All Episodes
Previous Next
July 30, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:49
July 30, 2012, Monday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
And greetings to you once again, music lovers, thrill seekers, and conversationalists all across the fruited plain.
Great to have you here, Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Our telephone number, if you want to be on the program 800-282-2882, the email address, L. Rushbo at EIBNet.com.
You know, the Olympic opening ceremonies, the Brits did a big deal honoring the National Health Service.
Now, I'm wondering, do you think at the Democrat National Convention anybody will talk about Obamacare?
I could go either way.
I mean, but I can see them not mentioning it at all.
A couple more Democrats have announced they're not going, and there's all kinds of stories today about how Claire McCaskill is losing.
She's the current senator.
She's losing to any number of Republicans in pre-election polls.
And Missouri is, I don't think it's a swing state anymore.
I think it's pretty much abandoned.
At least that's the point of this story.
Well, I know.
It's clear what the regime is doing.
It's clear what they want this country to be.
It's clear who it is they want voting for them.
So that they have that expansionist mandate to continue the assault on the private sector.
Here, I mentioned this.
Here's Bob Gibbs, the former White House press secretary.
He was on this week on ABC.
Before I play the bike, I want to share something with you.
Just an observation.
You know, when Tim Russert ran Meet the Press, that show was the number one Sunday morning show year after year after year.
And it continued to build on its lead.
CBS Face the Nation was a distant third place.
It was a half-hour show.
It was run by Bob Schieffer.
Before Bob Schieffer had it, Leslie Stahl did it.
The ABC show at Brinkley, a relatively high number two when Brinkley ran it.
And for a little while after that, but it didn't matter.
When Russert was at Meet the Press, it was the top dog, and it wasn't even close for years.
Well, sadly, Russert passed away.
David Gregory is now running Meet the Press, and they're no longer that big number one.
The number one Sunday morning show is CBS, Face the Nation.
And I, as a ranking member of the broadcast community, I study the media business.
And there are things that happen in this business that just defy any logic, particularly if you go back just 20 years or further, when I started in it in 1967.
For example, CNN.
Now, the president of CNN finally threw in the towel.
Jim Walton is finally quitting.
He says the place needs new thinking.
It's passed.
But look how long.
Look how long CNN has been comfortable sitting there with no viewers.
That would not be tolerated just 20 years ago.
But now it's almost like there's a badge of honor.
As long as you stay true to the cause, it doesn't matter.
They found a way to monetize it using CNN International so they were able to show a profit on CNN.
And by the way, a bunch of little media buyers sitting in the basements of these advertising agencies are very astute, and they'll send advertising to CNN, whether it makes any sense or not, simply to be loyal.
Liberals protecting liberals.
And don't doubt me on this, it happens.
But still, sitting there with 125,000 viewers max.
And then they say, okay, we get it.
We're going to be making changes here.
And they try to portray themselves as what is the passive-aggressive liberals.
You got MSNBC over there, which they are full-boat, insane liberal and proud of it, and act that way.
CNN tried to tell everybody that, well, yeah, we're liberal, but we don't do liberalism here.
We're objective.
We're what journalism should always be.
We're objective.
We don't have any opinions here.
And they mean it when they say that.
And then they intro a piece on Sarah Palin and they use as their bumper a song by Pink called Stupid Girls.
This is after Jim Walton quit saying the place needs new thinking.
This is the kind of stuff 20 years ago, people that ran these outfits wouldn't put up with it.
And you go back to NBC.
They have lost the lead in the Sunday morning franchise.
Meet the Press.
They owned it from a financial standpoint, from a prestige standpoint.
And now they've lost it to a guy who was in the third place.
And the guy who's in third place didn't do anything to gain any ground.
He didn't change what he was doing.
Bob Schieffer.
They only just recently went to an hour.
I think if it's even official.
Bob Schieffer just sat there, continued to be Bob Schieffer and so forth.
They didn't do anything spectacular.
What happened was NBC backed up to the field.
Meet the Press backed up to the field.
I don't know.
The way success is measured in this business is pretty standard and hasn't changed.
And there are two basic ways.
You measure it with ratings and revenue.
And the two generally are combined.
They go hand in hand.
Now, in some cases, you're able to get by with less or little revenue.
If somewhere else in the division is making up what you're losing, then you can say, okay, we'll stay true to the cause.
But that's not happening here.
So I just sit, I scratch my head at this.
And I think, folks, it's just a sign of how continually broken our political media complex is.
It is purely partisan.
It's entirely 100% agenda-driven.
And as such, the agenda matters more.
You got a bunch of liberals in there.
Doesn't it make sense the agenda would matter more than profit?
That agenda would matter more than the business aspects of it.
Now, the New York Times, look at them.
The New York Times is losing pages, losing ad revenue, losing money, but the family controls the shares.
There's nothing anybody can do about it.
They're looking for a new CEO at the New York Times, but it doesn't matter because whoever they hire, the paper's still going to be run by Arthur Schulzberger Jr., a little pinch.
So the CEO is a position that they have to have to satisfy Wall Street investors, but the CEO really doesn't have any power there.
The Schulzberger family does.
And the current scion running the place is running it into the ground.
Now, for that to happen, the New York Times has to be driving away its own readers because they only appeal to the hardcore fringe upper west side left.
And they have to be driving away their own people.
It's not as though conservatives all of a sudden woke up and got tired of reading the drivel that's in the New York Times.
And yet they're all hunkering down and staying true to the cause, to the agenda, which is different than the way it used to be.
I think they got all these media people, I think they still have it.
Even though the monopoly essentially was busted up in the mid-90s, I still don't think they've adapted.
I don't think they've come to grips with the fact that they're no longer a monopoly and they still want to operate according to these old models.
And they end up becoming laughingstock.
I saw, you know, I'm going to make an enemy here, and I don't really intend to.
This is not the point.
But I saw, at least according to one of the sound bites here, I didn't actually see it.
The substitute host for the Sunday ABC show yesterday is a guy named Matthew Dowd.
Matthew Dowd is a former on-camera Republican strategist/slash consultant for the Bushes and the Republican Party.
He's not a media guy.
He's not by training a journalist.
And there he is co-hosting.
You know how hard that job used to be to get?
They're putting people in these jobs that have never done it before, have no talent, are not really journalists.
You got all these people in the smaller markets sweating away, slaving, waiting for their big break, make me make a market jump here and a market jump there to finally get noticed and finally get an important network gig.
And the networks are giving jobs to people who have never done it before.
It would have never happened.
It's stunning.
Now, I'm interested in this simply because it's the business I'm in, and it flies in the face.
Oh, radio's been doing this for years.
All the radio.
What was the shrink's name in LA that they put on?
Doctor, what was her name?
Now, maybe Tony Gray, Tony.
Never forget, and then the car guys, they put all these people on who'd never, ever been on the radio before.
And I said, well, that's it.
That's the end of it.
Took me 30 years to get higher than market number 20.
And here, people have never done it before in markets one and two being hired.
Well, I know they're all gone now.
It's still here because it is a business, highly trained broadcast specialists, so forth.
But when you look at what's happening, when now happening in the so-called news business, they're bleeding audience and they're bleeding revenue.
And now they're all watching an HBO show, which is a fantasy.
The newsroom, which the West Wing was a fantasy presidency.
Now they're all watching a fantasy news show about a fantasy network and thinking it's real.
And that's who we're doing battle with each and every day.
That's just here's anyway.
Here's Gibbs.
This long intro to the Gibbs soundbite.
He was on this week yesterday.
And ah, here it is: fill-in host, Matthew Dow.
But nothing against Matthew Dowd.
And I don't want anybody calling him.
If you can get the gig in, it's not his problem he got hired.
Not his fault.
Looks good.
I guess that's what matters.
And he might be pretty good.
I don't know.
I didn't watch it.
I'm just chronicling how profoundly different that there's no such thing as a professional anymore.
At least not highly trained and seasoned and experienced.
I think it matters.
Anyway, the question for Gibbs, are we at a place where the Mitt Romney message is fire him and the Obama strategy is don't hire him and it's been all negative with no vision of the future?
Mitt Romney had a strategy during the primaries.
He used negative ads to destroy Rick Perry.
He used negative ads to destroy Newt Gingrich.
He used negative ads to destroy Rick Santorum.
We're not going to let him play his tried and true role as prep school bully.
We're going to certainly respond.
And look, the ad that you mentioned on what the president said selectively edited the Senate's previous to what you heard the president say is talking about infrastructure and roads and bridges.
And they are still, that's still gotten under their skin.
But yeah, I wanted to play this because he's a prep school bully.
Here's Romney's running around attacking all these people.
And yet he's a wimp.
On the latest cover of Newsweek magazine.
And we're back.
El Rushball kicking off brand new week of broadcast excellence.
First, first he came for your trans fats.
Then he came for your salt.
Then he came for your big gulps.
And before all that, he came for your cigars and cigarettes.
And now he's coming after your breasts.
We're talking about the nanny of New York City, Michael Doomberg, the mayor, who is pushing hospitals, not making this up, the mayor of New York City is pushing,
he's nudging, he's attempting to influence with governmental power hospitals to hide their baby formula behind locked doors so that more new mothers will breastfeed.
Starting on September 3rd, New York City will keep tabs, which means they're going to keep records, which means they're going to keep and take control of the number of bottles of baby formula that participating hospitals stock and use.
The New York Post calls this the most restrictive pro-breast milk program in the nation.
Under the City Health Department's voluntary latch on New York City latch on?
What does that mean in terms of breastfeeding?
Latch on?
That's what the baby does.
That's why they're calling it latch on.
Not just babies.
That's why I was getting confused in here.
Thank you, Mr. Snerdley.
Under the City Health Department's voluntary latch on New York City, 27 of the 40 hospitals have also agreed to give up swag bags, sporting formula company logos, toss out formula-branded things like lanyards and mugs, and document a medical reason for every bottle that a newborn receives.
Breast, it's, yeah, like it's hungry.
Breastfeeding activists applaud the move.
Are you kidding me?
Breastfeeding activists?
Breastfeeding activists applaud the move.
Bottle-feeding mothers are bristling at the latest lactation lecture.
If they put pressure on me, I would get annoyed.
Send Lynn Sidenum, a Staten Island mother of two formula-fed girls ages four months and nine years.
This is for me to choose.
Silly woman, it's New York City.
It's not for you to choose.
This is for the nanny of the mayor to choose for you.
Under Latchon NYC, new mothers who want formula won't be denied it, but the hospitals will keep infant formula in out-of-the-way, secure storerooms or in locked boxes like those used to dispense and track medicines.
With each bottle that a mother requests and receives, she'll also get a lecture.
She'll get a talking to.
Staffers will explain why she should offer the breast instead.
Allison Walsh of Beth Israel Medical Center, look, it's the patient's choice, but it's our job to educate them on the best option.
What is this?
Is this more of the so-called Republican war on women?
The mayor of New York is demanding that hospitals use the power of their influence to convince mothers not to use the bottle in the United States of America.
This is something the mayor of New York thinks got a problem.
I don't know.
This guy, and I've never met Doomberg.
I've been two holes behind him on the golf course, but I've never met this guy.
But folks, we're talking fetish here.
If it has to do with the mouth, this guy is on it.
Cigarettes, trans fats, salt, big gulps, and now baby formula.
This is something the mayor of New York ought to be thinking about.
And we have to listen to drivel that there's a Republican war on women.
Every time I see one of these stories, I ask myself, and it's a rhetorical question because it's never going to happen.
I ask myself, when are the people who are subjected to this kind of statist control, when are they going to reject it?
When are they going to stand up and say the hell with you and stop this?
Can you imagine if I tried something like this, if I used the power of this microphone, this radio show, to try to force women to the power of my influence, the only breastfeed, you imagine what would be said of me?
Well, man, I like that.
I'm starting, folks, to not recognize more and more people in this country.
Is this breastfeeding thing?
Whose business is it?
There are breastfeeding activists out there and they're Nazi-like.
What is it?
It's like the militant vegetarians.
What business is it of anybody else's what you eat, what I eat, or whether or not you breastfeed your child?
Why is it their business?
You know what's going to, Doomberg and the left know that, you know, people grouse about this and whine about it for a couple days and talk about how the government's overstepping and that it'll just be forgotten and accepted And considered normal, and then we'll move on to the next thing.
What's Doomberg going to do?
Is it going to put a maximum size that a woman's breast can be so as to make sure that the young kid isn't suckling more than 16 ounces of milk?
Is there a problem here?
When did this become a controversy?
When did breastfeeding or not breastfeeding become a major health problem or controversy?
It's like toenail fungus.
Remember when that started with all the TV ads on toenail fungus?
A bunch of people didn't know they had it, had it.
There's nothing they could do about it anyway, and nobody died from it that I heard.
Then we had the toe liquors, and then we had the frog liquors.
And these women in New York complain about it, and after a while, it'll just be accepted.
This is the kind of thing.
20 years ago, we would have made this up as a joke to try to tell people where the country was headed.
We would have made this.
Yeah, and you know what?
The liberals someday are going to tell you that you have to breastfeed, you can't bottle feed, are going to put a mandatory maximum size on the female breast so that the young baby doesn't suckle more milk than it should, certainly no more than 16 ounces, a lot of sugar in there.
We'd have been joking.
And sadly, every one of these things we've joked about, global warming or the environmentalist nuts, it's all happening.
SUVs, it's all happening.
We have on the phone the CEO of Bucky Balls, a guy from New York named Craig Zucker.
Mr. Zucker, welcome to the program.
Great to have you here.
Thanks a lot, Rush.
You have had your product banned.
We've had the Consumer Product Safety Commission has begun a process to ban our product and magnets in general.
It has not been banned yet.
Okay, not yet.
Not yet.
But you're on the way and you're on the road.
What's the problem they've got first with magnets and then we'll get to yours?
What's their problem with magnets?
You know, I guess over the past couple of years, they've seen a couple of children who have gotten their hands on an adult product.
They've ingested the product.
There's been 12 children over the past three years have ingested our product out of 2.5 million units sold.
And the Consumer Product Safety Commission believes that now all magnets should be taken off the market.
They should be banned and recalled due to these 12 incidents.
Even refrigerator magnets that remind people to shut the door and stuff like that?
Not those kinds.
The products that they're looking at are more of the, products like Buckyballs and Bucky Cubes.
They're office-relieving stress deaths.
How big is a Buckyball?
They're about five millimeters.
Each one's about the size of a BB.
And they come in packs of 125 or 216.
And they're marketed and sold as adult stress relievers, desk toys, things to build, create, create structures out of, and have been sold to adults for nearly three years now.
They've become probably one of the most best-selling adult gift products in the industry, in the specialty gift industry the past three years.
And because of a minuscule percentage of children misusing the product, now they want to ban the whole thing.
The incident rate compared to other products is extremely low.
I mean, you take products like balloons or five-gallon buckets or adult-size ATVs where kids are, hundreds of kids are sent to the hospital per year, and there's multiple deaths.
And the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the remedy for that is warnings.
But when it comes to an adult product marketed and sold to adults, they now say that warnings, which is the basis for most of the regulation of what they do out there, warnings don't work anymore.
Were you breastfed or did you drink formula?
I was given formula.
Formula.
They might have found that out.
They might have.
You know, I was popping some popcorn over the weekend for the watch the Olympics.
And the kind of popcorn I have, it's Orville Redenbacher, and it comes with the coconut oil, the popcorn, all in one package in two separate compartments.
So I'm looking for an expiration date, just for the fun of it.
And I see on the back of the package, there is this warning that suggests popcorn is dangerous to let kids eat because the kernels and the partial popped kernels could end up choking them to death.
Right.
Now, I know this is a liability thing.
They put that on there just to protect themselves in case some accident happens.
But how is anybody supposed to stay in business in this country?
Accidents happen.
You talked about balloons.
They tried to ban these things once because birds were eating them.
After they had send balloons up and they'd lose their buoyancy, come back, and birds would find the used balloons on the ground.
I remember doing a environmentalist were all upset about that.
How are people like you supposed to stay in business, Craig?
Look, I mean, I think product safety, it's a partnership between three different organizations.
It's the government, the CPSC, its manufacturers, industry, and its consumers.
And all three have to do their part to keep businesses and to keep children safe and to keep us in business.
The government has to create rules and regulations that are reasonable.
Manufacturers like us have to follow those.
And we have to educate consumers.
But it is the responsibility of consumers as well to follow the regulations that we give them and to be educated on the products that they're purchasing, especially when it comes to having children in the house.
Well, you know, you refer to your product, Buckyballs, as a toy.
But I remember as a kid when I first discovered magnets, they fascinated me.
Listen, they've been around for thousands of years.
Well, of course, they're natural.
You can't take magnetism out of physics.
They're used in all sorts of applications.
And by the way, we don't say toy, we say adult desk toy.
And so there's a context here when we talk about the product.
And the product is, if you just take a look, warnings are on the packaging in five places.
That's five times more places than a pack of cigarettes.
We have it on the instructions, the packaging in four different places.
You can't miss the warnings.
You can't miss the display warnings.
The mistake you're making is you're not factoring the education system, and that is how many people can't read.
Well, I don't know about that, but we've created a lot of unique.
Well, no, you're doing everything you have to do.
The reason I like this, well, I don't like it, but it's illustrative of what this government is doing to small businesses.
It's hard.
We've built this company from scratch.
We were a two-man operation.
We have exceeded every possible expectation a U.S. entrepreneur could have.
And it does feel un-American.
It does feel that us being put out of business and what to tell my employees and my sales reps and my retailers that count on this product to pay their rent.
It's hard to know what to tell them.
But it doesn't feel like the American way.
And how long did you say you've been in business?
We've been in business three years.
Three years.
So you're just now revving up.
We have been revved up since day one.
I mean, we've had a trajectory that's been just astronomical.
We showed up to our first trade show, and we were probably the most popular product there.
No, no, no.
You didn't build that.
You didn't at all.
Is your business on a road?
I'll tell you what.
We built it.
Me and a partner with $2,000 in an apartment in New York built it.
And it's getting slowly disassembled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, piece by piece.
It's death by a thousand cuts, is what they've done to us.
They've gone to our retail chain.
They've put out press releases even before serving us.
They've ignored every letters asking for how they determined the product was defective, and yet still went to retailers and basically destroyed our wholesale channel within a week.
They've put out false information to the press saying it's banned, although it hasn't been banned.
What do you think is really motivating them, Craig?
It's a good question, Rush.
It could be politically driven.
It's an election season that, you know, there's certainly...
Yeah, but Buckyballs doesn't have a political identity.
And I'm not going to ask you who you donate to, but they can find out.
But I mean, there's no political identity to your product.
Not at all.
They're crucifying you.
They are not crucifying us.
They are destroying.
They are putting a U.S. business out of business as we speak.
And it's been frustrating.
But I'll tell you one thing.
The support of people online and people like your listeners and people that are all over the Internet have given us, we've done more sales through our website than we could have possibly done through all the retailers that CPSC shut down last week in the course of four days.
The individual consumer online coming to rally to support us and the absurdity of what's happening at CPSC and the support that we're given is going to end up keeping this business thriving and alive.
And we're going to fight this.
And we're going to fight CPSC and we're going to go to court and we're going to beat them in litigation.
And that's what we're kind of building up our business for to do right now.
Well, it's great you're going to do that.
It's a shame you have to.
Can I give my website address?
By all means.
I think it's fabulous you've got so much public support on this.
Thanks.
So there's two places.
Getbuckyballs.com is where we have all of our products.
But there's a great campaign at SaveOurBalls.net.
Oh, I love saveOurBalls.net.
There's a great video there that explains what's happening.
There's a lot of information.
And again, any support we can get helps Facebook, Twitter.
Call CPSC, call Chairwoman Inez Teddenbaum.
Let your voice be heard.
You know, Craig, I looked at this.
I could be wrong on this, but I don't think so.
I think you're being singled out because being sued the way you are being sued, this particular legal tactic.
By the way, first of all.
I think it's only been used once before.
In the past 10 years.
Twice, and the last time was 11 years ago.
That's right, yeah, okay.
And the CPSC lost both of those cases in an administrative complaint in front of an administrative law judge.
So it's not a tactic they like.
99.9% of companies, when they're told to recall a product, do it.
CPSC is not used to somebody saying no, and they're not used to people standing up to their bullying, tack, and intimidation tactics.
And it's what we're doing.
And so, again, any support we can get is great.
Thanks for talking about us today.
Thanks for taking the call.
I'm glad you called.
Well, all the best.
God bless.
I'm ecstatic to hear you've got such a loud and boisterous public response to what's happening to you.
Oh, there's probably over 100,000 comments on all the blogs and all of the articles out there.
And all of them are in support of that the company is doing everything right and that the Consumer Product Safety Commission has overstepped their reach and what they're doing.
That's who they are.
That is exactly it.
Seems to be the case.
Craig, thanks for the call and best of luck.
Thank you.
Save our balls and we'll be back after this.
You know, it was not the birds, it was turtles that they tried to ban balloons because of.
Balloons would end up used balloons.
They never tried to ban condoms for this reason.
I never understood the difference why, but they banned balloons because these turtles, both land turtles and sea turtles, were ingesting the balloons and lost.
There were no air in them.
Turtles come up there and eat the balloon on the ground, and that's it.
They try to ban balloons, but never condoms.
Now, what you heard happening to Buckyballs, it sounds like they're being singled out, but they're not.
There are a lot of small businesses.
The same technique is not being used.
But this administration is at war with small business, and they'll find any pretext they can.
Bucky Balls is a $50 million business, and it is growing.
And it's the United States government trying to drive them out of business.
Not find a way to work with them on the safety side, but put them out of business.
It's uncalled for.
There's no excuse.
There's no rational reason for it.
And Mr. Zucker could not explain why he was being targeted.
So you've got an attempted ban of a product and the shutting down of a business.
They're doing this in different ways to the oil industry.
They're not succeeding.
What do you think the oil moratorium is all about?
The drilling moratorium.
The fascinating thing about that, there is a boom economy happening in the Dakotas.
And it's like it's in the twilight zone.
We talk about it here, but nobody knows about it.
It never gets reported on.
But there is an absolute economic boom going on because of new discoveries and technologies in getting oil out of the ground.
They happen to be ways that the left doesn't approve of.
And they've concocted a bunch of lies about what happens, say, to groundwater and other such things because of this method of extracting oil from the ground.
And it's all lies.
It's all trumped up.
But this boom in the Dakotas is so rapid that the biggest problem they have is lack of housing for the people who are moving there to find jobs in the oil business.
They don't have enough places for people to live.
So the next phase is going to be a bunch of developers going in there and rapidly building apartment complexes, condominiums, houses, this kind of thing.
Because the oil business in the Dakotas is going to have deep roots.
The left is targeting it, trying to make it harder and harder for these people with more and more regulation to profitably extract the oil.
It's cleaner.
And what ought to be happening, here we are in the midst of one of the most dismal economies since the Great Depression.
And what ought to be happening is that everybody ought to be going to the Dakotas and saying, look, here's how we escape this.
Here's how they're doing it.
This is how it's done.
You want to see economic growth?
Here it is.
It's happening right here in the country.
Instead, everybody's doing everything they can to keep it a secret.
And beyond even keeping it a secret, they're trying to treat it as though it's some odd fluke thing that is made up of a bunch of weirdos.
There's a Wall Street Journal story today.
They can't build homes fast enough in North Dakota.
Wouldn't you like to see that headline in a lot of states?
It's mind-boggling, folks.
There is a glorious economic boom and recovery happening in North Dakota.
And it remains one of the best kept secrets in all of the world.
North Dakota, 2002, this is Williston, North Dakota.
2002, rent on a two-bedroom apartment might have been $340 a month, but now rents on two-bedroom apartments in Williston, North Dakota are between $1,755, $2,700 a month.
Just supply and demand.
There isn't enough housing to accommodate people working in bringing about this boom.
Anyway, fastest three hours immediately, two down and done.
▲
Export Selection