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March 8, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:41
March 8, 2013, Friday, Hour #2
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And greetings to you, thrill seekers, music lovers all across the fruited plain.
I am Rush Limbaugh, meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
It's Friday, and you know what that means.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's Open Line Friday!
That's right.
Yip, yip, yip, yip, yahoo, open line Friday.
We try.
We seldom succeed, but we try to take more calls on Friday than any other day because it's theoretically the show is devoted to what you think about stuff, not me.
That's a giant career risk because nobody cares what you think.
They listen to find out what I think.
But I care what you think, and I'm only way to do that is to take more calls.
What are you saying to me?
I damn right.
Well, I'm interested in their opinions.
I don't care what they, I mean, yeah, I'm flat out interested in it.
I would love, you know, we had a call from a Democrat yesterday.
I would love to get calls from Democrats who actually don't resort to name calling in 30 seconds.
You know, if I thought we could do it, you know, I would devote a day like we used to, just take calls only from women who don't like the program.
We did this stuff early on, but now there's so many tricksters.
You know, I saw something the other day.
I saw a darn it, I wish I could remember what the source was.
Somebody had done scholarly research on all of these websites, social websites, blogs, you name it.
They had studied all of the comments sections, and they found that it really is the gutter out there in the comments section at blogs and social websites, and it's so nasty, it's so vile that it actually makes people uncomfortable.
It can have a profound effect on people.
The rudeness, the just how obscene, mean-spirited the stuff is.
In fact, one of the conclusions from one of the scholars who did the scholarly research is that young writers at blogs and other websites are afraid to actually write anything that contains an opinion because of what's going to show up in the comments.
Literally, they're being intimidated.
Now, as you know, that wouldn't stop me and it would stop a lot, but it's affecting some young people that are just getting into the whole business of sharing opinions.
And I don't ever read comments.
I used to, but I don't because it is.
It's just, it is human debris.
80% of it is just absolute sludge.
But this was a story devoted to the study of it.
And they were interested.
Are these people really like this?
Are they just taking the advantage of being anonymous?
Or do they, this is really how they think and act and live every day?
Are they really this low rent?
And they said things like, would these people say to other people's faces the kind of stuff that they write in the comments?
And they conclude that more and more people are treating other people that way.
And the vast majority of them are Democrats that are just constantly angry, enraged, ticked off, personal insults.
This is a fascinating piece.
I don't remember where it was Forbes.
That's what was Forbes.
Yeah, I knew it was not some flyby night bunch of people.
Anyway, what I was going to say is, I would love to take calls from low-information voters for a day.
Really, just talk to them.
I would love to ask them quite like what does American exceptionalism mean to you?
Are you for gay marriage?
If so, why?
I'll back out of the way, tell them no wrong answer.
I really want to know how you think.
But the problem with doing it now is the kind of people that would call based on the comments that we get.
I'm afraid it would be open season on people who would lie to Snerdley.
You know how to get on this program.
Tell Snerdley you love me.
He wants everybody to love me so much that when he hears it, he can't wait to move him to the front of the line.
Now he's going to be on the lookout for it.
So you won't get away with that today.
But I was thinking it'd be harder and harder to get genuine, honest.
And when you're talking about low-information voters, I mean, who among them are going to admit it?
And who among them even know it?
My theory about low-information voters is that most of the low-information people out there do not think of themselves that way.
They think they know everything.
They're up to speed.
They got all the answers.
What they know is all there is to know.
Anyway, so it's a pipe dream.
But Open Line Friday is the closest we get to that because Monday through Thursday, it's tightly screened.
You have to talk about things I care about because I don't want to sit here and be bored.
Because if I'm bored, everybody listening is going to get bored.
But on Friday, see, we'll throw that out.
And whatever you want to talk about is fair game.
Jesse Jackson Jr., the Reverend Jackson, is in Caracas at the funeral of Hugo Chavez.
And Bill Clinton, I'm sure, is feeling aced out.
Funeral crashers.
Reverend Jackson is there.
And we have learned, ladies and gentlemen, that they are going to preserve Hugo Chavez's body permanently.
They're going to embalm it, do whatever they have to to preserve it permanently, displayed in a glass casket so that his people will always have him.
Have you noticed that aside from the popes and the popes, by the way, you know the story behind the Paul?
I've been to the Vatican and seen the body of Pope John XXIII in a glass casket.
The Vatican says that if the body doesn't deteriorate, it is proof.
It is unalterable proof of, I forget what they say, not sainthood, but it's they claim they don't do anything special beyond the normal embalming process.
And if the body preserves, then that was the right man to be Pope.
And that's why not all of them are displayed in that way.
Leave the Catholic Church out there.
All of these Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Chavez, all these Ho Chi Men is preserved this way in Vietnam.
Ferdinand Marcos, who was a pretender to all this, but he wanted to be.
And if a Namelda hadn't bought somebody damn shoes, who knows?
You know, that country didn't have a big budget to begin with, and she blew it all on shoes.
But regardless, they're going to preserve Hugo Chavez so that his people will always have him.
Because in Caracas and throughout Venezuela, they're saying, who's going to take care of us now?
I played for you an hour ago a three-minute soundbite from my television show 1995 illustrating how Democrats' scare tactics to get everybody to agree with growing the budget.
By the way, this is a challenge for me.
The Democrats are talking about what a great era the Clinton era was.
They tell us now when they want to come and raise taxes.
Well, look at it, let's go back to Clinton era taxes.
We had economic boom.
Everything was great back then.
Of course, we played soundbites, a soundbite from 1995 of Democrats employing the same scare tactics then as they do today.
It really is quite instructive.
If you missed it, we got the link.
It's a YouTube video now at rushlimbaugh.com.
It's also, you'll see it's the daily show, except a conservative version of it, the forerunner to the daily show.
Ahead of its time.
TV show literally was ahead of its time.
I kid you not.
Now, government's only gotten bigger since 1995.
Democrats have gotten everything they want.
And they say bigger government equals solution to problems.
And of course, it doesn't work that way.
Now, I made all that very clear in the first hour.
There's another way of explaining it that I don't think low-information voters and even a lot of high-information voters can comprehend.
But here it is.
Back in the Clinton year, back in 1995, the government, government spending was 18% of GDP.
So another way of saying that, for those of you in Rio Linda, and by the way, speaking in Rio Linda, that is a tantamount, that's tantamount knowledge expressed by me of the existence of low-information voters.
That is why I've been singling Rio Linda out for 25 years, you know, make things clear to them in ways that are not necessary for others.
So I'm on the cutting edge here.
I can't tell you how many ways.
Anyway, 18% of GDP.
What does that mean to anybody?
I mean, I can sit here and say it all day long.
Okay, it's 18% of gross domestic product.
What does that mean?
Well, it's 18% of the whole economy.
Well, okay, so what?
Well, it's too high.
18% of all economic activity is the government, which doesn't produce anything.
The only way it gets 18% is by taking it from people.
Maybe try it that way.
But Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Limbo, the government does such wonderful things with the money.
It takes care of people.
It feeds the hungry and it clothes the naked and it provides homes for the homeless and medicine for the sick.
You can't.
And that's how the low-information new Castrate think of it.
Anyway, the size of government back during the Clinton years, back during this panacea, was 18% of the economy, GDP.
Today, it's 24%.
So it's grown by a third.
And how's that working for you?
I mean, the government is now nearly 25% of the whole economy, and it doesn't produce anything.
The only way it can get that big is taking money from other people.
Not other people, everybody.
It is the only way.
Now, knowledgeable economists say that 18% of GDP is a good size.
Knowledgeable economists, I'm not trying to sound like Obama, but genuine, real economists say that a government that is 18% of GDP, given a country like ours, makes sense.
Because 18% of GDP is enough to be able to provide for the national defense, defend and protect the Constitution, and take care of the people who can't take care of themselves and still have enough left over in the private sector for there to be the opportunity for plenty of prosperity on the part of the people.
Now, when you get above 18%, now we're 24%, what that means is the size of the economy where you live is getting smaller because the government's taking it away.
And they don't produce anything with it.
They just take it.
And they're doing much more now than providing for the common defense and defending and protecting the Constitution and building roads and bridges and providing for the needy.
Now they're doing much, much more.
And we can't afford it.
Anyway, that may be a helpful way of explaining.
And it dovetails, by the way, if I might now, into the unemployment situation.
Because the drive-by media and the regime are ecstatic today.
The unemployment rate went down from 7.9 to 7.7%.
And we're in a circumstance now, folks, where it has been like this for so long that many low-information voters are going to assume that this is normal when it's absolutely a disaster.
Unemployment, the entire employment universe, everything about employment in this country at present is a disaster.
And yet the media and the regime today are treating this drop as though it's Nirvana.
J.C. Penny announced today that they had laid off around 2,200 people at 100 stores and offices.
This is in the Chicago Tribune.
And this is happening every week now.
So while you hear that the unemployment rate went down to 7.7%, know that minimum 2,200 people lost their jobs.
That's just J.C. Penny.
More and more happening all over the country.
And here's the one of the hidden bits of news in the unemployment report today.
Another 130,000 people dropped out of the labor force, which means that the number of jobs that are available to be filled fell by 130,000.
Now, here's the important number on that.
Since Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, the universe of jobs has shrunk by over 8.5 million.
There are 8.5 million fewer job opportunities in this country than there were four years ago.
That's how many businesses have closed.
That's how much downsizing at businesses, large and small, there has been.
They're just 8,500,000 fewer jobs.
Our population hasn't dropped by 8.5 million.
Our population is either steady or increasing a little bit.
But there are more and more people coming out of college every day that want jobs that just aren't there.
And another 130,000 people dropped out of the labor force.
That means they've burned through their unemployment compensation benefits.
They've gone through their 99 weeks and there isn't anything and they're just out in the ether now.
They are not counted as unemployed, by the way, because they've given up looking.
So the way the government does this, if you're not looking for a job, you're not counted as unemployed.
You're just forgotten.
That's how the unemployment rate can come down.
People who drop out of the system are treated by the liberals and the media as if they never existed.
Much like unborn babies.
Unborn babies, aborted babies, are forgotten.
They never existed.
Same thing with people who drop out of the employment system.
Their 99 weeks of unemployment, they've burned through it.
They're no job.
They've quit looking.
Bye-bye.
We don't know who you are anymore.
You never existed.
And here's another dirty little statistic about it.
In February, people, one of the reasons there is any good news in this unemployment report, multiple job holders, people who hold more than one job, went up by a record amount.
Full-time employees dropped.
Part-time employees increased.
Full-time, when you hear employees, you think the full-time career-oriented job, those are going away lickety-split.
They are vanishing.
People who work more than one job are now working two jobs.
The number of people holding two or more jobs went up.
And they are counted.
Yes, Obama's the reason.
It's his economy.
So the people who hold multiple jobs, one or two, three jobs, they are increasing.
It takes that many jobs for many people to make ends meet.
Full-time employment dropping.
People working part-time also increasing.
There isn't any good economic news or unemployment news today, no matter what you hear anywhere.
You know, I was thinking, if I were president and for some reason the White House tours got shut down, I think I'd spend some time myself and I would grab the first lady and I go down there and make sure to tours somehow.
I would ask the first lady, and I'd cross my fingers.
I'd ask the first lady to go down and help me run the White House tours.
But the White House spokesperson is making excuses today for the White House tours being shut down.
We have an audio sound bite coming up.
One more thing on unemployment, and we come back from the break here coming up, bottom of the hour, and we're going to get to your phone calls.
White unemployment, 6.8%.
Black unemployment, 13.8%.
Hispanic unemployment, 9.6%.
Teenagers, 25.1%.
The actual unemployment rate made up of people who are out of work and not looking for a job and out of work and are looking is 14%.
But that doesn't even tell you how bad it is.
What you need to know is we've lost 85 or 8.5 million jobs in four years.
Okay, as I look at it, Mr. Broadcast Engineer, we're up now to audio soundbite number three.
Greetings, folks.
And welcome back.
Back to the phones.
Now we go with Ventura, California.
Dale, thank you so much for calling.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello, Rush.
I'm calling about Lindsey Graham and John McCain.
I'm really kicked off as a veteran the way John McCain and Lindsey Graham have basically sold out somebody that they should have been supporting.
They went and had a nice party with Obama, then they come back down, go to the floor of the Senate, and act like his attack dogs.
They may be calling it bipartisan, but in the old days, John McCain will be well aware of this term.
It's called being a collaborator.
They need to quit straddling the fence, land on one side or the other because the people are sick and tired of it.
You know, it's just, it's getting to be too much.
Let me working for us.
You are.
You are right.
We need to go back to the floor of the Senate and they need to make a public apology to have a conversation.
Paul Rand, they need to make an apology to Marco Rubio, to Cruz, and I can't remember the name of the Democrat that also came out and supported because this is just backstabbing gone way beyond the pale.
You are more right than you know.
And you're pretty right.
And you know you're pretty right.
This incident, the Rand Paul filibuster, has turned things upside down in Washington.
And McCain's behavior is exhibit A in this.
What happens?
McCain and a bunch of other Republicans decide to go to dinner with Obama on Tuesday night.
Now, I don't pretend to know why the Republicans did it, but I know why Obama did it.
He wanted the photo op, and he wants to make it look like he's cooperating because the people are not buying this sequester argument of his.
It's not working.
The country coming to an end, all falling apart, and Republicans being blamed for it isn't working.
There's a big, huge backlash, in fact, going on.
For example, the CDC has confirmed that the White House has been caught in a lie about child vaccinations in the sequester.
Congressman Andy Harris, MD, a doctor, Republican, Maryland, confronted Dr. Tom Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control, about misleading statements made by the White House.
The confrontation occurred during an oversight hearing for the Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services.
So what's happening here is that McCain and others are complaining that Rand Paul is out abusing Senate rules and is appealing to extreme, kooky libertarians in their college dorms while everybody else sees an assault on freedom and liberty and the economy and everything else taking place.
And they see the Republicans sitting at the same table of the guy who's doing it.
Who are they siding with?
And this has got the old bulls upset.
So they go out and they dine with the architect of this disaster who is intentionally inflicting pain on the American people via his sequester.
That's the point of it.
They go out and dine with this guy who still will not tell them what he was doing when Americans were dying in Benghazi, for example.
But he wants the photo op.
And they, of course, listening, the Republicans, listening to their consultants, think that they're making great gains by appearing bipartisan here, which is not what the people that vote for them want.
There has been such an upside-down turning of the power structure that, well, our office is getting phone calls begging us not to lump certain Republicans in with the ones we're criticizing.
Hey, don't talk about me.
I wasn't in that dinner.
Don't talk about me.
Don't talk about me.
I came out and I stood up with Rand Paul.
Don't put me.
There has been a major, major shift here.
There's more to it than you can see inside the power structure in Washington, inside the Republican Party.
And for McCain now to come call these guys kooks and wackos illustrates exactly what's wrong.
But here's the substance of this.
There is a fear among McCain, Lindsey Graham, and others who favor an interventionist foreign policy.
Think of the neocons.
Think of going into Iraq and not just securing Iraq, but building a democracy, nationbuilding, if you will.
Think of the outbreak of the Arab Spring and the people on our side who thought, wow, this is wonderful.
This is the outbreak of American democracy.
When it wasn't, it was the exact opposite.
Rand Paul, they're asking themselves, is he his father's son or is he on his own here?
They're worried that he's his father's son.
They're worried that Rand Paul is an isolationist.
They're worried that Rand Paul's diatribe on drones really means that Rand Paul wants to bring the military home and not use it unless we're attacked.
He doesn't like it being used in an intervention.
This is what they fear.
And as he succeeds in making a connection with the American people, they are worried.
The neocons are worried that they are being undermined by this.
Because, and I'll tell you why.
Rand Paul made a connection with the American people.
These other people do not.
He made a connection.
Therefore, he has the ability to influence, motivate people.
They fear.
I'm telling you what their fears are.
They thought that Ron Paul is an absolute nutcase wacko.
That's why they're calling Rand Paul a wacko, because that's what they thought of Ron Paul.
Libertarian, fruitcake, nutcase, isolationist, shut down the U.S. military, speak positively about Islamists, all this kind of stuff.
They are afraid that that's who Rand Paul is.
And they're afraid that what Rand Paul was doing in this filibuster was not just speaking out against the use of drones on American citizens on American soil.
They're afraid that Rand Paul is actually setting the stage for building up public support to stop the interventionist usage of American military might and voting, police, All over the world.
It's a fear that they've got.
And there's more to it than that, too.
It's also the whole notion of jealousy in power politics.
Let me put it this way.
They, I think, are worried that Rand Paul might be skillful enough to move the Republican mainstream away from the McCain crystal neoconservatism view of the world and toward a position that is not as extreme as his father's,
but is suspicious of interventionism, suspicious of Islamic democracy building, suspicious of financial and military support for dubious regimes.
And so this is, there's all kinds of stuff happening with this filibuster.
And in addition to the optics, in addition to what was on the surface for everybody to see, the reason McCain is calling Rand Paul and the people that stood up with him wackos is because he thinks that they are extreme kook libertarians who don't want the U.S. military going anywhere for anything, anytime, anywhere.
Not even to oppose the Islamists.
And so there's this fear about it.
But he made that connection with people.
That's what that whole thing was all.
He's now a national figure.
And he wasn't wild-eyed and screaming.
And he pounded.
It was very rational and very reasonable.
It was asking a very simple, easily explained and understood question.
It was as simple as the whole House Bank scandal was.
The reason that the House Bank scandal worked so well, the exposing of it, is because these guys in Congress were able to walk into a bank in the House of Representatives and cash a check when they didn't have any money in their account.
You can't get more simpler than that, and there's nobody else outside the House of Representatives who can do that.
If you write a check for money you don't have, it bounces, you pay a fee or worse.
But these guys were walking into the House Bank and writing checks and having the money given or paid with no limit.
Some of these people were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in checks they had written for which they didn't have the money.
The House Post Office was another.
Honest to goodness, a congressman could take a donor's check to the House Post Office and buy a couple bucks worth of stamps and get $9,900, $800 in change.
Just the way they had it set up.
Nobody knew it finally got exposed.
This is one of the many reasons the Republicans won the House in 1994.
It's one of the many reasons that the then Speaker, Fort Worthless Jim White, Jim Wright, was gone.
The House Bank scandal was late 80s, early 90s, and it built and built.
There were other reasons for the Republican victory in 94, of course.
But this thing was at the beginning of people easily under, this was what Rand Paul was doing.
Should a drone be able to kill an American sitting at a cafe, Starbucks, surfing the internet?
No!
It's very simple.
But he couldn't get an answer.
So it was easily understood.
Very simple question he was posing.
And all this was going on while our guys are out dining with Obama.
Dining with the architect of this current nationwide mess.
Rand Paul was standing up opposing this while these guys were out yucking it up with the architect of it all.
You know, it was a great example of the ruling class and the country class and the ruling class not liking what this country class senator was doing.
No more complicated ebb.
A lot of people ticked off about this too.
I'm glad you called.
I got to take a quick time out.
Sit tight, my friends.
We'll be back with more after this.
Welcome back.
Great to have you.
El Rushbo behind the golden EIB microphone.
You had a what?
A drive-by caller who said really, really?
But she's not on the phone now.
She hung him.
So she, a drive-by call.
Snerdley says, see, this is it.
She's a 27-year-old woman just called.
Said, man, this Rush guy is cool.
It'd be great if he had a phone app and we could like DVR his radio person.
She says, he does.
In fact, we just activated the Android version of the Rush app yesterday.
So if you use Samsung, Nexus, hell, I can't think of all the brands.
But if you're on Android and you want the Rush app, it's there now at the Google Play Store.
And the Rush app at the iOS Apple Store has been there for a year.
It took us a while to develop the Android app.
We weren't convinced there was that big a demand.
We're just kidding.
I love jabbing you Android people.
But it's not, we do have it.
And I'll tell you what, the Rush app, we just upgraded it, and it is like a DVR for the radio.
You can be watching this program right now if you're a subscriber to my website.
If the app is free, but if you're a subscriber to the website, you can be watching it right now on the DittoCam.
You get transcripts of the program every day.
You don't have to remember what I said when you want to tell somebody what you heard.
You just go get the transcript and show them.
And if you don't want to get the transcript, get the actual segment of the program.
Audio, it's there.
The clips are available.
It's everything.
And there's a Rush in a Hurry feature we mail out a half hour after the program with highlights and recap of everything that happened.
And it's all accessible with the Rush app.
That'd be cool.
This Rush guy had an app.
We do.
And it's another thing.
I do not tout my own stuff.
I should.
I should do it.
We had a Limball Letter app as well.
We've digitized the most widely read political newsletter in the country, the Limball Letter.
It's now available.
We're not the Android version of that yet.
I assume that's coming.
And I mean, Teresa in Alliance, Ohio, I'm glad you called.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi.
Oh, yeah, in Ohio, transplanted from Miami.
So every time you say sunny Florida, I get a little bit homesick.
I can imagine you do.
Well, I just wanted to thank you for just doing what you do because I guess I'm classified as one of your low-information voters or, you know, people.
And so if you're listening to this program, you were one at one time.
I was.
I was.
Yeah.
Until a few years ago, I started listening to you, and you have been systematically bringing me up to just kind of, it's like a big puzzle, and little puzzle pieces are starting to, you know, fit in here, you know.
And then I started getting real concerned because, you know, I didn't pay attention to a lot of government stuff before and politics and all of that.
And then now it's all starting to make sense.
I didn't even know if I was a Democrat or a Republican.
I mean, I had to figure that out.
And then now you've given me some meat to chew.
You give me meat to chew on each time.
You know, I have to look up words like filibuster and sequester and all those different things just to understand kind of, you know, what that means in the government and all the, you know, politics.
God bless you for taking the time to look them up.
Most people that don't know them are intimidated by them and think that it's something bad and run away from it.
No, well, I'm that's, you know, it's just if you want to understand something, you have to, you know, I guess I just go that extra step.
Not that I understand it all all the time, like you were talking about the figures and the 18%.
And I was listening to all that and I was trying to follow you.
You know, when you get into, you know, some technical stuff, it still kind of loses me a little bit.
But then you kind of brought it around that I understood it, you know, into meaning.
Well, that's what we try to do here: make the complex understandable.
And that's what I, that's why I listen.
Well, because I'm just like a schoolgirl now coming up and I'm old.
I am.
I remember when in the 60s when, you know, all the, you know, the.
But you're not old.
You are on the threshold of a brand new life here.
You're going to have youthful enthusiasm now, learning all these things that you didn't know.
It's going to totally change your life.
You're going to be young at heart like you've never been before, other than the last guy you met.
No, no, no.
Don't worry.
I have not forgotten about the story about women who get to the top of the corporate suite and then block the upward path of other women.
I have not forgotten that.
I got lots of stuff yet to come and more of your phone calls.
So you be patient, folks.
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