And we're back meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network.
And we come to you each day live from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882 and the email address El Rushbo at EIBNet.com.
By the way, folks, according to the Census Bureau, it's 49% of Americans.
Romney was wrong.
He underestimated it.
49% of Americans in the second quarter of 2011 lived in a household where at least one member received a government benefit.
Total population at the time was 305 million.
So a little over a year ago, 49% of Americans lived in a household where there was at least one member getting a benefit.
And that's up from 30% in the 1980s and up 44% in the third quarter of 2008.
And I have to tell you something.
Mitt Romney did not make any of these 49% dependent on the government.
Well, wait a second.
Might have with his health care in Massachusetts.
We could throw them out.
But you get the point.
Romney wants to lift everybody he can out of government dependency.
You know, folks, I just saw Dorothy Rabinowitz from the Wall Street Journal on Fox talking about, I just caught the tail end, but she was talking about how Romney comes across to people, stiff, distant, uncaring.
Look, that all may be true.
I couldn't care less.
What's the objective?
The objective, we are voting to stop Obama.
And we are hoping that a majority of Americans agree with us.
But at the same time, what is Obama compassionate and cool and attached and all that?
So what if Romney's stiff?
Everybody says Romney's stiff.
So what?
What does that matter?
Given what we face, I know, I know, I know we're talking about low-information voters and how they make judgments and all that.
But you're not going to be able to turn Romney into something he's not.
He's not some loosey-goosey, happy-go-lucky guy.
It isn't going to change.
You can sit here and complain about it.
It's going to change.
It ain't going to get anything done.
Comes off that way.
The way it comes off to me is he didn't make any of those 47% dependent.
He wants to lift people out of it.
Mitt Romney has a history.
He has a story of creating jobs, growing businesses.
What's Obama's story?
What's Obama's history?
Creating dependency and growing government and regulations that make it hard to do business.
Barack Obama is punitive towards small business people.
Mitt Romney's not.
The choice here is easy.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have this piece.
I'm going to finally get to this and share it with you.
It's this piece.
Charles Murray's latest book suggests the elite colleges are tearing apart the nation's social fabric.
And it's a piece that was ran in the, I think it was a Wall Street Journal.
It looks like it ran in the Wall Street Journey, which by Martin Morse Wooster, John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.
So Martin Morse Wooster has reviewed the Charles Murray book.
And let me just share some of this stuff with you.
One of the arguments for education at an elite college is the networking, the connections that students make at those schools.
Writing recently in the New Yorker, Columbia Journalism School Dean Nicholas Lehman made that argument, saying that Ivy League tuitions are undervalued because admission to a Harvard or a Yale provides a student with a gilded key to ascend the top of the social ladder.
That's the dean of the Columbia Journalism School saying that the value of a Harvard education is a gilded key to the top of the social ladder.
Now, what have I always told you?
Washington.
It's not just the work structure that people sit atop, it's the social structure.
And that's where all this elitism comes in.
And that's where the cool and the hip are, where the uncool and the unhip aren't.
And it's where the conservatives who arrive in town aren't, and where, sadly, many of them want to end up being.
They want to be accepted socially.
Everybody does.
I may be the only person in America that doesn't care about that.
I am the most boring person you would ever run into off the air.
I don't care about any of that.
I run away from it.
But it's seductive to a lot of people.
And here you have the Columbia Journalism School dean admitting that the value of being admitted to a Harvard or Yale is that you get the key to the top of the social ladder in Washington, in New York, in Boston.
That's what you get.
And therefore, it's worth whatever it costs your parents to send you there.
Charles Murray, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, would disagree with Lehman on most public policy issues, but both would firmly agree that a degree from a prestigious screw greatly boosts the odds of a cent into the highest levels of American life.
The theme of Murray's latest book, Coming Apart, is that our country is in trouble because the few graduates of elite colleges get the glittering prizes of life and that everybody else is fighting over what's left.
In other words, nobody ever gets out of high school, really.
It just changes location.
Charles Murray, the author of the book, believes that America is splitting into a world where the cognitive elite, top lawyers, government officials in the senior executive service or higher, editors of leading newspapers and magazines, and most movie and TV producers and directors live in enclaves where they only consort with people very much like themselves.
Part of the book is an exploration of differences between highbrows and lowbrows in the tradition of class by the late Paul Fusell, which suggested that there are nine levels of class in the U.S., or the works of Russell Lines, who in 1949 introduced the concepts of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow.
The book even has a pop quiz where Murray asks his readers to take the questions to see which class they are.
And if you know that Jimmy Johnson is a NASCAR champion or if you enjoy fishing, you are not upper class.
Even if some fly fishermen with six-figure incomes would disagree, according to these people, if you know who the NASCAR champion is and if you fly fish, you are not upper class.
You can't possibly be.
The elite colleges pride themselves on their diversity, but Charles Murray argues that they really aren't very diverse at all.
Their students are far more often than not children of rich white parents, rich Asian parents, or rich African-American parents.
Earning a degree from one of the elite scruples enables you to live in what Murray calls the super zips, areas where people have stratospheric incomes, such as Bethesda, Maryland, the upper west side of Manhattan, or Palo Alto, California.
Few of the people who live in these upper crust enclaves are not Ivy Leaguers or graduates of other elite colleges and universities.
As Murray sees it, the elite colleges of America are divided into several tiers.
At the top tier, he argues, are Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, followed by Stanford, Duke, MIT, the rest of the Ivy League, and some of what used to be known as the Seven Sisters.
If you throw in the rest of the top 25 universities and liberal arts schools, as rated by U.S. News and World Report and Barons, you'll have a fairly complete list of all of the elite schools.
Now, the reason that these universities are in the top tier, says Charles Murray, is not that they offer superior education.
They don't.
It's because they practice cognitive stratification.
He explains that until around 1960, Ivy League students weren't that much smarter than anybody else.
A 1926 study of students at Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale found that these students' IQs averaged 117, while the average college student of that era had an IQ of 115.
The average SAT verbal score of a Harvard freshman in 1952 was a relatively meager 583.
Murray deduces from these facts that America's academic talent, its brain power, was far more widely dispersed among colleges and universities than it is now.
In the 1950s, the Ivies and other top schruels changed their standards.
By 1960, Harvard's freshman's average SAT verbal score had risen to 678, meaning that the average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10% of the incoming class in 1960.
Other top schools tightened their admission standards at the same time.
Murray compares the Yale classes of 61 and 66.
In 1961, 25% of Yale freshmen had SAT verbals below 600 by 1966.
Five years later, it was only 9% who had below 600 SATs.
As evidence of the trend, Murray cites the work of sociologist Roger Geiger, who looked at where students who had the highest 5% SAT or ACT scores in 1997 went to college.
Geiger found that 10 schools took 20% of these brainy students and 41 schools took half of them.
Now, it's true that these elite scruples seem more meritocratic than they used to be.
The power of old money to open admission doors has largely disappeared, although there's still a little room for legacies or the children of celebrities.
Even at the oldest colleges, no admission officer cares anymore whether a student qualifies for membership in the sons or daughters of the American Revolution.
What they mostly care about are high scores on standardized tests and a parent's ability to pay.
To show how homogenous the elite scruples are, Murray cites the findings of another sociologist, Joseph Source, in his book, The Power of Privilege.
SOARS, using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study, shows that in the 1990s, 79% of the students at elite schools came from families with incomes in the highest 25%.
Only 2% came from families with incomes in the bottom quarter.
So so much for your precious affirmative action, diversity, and all that rotgut.
Those were the tokens.
This, Murray argues, is matters because smart, rich parents tend to produce smart, rich kids.
Well, at least rich kids who marry people like themselves and then pass their genes and wealth on to the future.
As Murray wrote in a Washington Post op-ed two years ago, the more efficiently a society identifies the most able young people of both sexes and then sends them to the best colleges and unleashes them into the economy that's tailor-made for people with their abilities and lets proximity take its course the sooner a new elite becomes a class unto itself.
Thus, America's elite colleges and universities have become the breeding ground of the new elite class, cloistered and unable to appreciate or understand other parts of America.
In addition, Murray sees the American elite as morally hollow.
The upper class does many things well, including have strong and lasting marriages, but is unwilling and possibly unable to defend the virtues that led to its success.
The signs that America's new upper class has suffered a crisis of self-confidence are hard to ignore.
We interviewed him about this for the Limbaugh Letter, the most widely read political newsletter outside the elites in the country.
By being separate from the rest of the nation, this elite class fails to set an example of good behavior that's necessary for everybody to follow in order to succeed.
The elite colleges are implicitly part of that problem.
So intellectuals are known for overthinking problems.
And the guy writing this review thinks that Murray may have overthought this to an extent.
He's not convinced that Murray's right, that the elite colleges set up the elite population and give them the gilded key to ascend to the height of the social.
But I think he's right.
Anyway, I've been citing this for the past week or so, and I just wanted to share it with you.
Now, brief time out, we'll get back to your phone calls when we come back.
So be patient.
Okay, back to the phones.
And these people have been waiting a long time, and I appreciate your patience, all of you.
Tampa, Florida, Jason, you're next.
Great to have you here, sir.
Hello.
Hey, Mega Ditto's Rush, longtime listener since 1989, but first time caller.
Thank you very much.
But you're almost a wifer.
Yeah, since.
1988 was the first year you came in in year two.
I mean, it's almost the whole time.
Junior year of high school in KFI Los Angeles.
Whoa, whoa.
That's big.
I look back on this.
25.
We're in our 25th year now.
I just, sometimes I wonder if I could do it all over again if we were just starting.
I don't believe.
Anyway, I won't belabor the point, but why do we have you here today?
Why'd you call?
Well, obviously I'm calling about the Romney audio clip, and I completely agree with you.
I think it's a golden opportunity for us to have a discussion about what I believe is really the central issue in this campaign.
And it really is what direction we want our country to go in.
I mean, I think, you know, you think about how the Democrats always talk about the social safety net and love to talk about how the Republicans want to do away with that.
You know, what's implied in the idea of a social safety net is that, you know, the idea is that you would break people's fall if they've actually made an attempt to achieve, and it's something to break their fall to help them get back on their feet.
And unfortunately, you know, what it's turning into in this country, and I think this is kind of what Romney was getting at, is that especially with the election of Barack Obama, people are no longer even attempting to achieve.
People have lost hope.
I mean, it's acceptable.
The news media, the president, and this administration is sitting there telling us that it's okay that 90 million people have dropped out of the workforce, that 16% unemployment is acceptable.
And I mean, frankly, it's tragic that that's where we are as a country.
Exactly right.
Exactly right.
And that's why this is a golden opportunity.
And I got to tell you, it's not scientific, but CNBC has been running an online poll about whether or not you agree with Romney.
75% out of 10,000 respondents agree with Romney.
This is not a losing issue for him.
I don't think if he plays this right, that's your cue to continue.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's just, I think you're absolutely right.
He needs to just play it the correct way and point out that, you know, there's two directions that we can go in as a country.
We can continue to circle the drain of this path of where we have, you know, over 50% of the country collecting and 10% of the country footing the bill, or we can take a different course where people take the approach of achieving, attempting to get a job in the greatest country on the face of the earth.
And I think step number one, obviously, is getting rid of Barack Obama so we can get back to work in this country.
Exactly right.
Exactly right.
That's what this election has always been about, stopping Barack Obama and the Democrat Party.
Let me ask you a question.
I've got, you know, I got a big prize clause.
I'm going to give you something.
You're a lifery.
You've been here in 1989, and you are a smart guy.
And your definition of social safety net, pretty close.
Pretty close.
So I got three things here.
Door number one, door number two, door number three.
You either going to have a brand new MacBook Pro retina display, 15-inch.
Okay.
I'm not going to tell him what door they're behind.
Okay.
You got an iPhone 4S.
I'm sorry.
It's brand new, but as of Friday, it's the old phone.
And a iPad 3, brand new engraved EIB signature iPad 3, door 1, 2, or 3.
You tell me which door and whatever's behind there is what you get.
All right, we'll do door number one.
Door number one is the engraved iPad.
Excellent.
They don't sound happy.
You already have one?
I do, but I'm happy with that.
No, tell you what, because all you'd have to do is give that away.
You'd have to gift it.
And, of course, it's worth that, but you already got an iPad.
So I'm going to use the power invested in me as host.
Do you have a retina display, MacBook Pro?
I do not, no.
Well, then that, we just moved that to door number one.
Outstanding.
Yeah, wait till you see this thing.
Wait till you see this.
It is the fastest computer Apple has ever made.
You'll be blown away by it.
Unbelievable.
I know.
Jason, thanks much.
It's great that you've been out there all that long.
I really appreciate it.
Hang on because we'll get the address that we need to have in order to FedEx this to you.
And we don't mail things.
It's not because we're opposed to the mail.
It's just that we'd have to take it to post office.
That's a job beneath my staff.
I just won't do that.
FedEx will come here and pick it up.
So it's got to be FedEx.
Snerdley will be along here in just a second to get your address.
We've got a half hour remaining here.
Big broadcast excellence continues, and we'll be back right after this.
Don't go away.
This is incredible.
Why I got to find this?
What is this?
Biden just stepped in it again.
But you got to hear it twice.
Vice President Joe Bite me said Monday that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is so out of touch with regular Americans, he thinks the middle class extends to people making up to $250,000.
Now, Biden, folks, folks, apparently he forgot that that's Obama's definition.
That's right.
If you make $250,000 or less in the middle class, you are not going to see a tax increase from me.
What an idiot.
Biden forgot that that's the same benchmark Obama and congressional Democrats always use, $250,000.
Don't you love it when Biden tries to call somebody stupid?
Okay, where are we going on the phones?
Give me a number, give me a line, tell me where we're headed.
We're going to Carmen in Dallas.
Carmen, great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi, Red.
Hi.
Thank you for everything that you do.
I wanted to say that, you know, what's interesting is that Obama sets himself up as the benevolent president that gives out all these things that we need.
But really, the truth is that these come from the taxpayers, and the taxpayers are getting squeezed by Obama.
And so all these benefits, these so-called government benefits, are from the taxpayers.
And Obama can set himself up as being the benevolent giver, but he's not benevolent.
Now, theoretically, you're right.
The government doesn't have a dime until it takes it from somebody.
But Obama wants the credit for having all the compassion.
He's not giving his money away.
Exactly.
He's not redistributing his own money.
He's redistributing yours.
Now, when I said technically, we're so much in debt that some of the dollars are the THICOMs.
And some dollars are borrowed from other people.
But theoretically, you're right on the money.
Government wouldn't have a dime without taking it from somebody.
And then you're exactly right.
It's Obama and the Democrats.
Who want credit for all the compassion?
You know what the Obama slogan is?
I've got the power to take what you've got.
That's exactly what I've got the power to take what you've got.
Vote for me.
Of course, he doesn't say that to the people he's going to be taking it from.
He says a variation of that to people he's going to be giving it to.
By the way, ladies and gentlemen, the latest news, Iran has deployed a Russian-made submarine in the Gulf.
A Chinese general.
These are drudge headlines.
Iran deploys Russian-made submarine in the Gulf.
Chinese general prepares for combat with Japan.
Libya is warning of more violence.
Obama is heading to Letterman.
And after Letterman, which tapes around 5 or 5.30, he's in off to a fundraiser with Jay-Z and Beyoncé and Green Ivy.
The kid.
So that's what it looks like out there today.
Iran deploying Russian-made subs in the Gulf.
Chinese general says to prepare for combat with Japan.
Libya warns of more violence.
And there's Obama on Letterman.
By the way, piece from Breitbart, who writes about the Gallup numbers that are out today, which we reported to you in the first hour.
Gallup has at Obama 4746.
That's up one.
Obama was up three in the previous Gallup number.
This afternoon, Gallup reported its latest tracking poll.
Obama's lead has slipped again.
But more importantly, in the Gallup poll, it represents a six-week swing in Obama's support in one week.
Last week, Obama led by seven points.
Now, clearly, what's going to happen is the media will tell us this is trouble for Romney.
He's only down one point.
He used to be down seven.
Definitely a problem for Romney.
Here's a pull quote from the piece.
The entire political universe began convincing themselves that Romney was fading away.
And yet, Romney gained ground as Obama lost ground.
Obama's approval rating slipped today under 50 to 49 percent.
His disapproval rose.
Expect the media to get very nervous now.
On the political word or in the political world, we have a term for a campaign that loses six points in just one week, and that's trouble.
Unfortunately for the media, this applies now to the Obama campaign, not the Romney campaign.
I'm telling the truth here.
Obama's down six points.
No, total of seven since last week.
Romney is up, and Obama's approval number is under 50.
Folks, is it perhaps now a little bit more clear why the mitt tape was released to the media last night?
Kind of makes sense now.
Obama is in trouble.
Obama's plummeting.
And by the way, there's another story.
I've got to find this before the program ends.
A great analysis of all kinds of polls that conclude that Obama is in deep trouble and that the mainstream media knows it and that their polls are not showing it.
And all it is, is an analysis of current polls and their samples, the party breakdown for each poll and how distorted and unreal or unrealistic their samples are.
And then this is interesting too.
May of 2004, May 2004, May 2004.
F. Chuck Todd, who at that time was the editor-in-chief of the Hotline, National Journal, he wasn't at NBC yet.
And the headline of F. Chuck Todd's piece in May of 2004 was based on polling data, a Kerry landslide.
And it's a page and a half here.
Oh, look, it's longer than that.
Two pages, maybe more, on how John Kerry in May of 2004 was headed to a landslide win over George W. Bush.
Now, what this means is the media is perfectly willing to lie, not only to us, but to themselves.
And the funny thing is, the great thing is they believe the lies they tell themselves.
It's pathological.
They really thought, I'm sure F. Chuck thought in May of 2004 Kerry is going to win in a landslide.
They thought that when the exit polls came in on election night 2004.
I'm sure they think Obama's going to win on a landslide.
They can't fathom anything else.
But they look at these Gallup numbers today, and they're going to be in trouble.
They're going to recognize it as trouble.
And I think I saw it yesterday, and that's why the Romney tape was released.
Got to take a timeout.
We'll do that.
Continue here in just a second.
Don't go away.
I just saw that Steve Sable has passed away.
NFL Films.
I knew Steve Sable.
I don't have time to do justice in the remaining moments today, so I'll put that off to tomorrow.
But Steve, he let me tag along a couple Super Bowls, what they do.
Their pregame meal, all the way through the game, up the press box, pregame post game.
It was fascinating.
And it even appeared on a couple of NFL shows.
Back when I was not a pariah of the NFL, he was a great guy.
He really was.
That's a shame.
He's had 18 years or 18 months brain cancer.
His dad just got in the NFL Hall of Fame, Ed Sable, who founded NFL Films.
And Steve got to see that.
So that's good.
The polling data that I have is from a blog called Date.
No, Day Tech Guy.
Day Tech Guy.
He's analyzed all of these polls and the party identifications that they use.
And they don't match up with reality.
And so the results from all these polls are so skewed.
And this guy has gone to great lengths to illustrate it.
And he concludes that the truth of the matter is that people in the mainstream media, if you want to know the truth, they're the ones demoralized.
They're the ones that know they're using Trumped up data.
They're the ones that know that they have manufactured a false narrative or reality that they are trying to make you believe.
And every day they're going through the pressure of wondering whether or not you're believing it.
And even as they doctor the polls, even they didn't the Gallup thing comes out today.
And even with a skewed sample there, Obama has lost seven points in the last week.
And his approvals dipped under 50%.
And that's why the Romney tape came out last night.
Or real sampling should be.
The latest Rasmussen poll of Party ID, released on August 31st, found that people identify themselves 37.6 Republican, 33% Democrat, 29.2% Independent.
These polls should be oversampling Republicans by 4%.
And the CBS poll Friday had a Democrat plus 13 sample.
So that's the kind of stuff that's happening.
They know they can dispirit you.
They know they can depress you.
And they're trying.
What they want you doing is giving up, thinking it's over, and sitting home.
That's their only hope because they can't tout Obama.
They can't go, yeah, yeah, we want Barack.
We won't, because nobody would buy that.
By the way, that Rasmussen report also found that more voters now identify as Republican than at any other time in history, which includes November 2010.
So despite what the media tries to convince you, you are not alone.