of this.
We cannot do one more year of this.
It's not just the debt that's burdening us.
It's the absence of growth.
The new norm is 2.5 percent growth.
That is not ⁇ that applies to every American in every city, at every income group, of every race, of every creed, of every religion.
That is, or not religion.
This has nothing to do with anything other than these policies that flow from, I think Gary is onto something, an absence of the first principle, the first principle, our natural right, which grows from freedom.
And freedom and liberty require responsibility.
And that responsibility means to be living within your living within your means and providing for your own community and family, which is a perfect segue to one of my all-time favorite people, Congressman Paul Ryan, who, you know, this is why I'm confident we're going to win.
If we can articulate the policies to correct the breadth and the depth of the problem that I just talked about, which is without getting sucked into distractions about dogs and cookies, and just as a happy warrior, talk about these first principles that undergird these policies.
We can get out of this.
And no one has done that better and has led the way more articulately and is the path not just to prosperity but to victory in the fall than Congressman Paul Ryan, who's in his seventh term in Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee.
He's on House Ways and Means.
Really, the path to prosperity is the path to victory.
Congressman, we're delighted you were able to join us today.
Thank you.
Hey, Mary, how are you doing today?
I am great.
And I really mean what I said.
The attacks on you are a testament, our badge and honor, testament to how well you're doing.
And I just want to make this point again, and you could speak to this.
The notion that the Democrats are so ecstatic that you are leading the way, that the path to prosperity is the roadmap to our policy prescriptions in the fall.
And I just think it's the most ludicrous thing.
When you can stand and fight, when you do it as a happy warrior, as you have done, tell me where it's ever lost.
We've won every single race where your principles have been articulated properly.
So articulate them your way because you do it much better.
Look, what happened this year was pretty predictable.
It's what happened last year.
We have a debt crisis coming where we can't keep spending money we don't have.
Government's borrowing 40 cents of every dollar it spends, and it's going to end very ugly.
Turn on the TV, look at Europe, and you'll find out what that kind of looks like.
And so what the President and his party leaders in the Senate decided to do, instead of lead and try and prevent this crisis from occurring, wait for the Republicans to offer their solution, then attack them.
And people see through this stuff.
And what we're showing with our budget is specifically, it is not too late to get back to the American idea.
It is not too late to take those great principles that made us such an exceptional nation in the first place, liberty, freedom, free enterprise, self-government, government by consent of the governed, and apply them to the problems of the day to get back to the opportunity society that we've always been with the safety net.
And what we're basically saying is we want to have a safety net in this country, but we want the safety net to be there for people who truly cannot help themselves and then to be there for people who are able-bodied but down on their luck so that they can get back on their feet onto lives of self-sufficiency, onto lives of opportunity.
And so we want a society that is more characteristic of upper mobility, of people reaching their potential and making the most of their lives, an opportunity society.
And in that kind of society, the government's role and goal is to protect our rights so we can define and pursue happiness how we see it, so that we can make the most of our lives and to promote equal opportunity, not to promote the equality of outcome.
You know, Congressman, one of the things that would be amusing if it wasn't so annoying is the usurpation and the distortion of language by liberals.
When you talk about those first principles, they take them and turn them on their head.
One of the most egregious examples of this is social justice, a teaching of the church, a hallmark of Christianity, the Judeo-Christian tradition, is social justice meaning aversion, meaning what you just said.
It is not.
Social justice is not keeping people in poverty in perpetuity.
It is not going through Caesar so Caesar can declad the unclad.
It is teaching people how to fish.
So these are I keep coming back to these.
Define social justice in its true meaning.
Well, everybody has their own definition, and I have mine through my faith.
And that is we want to help human beings flourish on their own.
Social justice is you leave plenty of space in our communities for individuals to join together to help advance the common good.
And that means we don't want big government to crowd out civil society, those institutions, our churches, our charities, our civic institutions that help get people who are in difficult, despairing parts of their lives back on their feet, which is how we advance the common good at our societies.
That means there's plenty of room for those social intermediary institutions to help get people onto lives of self-sufficiency, to help people.
That doesn't mean big government in an egalitarian way where you redistribute the wealth and then you have some distant bureaucracy that displaces and crowds out our communities.
That's what we have right now.
And if we define social justice as if the more federal money we throw at programs, the more we absolve responsibility for ourselves and for our communities and for our neighbors in our communities and just rely on big government to take care of things, we'll get more of what we've got.
And what we have right now are the highest poverty rates since we've measured poverty.
One in six Americans are in poverty today, even though we've thrown all this money, this borrowed money, at these failed programs.
And so what we're saying is let's fix this problem because we don't think the goal of fighting poverty, of advancing social justice, is simply treating the symptoms of poverty to make poverty easier to cope with or live with.
We think the goal of social justice is to attack the root causes of poverty, to break the cycle of poverty, to get people out of poverty once and for all.
And so when we look at the results of the poverty fighting programs in America today, we see more poverty, more debt, more despair, and more communities where people are not working with one another, and government is making it harder for that to happen.
And so we actually, in the 1990s, did welfare reform.
It was amazing, the success.
Child poverty rates went from 55% down to 39% over a decade as a result of those policies.
People went from welfare to work, but that program only reformed one program.
That reform was one program.
There are over 70 other welfare programs in federal law that have never been reformed.
And what we want to do is reform these programs along the same lines.
So our goal is to get people off of welfare and onto work into lives of self-sufficiency.
And to me, that's what, as a policymaker, social justice is.
And that means leaving space for our communities to be good, to be interactive in people's lives, and not just sort of deferring to big government to try and paper the problem over.
The way I look at it is the philosophy the President seems to be perpetuating is a message to the country that, look, you're stuck in your current station in life, and the government is here to help you cope with it.
That is not what America is.
That's not the American idea.
We want a society of upper mobility.
We're not a class-based society.
Look, I'm Irish and German.
My ancestors left those class-based societies to form this country with every other immigrant to get rid of that so that we can make the most of our lives however we see fit.
And that's the kind of great dynamic society that has been the best we've ever seen.
There is no other system in the world that has done more to lift the poor out of poverty than the American system of free enterprise.
And yet we stand at a crossroads where we risk exchanging this system for more of a European, decadent, cradle-the-grave social welfare state, which just ends in decline and a debt crisis.
We really are at the crossroads.
It's been said so often now it sounds hyperbolic, but it really isn't.
The upshot of an extended and accumulated social safety net that really is a hammock at this point has led us to this unsustainable and untouchable structural debt.
I speak to the I love the attack on your thoughts and your policies as radical.
The principal solution in Path to Prosperity for Medicare, premium support, was a Bill Clinton idea, so you're a radical.
He was the first radical.
Medicaid, your principal solution is block grants to the states, which aren't only the laboratories of democracy, achieved by common sense, greater efficiencies via subsidiarity, as we would say, or closer to the people.
Federalism, those are not radical ideas.
More importantly, they're ideas that used to have bipartisan support.
They're ideas that when they've been applied, have worked really well.
Block granting has worked extremely well because it allows states to customize to meet the needs of their individual constituents.
I live in Wisconsin.
We have a thing called BadgerCare.
It's a lot different than what, say, California or New York has.
And we're saying, let's improve on these things to let our states customize these benefits for the unique needs of their people in their states.
Medicare reform, our program does not change the benefit for anybody 55 and above.
And our point is if we move to reform Medicare soon, we won't have a debt crisis.
It's the biggest driver of our future debt.
So we can guarantee the benefit as it's currently designed to people who've already retired or who are about to retire, who organize their lives around this program.
But in order to keep that promise, a promise that is going to be quickly a broken promise if we stay in the current path we are on, we propose to change it for younger people, you know, like those of us who are 54 and below, so that when we retire, it works more like the system that members of Congress and federal employees have, where you have a list of guaranteed coverage options for Medicare, including the traditional program.
You pick the plan that meets your need the best.
You can't be denied.
And then Medicare subsidizes your benefit based on who you are.
More for the poor and the sick, less for the wealthy.
Doing it that way, which is exactly what the Clinton Commission recommended, which is what lots of Democrats in the past have been in favor of, saves and strengthens Medicare not only for the current generation, but for the next generation and prevents the program from going bankrupt, which it's scheduled to do in about 2024.
There you've heard it, friends.
That's the path to prosperity.
That's the path to victory.
Congressman Ryan, we can't thank you enough for your service for joining us today.
Don't run for VEV.
Don't get on the ticket.
Stay in the Congress.
I want you to stay in the Congress and keep your leadership role there.
Thank you, Congressman Ryan.
I'm here.
Thank you.
I'm filling in for Rush Limbaugh today.
800-282-2882.
We'll be right back with your calls.
Hello, Ditto Heads, Fly of our Country, the Faithful, The Fruited Plain.
I'm Mary Madeline, filling in for Rush, who will be back tomorrow.
Can I just close out this half hour by, before you go crazy, why I really love Paul Ryan to stay in the House by elaborating on some of his ideas.
Of course, he'd be a spectacular vice president.
We have a number of people who would make fabulous vice presidents.
But Ryan's work in the House has been not just critical, it's been pivotal.
Could you see how in a few short minutes how he got to the root cause, the root principles, and can attach all the policies to all of those?
One of the things he referenced was the failures of policies.
People ask me all the time: what's the difference between a liberal and a conservative?
There are many, many, many.
But a big one is emotion versus empiricism.
I'm emotional.
I'm a woman.
I cried when I saw Snerdley today.
I get all that.
But having good intentions is not the same as having a good result.
So if you measure success by how much you're spending and not with the money's being spent on, particularly when it's counterproductive, as has been the case in these poverty programs, which when they started, we had 1.6 children being born out of wedlock.
Today we have over 40 percent, the pathologies that flow from that.
So what is this president's response to the path to prosperity?
The Buffett rule, the Buffett rule.
If you took all of Warren Buffett's money, every bit of it, you would probably burn through that.
You took, let's take all of the millionaire's money, not just Warren Buffett, all their money that you could burn through maybe four and a half days of what the government is spending.
It doesn't reduce a deficit.
It doesn't reform the debt.
And it's not fair to anybody.
How is it fair to take money from the successful to give it to those who aren't producing?
It won't create one job.
If that's the answer to the prosperity, we're on the path to victory.
I am Mary Madeline and the EIB Golden Throne.
Rush will be back tomorrow, 800-282-2882 across the fruited plane.
One of the things Rush has had so great an articulation on is my favorite topic, which we're going to talk about with Congressman Marcia Blackburn of Tennessee.
Now, and that is the war on women.
If anything has been more preposterous, the attempt to distract from the record of the Obama administration, which points right to the record of the Obama administration, it is the war on women who have suffered grievously and mostly in this Obama economy, have lost more jobs, have a greater labor participation rate fallout,
are the ones who have to fill up their tanks, have the ones who have to do groceries, the ones who are doing the family budgets, the ones that are suffering from 9 percent increase in their health care prints.
This is what women deal with every day.
Who's waging a war on women?
One of my favorite things about Congressman Marcia Blackburn, and she has always been, her whole history has been about liberty and freedom, which is not a gender issue.
But if there's any bitter foxhole buddy to have in the war against the war on women, it would be Marcia Blackburn.
Thank you, Congresswoman, for joining us.
I am delighted to be with you.
Thank you.
Well, one of the symbols, you have been created the symbol of the war on America.
Forget about war on women, which is the light bulb.
Just give me your light bulb, Marif Marsha.
I love it.
Let's talk light bulbs.
I like to say that these newfangled, compact, fluorescent light bulbs are the perfect symbol for the Obama administration.
They don't work.
They're too expensive to afford.
And when they break, you have to call a federal agency, which is hazmat.
And, you know, Mary, I talk to women all across the country.
I was up in Kentucky on Saturday and talked to a group.
And there were women there that said, look, we're stockpiling light bulbs because we've got a government now that touches every portion of your life in such an accelerated way.
And here they are now even telling you what kind of light bulb you can and cannot use.
And me being somebody who's for freedom, free people, free markets, I am for freedom of choice and light bulbs.
You know, I used to think that was, I just could not believe that they were actually going to enforce that law.
It so puts one in mind of William Buckley saying a liberal wants to stick his hand in your shower and adjust your temperature.
But it's true.
You can hardly find a light bulb.
Remember the black market toilets?
Now there's black market light bulbs.
It's absurd.
It's obscene.
And thank you for leading on that.
Let's talk about the war on women because we have been forced to speak to this.
There's so many myths about female voters.
The first is that they're homogenous.
There's some, the cognizanti and the chattering classes talk about the gender gap, they're talking about something that doesn't exist the way they're trying to suggest that it does.
So talk about, we get, it is true that Barack Obama is favored by single urban women, but it is not true that he is favored because Republicans are women who pay the bills, married women, rural, suburban women, stay-at-home moms.
So talk about the non-homogenous notions.
You know, when we look at women, I think that the mom in the minivan, the one who's making decisions, single women who are trying to start a business, the real war on women is coming from this administration and their economic policies and what they are forcing on the American people.
You know, if you just take, let's just take the business sector.
There are 7.8 female-owned businesses in this country.
88% of those are small businesses.
And this administration keeps trying to increase the taxes on all of these small businesses.
Now, out of those small businesses, a third of those are owned by women.
And, you know, Mary, the women that I talk to are saying, look, the uncertainty in regulation, the uncertainty in taxation, the increase in taxation, and Obamacare is what is keeping us from hiring.
And then when you look at health care, women make 85% of the health care decisions in this country.
And the health care sector by a majority employs women more than men.
And women don't want the federal government telling them what type of health insurance to buy or what kind of delivery system of health care they can have.
They keep wanting to have the opportunity to make those decisions themselves.
And so if you're looking at business, if you're looking at health care, women don't agree with this administration.
They agree with Republicans.
And another thing, when you look at the economy, the negative jobs growth, and you were talking about this earlier in the hour, what kind of jobs growth we need to maintain in order to have predictive jobs growth in the economy, and we don't have that.
And, you know, the high gas prices, as you said, the light bulbs you can't buy.
Let's say you've got a child who's a teenager and they can't find a job for the summer, or someone who is a recent graduate.
They can't get a job right now because of the unemployment and underemployment that exist with those recent college graduates.
Which is getting worse with every new report.
You know what I think?
I think that the notion that there is an advantage to the Democrats with women goes to the fact that a lot of liberals are big mouths.
I mean, they get on TV and they say stuff.
So conservative women are working, but there is a way, and they're attending to all these problems, but there is a way through the social media that they can organize and they can share their progress in different ways to push back on these policies and elect people who will continue to push back on these policies.
You're engaged in that, Marcia.
Talk about that.
I love the Congresswoman.
Yeah, that's right.
They can.
And I think more and more women are connecting through social media because it's convenient, doesn't take time.
People can find me on Twitter at Marcia Blackburn.
They can find me on Facebook.
They can go to my congressional website, blackburn.house.gov.
And, you know, the Twitter is so easy and convenient.
And Mary, what they're figuring out is that the high cost of health care, look at what's happened with this administration, the accelerated spending by the federal government.
Look what has come from this administration.
The negative jobs growth.
Hmm.
There again, you look at what has not happened in the economy since this president took office, and they're figuring this out.
It's like you were saying earlier.
You know, you look at the labor force participation rate, which is very, very low right now.
Indeed, possibly lower than it has been since World War II.
And people are going, wait a minute, you know, when you look at the unemployment and the underemployment and the labor force participation rate, and then on top of that, disposable income, because the average household disposable income is down about $2,000 per household.
This is all impacting women.
And they've about had their fill of this.
So next time you hear the war on women is being lost by conservatives, think again.
The war on women will be won by conservatives because it's not a war on women.
It's a war on all of us.
So cease and desist with all of that.
Although I'll say this, Congressman Blackburn, you're a good woman.
These are not gender issues.
I'm so glad you're in Congress.
I'm so glad you're waving that light bulb across the fruited plane.
We don't want your light bulbs.
Take your light bulbs.
That's exactly right.
We keep trying to save those light bulbs.
And because, as I said earlier, it is just such a good metaphor for what is happening with this administration.
We know that what women want is more opportunity for their children and their grandchildren.
They want to preserve freedom.
And Mary, they want to preserve the American dream.
You know, the American dream is all about faith, family, freedom, hope, and opportunity.
It is about working hard today so that your children and grandchildren are going to have more and better opportunities in the next generation.
And women do not want to be dependent on the federal government for education, for a home loan, for a car loan, for a student loan, for their health care.
They want to be able to make those decisions that they know are going to be best for their family.
And they believe in the exceptionalism of this country.
And I think it's why you're going to see women more engaged in this election cycle than ever before.
You are right, Congresswoman.
We appreciate your thoughts on this.
This is not a woman thing.
It's not a man thing.
We are having a war on our values.
You've just described what they are.
You represent them out there, people.
I'm going to keep representing them out here.
And I'm just so pleased to spend a few minutes talking with you about it today, because these values are the values that are under attack.
And when people talk about preserving the ability to get that education and to dream those big dreams and to help their children to do likewise, they are wanting to increase those opportunities and they want less government.
Not more government.
That's right.
They work hard enough.
They don't want to have to push through a stormwall of the government in their face.
Thank you, Congresswoman, for joining us.
Go back to saving the country.
I'm Mary Madeline, filling in for Rush.
Join us.
800-282-2882.
We'll be right back with your call.
You're listening to the EIB Network.
I'm Mary Madeline, filling in for Rush Limbaugh, 800-282-2882.
Rushlimbaugh.com.
You know, Snerdley just made a good point, a logical point, after listening to Congresswoman Blackburn.
What president has ever won without winning the male vote?
I mean, why do we, this has become one of the political canards that soccer moms, mortgage moms, whatever.
I kind of like NASCAR Daddies.
One of the founding reasons I became a conservative, because I grew up a liberal, I had no choice, South Chicago.
Oh, Snerdly.
No, I didn't even think about it.
Well, I was a Democrat.
I was a Kennedy kind of Democrat.
And the first reason among many that I became a conservative was that era of feminism, and I was a feminist.
I wanted to work.
I wanted the same opportunities and I wanted pay for it if I did the same work.
And that was my focus.
The feminists back then said a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bike.
It was so hostile.
I love men.
I loved them then.
I loved my mentors.
And feminism has gone downhill, or so-called feminism, has gone downhill ever since.
So we've been since that period in the early 70s and 80s, through the 80s, we've been talking about this gender gap and how women are continue to be liberal.
They're not.
They're not.
They're just doing the hard work of living every day and taking care of their families.
You know, one of the things that Congresswoman talked about, taking care of your families, Snerdley just handed me this.
Half of new graduates are jobless or underemployed.
Think about that.
You know how much it costs to go to college?
You know how much effort it takes to go to college today?
So you work hard to raise your kids and get them the kind of education that can get them into these schools from which they will graduate with no marketable skills anyway.
And now they can't get a job in this economy.
I don't know how that's a gender issue.
That's just an American issue.
Let's go to my favorite place in the world, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Margaret, thank you for holding this entire time.
How are you?
Well, you know what, Mary?
Welcome to our Fair Town.
We are so happy to have you here.
So it's great.
But listen, the reason I'm calling, Mary, is I listened to your radio show back in the day, and I listened to you every single day.
I would get in the car on the way home, and I would say to myself, what am I going to learn from Mary today?
And I think, and I'm just so happy to hear you again today.
And I think what it was, Mary, was that you had this really, this great ability to put forth really smart arguments, just smart.
You know, you do it in a non-polarizing way.
You're not flaming the fan.
And I think it makes it easier when you approach it that way for the other side to listen.
And I just wish more of the pundits, more of the talking heads would take that approach because I think walls go up otherwise.
So I'm just so happy to hear you.
I'm glad Rush pulled you in.
I hope to hear you more on his show or on your own show moving forth, anything.
And then one other point.
I feel much better about James knowing that he's close to Father Nalty.
He's a friend of our family, so he is in very good spiritual hands there.
Margaret, you've hit all my soft spots.
You're a doll girlfriend.
Thank you for calling in.
Boy, that was really sweet.
You know, Margaret makes a really good point.
This is how we have to behave in New Orleans.
A great gift moving there was that the necessity of the civic associations, the breaking down the barriers between races and class, that it was necessitated by Katrina, the pulling together by Monsignor Nalty and our Archbishop and all the faiths to move ahead,
to not just rebuild the city, but to be a beacon for progress, urban renewal.
We had to do that in New Orleans through having faith in each other.
And when you try to work with people with whom you previously had been suspect with their philosophy or their politics, you quickly overcome that.
We had to do that there.
Our great mayor, Mitch Landrew, won with 67% of the white vote, 67% of the black vote.
He went in all the precincts.
He ran without a runoff.
And we've been running the city that way with citizens participating at every level and having an open door in his not taking this political polemic approach that we see so often, unfortunately, at our other levels of politics.
We've got to take a break.
I'm Mary Madeline, 800-282-2882.
We'll be right back on the Rush Lindbaugh Show.
Friends, let's just close out this hour on Margaret's point.
We don't need to be screamers or screeters.
The reason Rush has such a loyal following, the reason this show is so successful, the reason there are so many potential knockoffs, trying to knock off, nobody can do it, nobody's ever been able to do it.
The way Rush has done it is because he does what Margaret just said.
He does it with an open heart and a big fat brain, a big mind.
You know, Monsignor Nalti that Margaret just referred to, he makes us every day come to our friends and our neighbors and our family with an open heart.
And that's how we need to come into this election.
We don't need to, we can stand on our principles and we can advocate for our principles with an open heart and a calm voice.
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