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July 24, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:50
July 24, 2012, Tuesday, Hour #2
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The views expressed by the host on this show documented to be almost always right 99.7% of the time waiting on the new opinion audit from the uh from the Sullivan Group in Sacramento, California, the official opinion auditing firm, exclusively used by me.
I have been using them actually since 1985 in uh in Sacramento.
As I say, once you get to 99.7%, almost always right, it's tough to move that up.
You gotta be right a hundred percent of the time for a long time to generate another tenth of a point.
So we're not expecting any movement with the next uh opinion audit.
But almost always right 99.7.
Ain't bad.
Uh even if it's consistent for a while, it's not bad.
Happy to have you here, folks, 800 282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, the email address L Rushbaugh at EIBNet.com from the Wall Street Journal, around one in ten employers in America plans to drop health care coverage for employees in the next few years.
As the bulk of Obamacare begins and more indicated they may do so over time.
According to a study to be released today by the consulting company Deloitte.
Used to be Deloitte and Touche.
Do you know that?
Used to be Deloitte and Touche.
Don't know what happened to Touche.
I guess Deloitte ate Touche.
Deloitte consumed Touche.
You had to be sure to pronounce the T there.
Uh on that.
Anyway, the majority of Americans under 65 who have health insurance get it through the boss.
Big question about the law is whether companies will continue to offer coverage after Obamacare implements fully in 2014.
Look, this is light.
This one in ten will drop health care coverage.
It's far more than that, who are going to drop health care coverage.
Pretty much everything you've been told about keeping your doctor if you like your plan you get to keep it, it's going to be out the window.
And I think a vast majority of people know it.
I think that's one of the reasons there's such fear and opposition to Obamacare.
Now, even though I think Deloitte's late to this, and I'm only mentioning this because now the official surveyors are starting to weigh in on this.
Uh this was known during the debate on health care even before it passed.
Now let's move on to this uh this internet business.
And the reason that I want to spend just a little time on this before we get to your phone calls.
Obama's not the first, he's simply the latest in a long line of people to cite the internet as a justification for big government.
It's interesting that the internet is one of the only things they cite.
Of course, Obama's now talking about roads and bridges.
Do you know, by the way, uh the Chicoms?
The ChICOMs have twice as many miles of roads.
We have twice as many miles uh of road as the Chicoms do.
And yet theirs is the economy that's burgeoning, and ours isn't.
We got twice the number of roads.
And we probably have more bridges than they do.
That's exactly right.
With that huge landmass that the Chicoms have, we have twice as many roads.
Twice the mileage.
I don't know what the what the figures are on bridges, but it's it's probably commensurate.
So you have Obama is just the latest to cite the internet as uh uh evidence.
Big government is solely responsible for the success of many corporations.
Corporations where people work.
That's about all they can cite, so they they glom on to it.
And it's important here, I mean the Wall Street Journal sp uh Spells it out, it's important to recognize that building great technology businesses requires both innovation and skills to bring innovations to market.
And they use in this story a contrast between Xerox and Apple.
Let's just get straight to it.
The author of this piece is Gordon Krovitz, and it's entitled Who Really Invented the Internet.
A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Obama said, if you got a business, you didn't build it, somebody else made it happen.
He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, and he said the internet didn't get invented on its own.
Government research created the internet so that all companies could make money off the internet.
Now Krovitz writes that it's an urban legend that the government launched the internet.
The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communication lines up even in a nuclear strike.
Krovitz writes that the truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.
Now, for many technologists, the idea of the internet traces to Vaneaver Bush or Vannever, Vannever Bush, however pronounces the name, and the presidential science advisor during World War II, who oversaw the development of radar and the Manhattan Project in a 1946 article in the Atlantic titled As We May Think,
Vannever Bush defined an ambitious peacetime goal for technologists, build what he called a memex, through which wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex, and they're amplified.
Well, that, even if you don't know what that means, what it did in the scientific community, technology community is fired up imaginations.
And by the late 1960s, technologists were trying to connect separate physical communications networks into one global network, a worldwide web, if you will.
Now, our federal government was involved via the Pentagon's advanced research projects agency network.
Its goal was not maintaining communications during a nuclear strike, and it didn't build the internet.
Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 60s, sent an email to fellow technologists in 2004, setting the record straight.
He wrote the creation of the ARPANET, advanced research projects, agency, ARPA network.
The creation of the ARPANET was not motivated by considerations of war.
The ARPANET was not an internet.
An internet is a connection between two or more computer networks.
So Krovitz writes, if the government didn't invent the Internet, well, then who did?
A man by the name of Vinton Surf developed the TCP IP protocol, the Internet's backbone, and a guy named Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.
You know what TCP IP is?
What is it?
How would you explain TCP IP to somebody?
Somebody Rio Linda.
It's like the phone number of a computer network.
Like the phone number of a computer network, TCP IP.
And hyperlinks is obvious.
That's the links in a story you click to take you to some other site.
Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for creating the hyperlink.
According to a book about Xerox Park, Dealers of Lightning by Michael Hiltsick, its top researchers realized they couldn't wait for the government to connect different networks.
So they would have to do it themselves.
I mean, the government did create this labyrinth, but they didn't know what to do.
I mean, they had at not at no time were they even pondering commercial applications for this, which is the point.
You can debate and people are going to debate this till the end of time.
Um whether it was a network communications system for nuclear attack, whether it was this or whether it was that.
The point that Krovitz is making here is that whatever it was and why ever it was invented, it was never intended by the government for commercial application.
And had it been left to the government, and had it remained the sole property of the government, it wouldn't exist today.
That's all you really need to know about this.
And yet Obama is running around claiming credit, as Al Gore did, claiming credit for it, and making it one of the reasons businesses, corporations are successful.
So back to Xerox Park.
Top researchers there realized they couldn't wait for the government to connect all these different networks, so they had to do it themselves.
Robert Metcalfe told his colleague John Schock in 1973, we have a more immediate problem than they do.
We have more networks than they do.
So Mr. Schock later recalled that ARPA staffers were working under government funding and university contracts.
They had contract administrators and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend with.
But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA, and that's Xerox.
It was at the Xerox Park Labs, PARC in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks.
Researchers there also developed the first personal computer, the Xerox Auto, and the graphical user interface that drives computer usage today.
Xerox did all that.
They sat on it.
They didn't know what they had until Steve Jobs came along and saw it.
Now, one of the thing about this, and I'm going to have to take commercial break before I finish the explanation.
When we were back building this program in the late 80s and early 90s, I was using CompuServe.
And I'm going to lay claim.
I was one of the first major media personalities to start using CompuServe, which was the competitor to AOL at the time.
There was no internet.
Well, there was, but I'll get to that in a second.
CompuServe was an aggregator.
CompuServe is where you get the AP wire and the UPA wire, UPI wire, newspapers.
I remember starting, I was in 1986 with my Apple IIC.
Using the ProDOS system.
I was using it for show prep.
That's when I stopped or began the process of not using newspapers.
Then I bought my first Macintosh, and the process simplified.
And I remember using modems 56K modems.
It took days.
14.4 was the speed.
It would take 30 minutes to download a 750-word column.
If you actually wanted it download, you could read it, of course, it would all display.
You wanted to download it, it took a much longer time, longer to fully display.
But but that became my sole mechanism.
I was using three newspapers at the time to prep the program, and that CompuServe opened up avenues and vistas that I didn't know were possible.
So I wanted to get them as a sponsor.
We were trying to build this program, and we were being avoided by conventional sponsors because we were controversial.
Yes, folks, even back in 1989.
Even back in 1990, the liberal media and everybody else sending out warnings, don't advertise, it's controversial, it's conservative.
And we're dealing with that just as we've dealt with it from the get-go.
So what we had to do, we had to go out and find people had not advertised on radio before.
We were also offering a different advertising technique.
The The network advertising back then was called CPM, cost for thousands.
Advertisers didn't care about anything other than the number of people who heard the message.
It's all that mattered to them, CPM.
Well, we decided, I decided we're going to have to abandon that, because obviously we're being ignored with those kind of buys, so we're going to have to do results oriented.
We had to go get sponsors who would tell, be able to tell immediately when their advertising worked, results oriented.
If they had a toll-free number, if they had any other mechanism for people to reach them.
And CompuServe was a great test.
I used them, I could endorse it, I loved it, and we'd be able to show them immediately how many new signups they'd get if they became sponsors.
But they were a bunch of liberals, and they were a little leery, but to their credit, they took a meeting and we went and met with them.
And I had about the time I met with CompuServe, I had just heard of the internet.
And I had just started dabbling with Mosaic, which was one of the first browsers, even predated Netscape.
And I didn't quite understand what I was doing.
And hooking up to it was a nightmare.
Connecting to the Internet, I didn't know TCP IP, I didn't know all this stuff, and there was nobody to really teach me.
It was self-taught on the computer.
And I remember going to the CompuServe guys and telling you, they said, the internet.
And what was happening was in the early days of the internet, some of the scholars that scientists that were using the internet began to send email from it and to join chat rooms from it.
And people began to be made aware of things like the alternate and the internet and whatever it was called at the time.
And everybody wanted a piece of it and wanted to find out what this was about.
And the CompuServe guys properly, unbeknownst to me, looked at them as a competitor and said, ah, that's that's the internet's nothing.
They don't do what we do.
Well, if we know what happened.
The internet overtook everything and ate uh AOL and CompuServe absorbed them and so forth in time.
But that was my first exposure uh to to the internet was mosaic and the browser and trying to figure it all out.
And the CompuServe guy's telling me that it's it's just it's it's a bunch of military people.
It's primarily Department of Defense, but there's some government researchers on there, and and they've started chat rooms, and those are, of course, opinion-oriented, which is what appealed to me uh about it.
So I've got to take a break here, folks.
Don't go anywhere.
I'll wrap this up and and and bring this to a uh striking closure when we get back.
Okay, so I'm going to talk to CompuServe guys, and I'm asking about the internet, and they say the internet is just a bunch of military eggheads and scientists who are using it in their spare time to communicate with each other and start chat rooms and so forth.
So my my point is here you had CompuServe, which was what everybody uses the internet today for.
CompuServe was it, which begat AOL.
CompuServe was very, very liberal.
If I'm not mistaken, the guy who founded Free Republic got banned from issuing comments at various forums on CompuServe.
Jim, what was his name?
Having a metal block on this.
The Freepers are gonna kill me.
But the Free Republic started because CompuServe banned their guy.
So the point in recalling all of this was that Obama and these people want to tell you the Internet was the foundation.
wasn't.
There were private sector firms long before the internet doing what the internet was doing.
It took people, innovators in the private sector realizing what was there, to innovate it and then market it, take it to market, make it applicable.
Now the the Xerox, they came up with Ethernet.
Why did they do that?
Well, Xerox was in the copier business.
That's what they did.
And they had executives in their Rochester, New York headquarters that were focused on selling copiers.
And for them, the value of the Ethernet was being able to have people in an office link computers to share a copier.
That's what they did with it.
And that was it.
It was tied to their specific need, their specific Xerox copiers, so forth.
And their lookier business was lucrative for decades, but they didn't see what they had, and others came along and did and expanded on it.
And I guess I'm not going to be able to wrap this up yet, so sit tight.
You know, folks, since I've started into this, let me let me change tack here ever so slightly.
Because what I've realized, I'm dredging up a lot of memories with this.
And what I'm really talking about here is innovation across the board.
And let's, before we get to the innovation of internet and who really made it happen.
I want to go back the early days of this program.
Because actually it was in Sacramento where all of this stuff with CompuServe started.
I didn't approach them as an advertiser until this program began in 1989.
But I started using them in 1985.
And I was one of the first adopters of email in broadcasting.
I used to say that I was the most accessible host in all of media because of email.
I CompuServe email address was public.
It was the only email address I had.
I responded to as much of it as I could, starting in Sacramento, then when we moved to New York and took the program national.
And at the time, everybody else at Talk Radio was just using newspapers.
And this was a brand new vista for me.
And I was an information sponge, you know, life was show prep.
And having access to information six hours, twelve hours before it was going to be published in a newspaper, that was gold.
I mean, that was and it was fun.
And it became a major, major part of my daily existence.
A lot of people called it work.
It wasn't for me.
I was my horizons were expanding.
I was learning a new technology.
I was becoming proficient at it.
It was launching my business at a rapid rate.
And as it did, had an opportunity to learn about all the various ways there were to access this information that was out there.
And as I say, when I went, we made the sales pitch to the CompuServe guys, I asked them about the internet, and they disparaged it because they knew what its potential was.
And at the time it was it was just a bunch of scientists, government people, primarily military, who were chatting with each other.
They'd set up their own chat rooms, like CompuServe had chat rooms.
And I could even say that I might have been the first blogger.
I was uh I was certainly the first to communicate with my audience off-air as extensively and as personally and as in a detailed fashion as I did on the air.
And I invited them to do so.
And it was fun.
So in the process of of uh acquiring CompuServe as an advertiser, I'll never forget going to see the operation.
I envisioned this massive room.
I don't know what, didn't know what would be in it, but I envisioned this massive room.
Folks, everything was on it.
AP, UPI, French news agency, all the Chinese and Japanese news agencies.
Reuters was on it.
Um, Washington Post was on it.
It was the called W Post at the time, not WAPO.
Uh Wall Street Journal was there.
All these columnists, everything was there.
Now the people, the newspapers already had this stuff via wires, the AP wire and so forth.
CompuServe had brought that to the public.
And I think it was one of the early media figures to uh uh certainly in talk radio to access it.
And my only point in in in focusing on this is to try to let you know that the internet was not something the government started and s and saw it through to what it is today.
You know what my CompuServe address was?
Everybody had a number.
70277.2502, CompuServe.com.
That was the first email address that I had.
And then later on you could use an alias, your name with it, but at first you couldn't.
Technology hadn't gotten to the point of aliases.
At any rate.
So now where are we?
Oh, we've got CompuServe and we've got AOL that came later, and now we've got the internet out there, but it's strictly government.
It's being sat on.
It had it had very narrow intended uses by the agencies that were using it.
And the first people that really took it outside the government realm were the people at Xerox to connect computers to the copy machines that they were selling so that it would help them sell copy machines.
If you could link all the computers in an office to a copy machine, then it would facilitate the sale of copy machines and and uh any number of accessories that were required and or necessary.
And that's as far as it went for those people.
Then one day Steve Jobs walked in there.
So in 1979, Steve Jobs walked in and he saw what Xerox had.
They had the graphical user interface.
They had the mouse.
They had icons on the screen that you would point and click to make things happen.
At the time there was no windows.
Windows was MS DOS.
Uh uh Windows wouldn't become what it was until after they stole it from from Jobs from Apple.
And they already had their base of MS-DOS computers all over the place.
So their expansion was was built in.
So Jobs said later he didn't know that Xerox just didn't know what they had.
So the Macintosh, actually to Lisa, the Macintosh came later, was created with the graphical user interface, the GUI.
As for the government's role, uh the internet did not become fully privatized until 1995, when a remaining piece of the network run by the National Science Foundation was closed, just as the commercial web began to boom.
It wasn't until 1995.
Still no Fox News.
It was 1995, sorry, CompuServe and AOL and and and all those things, and and uh the big birth didn't happen until around the mid-90s.
A blogger, Brian Carnell wrote in 1999, the internet in fact reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government.
Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP IP, but it languished.
They were not, it's not so much that they were to blame, it's just not what they did.
By definition, government wasn't there.
People don't go into government to innovate in the private sector.
They go there for entirely different reasons.
And so they have this technology, and they're not that that's what's so laughable about Al Gore coming along later saying he invented the internet.
He didn't know what it was.
They had no intention of it becoming what it became.
They didn't intend for it not to either.
They just innovation doesn't happen in government.
Not private sector innovation.
But in less than 10 years, private concerns have taken that TCP IP protocol, and they have created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia.
And isn't going to be long before practically every aspect of your computer life is somewhere on the internet, i.e.
the cloud, as opposed to on your device.
And as Mr. Krovitz writes here in the Wall Street Journal, it's important to understand the history of the Internet because it's too often wrongly cited to justify big government.
It's also important to recognize that building great technology businesses requires both innovation and the skills to bring innovation to market.
You got to know marketing.
As the contrast between Xerox and Apple shows, few business leaders succeed in this challenge.
And those who do, not the government, deserve the credit for making it happen.
Now understand, nobody would be out there writing things, disparaging of the government, unless it were not for Obama running around trying to lay claim and credit for the Internet being it's it's folks, it's it's diabolical what he's doing.
He is he's got this chip on his shoulder about corporations.
He's got this chip on his shoulder about achievers.
He's got this chip on his shoulder about successful people.
He doesn't think they're genuine.
He doesn't think that they're real.
They have they have acquired what they have through chicanery.
They've cheated, they've lied, they've stolen, they have not paid people fairly, whatever his beef is.
And so runs around and says that the Internet made it possible for all these corporations, evil word, evil word, to get rich and further abuse people.
And it's a two-pronged thing because now he he's asking for uh people to place in him a confidence to do even more great innovation.
Like just let the government handle it, and we can have ten times more internets out there.
And the fact is, Barack Obama wouldn't know how to innovate a thumbtack, much less a computer network.
Barack Obama is still using Blackberry.
Barack Obama, Timothy Geitner, none of the people in his administration have ever drawn a paycheck in the private sector.
They have not made a payroll.
They don't have the slightest idea how the internet happened.
They don't know how it works, they don't know why it works, but they're right in there just like liberals everywhere trying to claim credit for it.
And had it been left up to them, none of it would have ever happened.
Now the internet's origins were in fact DOD, Department of Defense.
Military, another evil word.
The one area of government Obama despises.
The one area of government he wants to genuinely pare down, genuinely cut.
The military is where government does things right.
More often than not.
So next time you hear that the government created the internet and businesses have not paid properly for all of the wealth government allowed them to create.
Understand that the government is the biggest winner on the internet, and they didn't do anything for it.
All they have to do is sit around and siphon off taxes off every dollar earned.
They had nothing to do with innovating it, they had nothing to do with taking it to the private sector, they had nothing to do with taking it to the free market, they had nothing to do with monetizing it.
Zilch, the only thing they do is erect regulations that get in the way.
And the real thing Obama wants to do with the Internet is tax it.
That's what you need to keep in mind.
When it comes to the Internet, Obama sees a giant new revenue source via taxation.
And so all of this, that that Roanoke speech, all of this is a setup to try to convince as many Americans that the achievers are not genuine, that they're illegitimate, they've earned a lot of money that they haven't really earned.
It's not theirs, it's other people.
And the internet's just the latest example how government's being ripped off.
All this sets the stage for new regulations and new taxes against these people who did it unfairly so forth.
All right, I gotta run.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back.
Your phone calls are next.
I promise, don't go away.
How are you?
Rushlin bought talent on lawn from a god.
Now here's an interesting number.
I said we're going to get to the phones, and I will right after this comment.
Eleven U.S. cities, 11 U.S. markets, contain more than 100,000 small businesses each, and an additional 14 metropolitan areas have between 50,000 and 100,000 small businesses apiece.
The total for these 25 markets, according to a new study by an outfit called on numbers, is 3.13 million small businesses.
Government agencies have not created an official definition of a small business.
So on numbers uses its own parameters encompassing private sector business establishments with fewer than 100 employees.
So here's Obama.
He's out there saying, You got small business, you didn't create that on your own.
You didn't do that.
You didn't build the roads, you didn't build the bridges.
A lot of hard work people out there.
You didn't do that much.
You're nothing.
Well, he's telling three point one three million small businesses in 25 markets.
That they didn't do anything in each one of them.
What do you figure these small businesses employ?
What would be the average employee number if they're using 100 employees as a small business?
Could we say 20 and be safe?
So you got 3.13 million small businesses made up of 20 people at each that he's just offended.
He doesn't know who he's talking to.
He doesn't, folks, he doesn't understand.
I know he's a smart guy, and he thinks he doesn't understand.
Romney's right.
He does not at all have the slightest understanding of the American experience.
And he's undermining himself every time he opens his mouth, trying to sound like an expert on it.
All right, here's Robert in uh in Bloomfield, Michigan.
Hi, Robert, I'm glad you waited.
Great to have you on the program.
Rush, it's an honor.
You make me laugh, you make me smile, you stimulate my brain cells.
Uh I really appreciate I love listening to you.
Thank you very much, Robert.
I want you to know that Deloitte Touch and Ross was the firm.
Touch first eight Ross, and the rest is history.
And I would trust any numbers that they came out with.
Ah, cool.
One wonderful firm.
Let me say that our president is totally clueless on business.
He's absolutely ignorant when it comes to roads and bridges.
I have developed thousands of lots in Southeastern Michigan.
I have built over 5,000 homes, and that's that's and I'm not alone all across our nation.
People have done exactly the same thing.
Thousands of developers and builders.
Right, and you built the roads too, didn't you?
Yeah, that's true.
All the subdivisions that people drive on, that was risk reward.
You built the roads and the bridges to get them to the houses that you built for them.
Well, I built as an example two miles of a road called 22 morrows.
I built 20 for my because tied up enough land to create the value that you're gonna put that infrastructure and Spend a million dollars on a road.
Why let somebody else buy the adjacent land after you put the improvements in if you can afford to tie it?
This is this is this is an excellent, excellent point.
Forget businesses, homes, subdivisions, the roads that get to them, the developers that build them.
It's like Romney says, Obama's whole philosophy is upside down.
It does not comport with the American experience.
He's never been taught the American experience.
He has been taught to resent it and to dislike it.
He has no idea what it is, and as such, he cannot relate to it.
He just cannot.
Yeah, what isn't it?
Isn't this the same Barack Obama used to run around saying all the country's bridges were falling down?
He needed roads and shovel-ready jobs.
His precious government built all the roads and bridges, right?
And he used to say that the bridges are falling down.
So what good was the government's work?
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