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Jan. 31, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:37
January 31, 2013, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Why it is impossible to build a concussion proof helmet.
Right here it is.
It's not possible.
It is not possible to stop concussions.
The way football is being played today.
I have it on one of my tech blogs of scientists has done the research.
It's not possible.
Not possible to stop concussions.
Not possible to stop brain injury.
Not possible the way the game is played today.
It's a matter of physics and science, and no matter what you do with the helmet, you're never gonna be able to stop the brain from smashing up inside the skull.
Never, no matter what you do.
Um right here it is.
The brain trauma, chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
It'll continue to happen as long as football is played the way it is today.
Well, there's only one solution.
We're gonna have to regulate the way football's played.
You see how all the dominoes here are falling right in line.
I didn't know this, but I was told yesterday that during the middle of the day yesterday when this program was on over on PMSNBC, they actually convened a panel of liberal commentators to discuss the fact that football needs to be regulated.
And you know why?
Because the players don't know what they face.
The players don't know the dangers, and even if they did, they're not smart enough to make decisions on their own in their own self-interest.
Man, oh man, I'd say the speed with which all this is happening is defying even that which I thought would take place.
Greetings, folks, how are you?
Great to have you here on the EIB network Rush Limbaugh at 800 282-2882, the email address L Rushbo at EIB net.com.
Gonna conduct a little test here.
HR, did you remember to call that caller back from yesterday that we promised we would call back because we didn't give him enough time.
Okay, so you did remember.
All right.
All right, well, one in a row.
I'll let you know when I want to call again.
This is the guy I didn't quite understand what he says.
Last caller of the day.
He was begging me stop talking about global warming as as uh in the context of whether it is or is not happening.
That's not the way to reach low information voters.
They're gonna you're never gonna succeed talking to them that way.
They believe it is.
You're just gonna have to accept, I think that's what he was saying.
I think what the guy was.
Yeah, he was yeah, he was he was saying the way to go after it is just tell people how incompetent government is, and it's gonna get even worse if government's in charge of fixing it so forth.
So I think that's what he was gonna say.
Um we'll get him back at um at some point.
Here's the phone number if you want to be on the program today, 800-282-2882, the email address L Rushbo at EIB net.com.
I am shocked, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm stunned.
President Obama is gonna shut down the jobs council.
Did you know that?
I guess their work is done, and there aren't any more elections.
And so, and and the need to create jobs apparently not all that great.
Even though the president, I don't think met with them for over a year.
But President Obama will let his jobs council expire this week without renewing its charter, winding down one source of input.
This is an AP sir.
I I'm sorry, I can't I can't read the news today without laughing.
It's all a joke.
It's it's just listen to this.
President Obama will let his uh jobs council expire this week without renewing its charter.
Winding down one source of input from the business community, even as unemployment remains stubbornly high.
The GDP contracted, unemployment compensation requests for unemployment checks increased.
The AP, I have another AP story today.
They're calling the contraction, I kid you not here.
They're calling the contraction in gross domestic product growth.
They are describing economic growth in terms of the contraction.
So we're gonna shut down the jobs council, but we're not gonna close Gitmo.
In fact, we're closing down.
This is true.
I'm not making this up.
We are going to close down the panel that was advising the president on how to close Club Gitmo.
Club Gitmo will remain open, and the presidential advisory group that was well, they were to advise him on how to close it, they're being shut down.
Baby steps, Mike, baby steps.
So Club Gitmo of one of the first executive orders in 2009.
Obama close Club Gitmo.
The left cheered, it's open for business.
They're not going to shut it down.
Jobs council shut down.
They met four times in uh in two years.
When Obama in January 2011 formed his council on jobs and competitiveness, unemployment was hovering around 9%.
Two years later, more than 12 million people in the U.S. are out of work.
The unemployment rate has improved to 7.8%, but both parties agree that that's too high, but it's good enough so we can close down the jobs.
The reason I laugh...
I know you know why.
The jobs council, I I'll guarantee you, when they met, what what kind of input would they're silly?
We all know how to create jobs do the exact opposite of what Obama does.
There isn't any pro-growth policy taking place.
Look at I'm talking about broken record.
I just I think it's hilarious that the jobs council shut down because we're not just supposed to accept, okay.
Well, this is the new norm.
Mission accomplished.
Bloomberg News, now that the gross domestic product is contracting, i.e.
the economy shrinking, Bloomberg's editors have decided that GDP is an imperfect measure of progress.
Just ten hours after a government report showed that the economy went into contraction for the first time in three years during the fourth quarter last year.
An item written by the editors at Bloomberg News appeared last night, which basically said, you know, you people that focus on GDP are making a mistake.
That's an imperfect measure of economic activity and progress.
And we need to be looking at indicators, I kid you not, of social progress or human happiness.
So in judging or not judge, in measuring economic output.
Uh in measuring economic activity.
The GDP, it's old fashioned, doesn't work.
Never was all that accurate.
Don't pay any attention.
It's an imperfect measure of progress.
Instead, we should refocus and look at the indicators of social progress or human happiness.
So, as the usual case, when things go south, the problem is the way we measure it.
When the news is bad, the problem is how the news is determined, not the actual news.
So we're gonna have to change the mechanism by which we measure the economy because it's not showing the economy in a good enough light to reflect the magnificence of our esteemed leader Barack Hussein Obama.
Now, two stories on the unemployment news, and it is Thursday, and that's all we got of unemployment news.
First off, our old buddy Christopher Rugaber at the AP.
Headline weekly U.S. jobless aid applications rise to 368,000.
The number of Americans seeking unemployment aid rose sharply last week, but remained at a level consistent with moderate hiring.
See?
We got to change the way we measure this.
The number of Americans out of work and looking for unemployment benefits went up big time.
But that still indicates that there's moderate hiring taking place.
Poor Rachel, she's in for dawn to day racial.
She's kind of shaking her head like your dog looks at you, kind of curious, not sure what you're saying, but it's excited to understand.
And oh, it it is tough.
The number of people out of work.
The number of people asking for welfare benefits, unemployment compensation checks.
Skyrocketed, and the AP says, hey, that's well within our range here that shows there's moderate hiring taking place.
It's the twilight zone.
It's surreal.
Hiring, there's moderate hiring, meaning people are getting jobs.
There's moderate job acquisition going on out there, despite skyrocketing unemployment claims.
So once again we see the bizarre worldview of AP's weekly new unemployment claims reports, a sharp rise in unemployment applications.
It's consistent with moderate hiring.
Want to hear the numbers?
Weekly applications for unemployment benefits went up, leaped up, leapt up 38,000 to a seasonally adjusted 368,000.
The experts were projecting 350,000.
The increase comes after applications plummeted in the previous two weeks to five-year lows.
And later on in this story, the AP actually calls the negative GDP fourth quarter the recovery.
They refer to the ongoing recovery, and that the fourth quarter plummet.
Well, we just have to we have to throw the G the GDP out.
Just to remind you, under President Bush, one quarter of negative GDP was the start of an official recession.
And by the way, in this same story, the AP, that fourth quarter uh economic contraction, the GDP down by one-tenth of one percent.
AP says it's because the um Republicans cut spending.
Yep.
That happened because the Republican Party had their spending cuts out there, and people fear further spending cuts, and so economic.
That's the AP says that you, the American people, are watching the Republicans cut the budget, slash the budget, and you're getting depressed, and you're quitting your jobs and going on unemployment because the Republicans are cutting spending.
That's the message of the AP.
I kid you not.
It's it's what it's right here.
Now the Reuters version of this story.
Headline.
Jobless claims go higher, income surges, spending up.
The number of Americans seeking unemployment aid rose sharply last week, but remained at a level consistent with moderate hiring.
Isn't that amazing?
Two different ways that it is being reported.
Are two different places, but it's uh all the same thing.
Ray Lewis was over here.
They asked him about it at the Super Bowl.
What are you what do you think about this massive rise in unemployment?
Ray Lewis said it's a trick of the devil.
We need some antler spray for the economy, folks.
Clearly, this deer antler spray is necessary to stimulate some quick growth.
No, Ray Lewis, he did say that the uh the accusations he's using performance enhancing drugs, the deer antler spray was a trick of the devil.
The trick of the devil.
I got a brief timeout.
We'll take it, we'll come back.
I need to straighten something out.
It's a minor, minor point, and I probably ought not to mention it.
But I'm gonna mention it because it's part of the record that I want to correct out there on this whole immigration thing, and particularly my interview with Marco Rubio on Tuesday.
So we'll do that when we get back.
Don't go away.
And we are back, Rushlin Boy and the Excellence and Broadcasting Network, your guiding light through times of trouble, confusion, murkiness, two moat, chaos.
The whipsaw effect, a crisis upon crisis.
I am your guiding light, and even through the good times.
Okay.
Marco Rubio was here on Tuesday, and we had uh a 20 minute interview, maybe a little bit longer on immigration.
He's part of gang eight.
Four Republican senators, four Democrat senators have this brand new bipartisan plan to move forward on the path to citizenship for whatever number of millions of illegals are currently in the country.
And during the interview, Marco Rubio made it plain, and in previous interviews, he made it plain that without border security, all the rest of it was academic, he wasn't gonna support it.
If there wasn't border security, if that wasn't done first, then all the rest of this stuff to him would not get his support.
He did not vote on it.
By the way, I just might forget six and seven minutes.
I'm gonna maybe get two and three in here now if I have time.
During the course of the interview, and near the end of the well, actually through throughout the interview, one of the things that I liked, and one of the things that I praised, Senator Rubio set himself apart in my mind anyway,
from practically every other Republican on Capitol Hill, either in elective office or in a punditocracy or whatever, and that is he was fearless in telling the truth about President Obama.
He was fearless in his criticism of President Obama on this issue and any number of things, and I saw fit to compliment him on that.
It is that compliment which is either being misunderstood or purposely misunderstood, and then purposely misreported.
And as I say, this is a minor thing.
But you know, after this interview, I don't know if you people noticed it, you probably did.
You probably got scared the mainstream media all of a sudden liked me.
And that's a red flag.
Understandably so to all of you.
I mean, Time magazine said that the most important thing that happened on Tuesday was Rubio's interview with me, not Obama's speech in Vegas.
And a number of uh uh websites uh talking about how Rubio had started out hostile with Rubio, and he had the end of the interview converted me to uh supporting the grand bargain.
Now, grand bargain is an inside the beltway term.
Grand bargain was also how Boehner negotiating with Obama on the fiscal cliff.
Grand bargain means we're gonna do a lot more than just the fiscal cliff.
We're gonna fix spending, we're gonna fix the budget, we're gonna do all kinds of grand bargain, just one little isolated item.
And the same thing here in this immigration board.
The grand bargain is both parties getting together and coming up with all kinds of solutions.
And it was it was reported by a number of people that I had been converted during the course of the interview by Senator Rubio into supporting the grand bargain.
One of the places it was reported this way.
Like I said yesterday, whether or not a bill ends up passing, Rubio has already achieved something significant by getting rushed to acknowledge that recognizing reality in terms of a grand bargain on immigration is something admirable and noteworthy.
So whoever wrote this interpreted my comment to Rubio at the end of the interview that what he had done in the interview and what he was standing for and saying was admirable and noteworthy.
That was interpreted as me agreeing essentially with the whole concept of this this comprehensive immigration reform, which is amnesty.
And that's not what I was complimenting him on.
Now I can understand how people might have misunderstood this.
And I don't want to make too big a deal about it, so don't tell anybody.
It's just between you and me.
I just want you to understand.
I was simply, if you go back and listen to the interview, and at the point I said that he had just ripped Obama over the coals for his phoniness and for his artificiality for his insincerity on not just immigration, but the way he's running his whole administration.
And I had praised him.
I told you you've got guts, you're courageous, that's admirable.
What you're doing is noteworthy because nobody else has the guts to criticize Obama.
And that's what I was praising for.
I was not signaling that he converted me to amnesty.
Now look, folks, I don't want to spend a whole lot of time on this because I did yesterday, but I do want to set the record straight.
And just look, keep this between us.
Don't tell anybody.
You know, I I I'm not really getting any grief, but I think I'm I'm I'm um I'm just trying to be the new less threatening uh Rush Limbaugh, low profile Rush Limbaugh, and it's being misunderstood out there.
I'm trying to be civil and polite, and these guys think I'm changing my mind on things.
And I I haven't done that.
I'm it's created a lot of case chaos out there, but people scratching their heads now over what they think I'm thinking.
Let me hit Jonathan Tobin at Commentary Magazine writes this little exit in a long piece, why Rush Loves Rubio is what it's called.
And I do like Rubio a lot.
I admire Rubio profoundly.
But I'm not, and I didn't end that interview 100% all in.
I believe I took him at his word.
He says if he doesn't get border security and and workplace enforcement and that kind of thing, then he's not voting for this thing.
Well, that's fine.
I take him at his word.
It's interesting.
Obama uh goes on, was it Univision?
I've got the soundbite coming up.
One on Univision.
What do you mean border secure?
We've already done that.
Obama thinks the border's already secured, it didn't need to be anything done on that.
This is this is going to be a huge fight.
I don't want anybody to misconstrue where I am on it now.
Mr. Tobin writes in this excerpt, Rubio's ability to cause Limbaugh to moderate his position somewhat illustrates that the battle on the right over immigration isn't as one-sided as some would have it.
Now, maybe I misspoke.
I don't think so.
I maybe I just misunderstood.
You know, I live in Realville, and at the end of the interview, when I was praising Rubio to the hilt and calling him courageous and and what he was doing was uh I even remember.
Let me get the story here with the admirable and noteworthy.
I was in my mind, I was talking about his fearlessness in his characterizations of Obama.
Do you realize how few people in Washington will tell the truth about who Obama really is and what his grand designs are?
And Rubio did in that interview.
And I thought that was noteworthy, and that's what I was praising him for.
I didn't start that interview opposed to amnesty.
Well, I did start it a post-amnesty.
I didn't end that interview in favor of amnesty.
I didn't end that interview in favor of a grand bargain.
I did not mean to leave that impression.
So let me, as I did yesterday, let me very briefly state my position on immigration at large.
I'm not opposed to it.
I agree with everybody who says that this country was was built on immigration.
I, however, believe in legal immigration.
But more importantly than that, I believe in assimilation.
I believe in the maintenance of a distinct, unique American culture.
The early days of the 20th century, the massive immigration that occurred pre World War I, all the way post-war, post-World War II, people were fleeing tyranny and oppression and bondage, and they wanted to come to the greatest nation on earth.
They wanted to come here and be Americans.
They wanted to come here for liberty and freedom.
They wanted to escape where they were.
They wanted economic opportunity.
They wanted everything this country had to offer, and they were proud to be Americans.
And when they got here, the first thing they did, other than trying to find employment, was to assimilate into this culture.
They wanted to be Americans with a capital A. That's not what's happening now.
What's happening now is the balkanization of our culture.
On the illegal side of immigration, we've seen an evolution.
The point now that a good percentage of the illegal arrivals are not interested in assimilation.
They're not interested in this distinct American culture.
They're setting up their own subcultures within our borders, and we're being balkanized.
Now I'm not going to attach any theories to motivation here.
I'm just telling you what's happening.
I don't support illegal immigration in any way, shape, manner, or form.
And I don't want to change, and I haven't changed my mind on that.
I believe everybody in this country ought to speak English, not because it's punitive, it's because it's the simple best way to make something of yourself.
It's the simple best way to access access the opportunity, economic, political, social, that exists in this country.
I think the border's going to have to be secured.
I think that has to happen first and only.
And not until then should there be any discussion as to what to do with the people who were here.
And that is an entirely different matter.
Whether you call it amnesty or path to citizenship, there has to be an assimilation component to it.
I am not interested in illegal immigrants as potential voters.
Politicians are.
That's where I separate myself from them.
The Democrat Party, ladies and gentlemen, go through this again again.
Sorry to be redundant if you heard this yesterday, but I want to go through it again.
The Democrat Party needs a permanent underclass.
The Democrat Party is demographically in trouble if left to its own devices.
The vast majority of abortions in this country are done by Democrats.
So there a lot of future Democrats not being born.
They got to be replaced somehow.
In addition, prior to Obama, the way America worked was you started out young in your life, this for most exceptions to everything, but you started out with a low-wage entry-level job.
You got experience, you went to school, you became educated, you had a dream, you had a passion, and you were free to put as much into whatever your job or career was as you wanted.
If you wanted to be the best, you could shoot for it.
If you wanted to be in the top 50, you could do that.
And you were free to do whatever you wanted to do, get whatever level of education that you thought you needed, uh, work as hard as you wanted to to advance, and eventually you did, and you started out in the lower levels of middle class, and you worked your way up.
And the upward mobility was the American dream.
The American dream was not just a house or a car, a series of possessions.
The American dream was upward mobility, the opportunity to better yourself, the opportunity to improve your standard of living for you and your family and for your neighborhood and your community.
Because as that happened to you, it inspired others, and it was all a wonderfully working system.
Well, the problem for the Democrats is that as people are upwardly mobile, as they become more self-sufficient, as they become more self-reliant, and as they become wealthier, and I don't mean rich, but as they acquire more disposable income, as they amass more wealth, They have less need for government, less need for the Democrat Party.
That means less power for the Democrat Party.
The Democrat Party exists, particularly today, on millions of Americans feeling hopeless, helpless, not confident in themselves, and relying on government as the source of prosperity.
We know that 75%, this is scholarly data in academic reports.
75% of illegal immigrants in the country also believe that government is the source of prosperity.
So they're naturally going to be inclined to vote Democrat.
That's why they're interested in them.
All the talk about human concerns and so forth, that's, I think, a crock.
On the Republican side, let's face it, there are a bunch of people who are interested in the arrival of new waves of low skill, low wage labor.
Labor costs are the highest in any business.
Whatever you can do to limit them the better.
There are certain jobs Americans won't do.
You've heard that riff.
So both parties have their vested interest in this, and at the end of the day, both of them are looking at this pool of illegal aliens as potential voters.
There's no question that Republicans are too.
After the election, what the Republicans think?
They were talked into believing they lost because Hispanics don't like them.
And why don't Hispanics like them?
Well, they were told Hispanics don't like them because they are not for amnesty.
And so the Republicans, scared to death over the election results, think that they've got to have Hispanic outreach, which to them means amnesty.
Think every Hispanic citizen in this country and every illegal alien in this country is solely focused on immigration.
And the fact of the matter is they aren't.
In terms of Hispanics, both illegal and citizens, immigration, not even in the top 10 most important issues to them.
That reality doesn't matter.
The political perception that Republicans are somehow anti-Hispanic and anti-immigrant has settled in.
The Republicans feel the need to do something about it.
And they think that means they've got to be for amnesty or whatever would send the signal that they don't dislike Hispanic.
None of that reflects at all the way I look at the issue.
I look at it simply as an issue of law, as an issue of American exceptionalism and tradition.
And if we're going to have immigrants here, they should assimilate and join this great, distinct American culture, which is what in the past immigrants wanted when they came here, the vast majority of them.
That isn't the case.
Then the other side of this, the H1B visa types, the legal immigrants.
The president went out to Las Vegas.
He makes this speech about immigration, and he did one of his jujitsu things.
He left people with the impression that the next CEO of Intel is probably in this pool of illegals.
Yeah, he said the problem with America now is that we're having these people come here and they come here and get educated and they leave.
Well, the CEO of Intel came here, got educated and stayed.
The CEO of Intel was Andy Grove, and he was never an illegal immigrant.
Ditto, the Instagram guy that Obama talked about.
He's mixing apples and oranges here on purpose to confuse the issue.
What the Democrats need is replacements for the people that they're losing demographically or used to.
There isn't any upward mobility right now, so that problem they don't face.
The income tax is going up, and a whole bunch of new taxes are being imposed, and the progressive tax system, progressive income tax, and increasing taxes is the greatest obstacle to accruing wealth that exists.
The coupon clippers have theirs.
The really truly rich who don't get paid the amount of money they have.
Nobody pays somebody five billion dollars.
That money is earned in different ways.
It's not taxed as ordinary income.
It's tacked at capital gains rates 15 or 20%.
But somebody currently making 50 who wants to make 75 may make the jump, but the tax increases, the disposable income doesn't rise appropriately or proportionately.
So people finding it harder and harder and harder today to accrue wealth, to create wealth, especially with this regime, and therefore there is no upward mobility.
The economy's contracting.
Therefore, there is no rise in independence and self-reliance.
There is instead an increase on dependence on government.
Because the private sector is being shrunk so fast that there isn't any opportunity in it.
The government's taking over the role of providing prosperity.
The most of the illegally arriving immigrants agree that that's where prosperity comes from, and that's our problem.
Our problem here's Obama.
Our problem's a Democrat Party.
The fact that they want amnesty is for votes and to make sure that they have a perpetual underclass that needs government, that looks to government as the source of prosperity, therefore looks to the Democrats.
Well, I don't support any of that.
I don't think that's compassionate.
I don't think that's humane.
I don't think that's interested in the humanity of these arrivals.
I don't believe keeping people poor is in their self-interest.
I don't believe keeping people poor helps a country.
I don't believe obstacles on the path to wealth are the right thing to do.
That's what the Democrat Party today in Obama stand for.
But I don't support blanket amnesty.
I never have.
I never will.
It's it's right now a crisis issue that's being used and manipulated by the Democrats to swell the number of voters they have, pure and simple.
And the Republicans think somehow that if they moderate their position on amnesty, that somehow Hispanics can be less inclined to vote Democrat, which I think is a huge tactical mistake that they're making.
In the meantime, there's no talk of assimilation, there's no talk of joining this great American culture, which the legal, the H1B visa people do want to do.
They do want to come here legally, assimilate, become part of the great American society.
Gotta take a break back after this.
I got a new AP story here by our old buddy Jim Coonin, and this headline is great, the story too coming up.
I just want to give you the headline, Economic Jitters Compete with Obama Agenda.
Oh no, it's so unfair.
It's so unfair.
People are getting worried about the economy now, right when Obama's on the verge of getting rid of guns and legalizing the illegals.
Oh no, it's so horrible.
That's the tone of the story.
So unfair to Obama.
He's on the verge of all these great liberal dreams, and here comes the economy worrying people.
And it's distracting them from Obama's agenda.
How unfair.
Meanwhile, Mark in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
I'm glad you called, sir.
Welcome to program.
Well, hi, Rush.
It's a pleasure and honor to talk to the Beatles of Talk Radio.
Thank you, sir, very much.
Well, the reason I called, I wanted to get your comments on how the left has changed their tactics in dealing with you.
For example, in the past, they said don't listen to you, you're right winged, all those type of uh comments.
But what happened is your audience grew.
But what I see now is they changed the tactic to interpreting you to the low informed voter.
And that's why they've come out and said, like you commented, uh started out hostile in your interview with Marco Rubio, Rush was converted.
And uh my thought is this is a lot more deceptive because now the low informed voter thinks they know what you're saying.
That's an interesting interesting point because what Mark's saying is the low information voter doesn't actually listen, but the low information voter does watch various mainstream media outlets, and if the mainstream media mischaracterizes what I say, that's what the low information voter ends up thinking.
It's an interesting point.
In fact, last night when I was telling Catherine, you know, I've I've got to go clear this up.
These these people think that I came out for amnesty.
She said, they don't think that.
They heard you.
They're just misreporting it, which is essentially what Mark is uh is saying.
But it was even people, you know, on on the my friendly side here, friends of mine who uh ideological friends who I've misunderstood it, which is why I want to take just a brief moment.
It only took about 25 minutes to um straighten it out.
Sit tight, my friends.
Another excursion into broadcast excellence.
First hour in the can on the way over to the Limbaugh Broadcast Museum at rushlimbaugh.com.
We have much more as always.
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