I'm watching Fox here at the top of the hour break.
They got Ed Henry, their White House reporter, and they're talking to Megan Kelly, and uh the question is will there be any spending cuts in the fiscal cliff to come?
There will not be any spending cuts in the physical cliff.
At best there will be reductions in the rate of spending growth if there is even that.
But Obama won the election.
The Republicans are in the cave profile.
Why in the world would anybody think that they're going to be spending Dick Durbin, the Democrats are all out there saying there's not going to be any entitlement reforms, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, not even on the table.
So they're going to kick the can down the road.
Not going to solve anything here.
The best way to understand this fiscal cliff, don't look at it as a way to try to create economic growth or if there's more redistribution.
It's higher tax rates on the middle class, not just the rich, another big myth.
Greetings, welcome back.
Great to have you, Rush Limbaugh here, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
More on this in a moment.
I'm going to give a little think piece here, just a little stat.
Byron York had a piece over the weekend at a DC examiner.
Said, yeah, the Republicans, if you want to focus on the Latino vote, go ahead, but you didn't lose the election because of it.
And if you want to focus on the women in the 30 vote, go ahead, but you didn't lose the election because of it.
Interesting stat.
More old white people, 65 and older, voted in the election than all the Hispanics or blacks combined.
Romney's still lost.
This is not to say not make an effort, the Hispanic vote, but if you're going to go get the Hispanic vote as it exists today, there are certain things you're going to have to do, which we've talked about earlier in the program, folks.
They just family values to them is, by the way, here's another little secret.
You start talking about cutting government, that scares the heck out of people because they think that means cuts in state government, too.
And believe me, when it when it comes to the left, and people that vote Democrat, family values is not about abortion or contraception or same-sex marriage or any of that.
Family values is about making sure the government is able to take care of the family.
Now, Snerdley, you can shake your head all day long in there all you want, but that's exactly that's exactly what this election told us.
And if you're not gonna, if people are not gonna be willing to you might say, well, we would have won if if, yeah, well, the ifs didn't happen.
If there have been more people that voted, yeah, turnout was down.
Wonder why.
Why was turnout down?
Obama could have been beaten.
I don't want anybody misunderstand here.
Obama could have been beaten.
The Republicans could have won this election.
And now, as they analyze why they lost it, they're making the biggest mistake in the world in assuming that they have to go out and get the demographic vote that they lost because there's only one way to get it, and that's stop being Republicans.
Why do you think not meaning to yell here?
Why do you think the Democrats are so eager for Republicans to agree to amnesty?
Why do you think the Democrats are do you think the Democrats want to get rid of their voters?
You think the Democrats want to share their voters with the Republicans?
You think the Democrats want to help the Republicans?
So why are the Democrats saying, you know, you guys, you need to under, you need to agree with us on amnesty.
You need to agree with us on same-sex marriage, you need to agree with us on uh uh uh uh d all these social issues.
You better you better abandon what you why are they saying that?
And Republicans sound like they're eager to do that.
They're gonna come to all the wrong conclusions.
Anyway, we're gonna have lots of time to discuss all this, and I'm sure many of you want to weigh in on it when we get to the phones.
There are other stuff out there as well that I want to touch on here today as we um get back to busy broadcasting.
Jeff Zucker uh as was expected, is uh looks like he's gonna get the CNN gig.
Now, people I I've often believed that the best resume enhancement you can have as a liberal is to fail.
They move you to the top.
And they do it for a reason.
They will never allow their ideology to be blamed for anything that goes wrong anywhere in the country, within their party, or anything else.
So Jeff Zucker, basically, and I don't know Jeff Zucker.
I don't dislike him.
I don't like him.
I don't know him.
All I know is that when he ran NBC Universal, he ran them into the ground.
You can take a look at what once was the NBC primetime behemoth, and you have to go back to the past to find it.
He's now going to run CNN.
They promote their failures in order to save their ideology.
They are that proud of it, they're that confident.
We, on the other hand, can't wait to get rid of our failures.
In fact, even before they fail, if the left says they don't like people, like I mentioned the other in the last hour, when I challenged Snerdley, name for me a proud, happy, cheerful, confident conservative who believes it and will say it and talk about it unashamedly, day in and day out, Sarah Palin, and look what happened to her.
Now it's natural that the left would despise her because they were afraid of her.
The thing that I will I will go to my grave being angry about is what happened to her in her own party.
I can't tell you how frustrated I got when I would run into average Republican voters, people not in politics is what I mean by average voters, just citizens that vote Republican.
Who said, well, we got to get rid of Palin.
Why?
Well, look what the media's done to her.
Oh, so you just want to sit there and let the media destroy our people.
Now, once the media, yeah, well, that's a test for me.
If if if if they can't survive the media, they don't deserve to be.
Oh, okay, so the media can determine our candidates.
Is that what you're telling me?
And they essentially said yeah.
They weren't willing to even speak up in defense of her.
Because they thought it would make them sound stupid too.
Since that's what everybody thought of Palin, since that was the image that was created for her, that she was stupid, not bright, that anybody defending her would be tarred the same way, and they didn't want that, so okay, I'll throw her overboard.
I've always been in a fight mode when it comes to the media to not let them define us or determine who our champions are, or any of that, because their objective is to destroy all the quality people on our side.
They have our people acquiesce to it.
I can't tell you how it bummed me out.
Dan Rather, a total career embarrassment with the George Bush National Guard story.
What happened?
Tom Brokaw and the late Peter Jennings created a brand new award, some lifetime achievement and plagiarism award or whatever it was, and they gave it to Rather at a big dinner that got all kinds of publicity after Rather embarrassed himself.
Because they had to save their industry.
And they were willing to do it.
They were willing to save the news business as it exists.
They were willing to save rather to do it, and they were willing, didn't matter if it looked like they were embarrassing themselves, they didn't care.
They were saving liberalism, their ideology, saving their business, the news business, and they were saving uh rather.
What do we do?
We don't try to save any of our look at look at the consultants, the Republican consultants who want to throw every conservative media person overboard now.
So Jeff Zucker, who did succeed with the Today Show, but then they moved in the Peter principal got him.
They moved him into the presidency of NBC Universal, it didn't go well.
Now he's being hired to fix CNN, which is in the toilet.
They protect their failures.
They elevate them because they'll do whatever is necessary to save liberalism or socialism or whatever you want to call it.
By the same token, look at Oprah.
Have a story here for the New York Times.
Oprah at a crossroads.
The Oprah is scared.
Because you know what's happened?
The Oprah had her afternoon talk show.
And it was thought that the Oprah owned America television.
Nobody was close to the Oprah.
Their ratings, business, revenue, all of that.
And then the Oprah decided, what was it after 25 years that she's going to move on, and she retired from the show, and she started her own cable network called the Own Network.
And you need a magnifying glass.
Hell, you need a telescope to find it.
They're doing everything they can to save the Oprah.
It's not easy to find a fresh way to photograph Oprah Winfrey.
That's why the editors of Oh, the Oprah magazine recently try to create a shot that recalled the glory days of Oprah's syndicated talk show.
They arranged a photograph her for the April 2013 issue as she stepped on stage to speak to 5,000 attendees of the magazine's annual conference, a new age slumber party of sorts.
Four women held at the convention center in Los Angeles last month, when she confidently strode out dressed in a sea foam green v-neck dress.
That is an sea foam green.
That's a color I've always wanted to see people in.
And a pair of perilously tall ruby red stilettos.
The audience collectively leapt to its feet and shrieked at the sight of her.
Some women shouted while other fans cried.
I love you back, said the Oprah.
Ms. Winfrey, who used to receive his kind of applause from fans five days a week, has had fewer such receptions since her show ended 18 months ago.
The cable network own, which she started with Discovery, is emerging from low ratings and management shakeups without a regular presence on daytime network TV, the Oprah cannot steer traffic to her other products as easily as in the past.
Her magazine has experienced a decline in advertising revenue, newsstand sales since the talk show finished have plummeted.
She's still the Oprah, but she's still struggling, said Janice Peck, an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Colorado, who wrote a book in 2008 called The Age of Oprah.
I think the Oprah is scared, said Janice Peck, even though she very, very rich and she's always going to be very, very rich, the possibility of failure is quite scary.
So this whole New York Times piece is how the Oprah is not doing well in all of her ventures these days.
But because she is a liberal, a liberal woman of color, she is being saved.
And she's being hyped as the most wonderful that's ever been.
Folks, I'm telling you, the OWN Network, when I say you need a telescope to find it, I am not exaggerating by much.
They're out doing everything they can to save the Oprah.
Because in saving the Oprah, they save liberalism and they save the movement.
And so what's nerdily?
What's the question?
What?
How come Obama is not stepping into that?
Are you kidding?
Let me let me tell you something.
Let me tell you something.
The one thing about Barack Obama, he's not going to save anybody.
If they fall overboard, they are on their own.
He's not going to risk being plunged down with people on the way down.
He's not going to risk it at all.
That's uh if you don't understand that about the Obama.
That's right.
So if Obama if if the Oprah has slipped overboard, you know, he's up there, Jay, hey, Oprah.
Huh.
Oh, well, hope you get back up here.
I'll be here when you get back.
We love you.
Hey, Oprah, you didn't build that.
That's what this means.
You didn't build that.
Um.
So there are countless other examples like this.
Jimmy Carter.
May be the worst president in the history of the country, present company excluded, of course.
Top seat Democrat convention.
They do what they can to save Jimmy Carter because they got to save the party.
They got to save the movement.
And yet.
You know as well as I do.
Look at how quickly the Republicans couldn't wait to throw Sarah Palin overboard.
Or any number of other conservatives that I could name for you.
And as far as Obama, he's not even not only is he not helpful, he's not grateful.
You could say that the Oprah helped give us the Obama.
In fact, you could say, and you wouldn't be far wrong, that the beginning of the Oprah's plunge was when she went political and endorsed Obama because up until then, all these women who watched the Oprah never thought of her in political terms.
You and I thought they must be, but we were wrong.
They did not think of her in political terms.
That's been another big secret of the left.
They've been able to do liberalism each and every day with people not thinking it's politics.
But Oprah was nothing but pure new age liberalism every day.
Her audience never realized that until she endorsed Obama.
Then they said, whoa, wait a minute.
And that's when the help we say the decline of the Oprah began.
It did, folks.
And Obama, you know, the Oprah's out there swimming in the ocean, barely afloat, and Obama's up on deck of the cruise ship looking down.
Hey, hey, Oprah!
It's nice knowing you.
Watch out for that shark.
Gotta take a break.
Be back after this.
Don't go away.
Yeah, you know I just saw.
I'm watching, I'm watching television here during the break.
Apparently a guy, well, a young student, a young girl with cerebral palsy, got off the school bus and was crossing the street to get in her parents' car for the ride home, and some guy starts walking behind her, imitating her.
It happened in October.
She doesn't know.
I guess she was told.
They're putting him in jail.
The guy walking behind the girl with cerebral palsy, imitating her walk, is being put in jail.
Probably next to the guy who did the video.
That Susan Rice maintains caused all the problems in Benghazi.
And in America in 2012, both those people ought to be in jail.
Damn straight.
Damn right put them in jail.
Intimidation?
Exactly right.
Intimidation, mockery, making fun of making her cry.
Damn right put him in jail.
Don't even think about it.
You watch, you'll see the video.
You'll see this girl with cerebral palsy getting into her car.
This guy gets off the bus, follow her and making fun of her.
That's even worse than adult should have known better.
Absolutely put him in jail.
It was not his son.
There was son next to him.
He was not imitating his son, it was somebody else's kid.
Well, put put put the son in jail, too, for having the guts to walk next to his dad while his dad was doing this.
Legal marijuana, legalized marijuana in Colorado and Washington State.
NPR has a story here.
Legal Pot is here, but and and they start speculating and they mention, do you know that in the past Philip Morris wanted to put marijuana in cigarettes and tobacco cigarettes?
They wanted to call it Marley.
And Bob Marley of Bob Martin the Whalers estate got made.
You can't do that.
And they said, we're not naming it after you.
We're thinking of Jacob Marley.
Christmas Carol.
That didn't fly.
But I have a question for you, folks.
Because there's a uh a companion story someplace, Burlington, Vermont, I don't know where it is.
They've banned smoking in buildings next to bars now.
They banned smoking in buildings next to restaurants.
And I'm just I'm just wondering, and and of course they should do that in America 2012.
Hell yes, they should do that.
Now, would liberals end up loving big tobacco if big tobacco was allowed to put marijuana in cigarettes.
Because it's coming.
Marijuana will be legal in this.
It's already it's it's it's it's just it's gay marriage, you never thought that would happen.
It's going to happen, folks, and it could save the tobacco business.
Okay, back to the phones.
This is Dennis in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Hi, Dennis, you're on the EIB network.
Hi.
Hey Rush, how you doing?
I can't believe I'm talking to one force of my perfect golf horse.
Hey, wanted to make a uh a couple points here.
Um I'm just afraid our guys have already changed.
I don't think they really understand what liberalism is.
Uh, to your point about true conservatism.
I think that uh one point our senator was a true conservative, but when he goes on MSNBC with Chris Matthews and Joe Klein and starts talking about all options are on the table, uh really really bothers me.
Um You're talking about Tom Colburn.
Tom Colburn, yeah, the senator from from Oklahoma.
When when was the last time we saw you the liberals on any of the talk shows talking about uh spending decreases?
Well, look, uh your your instinct on this is uh is right.
The Republicans right now, uh Dennis are shell-shocked.
The Republicans really thought that Romney was going to win the election, and I think they thought it was going to be fairly sizable.
Not landslide, but there are a lot of people thought Romney was going to win.
As a result, the Republicans are now shell-shocked.
They are believing that every core principle they have has been rejected by a majority of the American people.
And a politician's job is to get re-elected first and to spend money second.
That's their job.
So that's why you're hearing from the Republicans all the things they think they've got to do in order to get the votes that they lost to Obama.
So they got to get the illegal immigration vote.
That's amnesty.
They've got to get uh the welfare state vote, that's uh well, supporting bigger government.
Well for that.
They don't there's no there's no impetus right now in the Republican Party to buck up and to embark on an educational Process to the American people.
It's just not how Republican politics works.
The Democrats, by comparison, when they lose, you never ever hear a single Democrat say, you know what?
Maybe we're going to have to abandon amnesty.
You know what?
Maybe we're going to have to abandon our pro-abortion position.
They never publicly or privately say anything like that.
Their objective is to conduct an even more fervent assault on the voters for voting against them.
So that's just where we are.
Of course there isn't going to be entitlement reform.
My question would be, hey, why does anybody think there will be?
Who won the election?
Barack Obama and the Democrats.
Do they believe in entitlement reform?
No.
Do they think that the entitlements should be made smaller and that government should get smaller?
No.
Who lost the election?
The Republicans.
What power do they have?
They have the House of Representatives and that's it.
They don't have the Senate.
They don't have the White House.
They don't they're not looking at their position as being in any way, shape, man, or form one of strength.
What do you mean, Rush?
The parameters of the deal were going to be entitlement of what deal?
The so-called balanced approach.
Who is they?
Okay.
So Bomb and the Democrats said that we're going to the fiscal cliff digging a balanced approach and balanced means we're going to have some spending cuts along with revenue enhancements.
Right.
Well, I'm sorry.
I just don't believe a word the Democrats say, particularly when they start talking about balance or spending cuts.
They may say it, they don't believe it, and it isn't going to happen.
Not the current configuration, not with Obama in the White House, not even three weeks after winning.
Why in the world does anybody think Obama's gonna give anything away three weeks after winning the election?
Why does anybody think Obama is in a weakened position after winning elections?
Why does anybody think that we are in a more powerful position after losing the election?
So what are we gonna do?
Well, we can do our best to hold tight on no tax increases.
But I mean, I'm I look at I've seen Republicans here and there say, well, yeah, we're gonna have to look at the revenue side of things.
That's no question about debt.
Yes, there is a question because the revenue side of things isn't the problem.
The spending side of things is the problem, and but we didn't win, folks.
The people that believe in no limits on spending did.
Here.
Let me say.
Uh two stories here.
I find I find this fascinating.
We've got a Rasmussen survey on their Rasmussen Consumer Index in index investor confidence drops below consumer confidence for the first time since March of 2009.
For the first time since March of 2009, the Rasmussen Investor Index is now lower than the Rasmussen Consumer Index.
So the investors are not as confident as the goofy consumers are.
That's one.
Now, Gallup.
You see this and you just...
You just throw your arms up and you say, What do you do?
For the first time, for the first time In Gallup trends since 2000.
A majority of Americans say it is not the federal government's responsibility to make sure that all Americans have health care coverage.
Prior to 2009, a majority always felt the government should ensure health care coverage for all, though Americans' views have become more divided in recent years.
So first time in 12 years.
First time in 12 years after the American people re-elected a guy who wants single payer health care coverage.
Gallup says the majority of Americans don't think the government should be in charge of it.
Now what are we to make of this?
Because the majority of voting Americans just voted for single-payer health care coverage.
Whether they know it or not, they voted for Obamacare.
They voted for the guy who wrote it, gave it to it, well, sponsored it, what have you.
But now we got a poll.
I don't when was the poll taken?
Let me see.
Uh it's uh doesn't.
I I don't know if this was uh before or after the election.
I'm I'm scanning this very quickly here.
I can't can't tell.
Anyway, what do you what do you make of this?
I mean, all you can do is laugh at it.
Okay, majority of Americans oppose federal health care guarantee for the first time.
Too bad.
You just voted for it, you idiot.
Be right back.
That Gallup poll, by the way, was conducted after the election, the one where a majority of Americans don't want the government running health care November 15th through the 18th, after the election.
Go figure.
It just it just goes the polling sample did not reflect the turnout sample is uh what that means.
By the way, the most recent two if by tea gigantic sweepstakes where you uh the winner gets to pick anywhere in the continental U.S. He wants to go for three days and two nights.
We have that winner.
We called a winner last night's in Vaccaville, California.
Uh right, right not far from my adopted hometown of Sacramento.
And the winner was not home, so Catherine and I left a message on the voicemail, and always risky because they never believe it's really me.
But we did.
Uh and want to thank everybody that uh that entered and you can check all of our former winners on our Hall of Patriots page at 2 if by T.com.
Uh ladies and gentlemen, there's an incredible community.
I don't want anybody to get the wrong idea from um today's program.
There, there's a well, no, I just uh you know me, mayor of Realville.
There's some things hard cold reality that we're gonna have to deal with if we're gonna turn this around.
And it will get turned around.
The question is when how and whatever do not discount, ladies and gentlemen, the notion of how historic twists pop up in second terms in presidential second terms, the historic twists of the unexpected could be just around the bend.
Now, given this guy's luck, it could well be that his second term be one of the greatest in history.
Who knows?
And the guy that did the video might actually be executed.
Which the American people would support, of course.
And Susan Rice will be confirmed to the United Nations or the Secretary of State.
I'm laughing at that too.
I we didn't have a chance to discuss that.
But here's Lindsay Gramnesty and and and McCain even more concerned after they spoke.
Apparently, we're dealing here, folks, with a real business being there.
Uh kind of person, which is also typical.
And This is John in Wellington, Florida.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Yeah, hey, many uh ditto rush.
You know, how are you doing?
Very well, sir.
Thank you.
Yeah, I just wanted to say, you know, uh some of the people uh uh this earlier you were talking about uh uh you know the uh these people up north uh uh having uh you know trouble and stuff.
Uh you know, it's like us down in here uh when we had all those storms, you know, and uh uh uh you know, crash, nobody was around to help us but our neighbors.
And uh, you know, that's what we did.
I mean, we had uh uh uh uh you know people's houses banging into other people's houses and uh uh uh you know.
John, let me tell you it's absolutely brilliant comment.
It's um I wish I had more callers like you.
You gotta take care of your yourself and your neighbors, yeah.
Uh exactly right.
That's exactly folks.
Let me tell you, let me tell you how smart this guy is.
Let me tell you, he is so far above the let me tell you what I think he's saying.
He heard me earlier talk about the Nick Christoph column of the New York Times, and Nick Christoph was unhappy that some people during Hurricane Sandy had home generators that they bought themselves, and that other people didn't.
And Nicholas Christoph was upset that the the reason why some people had home generators is because tax rates for the rich are too low, and because of global warming.
And he didn't think it was fair.
So we gotta raise taxes on the rich and go after global warming so that nobody has a generator during a power failure.
And what John here is saying.
Well, I thought these Northerners were so smart.
How come they don't have generators?
And we get a hurricane, we've all got generators.
We don't have to worry about not having power.
We've got see, he's and it's a it's a brilliant question.
And John, let me answer the question for you.
Based on what Nick Christoph column said, uh many people uh apparently were waiting for Governor Christie to show up with generators for them.
And for Mayor Bloomberg to show up with generators for them.
No, that's true.
Christoph did write a column.
He said the reason it's not fair that some people should have generators, and the reason that they do is because tax rates for the rich are too low, and we haven't done enough on global warming.
And it's not fair that the rich can just opt out of the grid when the grid fails when not everybody else can.
Anyway, folks, um yeah, I gotta go.
be back to wrap it up after this folks it's exciting to be back it's always a thrill to be here with you a It's an honor and a privilege uh as well.
And uh I can't believe it's already Wednesday.
I mean the fastest week in media already three down and two to go.
We'll be back tomorrow, 21 hours to uh do it all over.