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Dec. 18, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:41
December 18, 2012, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Ladies and gentlemen, did you know I didn't know?
I just found this out last night.
Did you know that the young man, the shooter in Connecticut was a vegan?
Did you know that he was a vegetarian, essentially?
Did you know that?
Greetings, my friends.
Welcome back.
Happy to have you along here for The Ride, The Excellence in Broadcasting Network, and Rush Limbaugh.
Telephone number 800-282-2882 and the email address LRushbo at EIBnet.com.
Ron Fournier used to be a reporter for the Associated Press.
Now he's moved over to the National Journal.
It's an Inside the Beltway bunch.
They publish a lot of things, among them the hotline and other things.
It's where F. Chuck Todd worked before he went to NBC.
And he is an acknowledged, committed, left-wing Democrat and also a member of the media, which is the same thing.
And he's got a piece just posted.
Actually, it was posted, I guess, late yesterday.
What if there is nobody or nothing to blame for Adam Lanza's heinous acts other than Lanza?
What if school security and the school psychiatrists kept an eye on Lanza since his freshman year?
Wall Street Journal has a compelling narrative about the red flags addressed.
What if he had a form of autism that has little or no link to violent behavior?
Might have had Asperger syndrome, but even so, that's not a cause.
What if it's too simple to lay the measure at the feet of the gun lobby?
What if the NRA had nothing to do with this?
What if Lanza was not provoked by video games?
David Axelrod, close friend and advisor of Obama, tweeted last night in NFL Postgame an ad for shoot-em-up video game, all for curbing weapons of war, but shouldn't we also quit marketing murder as a game?
When I asked whether he was laying the groundwork for a White House initiative, he said, no, just one man's observation.
Quentin Tarantino's got this movie with Jamie Foxx, Durango, about slavery.
Django, Django, yeah, he uses the N-word in it like 100,000 times.
Shoot 'em up, cancel a premiere.
Tom Cruise movie with Jack Reacher, shoot-em-up movie, canceled the premiere.
All these Hollywood people are essentially taking on responsibility.
Well, they are.
They're canceling their premieres.
They're delaying releases.
What are they saying when they're doing this?
I'm not really sure.
But it sounds to me like they think they might have some culpability.
Or they don't want to be accused of having any, so they're delaying the release and their celebratory premiere parties.
What if Mr. Fournier says there, what if there is nobody to blame?
What if nothing is at fault?
Would that make this horror unbearable?
What if we didn't rush to judgment?
What if we didn't waste our thoughts and prayers and actions on assigning blame?
What if we calmly learned whatever reasons we can from the massacre and tried to prevent the next one?
What if it wasn't just one thing, but everything that set the guy off?
What if it no more complicated than the guy just did it?
In other words, excrement happens.
What if, you know, you can't, that's true, you can't get funding for excrement happens.
You can't advance a political agenda on excrement happens.
You can't blame your political opponents for excrement happens.
You can't.
Here's something else that's interesting from the Connecticut CBS affiliate.
And again, these people were all wrong on Friday afternoon.
So I leave it up to you as to whether you choose to believe this or not.
Connecticut Mental Health Bill defeated months before deadly screw shooting.
Before Friday's heinous act, there was talk in Connecticut state legislature to beef up the state's assisted outpatient treatment law.
Connecticut Senate Bill 452 was proposed in February to enhance the care and treatment of persons with psychiatric disabilities in both inpatient and outpatient settings.
But the bill to afford greater care, monitoring, treatment was defeated in March.
People who opposed it said that it was outrageously discriminatory.
And among those opposing it, the American Civil Liberties Union said the bill would infringe on patients' privacy rights by expanding the circle of who can medicate individuals without their consent.
So everybody said, we need to beef up our mental health legislation.
We need to beef up our treatment.
We need to beef up the attention we pay to the mentally.
They tried in Connecticut, and a bunch of leftist activist organizations defeated it.
Had a caller yesterday explained why.
These people have rights.
You can't just go in there and treat them like they don't have rights.
You can't drug them up without their consent.
You can't put them away without their consent.
Now, had the bill been passed, had the Connecticut bill been passed, it would have given the state of Connecticut the right to institutionalize a person who is mentally ill for treatment if the state had enough evidence to believe the person could be a danger to himself or the community.
This is what we had a clinical psychiatrist on the phone just yesterday advocating this is what we need.
If a person, remember, did any of you check out that piece in Gawker that I recommended yesterday?
I Am Ryan, or Adam Liz's mother.
Did you check it out?
Because a woman fears she's got a son mentally ill who's already showing these exact signs of behavior and she can't do anything about it.
She's at her wit's end.
And we have the clinical psychiatrist on the phone saying, what we need is exactly what was now, it turns out, defeated in Connecticut.
I don't know.
I find it fascinating.
Folks, there's one thing to keep in mind here.
And I've got a stack of stuff here about all of these emotional reactions to this episode.
People's emotional reservoirs only hold so much.
And fever pitch emotion subsides after a while.
And I'm going to make a prediction.
And of course, I don't know.
No one can.
And I am by no means certain.
But I wouldn't be surprised if by the time legislative bodies get around to serious legislation infringing on the Second Amendment, the emotional pitch that exists today will have surpassed, will have evaporated.
It will have dissipated, in effect, and there will be less energy associated with it.
And the end result is that probably very little will change.
What's happening now are people politically posturing everywhere.
I'll give you some examples.
Fortune magazine, the money behind the Newtown Massacre.
One way to reduce mass shootings is for big institutions to stop funding the assault weapon manufacturers.
Now, this is from the investing section of Fortune Magazine.
This is not an editorial.
It's presumably a news item.
Do you know who owns more than a 6% stake in the maker of Bushmaster rifles, like the one used Friday?
Do you know?
It is a private equity group, Cerebris, and they have announced that they are getting out of it.
They have announced that they are defunding this company.
They are no longer going to invest in this company.
Cerebris Capital Management has decided that they're out of there.
They don't want to be seen as investing in an evil weapons manufacturing company.
And there are other things.
Senator Joe Manchin, West Virginia, and former Virginia Governor Mark Warner are all saying, no, I've had a second opinion and my daughter has changed my mind on it.
Or I've reached the tipping point.
Let's go to the audio soundbite, show you what we're talking about.
Let's start with number nine, Mark Warner.
This was yesterday, Richmond, Virginia, on television.
The local anchor interviewing said, look, this is a terrible time for America.
It renews the discussion about gun control and assault weapons.
You think that we need to get tougher?
And if so, how do we do that?
I believe every American has Second Amendment rights and that the ability to hunt is part of our culture.
I've had an NRA rating of an A, but, you know, enough is enough.
I'm father of three daughters, and this weekend they all said, Dad, you know, how can this go on?
And I, like I think most of us, realize that there are ways to get to rational gun control.
There are ways to grapple with the obvious challenges of mental illness.
There should not be a Democrat or Republican position on this.
It is time for this kind of senseless violence to end.
Yeah, but there's not a person alive who knows how to make it end.
There's not a person alive who can make it end.
But here you have Governor Warner now trying to get in on the action.
The fever pitch coverage has made it politically attractive for him to say, you know what?
You know what?
I've changed my mind.
We can't put up with this anymore.
And whether anything beyond where we are now happens, whether there's tighter legislation or not, he still has a soundbite where he can say that he was for tougher measures, even if he doesn't do anything about it.
Jimmy Carter, let's go back to October 28, 1980.
He was in Cleveland.
I had a discussion with my daughter Amy the other day before I came here to ask her what the most important issue was.
She said she thought nuclear weaponry.
Well, so I got to change my mind on nuclear weaponry because Amy doesn't like it.
So Mark Warner, my daughter convinced me I was wrong on guns.
Jimmy Carter, my daughter convinced me I was wrong on nuclear weapons.
Here's Joe Manchin, the senator from West Virginia.
He was on CNN with Christianamonpour, who said, it's surprising, perhaps, that you have now come out and said it's time to rethink the elements of gun control.
What was the moment that made you rethink it?
Who would have ever thought in America or anywhere in the world that children would be slaughtered?
You know, that it's changed me.
But with that being said, people are afraid to talk about some things that just basically should be talked about.
Who's afraid to talk about it?
Nobody's afraid to talk about it.
It's all we're doing is talking about it.
That's all we ever do about it.
Talk about it.
Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.
What do you mean, afraid to talk about it?
So anyway, here's another Senator Manchin.
You know what?
That Newtown shooting changed me.
Slaughtering children, that changed.
Senator, you ever heard of Chicago?
You know what happens at Chicago every night?
What has happened in Chicago cumulatively makes what happened in Newtown look like chump change?
No, I'm not kidding, folks.
But what happened at Chicago wasn't enough to make him change his mind.
No, it's the glare of the media on this.
It is the focus of attention.
It is a politician being a politician.
Let's take a brief time out.
We'll do that.
We'll come back.
More of your phone calls on the other side.
Sit tight, my friends.
Salon.com has the story.
Adam Lanza was a vegan.
He did not want to hurt animals, ladies and gentlemen.
It was a shared love of live music that sparked a close relationship between Russ Hanneman and Nancy Lanza more than five years ago.
Now, in light of the tragedy at Sandy Hook and recent reports suggesting that she was a paranoid survivalist, Russ Hanneman is speaking publicly about the woman he knew.
She was a wonderful, beautiful, elegant woman who loved life, and most importantly, she loved her son Adam.
And another small detail emerged during the course of the interview, this time about Adam.
He was a vegan.
He didn't want to hurt animals.
I'm sure that Adam Lanza had seen plenty of and heard plenty of animal rights talk.
He'd probably seen animal planet TV shows.
He'd probably don't think there's any doubt that he had come across numerous things about animal rights.
Why else be a vegan at age 13?
I mean, you're worried about health.
Come on.
He clearly thought it was cruelty to animals.
Just throwing a little thing in, no big deal about it, folks.
Just a little fact.
Wanted to toss that in there.
Here's Kevin Amanda, Ohio.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Hey, thanks for taking my call, Russ.
You bet, sir.
Hey, your last caller was absolutely dead on.
The Tea Party demonstrated in 2010 that they could remove every official down to dog catcher.
So what happened in 2012?
Well, at the Republican convention, they locked out 568 delegates.
How many millions of votes did that take?
Obama got 10 million fewer votes, and Romney arguably got left.
Well, it wasn't that many.
I mean, it wasn't 10 million or fewer.
It was significant, but I don't think it was that many.
It could be right.
I don't think it was that many.
But the Republican Party has lost their credibility.
They attacked the Tea Party starting at the convention, and it materialized to everybody else once they got into or after the election.
They started dismissing all the Republican committee members.
You know, this tax argument, we are so far in debt and on the verge of financially collapsing our dollar that this tax argument is relatively ridiculous at this point.
And that's what we're focusing all of our time on.
I mean, the Republican Party is in the middle of the destruction.
All right, let me, a serious question, because I think you may have a point.
Why then are the Republicans so focused on having everybody know that they are willing to raise tax rates on the rich?
What's the deal?
Well, I think at this point, it's a mute argument.
They have to accept the Democratic's offer of everybody below $250,000.
Otherwise, they're totally going to self-impose.
They're going to lose their moderates.
I mean, the Republican Party has already attacked their base, and now they're going to lose their moderates.
They've got to get this issue off the table.
They made their bed.
They've got to sleep in it, get the issue off the table, and then let's start talking about what real issues are out there.
Because we're not talking about it now with tax increases.
That's a ridiculous argument.
What if I were to tell you that Boehner's offer today, his plan B, was just that?
Get the tax issue off the table and start talking about spending cuts.
Right.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not arguing that the quasi-socialist president that we have now is not playing hardball.
But what difference does it make at this point?
No, no, you sound like you're very angry at the Republicans for turning on their own.
Very.
Absolutely.
But then you followed that by saying, but they've got to get taxes off the table so they don't lose their moderates.
They've got to start talking about what really matters, which is spending cuts, I assume you think.
Correct.
Why do you care what they do if they've so ticked you off?
I mean, aren't they in the process of destroying themselves anyway?
Yeah, exactly, Rush.
And because I'm in a point now where do we break away, do we go third party, or do we try to take over the Republican Party?
And we're under a massive attack by what we believe to be physical conservatives.
No, we're the physical conservatives.
They're the rhinos.
They aren't even, like the last caller said, they aren't even proposing spending cuts, true spending cuts, true attempts to save our currency.
They aren't doing it.
So where do we go?
Do we go third party or do we try to take over the Republican Party?
And that's what they're saying to me.
I'm not speaking in their defense here.
I'll just tell you, they are looking at the election returns and the results.
And what they see is a country that wants bigger government and more spending.
And I think they want to get in on the deal.
Well, that's how we got here, Rush.
I know.
I'm not defending it.
And that's why we're going to collapse if we don't correct it.
And so you said go back to your morals.
Go back to your values when there is no answer, where your values isn't principles.
Okay, principles.
Okay, exactly.
Political principles.
Right.
Well, that's not compromising and playing this game.
Get the issue off the table.
You make your bed, sleep in it, deal with it, take it off the table, and let's start talking about real issues.
That's where I'm at with it.
I appreciate it.
Okay, I understand.
I got you.
By the way, folks, I just got two emails.
You know, I have three nieces.
I just got two emails.
Dear Uncle Rush, with all that's going on, do you think you should buy more guns?
Everybody else's daughters are saying, get rid of your guns.
My niece is asking me if I have enough.
And we have some more headlines on guns in the Washington Post.
Marco Rubio, open to changes in gun laws.
It's a Washington Post story.
No details, no specifics are mentioned, but I'm sure they love the headline.
Rubio, open to changes in gun laws.
From the Hollywood Reporter, gun scene cut from Tom Cruise movie.
Marketing in wake of screwal shooting.
This is the movie Jack Reacher opens in theaters on Friday.
They've also moved to premiere to December the 19th.
It'll be tomorrow in Pittsburgh.
Dana Milbank in the Washington Post, slow walking the gun issue.
He's not at all optimistic that Obama will do anything.
And he liked, like I mentioned moments ago, he says here that the mood to do something will evaporate.
It'll dissipate.
It always does.
The emotional reservoir just isn't large enough.
People keep this fevered pitch as long as it will require for legislation to take place.
A couple of sound bites here.
Mentioned earlier, Plan B, John Boehner essentially proposing the Nancy Pelosi plan to Obama to avoid the fiscal cliff.
If you weren't with us, essentially what Boehner did was offer to increase tax rates on all income over a million dollars.
Income under a million exempted, no tax increase.
For Obama, the number's $250,000.
Pelosi in April suggested a million.
Chuck Schumer in 2010 suggested a million.
The White House rejected it practically before Boehner's presser was over.
Here's the White House press secretary.
The so-called Plan B that's been put out there achieves nothing like what a bigger deal would do.
And you would lose, by just extending current law for those making under a million dollars, you would lose hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue relative to the decoupling the president has proposed.
A significant portion of that money, if not most, would go to millionaires.
Because when you extend tax cuts for those making under $250,000 or those making under $400,000, everybody who makes more than that benefits from those tax cuts.
If you extend the tax cuts for everybody making up to a million dollars, everybody making more than that gets a significant tax cut on their first million dollars in earnings.
So the proposal essentially is to give another big tax cut to the wealthiest Americans.
You saw Leader Pelosi say that Democrats would not vote for it.
Well, she might have said that, but it was her idea.
Now, that might have been hard for you to follow.
Let me explain what he's talking about here.
And it's basically the definition of a marginal rate.
For example, the rich pay a marginal tax rate of 30, what is it, 36, let's say 36 right now.
35.9, let's say 36.
But they don't pay that on all of their income.
On the first 50,000, they might pay whatever the rate is, 15%.
And then the next bracket, they'll pay 20%.
And once under Obama's plan, once you get to $250,000, every dollar over that would be taxed at the new rate of 39.6.
What Carney's saying here is that Boehner's plan does two things wrong as far as we're concerned.
A, it gives people who make up to a million dollars no tax increase.
And that will cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars, he said.
Hundreds of billions of dollars.
It's outrageous.
It will cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars if we exempt all income up to $1 million with any tax increase.
But then he said, the rich get another tax cut because the first million they earn would not be taxed at the new tax rate.
So if somebody earns $10 million, only $9 million of it would be taxed at the new rate.
And he said, we can't do that.
So he's saying that a massive tax increase on the rich is actually a tax cut for them.
Now, even if we got Obama's plan, all income over $250, taxed at 39.6, you would raise enough money to run the government 11 days.
We're not talking serious revenue here in the first place.
This is all about politics.
It's all about expanding government.
It's all about shrinking the private sector.
It's about redistribution of wealth.
It's not about revenue.
It is not about the government having more money to operate.
It's not about deficit reduction.
We're not talking about nearly enough money for there to be any deficit reduction, particularly when you add to it all of the new spending that's scheduled.
This is just outrageous misstatements of fact.
And they're designed to make the low-income voter, a low-information voter, used to be called morons.
They make the low-information voter think that there's enough money.
And the objective really is.
If you want to boil it down to its essence, what the White House wants the nation's morons, low-information voters to believe is that we would not have a deficit or a national debt if the rich were paying their fair share.
And when you boil it all down, that's their message.
And if we just raise taxes on the rich, we're not going to have any deficits.
We're not going to have a national debt.
There's real deficit reduction.
They want people, believe this, when in fact we're talking about so little money in relation to deficit reduction that it would run the government for 11 days.
And I'm sorry, there's just no deficit reduction in that.
In fact, you could confiscate, not tax, you could confiscate every dollar that everybody has over a million dollars.
You could confiscate it, not tax it, tax it at 100%, and you would run the government for no more than a month.
You might not even get a month out of it.
And I tell you this, ladies and gentlemen, so that you will know unequivocally there is no amount of money being held by the so-called rich that if it were all transferred to government would make an iota's worth of difference in a government that overspends and a debt that's being racked up.
There just isn't enough money on the table that we're talking about here.
So it's not about that.
But Obama does want you to believe that the only reason we have a deficit is because the rich are getting away with not paying their fair share.
So any deal that Boehner offers is going to be rejected because the objective here is to wipe out the rich ultimately.
The objective is to eliminate them.
That's what Obama is actually aiming for over many, many years.
And so Kearney comes up with this convoluted explanation that the rich are getting two tax cuts with Boehner's proposal, when in fact they aren't.
The rich would see a massive tax increase with Boehner's proposal.
And the fact the White House is rejecting it ought to speak volumes to you.
Boehner has offered exactly what Obama says he wants.
And he's rejecting it.
He's offered, in fact, on the tax side, he's offered more than Obama has asked for in one instance.
Here's, by the way, Carney got a question from the AP reporter, Ben Feller.
He said, look, is it the president's view that he can't get a big deal unless he goes up?
This requires compromise, and that's why we have moved and reduced our revenue target and moved from 250 to 400.
The point that the president had always made is that it is not his preferred option, but he knew that he would have to compromise in order to reach an agreement without sacrificing the principles that are clear, and that is that we have to have balance.
It has to ask the wealthiest Americans to pay more so that the burden isn't unduly placed on seniors and students and families who have children with disabilities and others.
And that's what his current proposal maintains.
There it is again.
Children with families with disabilities.
Families with children with disabilities.
There it is again.
Throwing it in.
So the Adam Lanzotype that we can't put the burden on them.
The rich have got to pay more.
It's got to be balanced.
We have to ask the wealthiest Americans to pay more so that the burden isn't unduly placed.
Where this is all going to end up, I'm pretty sure.
We'll see if I'm right.
Won't be too long.
Maximum next year, sometime, maybe two years.
Where this is all going to end up is that the middle class is going to get soaked.
The middle class is going to see their taxes go up.
And the reason is that's where the bulk of the money is.
You could confiscate all the money the middle class has and run the government for quite a while.
Much longer than if you confiscate all the money the rich have.
There's a reason why the rich are called the top 2%.
Aren't very many of them, folks.
They're only the top two, the top 1%.
And the idea that 98% of the country is not going to have a tax increase under this president is absurd.
Everybody is going to see a tax increase under this president because his objective is to shrink the private sector and expand the government so that the government becomes the primary source of prosperity and benefits for the vast majority of people.
That's the objective.
And the only way he can bring that about is to take as much money out of the private sector as possible so that no matter what job you have, it's simply not going to pay enough to allow you to get by without some government assistance.
That's his objective.
That's what he wants.
He wants as many people needing government benefits and assistance as possible.
Now, some of you might be saying, well, why would anybody want that?
Well, you have to try to understand the power that somebody like Obama salivates for.
You have to try to understand the desire.
Think Soren in Lord of the Rings.
That's what we're dealing with here.
Power is everything.
Power is perpetual.
Power perpetuates itself.
FDR tried it.
He tried to set the Democrat Party up so that it would never, ever lose its power.
And that's what Obama is attempting to do now.
And the simplest way to do that is to simply take as much money out of the private sector, meaning where people live and work, as possible.
So there's less to have.
There's less to go around.
A shrinking pie, if you will.
Brief timeout.
We'll be back much more straight ahead after this.
Ah, yes, it's Christmas time.
We're only a week away, my friends.
Well, I remember when I was a kid, I couldn't contain myself.
I couldn't sit still a week away.
I was already practicing staying up late.
I was getting in shape.
I was getting in gear.
I was so excited.
And I just do whatever you can to recapture that feeling your entire adult life.
Sometimes you're not able to, but boy, those are rare fleeting moments when you're able to, as an adult, to capture the feeling you had when you were a kid.
There's nothing better than that.
Now, let me say one thing.
The opportunity here to get confused in this debt deal and the fiscal cliff is huge.
And there's something that I think needs to be stated and understood.
There is not a single tax cut being proposed as we speak.
There is nobody, no Republican, no Democrat is talking about tax cuts.
There aren't any.
And the reason I'm making a big deal out of this is that Jay Carney and his soundbite from the White House just now, rejecting John Boehner's latest proposal, is filled with lies about how the Republicans are cutting taxes for the rich.
And I want you to understand: there are no tax cuts.
There are no tax cuts contemplated.
There are no tax cuts scheduled.
We have current tax rates.
They have been the same since 2003.
These tax rates were put into place by an agreement that Congress made with George Bush.
They are to this day called the Bush tax cuts, but they are not tax cuts.
They were at the moment they were passed because the new rates were smaller than what existed in 2003.
But they have been the effective tax rates since 2003.
There are no tax cuts, my friends.
So when you hear Jay Carney or anybody in the media or anybody on a cable TV show talking about the Bush tax cuts, there aren't any tax cuts.
And nobody has proposed a tax cut.
What is going to happen on January 1st is that the current tax rates are going up.
The question is on who.
If we go over the fiscal cliff, everybody's income tax rates are going up.
The capital gains tax rate is going up.
There is a 1%, actually 0.9%.
There is a 1% income tax surcharge on everybody for Obamacare.
Everybody, no matter what else happens, there is a 3.8% surcharge on capital gains, independent of whatever the tax rate is on capital gains, and that's an Obamacare tax.
So if nobody does anything, Everybody's taxes are going up potentially 4.8%.
A 1% income surcharge on everybody for Obamacare.
And a 3.8% surcharge on any capital gain.
If you sell your house at a profit, you sell a stock at a profit.
In addition to whatever the capital gains rate is, add 3.8% to it.
It's an Obamacare tax.
Both of these are.
The Republicans are not proposing tax cuts, and neither is President Obama.
When he talks about tax cuts for the middle class as part of the deal, all he means is that the current tax rates will not go up for the middle class.
But nobody is getting a tax cut.
The president has not proposed one.
The Democrat Party has not proposed one.
And sadly, the Republicans have not proposed one.
So when you hear people talk about the middle class tax cut with a fiscal clip, there isn't one.
It is political doublespeak.
It exists by continuing to call the current rates the Bush tax cuts and then claiming that people who will not see a tax increase are getting a tax cut.
When they aren't, their rates are going to stay the same.
There is no tax cut anywhere for anybody, anytime on the table.
Associated Press is reporting that Paula Broadwell, a mistress of General Petraeus, will not be charged with cyberstalking for harassing Jill Kelly, the consul, and the socialite whatever in Tampa.
Gotta take a quick break.
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