Obama wants the Bush tax cuts extended for everybody who makes under $200,000.
And most people didn't think that the Bush tax cuts affected people under $200,000.
The tax cuts are the rich.
It turns out that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Yu Schumer want the Bush tax cuts extended for everybody making under $1 million.
Now, how far left do you have to be to be to the left of Chuck Yu, Schumer, and Pelosi?
And yet there Obama is.
See, they know.
They want the Bush tax cuts extended for everybody under a million, Obama under 200,000.
To show you how bad things are, there's a website Seeking Alpha.
I don't know about it.
Never heard of it.
But they do have sourced material here.
And the headline says it all.
Retail sales suffer from loss of extended unemployment benefits.
Now, I submit to you, we would never have seen thinking this way just 20 years ago, much less would we have reporting like this.
That retail sales.
We don't see a story on retail sales affected by joblessness.
No, we have a story on retail sales being affected by people no longer getting unemployment checks.
Now, my whole point in the last hour, I want to sum this up for Mitt Romney.
And I hate to say this.
It pains me to say this.
I can't tell you how sad it makes me, but I don't care.
Reality is reality.
And the economy and its condition is not an automatic win-win for Romney or the Republicans right now.
It just isn't.
And Snerdley's looking at me with an expression of disbelief on his face, and I'm sure many of you are too, because that's so revolutionary.
It was only back in 1992 where it's the economy stupid was the reason Clinton won.
And I'm here to tell you that the economy today is worse by factors of geometric proportion than it was in 1992.
I had calls in 1992 from people saying can't get any worse rush.
I had guys that I play golf with at various clubs I belong to, educated, successful businessmen, Democrats telling me in 2004 it can't get any worse rush.
Well, it's worse by factors indescribable.
And the same guys are still telling me that we got to vote Democrat to fix it because it's all Bush's fault.
The sad truth is, and the Romney people are going to have to learn this right now, the sad truth is that employment is not pivotal.
The unemployment rate, the jobs circumstance in this country is not pivotal, and it's not something Obama can lose the election on.
Not by itself.
It's not something Romney can win.
What do you mean, how can I say that?
I'll tell you how I can say it.
We have 48 million Americans, 47 million on food stamps, and the regime is advertising for more.
We have 47, 48% who pay no income taxes.
We have 3 million more off the unemployment rolls and on disability rolls, and they all vote.
What does it add up to?
No jobs?
No employment?
No problem.
And that's no job, No employment, no pain for a whole heck of a lot of people whose expectations for themselves are not very high.
You have food, you have a car, your cell phone, and a TV, and you're set.
It's snurdly shouting at me, all those people can't want to stay on food stamps.
Would you explain to me then why more people are getting on food stamps exactly?
What else do they have?
There are no jobs, and yet they're still eating.
I'm not criticizing, I'm telling you, it's a new reality out there.
This is something that's been gnawing at me for over a year.
Every Thursday, I come here with these unemployment numbers, and my instincts have been telling me, and I've been fighting my instincts, my instincts have been telling me that nobody cares because it's not resulting in that much pain, not nearly as much as it used to, not nearly the kind of pain that existed in 1992.
When Bill Clinton runs for reelection, it's the economy stupid.
Worst economy in 50 years was the campaign slogan.
The economy today is worse by factors that I can't even quantify.
And it's accepted.
It's seemingly accepted because the so-called victims of the unemployment circumstance in this country are not suffering as unemployed people of the past did.
And not that I want them to.
It's not even about what I want.
I'm just dealing with the reality here.
Now we've got stories.
Retail sales suffering because unemployment checks have ended.
Not retail sales off because of the jobs circumstance.
Retail sales are off because the government isn't giving people any money anymore.
Now, you couple all this with the way mines are wasted in the American education system today, the way they're polluted, propagandized, whatever you want to say.
Yeah, that's true.
Clinton had a Perot out there helping him.
Romney's not going to have, he's not going to be held by a Perot type.
I'm just saying that there's an architect of this circumstance, and he's got to be identified.
His name's Barack Obama.
That long checklist of things I went through last hour that you have to do to ensure 9% unemployment is a long list of things.
They can't all be coincidental.
They can't all be accidental.
Obama has an economy that is almost as bad as Herbert Hoover's economy.
And I realize what percentage of people in this country even know or care about Herbert freaking Hoover.
So here I am drawing an analogy.
Herbert Hoo-Rush.
All they know is he's a Republican, so he sucked.
There's a lot of stuff that we're up against here.
And simply, my only point is relying on what traditionally has always worked is not going to get it done.
The polling data indicates it.
Then there's the other part of me, though.
The other part of me says if the election were today, it would be a landslide with Obama sent out of town so fast a cloud of dust, he wouldn't be seen in it.
I still think that's possible, probable.
But during Herbert Hoover's day, there wasn't any welfare.
There wasn't any relief.
Most of that came in with FDR.
And FDR still won, ran on how bad it was.
Of course he did, because with Hoover, there were people jumping out of buildings.
Now the scam.
This is interesting.
Scammers are committing a particularly painful form of identity theft.
And they appear to have hit on just the right formula to trick tens of thousands of victims.
They are capitalizing on the heat wave and the power outage in the North.
And by the way, forgive me here, folks, but Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, the suburbs.
We would have to say that's our national capital.
You might even say it's the capital of the world.
And we still have people without power after a week in the United States of America in our national capital.
We've got, I mean, it's a different day.
We can't restore power in over a week in the area surrounding the nation's capital.
We, Americans, can't get that done somehow.
Got to be a union involved.
But that's another thing.
Here's what the scammers are doing.
These criminals are marching across the country and focusing primarily on areas where the power has been out for quite a while, state to state, knocking on doors, telling people that they are from the government and that they are offering a federal, special federal government assistance program that they are describing as a bailout authorized by Obama to pay their utility bills.
The victims are offering their bank account and bank routing numbers.
They're giving those numbers away so that these people can, on behalf of Obama, pay their utility bills online, but only after they register by surrendering their social security numbers and other personal information.
They're going door to door where people have been sweltering in triple digit heat and saying they represent the government, the Obama administration.
And because of this disaster, there's a new Obama bailout to pay their utility bills, which will help prevent bailouts or prevent power outages in the future by making sure that the power companies are flush with money.
So two things are happening here.
A, people are being scammed, but the way they're being scammed is that these criminals are approaching them and saying, Obama, federal government, Obama is seeing to it that your utility bill is going to always be paid so you don't have to.
That will help your utility company always stay online because they will be flush with cash.
So people are giving up their social security numbers and their bank routing numbers, account numbers, on the premise that Obama is going to be paying off their electrical bills.
Now, these scams have been around since the beginning of time.
These scams have been around since there have been human beings and criminals and so forth and so on.
But I have to admit, it pains me how easy this is probably working because people will believe that Obama has bailed out a utility company and is bailing them out because that's what Obama wants them to believe.
That's what his presidency means.
Bailouts of the people who've been screwed in this country by the profit seekers and by the corporations and by the power companies.
There is no such utility payment assistance program.
It doesn't exist.
It's been created out of whole cloth.
Electricity users seem to be falling for it everywhere, making it one of the most successful scams in recent times.
Last week, 2,000 people in Tampa were tricked.
The local utility company there is Tico Energy.
There were more victims in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Indiana, New England.
Utility firms in Utah and California reported similar scam epidemics earlier this year.
At least 10,000 people fell for it in New Jersey in recent weeks, according to Pacific, or Public Service Electric and Gas.
We see scams once or twice a year.
A handful of people fall for them.
But this is crazy, said Sylvia Wood, the Tampa power company spokeswoman.
She said about 2,000 customers tried to pay their bills with bogus account information traced to the scam within a 24-hour period.
So what they were told was that they're setting up accounts that Obama's putting money in, and you pay your utility bill from that.
And all you have to do is give me your social security number and your bank information, and that's how we'll set it up.
Obama cares for you.
Something like this being done in my name, I don't know, I'd be embarrassed, angry, all those other things.
Obama sits at, all right, it's working.
Okay, we go to the phones, and we're going to start in Cincinnati.
This is Pam, and I'm glad you waited.
Great to have you on the program.
Hi, Rush.
Hi.
It's good to talk to you.
Thank you very much.
Yeah.
Remember how at the beginning of the show you were saying that, like, well, I might butcher this, but, well, as a paraphrase, you were saying that you look at, you used to look at 60 and 70 year olds and you'd look at them.
I said that I vowed that when I became the age I am, 61, that I wouldn't look at young generation people as the beginning of the end, reprobates, worthless, you know.
human debris.
I was calling because I wanted to let you know, I'm 27, and I wouldn't blame you if you looked at my culture and younger as the beginning of the end of the culture.
It's really frustrating.
Like, everybody I know that's my age, with the exception of maybe one or two people, are liberal zombies.
It is impossible to have a real debate because it's just, I mean, they've been brainwashed.
Well, and a lot of it's the schools, I know.
Well, I have to admit that I think this is what I'm trying to avoid doing.
I'm tempted to agree with you.
I remember when I was your age, younger generation, The older generation looked at us as a bunch of, I don't know, we just weren't ready for anything yet.
We were spoiled, rotten.
We were me, me, me and so forth and all that.
And they looked at the drugs and the music in the 60s.
I'm a child of the 60s.
They looked at that and they said, my God, these kids are never going to amount to anything.
They're throwing their lives away.
They're frying their brains, all this sort of stuff.
And it turned out that half my generation ended up okay.
The other half ended up as so self-important, self-focused, that they never have grown up.
They've never had to grow up.
So I understand when I was young, the political divide didn't exist in young generational people like there were liberals, but they weren't like the liberals of today, angry, enraged, profane.
Although, now, wait a minute, see, this, I got to catch myself because it really there were, I mean, there were people blowing up bank buildings when I was 16, 17, people my age, 16, 17, 20, 20, blowing up bank buildings, kidnapping people, protesting the war and so forth.
I just vowed that I would not make a judgment on the future of the country based on where young people happen to be at a moment in time.
But I know what you mean.
Liberal education has had a much more total powerful control over young people today than it did even in my day.
As I sit here and think about this, another reality has hit me upside the head.
It's not the kids today that are the problem, because kids are always a problem.
It's today's adults that are the price.
It's today's adults that I don't have any faith in or that I wonder about.
You know, it used to be when I was young, what do you thought adults were screwballs or nerds or cooks or what?
You still thought they were adults.
They were mature.
They were smarter.
They were reliable.
You could count on them for wisdom and advice.
And today, I think that's what I am questioning.
And who are the adults today?
My generation of boomers, the baby boomers, the most spoiled, rotten generation in history.
And yes, I'm one of them.
Not spoiled, rotten.
But my generation is, has among it some of the most spoiled, rotten people in the history of the country.
I think you look at the kids today.
The biggest single change from my generation when I was young to today is that when I was a teenager, early 20s, things weren't so politicized.
The culture wasn't as politicized.
School wasn't as politicized.
Not where I grew up, snurdly.
The liberals took over education after World War II.
It was just starting.
I'll tell you, what happened was the major universities prior to World War II had been bastions of the wasps, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
After World War II, they opened their doors and the intellectuals and the multiculturalists poured in there.
And that's when the transformation began, the liberal transformation.
Liberals have not always owned education.
No, they haven't.
That's the point.
But certainly, entertainment was not nearly as politicized when I was for today.
Every actor's a Meryl Streep.
I'm reading a novel, reading a novel right now about pre-World War II France.
And it centers on a fictitious American actor who is in France making a movie.
And he's being hit on by Germans and Nazis to be threatened and pressured into becoming a Nazi propagandist.
And in the novel, which is historically accurate, he ends up getting screwed by a journalist.
He gives an interview what he thinks is promoting his movie.
It turns out the story ends up how he's a Nazi sympathizer.
And his producers in Hollywood call, get the politics out.
Everybody goes to the movies.
We don't want your political views.
Now, we've always had liberals in entertainment, but it used to be very bad to be a liberal in entertainment.
Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, those days, the blacklist.
It used to be very, very bad to be a...
Now it's a resume requirement that you be a liberal to be entertainment and that you be public about it.
And they don't care about the box office.
Now, sports is still that way.
Michael Jordan, a big Democrat, he's never going to tell you that.
We still don't know what Tiger Woods politics are because everybody buys golf clubs, t-shirts, and golf shirts, all that kind of stuff, tennis shoes, so forth.
They want to sell everybody.
They don't care.
But Hollywood, long time ago, gave up the ghost.
I didn't have any left-wing teachers.
I mean, even through high school, I didn't have liberalism pumped at me each and every day.
Not like your kids have it pumped at them.
I did not have it.
So that is a transformational change.
And the transformational change did not happen by accident.
And it is true.
Most entertainers shied away from politics.
Only the biggest names, the Sinatras and so forth, could identify.
But look who they identified with, people that were universally popular, the Kennedys and so forth.
Folks, we used to live in a country where people wanted to be successful.
People wanted to be millionaires.
Today we live in a country where people want to receive a government check.
And wanting to be a millionaire is said to be bad.
Wanting to be successful, wanting to be a millionaire is said to be greedy and selfish.
Well, what is more greedy and selfish than living off of other people?
And yet that is what is championed today.
Receiving a government check, that is said to be good.
That's fairness.
This is where Obama and the left have taken us.
Failure is now accepted, not stigmatized.
It's in fact in some cases encouraged.
Failure is how you excuse being discriminated against.
It's a badge of CNN.
Look at CNN for crying out loud.
100,000 viewers.
And within the news business, CNN is treated as though they are heroic because they haven't given up.
They haven't given up the cause despite audience abandonment, profit, and so they haven't given it up.
Failure is accepted.
It's lionized.
It's explained away.
In some cases, encouraged.
And it is now subsidized.
And it's subsidized on the basis that the failure that people encounter or engage in is somebody else's fault.
It's sociopathic.
Today's failures are victims of the 1%.
Today's failures are victims of George Bush, victims of Republicans, victims of the Founding Fathers, victims of an unfair capitalistic culture.
And as such, failure in some places is a badge of honor.
And so we subsidize it.
Meanwhile, more and more liberal billionaires are dropping U.S. citizenship and fleeing overseas.
Have you heard about Denise Rich?
Mark Rich's wife is renouncing her citizenship and fleeing the country to avoid taxes.
And this woman is a multi-billionaire.
Eric Holder got the pardon for her husband, Mark Rich, who was a criminal in the commodities markets.
He can't come back to the United States without being arrested and sent to jail.
Denise Rich is his ex-wife, big-time liberal fundraiser, entertainer, social doyenne, homes in New York, Aspen, Saint-Tropez, you name big 150-foot yacht with some of the biggest parties of the summer.
Off the coast of the south of France, she's renouncing her citizenship.
A liberal Democrat billionaire.
This guy, one of the co-founders of Facebook, Eduardo Saverin, liberal renouncing his citizenship.
Liberal billionaires fleeing overseas.
The question, ladies and gentlemen, is can we as a country pull together to rid ourselves of this president and the poison that is his administration and his parties?
We can't rely on others to do this.
We have to do this ourselves.
We can't rely on Republican leadership.
We can't rely on Romney.
I don't think the Republican establishment has the slightest.
In fact, if anybody in the Republican establishment's listening to me, they probably think I'm off my rocker.
They're still stuck in the traditional, we can win this race on the economy.
But I'm here to tell you the sad truth is the economy is not pivotal because it's not painful.
Unemployment isn't painful.
46 million Americans on food stamps with more signing up every day.
47, 48% not paying any income tax.
3 million more off the unemployment rolls and on disability.
It's sadly not a big deal.
It's not something that a whole lot of Americans care enough about to want to change.
So can we pull together to rid ourselves of this president and the poison?
And by pulling ourselves together, can we rally enough people to vote against Obama and to show them that it is in their best interests for this administration to not be reelected?
I just don't think we can rely on the traditional political establishments to bring this off.
You remember during the primaries, we all talked.
You people, you would call, we would talk about what kind of campaign Romney would run if he got the nomination.
We all said it better not be a McCain campaign.
It better get rid of this first black prisoner stuff.
That's four years in the history books.
It doesn't matter anymore.
We got the country to save all that.
And we openly, we asked, you and I, we would talk and ask each other, will Romney treat Obama the same way he treated Newt Gingrich or San Torman?
He better.
Whether he does it or his super PACs, he better.
That's what it's going to take.
He can't just run around and cite economic statistics and expect that to rally people.
The polling data shows that ain't going to work.
Romney should be up by 25 points if this were the America of 30 years ago.
Sadly, it isn't.
This has to be a repeat of 2010 where we show up and push back and make things happen.
Tea Party et al.
The other side's out there selling class warfare, which is snake oil.
And the question is, how much snake oil do we all want to drink?
Yeah, it's the adults today that are the problem.
The baby boomers and the youth they had and the adults they became.
That's the problem.
Not the younger generation.
In fact, I frankly believe, ladies and gentlemen, that the younger generations are going to ultimately be who save us.
Because I don't think they're going to inherit this kind of country.
And they'll do something about it.
That's what happens every third or fourth generation, anyway.
They say, I'm bad and I'm going to live the way my parents did.
I don't want the kind of life my parents had, whatever it was.
And they go about changing it.
I maybe tell that story again.
I got to take a break now and I want to get some more phone calls in.
But I evolved a theory about the baby boom generation.
We had to invent our traumas in order to tell ourselves how tough life was.
In fact, baby boomers, we don't really know how tough life was for our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.
Can't fathom it.
Anyway, maybe I'll repeat that.
It's an interesting theory, questionable whether I got time to squeeze in with everything else I want to do, but we'll see.
Brief time out here.
We'll come back and continue on the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Back to the phones we go to Orofino, Idaho.
This is Pat.
It's great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hey, Rush.
I'm glad you finally got to talk to me.
Thank you, sir.
I'm glad you made it through.
Hey, you know, I'm getting kind of tired of liberals always blaming us, business workers and producers for all the olds in the world.
And I think if they win this next election, all of us people who produce stuff ought to go on a duel.
Just it.
Just live in the world they want to create.
Well, it's going to make more business sense.
And you, small business is clearly being targeted.
Well, I want to look at people, we'll look at these people and say, well, you've told me not to cut trees for years.
You told me I shouldn't let my cows eat grass.
And Lord Almighty, nobody broke a hole in the ground for one of them.
Well, you intellectuals could just make oil out thin air.
Let's just live in the world you want to create.
Well, they're on their way.
They're doing a good job of it.
Let's just throw up and live in it.
They're on their way.
These are people with no real world experience whatsoever who seem to have all the answers.
Anyway, Pat, I appreciate it.
Tara in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
You're next on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
Hi.
Hi.
I was just curious as to what you thought about John Boehner's comments.
I thought that maybe it happened this weekend because I didn't hear any news about it until just this past weekend.
But apparently it was on June 30th.
He was at a fundraiser in Wheeling, West Virginia, and someone in the crowd asked him, can you make me love Mitt Romney?
And Boehner said no.
And then he went on to say that the only people who would vote for Romney would be like some friends, relatives, and fellow Mormons.
But then that was a good idea.
Wait, wait, wait.
He didn't say the only people who would vote for Obama.
Well, yeah, he said some people that are going to vote for Romney.
He said some of the people are going to vote for Romney as friends.
And the fellow Mormons thing.
That's what I was really curious about.
Yeah, I saw it.
I thought I saw it reported over the weekend.
I saw it, I guess, Saturday when I saw it.
I kind of cocked my head and I said, what the hell's that?
Yeah.
I thought it sounded kind of snorkey.
Yeah, I've not talked to Boehner about Romney, so I don't know what he well, do you think that that sort of comment coming from the Speaker of the House is helpful to Romney?
No, but I don't think it really matters all that much.
Like you said, it hasn't been widely reported.
Like members of my staff who are like most people, they rely on me for everything they know, had not heard it either.
Yeah, I heard about it over the weekend.
So more people are hearing about this now than heard about it over the weekend.
John Boehner probably wishes I hadn't made this call.
Yeah, here's the quote.
Listen, we're just politicians.
I wasn't elected to play God.
Can you make me love Mitt Romney?
He said, no.
Look, we're just politicians.
I wasn't elected to play God.
The American people probably aren't going to fall in love with Mitt Romney.
He said that Romney's got some friends, relatives, and fellow Mormons.
Some people are going to vote for him.
But he said, at the end of the day, Republicans would be voting against Obama rather than for Romney.
Do you think that if you were like...
Well, I'm going to tell you something.
You...
You may not like the way he said it, but I said something similar last week when I said Governor Romney had better learn fast this election, not about him.
And I mean that from an ego standpoint.
I think what Boehner means is the world, the country's not clamoring for Romney.
They're not.
We've got to be honest.
What they're clamoring for is no more Obama, and that's what has to be capitalized upon.
Now, throwing the Mormon thing in there, must be something going on behind the scenes that we're not privy to.
By the same token, folks, country's not clamoring for John Boehner either.