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May 21, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
32:34
May 21, 2012, Monday, Hour #3
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I don't have much on this, but this is what we do have.
From the Atlanta, Georgia CBS affiliate, WGCL.
Police say that a former CNN executive has left dog feces in his neighbor's mailbox.
A former high-ranking CNN executive accused of leaving dog feces in his neighbor's mailbox.
Police have a video of a guy named Bob Fernad walking with his dog up to the mailbox and placing a bag filled with the dog feces in the mailbox.
The CNN executive told a Covington News that he pulled the prank due to a long-standing feud with the neighbor.
But what's a this is what CNN's doing to the American public on a daily basis.
Putting feces on our television and calling it news.
Greetings, folks, great to have you back.
Rush Limbaugh in Los Angeles just for the day.
Who's our guest host tomorrow?
Who do we have?
Mark Davis will be here tomorrow, and then we'll be back and back to normal on uh on Wednesday at the EIB Southern Command in Florida.
Great to have you here, telephone number 800.
No, I'm not making it up.
It's a true Atlanta CBS affiliate.
CNN executive, Bob Fernad, previously an executive VP, senior executive producer CNN from 1984 to 1997, before becoming president of CNN Headline News until 2001.
He's been an ex-executive, I guess, since then.
Dog feces in his neighbor's mailbox.
800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, the Facebook IP, what's Facebook?
Facebook is looks like it's right just under 35 bucks.
Opened at 38.
Snurdly wanted to know right before the break at the top of the hour if I was surprised.
I'm not surprised.
Look, I I don't want to sit here and I'll start ripping into this.
But I um I'm I'm not surprised.
I am surprised that the underwriters are not continuing to prop it up.
And there's an image here.
And this is a big image.
I mean, this this IPO was one of the most eagerly anticipated.
You know, even go back to last Thursday and Wednesday, the day before, everybody calculating in the media how many multiple billions Zuckerberg was going to end up with and Bono was going to end up with, how many millionaires are going to be created.
Well, this is a big deal.
And it started out big, but even after the open, I mean I remember on Friday I I jokingly said uh I hope the Federal Reserve done it to come in and bail Facebook out at the end of the day.
And now they're trading roughly three, four bucks uh below their open at 38.
And I'm just a little surprised that the maybe the underwriters are tapped out, I guess.
But I'm surprised or not uh but this is the market working.
It was overpriced, is all this means.
And there's another thing about IPOs.
The general public is pretty much at least their representatives, they're they're uh financial gurus that manage their accounts are aware that there are really two IPOs.
The insiders get in early and they score all the really good deals, and then by the time it's open to the public, it's it's okay, but it's it's it's it's not what the insiders, and I don't mean that in an illegal sense, but it's it's it's not what the insiders are are getting.
It's a tiered thing, and there's some sophistication understanding this.
All it means is that the opening price was a little bit high, a little overvalued.
The uh the market is determining the price and the value of Facebook stock.
Right now, I'll tell you the thing since uh I wasn't even gonna mention this, but it's snerdly asked you about it.
I'll I'll just tell you folks, the thing, the big news to me about Facebook last week was General Motors announcing that their ads on Facebook had not worked.
Oh, that if you if you're at Facebook, you you want anybody saying anything but that.
Because they've got what a 900 million friends users, 900 million people around the world use Facebook.
I mean, it is a huge imagine if we had an audience of 900 million, what our confiscatory advertising rates would be, because our advertising works.
They've got 900 million in advertisers and that's one of the reasons the value of the stock was placed what it was because they figured they really haven't spent a lot of time yet exploring their advertising on Facebook.
In fact, this Eduardo Savarin guy who renounced his citizenship, a lot of people, by the way, disagreeing with me about what I said on this on Friday.
But nevertheless, he was in his first job was to go out and get advertisers, and they made fun of him.
Zuckerberg and the boys, and and uh at least according to the movie, social network, what was the Napster guy's name?
Sean, what's his name?
Sean Sean, whatever what was that?
Sean Parker.
They were all making fun of Saffron for trying to sell average, trying to monetize the thing early on.
And I thought that was strange, if that's actually true, and that's based on a book.
But they they really haven't explored their advertising when General Motors said it's not working.
That that to me was the worst news they could have heard.
And that happened the day before, a couple days before the uh IPO.
Look, let's get to the audio sound bites.
Uh Corey Booker, the mayor of Newark, prominent Democrat, enlisted as a surrogate for Obama's campaign, ended up criticizing the Obama campaign yesterday for attacking Romney's work at Bain Capitol.
Corey Booker was on Meet the Depressed, made his comments in response to a TV advertisement of Obama's campaign that was unveiled last week.
It uh it portrays Romney as somebody who eliminated jobs for the sake of profits during his years running Bain Capital, but the period of time the Obama ad criticizes Bain, Romney wasn't there.
And that's by the way, not what Bain Capital didn't go into business to create jobs anyway.
That's not what private equity does.
Corporations, look, whoever, you know, Johnson of Johnson ⁇ Johnson's baby powder, he did not go into bizarre he was to create jobs and to provide health care for his employees.
He went into business to sell products.
And it turned out that he needed employees to make that happen, and it grew.
And this is the point basically, Booker said, the um uh we've got here the round table, and you had Corey Booker, the mayor of Newark, Jim Kramer of CNBC, and they're having this this discussion of uh of the of the ad and Obama's attack ad on on Romney.
And David Gregory, the host says, Mayor Booker, Governor Romney says that this is character assassination, not about economic record.
It's about saying he's a bad guy.
We're getting to a ridiculous point in America, especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions, and other people are investing in companies like Bain Capital.
If you look at the totality of Bain Capitol's record, they've done a lot to support businesses who grow businesses, and this to me, I'm I'm very uncomfortable.
This kind of stuff is nauseating to me on both sides.
It's nauseating to the American public.
And what he's talking about here, Bain Capital didn't do anything.
Cutting jobs.
This is not the focus.
Um Bain Capitol's done a lot to support business, to grow business.
They have bought failing businesses and revived them.
Some they succeeded at and some they failed.
It's the way the market works.
But what Obama wants to do is target all of these private sector businesses and demonize them.
Try to make voters think that only government is safe.
That all these private sector businesses are out to screw you, to kill you with their products, to screw you to overcharge you or whatever.
And only government, tolerant understanding government is going to take care of you.
And Corey Booker, the mayor of Newark, works with private equity firms.
They're very much involved in necessary in his state and in a lot of other states.
He doesn't like them being demonized.
So then Gregory said, Jim, I mean, Jim Kramer, you say there's a legitimate hit here on Romney, his Governing philosophy, whether uh whether he ran Bain or how he would run a federal budget.
Well, look, when I interviewed uh trying to figure out whether it worked for Bain under Romney, came to school.
I heard look, we're gonna cut the fat.
We're gonna make these companies lean.
The only way to do it is to fire as many people as possible.
Okay, so once again, here's Kramer carrying Obama's water.
Yeah, we bought that company to fire people.
Bain bought those companies to fire, make them lean, fire people.
This is what Bain and wanted to bring pain to people.
This is the ridiculous this is what Corey Booker doesn't like.
You don't buy a business to fire the workers because you get off on firing workers.
You don't buy a business to lay people off because you get your thrills making people miserable.
But this is what Obama and the intolerant left want you to believe about business, and they've got this Kramer guy carrying their water.
So Booker wasn't happy about that, said this.
This is not about what happened to being capital.
Heck, I've reduced the employees in my city 25% because it's the only way my government would survive.
Call me a job cutter if you want to.
Oh no, Corey Booker, surrogate for Obama undercutting Obama, undercutting Jim Kramer.
Hey, look, I've had to reduce employees in my 25%.
I had to keep the city afloat.
Labor is any enterprise's number one expense.
Business, government, what have you.
Labor is your number one cost.
And if you have to cut costs to stay in business, that's where you go first.
But it's not why you buy a business.
You buy a business because you think ultimately you can make it profitable.
That's what private equity, that's what anybody who wants to run a business do is make it profitable.
Now, if you listen to Obama and some of these people on the left, and a lot of people believe this, that people buy businesses simply to write off the losses.
Yeah, tax breaks, right off the loss.
You have to lose the money to be able to write it off, folks.
And that's not why people go into business to lose money.
Yeah, this write-off stuff sounds good, sounds sophisticated, sounds big time, but you have to lose it to write it off.
And that's not a feather in anybody's cap.
So this continued a while, and Corey Booker eventually got some more in.
Mitt Romney has made his business record a centerpiece of his campaign.
He's talked about himself as a job creator, and therefore it is reasonable, and in fact, I encourage it for the Obama campaign to examine that record and to discuss it.
I believe that Mitt Romney, in many ways, is not being completely honest with his role and his record, even while a business person.
I use the word nauseating on Meet the Press because that's really how I feel when I see people in my city struggling with real issues and still feeling the challenges of this economy.
I get very upset when I see such a level of dialogue.
Wait a second, what happened here?
What happened?
Why, Corey Booker was out on one side of the issue, and then that that sound bite was from his YouTube channel.
He released a video to clarify his comments on Meet the Press.
What happened was the Obama campaign took Booker to the woodshed.
Even Mike Allen at the Politico is making fun of this, calling this Booker's hostage video.
It's Booker.
Obama.
Obama campaign, Axelrod probably took him hostage.
I mean, Booker went out and basically undercut the entire advertising campaign with his comments on Meet the Press yesterday.
He just blew it to Smithereens.
And then further, we added insult to injury when he pointed out he had to do the same thing that Obama's criticizing Bain for doing.
Hell, I had to keep my city afloat.
They get rid of 25% of my work.
Call me a job cutter if you want.
So after that appearance, I guarantee you, Axelrod and Obama, the boys got on the phone to Booker, say, you like being mayor.
Do you want to go any further than Newark?
Because look, pal, Newark's nowhere right now.
If you want to go beyond Newark, you're going to have to do some dances.
So they got him to go out and recant, basically.
He said everything that the Obama camp wanted him to say is almost like he Got a gun to his head.
Well, Mitt Romney has made his business record a centerpiece.
He's talked about himself job creator, therefore it's reasonable, in fact, to encourage looking at him to this way.
It's reasonable for the Obama campaign to examine that record discussion.
Yesterday, Booker was chiding the campaign, saying he didn't like this kind of politics, he didn't like this kind of stuff.
It made him nervous.
Today he's out there saying, hey, Obama's totally justified looking at Romney.
Absolutely.
Well, the only way that happens if he gets taken to woodshed.
Axelrod is still publicly attacking Booker as we speak.
Booker got bullied by the intolerant left.
Booker went out, said what he thought, believed in everything else, and the tolerant Obama and Axarod get hold of him and say, That's no, no, no, no.
That that's not that's not how you no, that's not what you're supposed to say.
In fact, we've got Axelrod.
Uh he was on State of the Union with Candy Crowley on CNN.
She said, Is not the gist of the ad that you all put out about Bain Capital, Romney's former firm that he's a rich, greedy guy, doesn't care at all about the uh about the middle class.
The fact is that he wasn't about job creation, and he and his partners have acknowledged in candid moments.
Our job wasn't to create jobs, it was to create wealth for ourselves and our partners.
He always walked away uh with money, and that was the point.
The point was that he didn't they didn't fail with the company.
They didn't they didn't embrace the failure.
They loaded that company, GST Steel, with debt, uh, and then they bankrupted the company.
It is not right when you have two sets of rules where the guys at the top prosper no matter what happens, and the workers down the line bear the brunt of it.
Okay, go back here, soundbite one.
You just heard you now that's the official regime position.
That's the position on Romney.
Now go back and soundbite one.
This is what Booker said about that very thing that you just heard Axelrod say.
We're getting to a ridiculous point in America, especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions, and other people are investing in companies like Bain Capital.
If you look at the totality of Bain Capitol's record, they've done a lot to support businesses to grow businesses, and this to me, I'm I'm very uncomfortable.
This kind of stuff is nauseating to me on both sides.
It's nauseating to the American public.
Right.
It's no we don't like that.
In other words, the the the Obama attack here is nauseating.
You look at the totality of Bain Capitol's record.
They've done a lot to support businesses.
Well, hell the regime's out there saying they destroy them.
So Booker is in heap big trouble.
Little Elizabeth Warren looking.
Now play soundbite three.
Booker added even more to it.
This is not about what happened in Bain Capital.
Heck, I've reduced the employees in my city twenty-five percent because it's the only way my government would survive.
Call me a job cutter if you want.
Right.
So makes this video, puts it out with a gun to his head, figuratively, uh, and even the political calling it the hostage video, because Booker, in order to stay viable in the Democrat Party, had to go out and do a Mayakulpa and basically try to retract everything he'd said about Romney and Bale or Bain yesterday on meet the press.
Got to go, quick break, back with much more after this, folks.
Don't go away.
Austin Goolsby was uh well, let me grab a call.
There's not enough time I have Goolsby and Paul Ryan.
I can't squeeze them both in right now.
So let's go to Katie Island Park, Idaho.
Glad you called.
Great to have you on the program.
Hello.
Hi, Raj.
Yeah, my name is Katie, and I'm 14, and I'm not sure if I qualify to be a rush baby or a rush babe.
What do you think?
Um you're 14.
I'm 14.
You're for you're both.
You you are rush baby and a rush babe both.
We'll count you both.
All righty.
Have you signed up on our Facebook page?
Yes, I just did this morning.
Well, then you're a rush babe.
That's it.
14.
Well, thanks very much, Katie.
I appreciate it.
Thanks.
Thanks, Ash.
See, folks, this program has no boundaries.
We have people from all three sexes.
We have people from all religions.
We have people from all genders, all demographics, all ages, a 14-year-old rush babe.
By the way, I've got audio sound bites coming up in the next hour.
Fox News went to the Nags protest.
Wait till you hear it.
Everybody back, El Rushbo serving humanity simply by showing up in Los Angeles here behind the golden EIB.
Microphone.
Let's go back now to the audio sound bites.
This is Austin Goolsby.
He was on Fox News Sunday yesterday.
And everybody Obama people are out talking about Bain Capital.
And primarily they're talking about uh GST, which is uh was a steel company in Indiana, that Bain went in and destroyed, fired people, and made them suffer.
And Romney did it, and it's all a bunch of garbage.
The fact if you if if you if you want to read the truth about what happened with GST and Bain, Kimberly Strasso had a great piece uh last Thursday in the Wall Street Journal.
But the and Harold Ford Jr. has come out and told Booker that he shouldn't have backed off in his original support of Bain.
He shouldn't have walked back his comments.
But the here's the if if if Bain is so evil, if Bain capital is so damned evil, why do all the Obama ads have to lie about it so much?
If it was so evil, why don't you just tell the truth about Bain?
But they're having to lie about what Bain did, which is another characteristic of liberalism.
They lie, they do not tell the truth, and they must have demons.
They must have uh people that they demonize, whoever, critics, opposition, and not just the opposition, and not just people in a compromise.
These are people that have to be destroyed and wiped out.
So Chris Wallace is talking to Austin Goolsby, former economic advisor for Obama.
He's now a professor somewhere.
And Wallace said, Professor Goolsby, do you uh see anything wrong with what Bain Capital did?
They put lots of money, millions of dollars into the steel industry at a time when steel was in trouble.
What's wrong with that?
Well, it depends how they did it.
And as I say, they ought to turn over the annual records of the company.
In this case, the company did horribly, but the investors did great.
So I think it's a little bit different than a normal investor philosophy, which is if we can turn the company around in a positive way, we benefit.
This was a case where they cancel the pensions, they drove the company into the ground, but the investors from Bain actually profited a great deal.
That is just such BS got rid of the pension.
Oh, yes, the retirement of the hard-pressed workers.
The first thing they did was go in and get rid of the workers and then their pensions, but somehow Bain profited.
Paul Ryan put this uh in perspective uh in the uh in the next soundbite that we have.
He was he was also on Fox News Sunday.
And uh Chris Wallace, Congressman Ryan, the Obama campaign says the point of Romney economics is to make money for Bain, to make money for their investors, even if all the workers get wiped out in this particular case.
With the steel mill in Kansas City, the workers in the plant went bankrupt.
The 750 workers were laid off.
Bain did make millions of dollars in profit.
Mitt Romney was running the Olympics during this time.
He wasn't even running Bain during the time period in question.
I think the individual, if I'm not mistaken, who was running Bain is a big Obama contributor.
What Bain did was they used private capital to try and help struggling businesses.
What President Obama is doing is he's gambling with taxpayer money and giving money to corporate contributors to campaign contributors like Sylindra, and he's losing taxpayer money.
What we have with the Obama administration is this crony capitalism on the net when Mitt Romney ran Bain, they were very successful.
They created thousands of jobs, great success stories.
We don't think the government should be in the position of picking winners and losers in the economy, which is the result of the president's economics.
Look, this is an excellent point, and I want to try to expand on it a little bit.
Bain capital is private equity.
They went in and they did what they did, and by the way, they they elongated the life of this company by eight years.
And they took A risk with their own money.
And therefore, if they gain, fine, and if they lose, it's their problem.
And here's Obama outripping it because somebody lost.
What Obama's doing is much worse.
He's taking taxpayer money and he's funneling it back to his donors, like Solindra.
And they are all going bankrupt.
Every green energy business, solar, wind, or whatever that Obama's propped up with taxpayer dollars has gone bankrupt or will.
Obama is recycling money to these people not to help these businesses.
Obama's sending money back to them as a thank you and a payback for donating to him.
And in the process, giving them more money to give to him.
It's another money laundering scheme.
But Obama's not using his money.
He's not risking his money.
He's spending our money, taxpayer money, and he's picking losers.
What they're saying about Bain Capital is exactly what's happening with Obama's businesses.
The Cylindra executives made out like bandits.
The company was never a viable business.
The same thing with these wind energy companies.
The executives, the guys that donated to Obama, they get Obama payback, they get cash infusions, low interest for given loans, the businesses go bankrupt, the executives do well and flee for the tall grass, free to give more money to Obama in the next cycle.
If there's any immorality going on here, if there's any gaming in the system, it's Obama.
And he's not even using his own money.
Now, if you want, if you want the real truth about what happened between GST, the steel business in Bain, as I said, Kimberly Strassel had it Thursday in the Wall Street Journal.
And she said the real story of GST, which is the steel business here that's come under assault.
A real story is that of a private equity firm, that would be Bain, trying to spark some life into an uncompetitive, overunionized industry, the steel business.
Bain's crime here, if that's what you want to call it, was giving a dying steel plant an unexpected eight-year lease on life.
And that's that really is the end of the story.
Sometimes you can save a company, even a U.S. steel company, and sometimes you can't.
Obama hasn't saved one industry.
Well, well, if you want to call it saved, General Motors, but outside of that, and that's even arguable, Cylindra, all these other green energy programs that Obama's investing, he's destroying the oil business for crying out loud, folks.
Everything they are accusing Bain of doing, Obama is doing.
Now here's how the Kimberly Strassel piece ends.
A private equity firm looking to quickly strip value from a company to suck the life out of it, as Obama charges, doesn't do so by investing a hundred million dollars in modernization and holding on to it for eight years, even through bankruptcy.
Bain has surely made its share of mistakes, and one may well have been trying to resuscitate a traditional steel firm.
Might have been a big mistake trying to save a steel company.
But the irony is that this plant wouldn't even be in the news today if it hadn't been the opportunity that came with Bain.
Those jobs would have been gone in 1993.
So Obama wants you to believe, and Goolsby and the rest of these people want you to believe that Bain went in there to kill that company, to lose those jobs, to strip the employees of their pensions and somehow reap millions of dollars of profits for themselves.
What they did was put a hundred million dollars into it and kept it afloat for eight years.
They had to lay some people off by making it leaner, what Cory Booker said he had to do in Newark.
And if they hadn't done it, that company would have never seen those eight years.
And those employees would have lost their jobs, all of them, a lot sooner than they did.
The bottom line is Bain ultimately might have made a mistake trying to save that particular business, a U.S. steel industry business, but they nevertheless tried.
And they lost on it.
And there's no crime here.
Between 2001 and 2003, 31 steel companies went bankrupt in this country.
But this is what liberalism does, and This is what the Democrat Party does.
It's what Obama does.
Now they want to criminalize this, but as Paul Ryan said, when all of this was happening, Romney wasn't even there.
An Obama donor was running Bane at the time.
He wasn't even there.
Brief timeout, folks.
We have much more.
The nags.
Well, seven of them.
Try to shut me down Friday in Washington.
Ha.
How are you?
Welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh.
Half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
All right, it was Friday.
The nags had everybody believing that a major, major protest was going to happen.
It was the uh National Association of Gals, Nags, our affectionate term, and I mean that, affectionate, for the National Organization for Women working in conjunction with Media Matters for America to finally once and for all get me off the radio.
It's not enough for them to turn it off if they don't like it.
Nope.
They have to get me off the air and claiming at the same time that all women agree with them and want me off the air.
I'm just I'm just too mean of a big bad brute.
And I have to be fired, thrown away, discarded, gotten rid of.
So they had this big protest.
Outside our affiliate in Washington, WMAL.
Here's Alison Camarata Sunday morning on Fox and Friends Weekend.
Only seven females showed up to participate in the National Organization for Women's Protest against Rush Limbaugh.
This picture snapped of the so-called massive demonstration in front of Limbaugh's affiliate station in Washington, D.C. The advocacy group calling for advertisers to pull the plug on the conservative talk show post.
Why is it even new?
This has been my not an argument.
I've I've been for my whole career.
They've never had more than 300,000 members.
They call a protest, and 10 or 15 women show up, and there's NBC, there's all the networks.
Seven women show up.
The networks were there.
Seven women.
A rush to excellence performance in I forget, was Louisiana somewhere, two protesters outside.
And that was the picture on the front page of the paper the next day.
A protest involving a mother and daughter with one sign.
There were 1,800 people inside, two people outside, and that made the news.
So, what happened here was that Daily Caller sent a reporter over there, Caroline May, to interview the now-action Vice President Aaron Mattson about the NAG protest against me outside WMAL.
And during the interview, Ellen Mattson of the Nag said this.
He's had a history since he's been on the air about since he came on, you know, in the late 80s, 1988, of going after women, of going after people of color, of going after gay people.
So, you know, it's really, it's this is we're supporting a community response.
Of seven people.
What is going after mean?
Going after women, going after people of color, going after gay people, going after what them.
So then the daily caller, well, did you did you happen to see his new Facebook page?
He launched as a direct response to your campaign to rush babes for America.
I believe he termed it a national organization to rush babes.
I'm wondering if you had any thoughts on that.
And uh the 60 plus thousand women who have signed it.
Of course, Rush wants to make this all about him.
Honestly, this is about our community and what's decent speech and really standing up for good treatment of women.
And so, so I I'm not gonna fall into his trap of let's make this all about me.
It's not about him.
The era of his brand of thinking is over, and we're moving on.
See, I'm minding my own business.
They announce a protest of me.
They announced their objective is to get me thrown off of the air.
They announced that they have got to get rid of me.
And somehow I am making it all about me.
Well, in their in their world, I guess it is logic.
Somehow I am making this all about me.
But what am I protesting?
I'm what they are protesting me.
And I'm making this about me.
How does that work?
You think that's it?
Just I'm a man, therefore I am to blame.
I guess.
Folks, that's it for us today.
Thanks so much for being with us.
It's always a fun and great time here out on the left coast.
And again, a reminder off tomorrow, and Mark Davis will be doing the program tomorrow.
But we will be back, all of us intact on Wednesday back home at the EIB Southern Command.
We will see you then.
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