All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 9, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:53
January 9, 2013, Wednesday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Okay, so I had this unstated New Year's resolution.
I didn't tell anybody about it.
I didn't even tell Catherine about it.
It's a very private, unstated New Year's resolution, and it very simply was to become more low profile.
to not get noticed.
I had it as an objective to not be discussed every day by the drive-by media.
Just a simple New Year's resolution.
All I wanted to do was keep a low profile.
You know, just you and me, three hours here every day, and when it's over, it's over.
We come back the next day and we do it again.
I'm trying.
I'm doing everything I can to do this low profile stuff, and it's not working.
CNN devoted most of their busy broadcast day to me yesterday.
Well, uh Ali Velshi, the economist guy was a little ticked off, and I called him a low information reporter.
So he uh on on the debt limit uh discussion.
And so he uh defended himself on that and then told everybody why I was wrong and what I was talking about, how I don't understand anything.
And then this one I really don't understand.
Solidad O'Brien gathered a bunch of people to talk about my discussion on pedophilia.
All I did was quote from a from a liberal newspaper in the UK, The Guardian.
I it's all I did.
Well, I did one other thing.
I I said, remember where you were when you heard some things of some outrageous social custom that's bit in the dust.
When you first heard that something might happen, like gay marriage, when you first heard gay marriage, what did you think?
Ah, never happened.
Versus where are we now?
Well, I said, here we go.
Same thing with the SUV when the Sierra Club back in 1997 says we're gonna ban the SUV to save the planet.
I warned USUV owners you're gonna become targets.
You poo-pooed.
What happened?
So a big UK liberal newspaper, mainstream, not some fringe supermarket thing, but a mainstream left-wing newspaper with a huge long story on how pedophilia is normal and should be considered normal and quoting academics, and all of a sudden CNN discusses it as though I'm making the assertion.
And we got the audio sound bites.
I've I but that's not the point.
The point is I had this unstated New Year's resolution, trying to be low profile.
And I think you'll have to admit here, folks, uh, well, you may not have to admit it, but you know, I've I've I've I never try to get noticed anyway.
It just happens.
I never try.
I'm not somebody that likes fame.
I I do not live and die by whether or not I see my name in the paper or or hear myself discussing in fact just the exact opposite.
Now most people would say, well, after Rush they stop talking about you means that uh nobody's interested anymore.
I don't that'd be fine with me.
Be actually fine with me, because I know that you're here no matter what, and you all in this audience are what matters.
So I got the audio sound bites on this stuff, and I might deign to play it, but you know me.
I don't like making this show about me, so I don't know what I'm gonna play those sound bites or not.
But here.
Um what was first time I mentioned what I'm gonna mention to you was probably in November of last year.
And it might have been even further back than that, a little longer ago than that.
But during a discussion of where the country is going, where we are culturally, the expansion of the welfare state, I warned you.
I said, next up to happen will be somebody on the left asking this question.
Why should there be profit in making people well?
Why should there be profit in making people healthy?
Why should doctors and nurses in hospitals make a profit?
That seems to the left be counterproductive and even counterintuitive.
We all should be healthy, and we are not doctors, so we have to go to doctors and nurses and hospitals to make ourselves well.
Why should they profit for I warned you that this was coming.
And it was probably greeted with the usual poo-poo.
Yeah, there you go, Rush exaggerated, coming up and all this extreme stuff.
And I mentioned this to you because here's CNN on the war path claiming, I don't know what they're claiming.
I haven't listened to sound bites, I just read the transcripts of this pedophilia business.
I can't help it.
It shows up in a left wing newspaper.
I tell you what's in it, quote, academic.
And by the way, the academics, oh, you know what really upset them at CNN was that I drew a connection to homosexuality in it.
Well, so does the peace.
That's why I did it.
The Guardian piece does that.
Anyway, I'll get I'll I'll explain as we get to that segment.
Point is I come out with these predictions, and they for the even when I think I'm wrong about something I usually end up being right.
So I said many times, my usual uh attitude of warning you, particularly those of you in the in the medical professions.
Why should there be profit in making people well?
Why should healing involve profit?
Why should that cost anything?
Why should that cost any more than what it costs?
Well, let me take you to what I hold here now in my formerly nicotine stained finger.
Right here.
It is in the New York Times.
It is a story by Eduardo Porter, and the heathline, health care and profits, a poor mix.
Do I need to even go any further?
No.
And as HR, my trusted aide de camp and chief of staff said, Boy, did you call it.
Yep.
And I'm not surprised.
Thirty years ago, Bonnie Svarstad and Chester Bond of the School of Pharmacy, University of Wisconsin Madison, discovered an interesting pattern in the use of sedatives at nursing homes in the south of the state.
Patients entering church affiliated nonprofit homes were given drugs roughly as often as those entering profit making proprietary institutions.
But patients in proprietary homes received on average more than four times the dose of patients at nonprofits.
Writing about his colleague's research in his 1988 book, The Nonprofit Economy, the economist Burton Weisbroad provided a straightforward explanation.
Said wise broad differences in the pursuit of profit.
Sedatives are cheap, Mr. Weisebrod noted, less expensive than say giving special attention to more active patients who need to be kept busy.
Now, this behavior was hardly surprising.
Hospitals run for profit are also less likely than nonprofit and government-run institutions to offer services like home health care.
So not only are these people making profits, they're not offering you nearly as many options.
are really evil.
They don't offer as many options, nor as cheaply as the non-profits.
These profit seekers, essentially, are short-changing you.
A shareholder might even applaud that creativity, with which profit-seeking institutions go about seeking profit, but the consequences of this pursuit of profit might not be so great for other stakeholders, i.e.
patients.
Oh my gosh.
Folks, when I am right, I am right.
When I nail it, I nail it.
Now you'll never hear this being discussed anywhere.
You'll never see CNN do a panel discussion for four hours on how Limbaugh accurately predicted an assault on the profit sector in health care.
Well with Obama.
Yeah, the woman on the ABC primetime special who asked if her I still, that still gives me the creeps.
That ABC Primetime Special back in 2009, where an American citizen, a woman, uh stood up and asked the president of the United States.
This is before we even have Obamacare.
If her 100 year old mother would be given a pacemaker.
I thought what's creepy about it is even before Obamacare, what in the what if we become where a citizen has to go on a network TV show and hopefully get the chance to ask the president whether or not he will approve her mom getting a pacemaker?
What business is it of his?
But there she was asking the question, and her real point was look, my mom, she's a hundred years old and she really likes to live.
She got a great spirit, great will to live.
Will you factor that in and making these kinds of decisions?
And Obama said no.
That's that's too nebulous, the will to live.
How do you assess that?
No, probably the compassionate thing you do would be just give them a pill and zone them out for their remaining short moments on the planet and uh give them all love you can and then wave goodbye at the last moment.
That's it.
And all because they don't have the money.
The government's gonna run it, they don't have the money.
So anyway.
A shareholder might applaud the creativity with which profit-seeking hospitals go about seeking profit, but the consequences of that profit pursuit might not be so great for other stakeholders in the system.
Patients, for instance.
One study found that patients' mortality rates went up.
The death rate, for those of you in Rio Linda, went up when nonprofit hospitals switched to become profit-making.
So get this.
Profit making leads to more death.
Hospitals seeking profit equals a higher mortality rate.
Right here it is in the New York Times.
And these profit maximizing tactics.
So now seeking profit is a tactic, points to a troubling conflict of interest that goes beyond the private delivery of health care.
Raises a broader, more important question.
How much should we rely on the private sector to satisfy broad social needs?
Folks, right?
I've just, this is the first four paragraphs of this New York Times story, and it's all here.
Everything that our future is is right here in these four paragraphs.
Profit in the health care system, bad.
Nonprofits, good.
Private sector medical care, bad.
Government sector medical care, no profit, good.
Private sector profit-seeking health care, higher death rate.
Nonprofit medical care, lower death rate.
And it was it was so easily predicted.
It was easy for me to see.
People still ask me, you know, when I make a prediction, and some will say, really, really, really a wacko prediction.
Why are you making because I know the left.
I know who these people are, and I know what they're going to do before they do.
I know what they're thinking before they're thinking it.
I know what they're feeling before they're feeling it, and I know where all this is going to go, particularly if they're not opposed.
And even if they are opposed, they're still going to go there.
So, right here it is, health care and profits, a poor mix.
And it isn't going to be long before the question is going to be posed exactly as I pose.
It gets very close in this story.
Why should there be profit in making people well?
And if seeking profit causes more people to die, then what has happened to our country?
And so the entire backbone or the foundation of capitalism is under assault yet again.
And I'm convinced people that read the New York Times are the equivalent of low information voters.
All they know is what's in the Times.
They're low information voters.
They're going to eat this up.
They're going to eat it up, and they're going to be quoting it.
It's going to be all over Twitter and Facebook.
It's going to, it's going to cascade all over this country.
It's going to dovetail quite nicely with where everybody is culturally and emotionally in the country right now.
Everybody's hurting.
The economy's stagnating, but we all want to be well.
Why should people be making a profit While they administer health care.
It's not fair.
It's greedy.
It's selfish.
And it leads to some people not even being treated.
If they can't pay, if they don't have insurance, that means no profit.
That means they don't get treated.
It means they die.
See what capitalism does?
It kills.
We're on the cusp.
We're on the edge of this becoming the new reality.
By the way, you see where ESPN has apologized to Miss Alabama.
ESPN has apologized to Miss Alabama for Brent Musberger slobbering all over her during the Monday night BCS championship game.
What Musberger, all he was doing was making comments about her feminine pulkritude.
And no pulkritude.
In real enemy, she's hot.
You ought to know what the word means, even though you don't, because you know what I'm discussing.
Now I haven't read their official apology.
But what are are they are they uh saying that Musberger was wrong and that she isn't pretty?
Is that what the I take it back?
The woman was not pretty.
Quarterbacks don't get all the good looking girls.
And it's it's amazing.
Here's the ESPN, which cut its teeth and still survives on close-ups of cheerleaders.
Apologizing for Brent Musberger.
What's wrong with noticing an attractive woman?
What's wrong with pointing it out?
And then, of course, there's again they mentioned yesterday, Kathy Griffin uh uh what's it an Anderson Cooper example.
Nobody had a problem with that.
Point out an attractive woman.
Boy, you can get in deep trouble.
ESPN will apologize for you.
Lance Armstrong is gonna fix everything.
Lance Armstrong, sad situation.
You have to admit.
Here's a guy that was an inspiration to millions, beating cancer, working hard, becoming the best he could be, and then he finally was reduced to having lost all dignity and integrity when it was apparent that he had cheated, that he had doped.
But now he's gonna fix it.
He's gonna go on Oprah and cry.
He and Oprah will cry be an hour and a half interview on Oprah's O Network.
You can't find that network on cable.
I mean, it's not in the top tier, it's there, but you have to look very hard for it.
That's one of the reasons why he's going to appear there.
Uh is to help Oprah.
But he'll, you know what's gonna he'll go on there and he'll he'll he'll he'll admit all.
He'll talk about the pressures involved and whatever, and he'll open up, and he and Oprah will cry, and it'll be all fixed.
It'll be all done.
Everything will be just cool after that.
We'll be back.
The New York Times piece, health care and profits, a poor mix, which gets the ball rolling, of course, on the assault on profit in health care.
During the break, I went to the New York Times website.
I just wanted to see comments to the story.
Was not surprised.
Here's a typical comment from a reader, low information voter, New York Times.
Typical comment, this is right on the private health care system, is the heart of the problem.
We will never reduce health care costs without recognizing this fact.
So there you go.
Right off the bat, the New York Times editors can say success has been won.
Their first comment, and all of them are like that.
That the problem with private health care is profit.
And the reason costs are out of control is profit.
And the reason people don't get treated is profit.
So the Times has succeeded in getting exactly the response they wanted from their low information readers.
Here's another comment.
Another result of for profit health care is that it has become far More lucrative to treat patients than it is to cure them.
Well, hey, remember Obama?
Who actually got this ball rolling?
Way back early on in the health care debate.
Obama accused doctors of needlessly doing tonsolectomies.
What else did he do?
Did he accuse doctors of needlessly doing uh a lot of surgeries?
I think it was amputation.
Yeah, he he said that some doctors did amputation unnecessarily just to be able to charge for it.
And he's had similar cutting comments about the the uh insurance industry in health care.
So he is a willing participant in getting his ball rolling.
So there you have it.
And it's gonna snowball.
Now you ask me, uh, well, what can we do to stop it?
Uh we got to take over the education system, folks.
We've we've got to reassert ourselves in the public education of this country, because that I think is the root of where, for example, capitalism being misunderstood began.
That's right, Obama made two allegations that doctors are take tonsils out, taking tonsils out for money instead of diagnosing it as allergies.
Tonsolectomies because there's more profit.
Doctors choose amputation because surgeons get paid more than physicians.
So we've those are both YouTube entries if you wanted to check out Obama actually saying it.
So I'm just telling you the all-out assault is on now, as it has been.
This is really just the next phase in the assault on private sector health care.
And private sector health care in this country gave the world the undisputed greatest health care system in the world.
It's under assault, and it is about finished.
It has been effectively nationalized.
I think it is finished.
But with the left, nothing is ever over.
They continue to hammer nails in the coffin after the patient's dead and buried.
And so now nailing health care and continuing to justify what Obama's done by assaulting profit in health care, as the reason more people die in this country is now underway.
And so people say, okay, you can tell us all these rotten things.
Well, what do we do about it?
I'm telling you, folks, uh there has to be an all-out assault.
First, the Republican Party's gonna have to recognize what it's up against, and they don't.
I I don't think they're willing to admit who they're up against, what they're up against, because they don't really want to do what's necessary to fight it.
My honestly held view.
Second thing is an all-out assault is gonna have to be made on the minds and hearts of low information voters.
And they are the product of a culture that's been debased and simplified and corrupted basically by the public education system and a multicultural curriculum.
So if you and it's taken a while.
I mean, this didn't happen overnight.
And fixing it's not gonna happen overnight.
Uh Robert Griffin, the third, the quarterback of the Redskins uh surgery today, James Andrews, the noted orthopedist, performed the surgery.
Nobody yet knows what the recovery time is.
Apparently uh RG3 blew out an ACL in addition to the LCL, which is worse than the ACL.
Apparently it just blew out the knee.
What what happens surgery today is essentially reconstruction of RG3's right knee.
And so the recovery time normally for an ACL is a year.
And then even after the year, the first couple months back are rather tenuous because the player obviously is not fully confident that the surgically repaired knee in this case gonna hold up.
Adrian Peterson of the Vikings is a really rare exception.
Peterson came back in less than a year and with no ill effects whatsoever.
Peterson came back to all appearances stronger than even before.
That is highly unusual, and Adrian Peterson of the Vikings, no doubt, will become uh role model of sorts for RG3 and in his attempted comeback.
But already, people oh yeah, he could be back for training camp.
He could certainly be back for opening uh opening day.
That's a stretch.
Uh in the in the normal history of ACLs alone being blown out, he'd miss the season.
This happened in January.
It's usually eight to twelve months, and that's we're saying this is.
But I was reading the Washington Post today, and do you know why RG3 blew out his knee?
Washington Post, I've got it right here.
In a column by the noted Washington Post columnist Cortland Malloy.
And the reason RG3 blew out his knee is because of the racist nature of the name of the team, the mascot, Redskins.
It's an insult to Indians.
And the bad karma that surrounds the Redskins is due exclusively to the fact that their team name is racist and bigoted.
Right here.
That's that's what blew out the knee.
As uh Mr. Malloy writes, and I join it in progress.
Besides, Washington's professional football team has raked up one disappointing season after another since 1992.
Now, why does Mr. Malloy focus on 1992?
Well, 1992 is the year that Washington resident Suzanne Harjo became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking to change the team's disparaging name.
Suzanne Harjo sued the team in 1992, and that's why we start with 1992 in terms of the Redskins historical pathetic performance.
Although Suzanne Harjo lost that legal battle on a technicality, a group of younger Native Americans have filed a similar lawsuit, and justice may yet be served.
The term Redskins is the most vile and offensive term used to describe Native Americans.
Harjo told the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in 2011.
It is most disturbing to the overwhelming majority of Native Americans throughout the country that the professional football team in the nation's capital uses a team name that demeans us.
Mr. Malloy writes, does anybody really believe the name Redskins will survive the 21st century?
Other than the people who probably thought white actors in blackface would survive the 20th.
The genocide of Native peoples, like America's other original sins, slavery, cannot be forever uh cannot forever mask the caricatures of the dead.
This is in the sports pages of the Washington Post.
So the name Redskins is an example of the horrible past of this country.
The genocide of native peoples is on par with slavery.
And the name Redskins, so upsetting, so abhorrent, so racist, has created a karma around the Redskins.
And this is why they haven't won anything since 1992, and that's why RG3 blew out his knee.
Next month, on February 7th, the National Museum of the American Indian on the Mall will hold a day-long symposium and community conversation about the use of racist stereotypes and cultural appropriation in American sports.
In a recent news release about the event, museum director Kevin Gover wrote, What better place to address this issue?
The Smithsonian Institution is the ideal forum to bring people together to ask tough questions.
For those who claim that Redskins is an honorific to Native peoples, as the team owner Dan Snyder does, representatives from several Indian nations will be on hand to tell you what they really think about that name.
And by the way, while Washington was weighed down with that tired old caricature of an Indian head on their helmets, Seattle was sporting a lighthearted seahawk based on an ancient Northwest Coast native carved totem design.
They didn't just score more touchdowns, they won on style points.
So you see, by the way, do you know there's no such thing as a sea hawk?
There isn't.
There's no such animal as a seahawk.
So now we learn that the Seahawk mascot is a is based on an ancient Northwest Coast native carved totem design.
So this is something.
Well, can I set this up for you?
The Redskins are playing with this racist horrible icon on the helmet, the red skin.
Bad karma.
They're playing the Seahawks who have as their team name mascot a caricature of an Indian head of a Northwest Coast native carved totem design, meaning native peoples in the Northwest carved the icon, the logo of the Seahawks.
So they are good karma.
They are being celebrated by the gods.
The Redskins are being punished by the gods.
And that's why the Redskins lost, and that's why RG3 blew out his knee.
And it's right there in the Washington Post, Cortland Malloy.
I tell you that environmentalist wacko picks on the money, right?
Every time we did environmentalist wacko pick involving the Redskins and somebody like the Seahawks or something, the bird always beat the Indian.
It was a tough call because the environmentalist wackos love Native Americas.
They're on a par with blacks having been slaughtered, genocide, and all that, as far as the leftists are concerned.
But then again, the Redskins is a disparaging name.
Anyway, this is offered seriously here in the sports pages of the I think it's the sports page in the Washington Post.
And he say, well, Rush, how do we combat this?
Oh, you tell me.
This is so absurd.
I'm afraid that if I treat it seriously, I'll lose IQ points.
To assert that there's bad karma around the Redskins because of their racist mascot name, and that's why RG3 blew out his knee.
Or deserved to have it blown out, and why the Redskins deserve to lose, and why the Seahawks deserve to win, because they honor native peoples with their mascot.
Quick timeout, we'll be back.
Don't go away.
So apparently RG3 took an arrow to the knee.
That's what happened on Sunday.
Bad karma from Cortland, Malloy.
So I checked the email.
Sir Rush, what are we going to do about this?
There's nothing we can do.
Folks, the Redskins are going to have to change the name of the team.
That's what's going to happen.
We're going to have to acknowledge that's the direction everything's headed, and the pressure is now been brought to bear.
This is just going to kick off a new round of this.
And the Redskins are ultimately going to cave and change the name of the team.
That's my prediction.
By the way, this uh profit being the evil component in health care, I just want to remind you.
Stephen Moore did his interview, the Wall Street Journal guy with Boehner.
Boehner reported that Obama told him we don't have a spending problem.
And I'm tired of hearing about it.
We have a deficit because of health care.
We have the huge national debt and a giant deficit every year because our health care system doesn't make any sense.
That's what Obama told Boehner, according to Boehner.
Well, makes sense, doesn't it?
Obama, I'm sure, also believes that the problem with health care is profit.
Profit adds unnecessary costs.
Profit adds unfair cost and expense.
And it's unfair.
Why should anybody make money making somebody well?
Why should anybody make money earn- and again a lot of why should doctors be richer than anybody else?
Why should doctors be the guys who have two houses?
Why should doctors all the it it's almost mandatory on all of us to heal people who are sick?
The people who go to school and learn how to do it and are trained to do it, they have an even greater responsibility to heal people.
Can you imagine Rush turning somebody away because they don't have enough to pay you?
You can't make a profit.
What kind of culture are we, Rush?
That's where we're headed.
And Obama has set the table.
Speaking of Obama, Vice President Bite Me has revealed that the president might use an executive order to deal with guns.
Just posted at the weekly standard at their blog, it's by Daniel Halper.
They quote Biden as saying the president's going to act.
There are executive orders, there's executive action that can be taken.
We haven't decided what that is yet, but we're compiling it all with the help of the attorney general and the rest of the cabinet members, as well as legislative action that we believe is required.
Biden said that this is a moral issue and that it's crucially important that we act.
And Biden also talked about taking responsible actions.
As the president said, if your actions result in only saving one life, they're worth taking.
But I'm convinced that we can affect the well-being of millions of Americans and take thousands of people out of harm's way if we act responsibly.
So the vice president has put it on the table that the president is actively considering options with guns involving executive orders.
Now, what pray tell could a bunch of liberal Democrats be thinking about doing with guns?
Wonder what that would be.
Maybe taking them away from people?
I think so.
I know enough liberal Democrats who have said that to me, that they wish they had the power to take people's guns away.
They that they've advocated it.
So when Biden, himself a liberal Democrat, says that himself and the president and the cabinet, attorney general, all a bunch of leftist Democrats are talking about using executive orders when you say for what?
It could only be to take guns away from people.
And who knew that an executive order could trump a constitutional amendment?
You know, after they finish that, why don't they just issue an executive order outlawing abortion?
If they really want to save lives.
Another prediction that I...
Not another prediction, not a prediction.
Last week, after the fiscal cliff deal was signed, and everybody was celebrating on the low information side about taxes being raised on the rich.
I very cogently and timely reminded people that there are two kinds of rich.
There are the income rich and the asset rich.
And that the asset rich are the people that you think about when you think of the rich, the Bill Gates's and the Warren Buffett's and the Jeffrey Melts and the Hollywood people, the Wall Street people, the hedge fund people, those are the asset wealthy, and they don't pay income taxes.
Their taxes did not go up.
Well, the capital gains rate went up from 15 to 20%, but their income tax rate, 40%, they don't pay much of income tax because so little of what they have every year is earned income.
It's other kinds of income.
So I made the point that while the low information voters out there celebrating and happy and clapping that the rich finally get theirs, that Obama's finally going to take money away from the rich because the rich took all everybody else's money, and that's why they are rich.
And now Obama's going to do the right thing.
He's going to go get it.
He's raising taxes on them.
Threw a little cold water on their thinking by saying, you know, the real rich that you're thinking about didn't get touched.
And here it is.
In the Washington Post by Harold Meyerson, a tax deal only the ultra-rich could love.
You see, Obama protected his donors.
He protected his bundlers, the hedge funds, the Wall Street people who raise money and bundle donations and contribute.
They didn't get a tax increase.
Now, other liberals like Harold Myerson are not happy about it.
The tax deal Congress passed last week raised the top rate on wages and salaries From 35 to 39.6.
The rate on income from capital gains and dividends, however, was only raised to 20%.
And he's not happy at all because he points out quite accurately that the ultra-rich didn't get a tax increase.
The ultra-rich, the people Obama wants to be, didn't get a tax increase.
Still not happy.
Taxing wages at a higher rate than profits is wealth redistribution.
We'll be back.
Don't go away.
Harold Myers in the Washington Post on Happy.
Capital gain is profit.
Profit did not get a tax increase under Obama.
Wages did.
Income got a tax increase, but profits, which they hate, didn't.
▲
Export Selection