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April 2, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:48
April 2, 2013, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 247 podcast.
When was it last week?
It was Thursday or Friday that I said that everything happening confused me.
Forget what day it was last week.
Well, today everything is boring me.
Everything in the world, and I don't care about any of it today.
I'm not supposed to tell you that, by the way.
That goes to gang goes against every media broadcast principle that there is.
I'm just supposed to do it and let you wonder if I'm bored.
I'm not supposed to admit it.
But it is what it is, and it's nevertheless, it's still great to be with you folks.
I'm looking forward to talking to you.
Our telephone number is 800-282-2882 and the email address, Lrushbaugh at EIBNet.com.
If you look real hard today, in the back of the front section of the New York Times, you'll find a story on Obamacare, which is where a lot of the stories on Obamacare are now in the New York Times.
to find.
Because the news on Obamacare isn't all that good.
And here's another one.
And the headline of this story, small firms offer of plan choices under health law delayed.
And here's the crux of it.
Unable to meet tight deadlines in the new health care law, the regime is delaying parts of a program intended to provide affordable health insurance to small businesses and their employees.
It was a major selling point for Obamacare.
And they're unable to meet the deadline of implementation.
The law requires it to be implemented next year, starting in January.
And they're not going to make it.
It's just now April of 2013, and they're not going to make January of 2014.
Unable to meet.
Tight deadlines in a new health care law, which they wrote, the regime is delaying parts of a program intended to provide affordable health insurance to small businesses and their employees.
The law calls for a new insurance marketplace, specifically for small businesses starting next year.
But in most states, employers won't be able to get what Congress intended, which is the option to provide their employees with a choice.
Instead, everybody's only going to have a single plan.
That much touted choice, the much touted flexibility, which was the way that they were going to lower costs.
Oops, sorry, uh we're behind.
That isn't happening.
We're not going to be able to get that done until 2015.
The choice option already available to many big businesses, was supposed to become available to small employers in January.
But regime officials said they're going to delay it till 2015 in the 33 states where the federal government government will be running the uh the exchanges because the states in those uh the the states those those states refuse to do the exchanges, so the government's got to come in and do it.
And they're not set up for that.
There's no provision for the federal government to run an exchange in one state, much less twenty-seven of them.
The promise of affordable health insurance for small businesses, if you recall, was portrayed as a major advantage of Obamacare.
It was mentioned often by regime officials and Democrat leaders in Congress as they fought opponents of the legislation.
This was a major selling point.
This is a reason we had to do it, and we had to do it now.
Because it was going to affect so many people, small businesses and their employees.
But now the regime is unable to meet the tight deadlines.
And so they just decided that they're going to move the requirement from January of 2014 to some time in 2015.
Now you may You may remember, it well, you you you'll remember as I recall for you, this provision, all of these choices for small businesses and their employers, which was going to offer the opportunity for lower prices.
This was the provision that was required to get Mary Landrew's vote for Obamacare.
This was a specific provision promised to her, required by her based on concerns that she raised.
But it's not just her.
There were a lot of people who were who were assured and promised that health care was going to be cheaper, it was going to be filled with more choice, and the small business specific here was cited as I mean, this is a major, major element of Obamacare.
So people are starting to ask a question.
Well, look, if this isn't going to be ready in time, and if that's not going to be ready in time, and if that's not going to be ready in time, if if why don't we just delay the implementation of this for a full year, every aspect of it?
Why do this piecemeal?
And the answer to that is, even though I don't care today, the answer to that is that the Democrats don't want this kind of of failure going into the midterm elections or the presidential election.
They don't want it.
That's why 2015 is sort of a drop dead date to get as much of this implemented.
Well, 2014 was actually the uh the target yet.
And I'm going to make that now.
And this is a this is a huge, huge provision here.
And by the way, this isn't going to matter.
Nobody's going to say anything, nobody's going to do anything about it, but they do not have independently the authority to delay this on their own.
They've got to go get approval and votes to move this.
Now they they're not it's it's another aspect of the law that's just going to be ignored.
But they do not have, and it's it's written in the legislation.
They do not have the regime, just can't say, you know what, we're going to delay that a year.
They'll get away with it, like they get away with everything else.
But statutorily, they don't have the um the right or the freedom or what have you to do that.
But you you'll notice now, New York Times healthcare news is always in the back of the front section, because it's always bad news.
It's always, for the most part, it's news about all the problems with Obamacare.
And I think I said last week, and every time another number of people have said this, this this thing, folks, is so massive.
It is so big, it is so unruly.
Remember my analogy, I was watching a fascinating BBC show called The Challenger, and it was about the congressional, the official investigation into what caused the Challenger explosion in 1986.
And there's a there's a scene where two of the primary characters are driving to the Pentagon for a demonstration, and Air Force General is showing a physicist some secret stuff about the solid rocket boosters, as they're trying to steer him to the cause that they know, but that they can't be part of revealing.
Yeah, I'll review that.
Very quickly, and by the way, the show's not aired in America.
It's only aired on the BBC.
It stars uh, I think William Hurt, who plays the physicist, Dr. Richard Feynman, who's no longer alive, some Berkeley, or not not, it was uh Altadina, California.
Anyway, he was one of the civilians, one of the few civilians on the official commission to investigate what happened.
And as we all know now, the O-rings were not tolerant of cold temperatures, and they were not properly tested.
And it was unusually cold the morning of that launch, and the O-rings, think of think of rubber that has to expand and fill gaps.
It hardened, it didn't expand, and so flames escaped what should have been tight enclosure thing blew up.
Well, what they were they were caught, that they wanted to tell everybody what happened, but they couldn't reveal national security secrets at the same time.
So they tried to steer Feynman, it was Sally Ride, an astronaut she was on the commission, the late Sally Ride, and an Air Force General, who knew what happened.
They knew that the O-rings blew up, but Morton Fayacola manufacturers were trying to cover it up, obviously, a lot of people were.
So they were trying to steer Feynman, the physicist, to the answer that he would conclude on his own, as far as anybody else thought.
The O-ring problem.
And really what it boiled down to was, and the reason why they didn't want to make any of it public is because what they were eventually ultimately telling the world was that the United States could not launch military payloads of any kind in weather below 50 degrees.
It's 1986.
That would have been overwhelmingly valuable to somebody like the Soviet Union or the ChICOMs.
Saver caught between a rock and a hard place.
They wanted everybody to know they wanted to be public.
It was the Reagan administration.
They didn't want to cover anything up.
But at the same time, they had a secret that they needed to protect for national security.
Anyway, as in this show, it's about 90 minutes and maybe two hours, as they're they're driving the Pentagon, a thought struck me.
Because they had an aerial view of the Pentagon, and these two guys are driving in.
And the Air Force General is going to give Feynman, Dr. Feynman, a slideshow presentation that will not conclude anything.
But Feynman's supposed to get the picture from this on his own without anybody...
Actually telling him.
And I got to thinking, is there anybody?
Is there any single individual alive who knows everything going on at the Pentagon today, tomorrow, right now, next week.
And of course, the logical answer is no.
But stop and think about that.
The Pentagon is national defense.
Pentagon is the defense of the people of this country, this country, the Constitution, and there are things going on in there.
I'm not talking about conspiracies.
I'm just talking about massive bureaucracies.
There are things going on in there that nobody knows.
The president doesn't know everything going on in there.
The Secretary of Defense doesn't know.
By definition, some things have to be kept secret from everybody.
What is it that keeps everybody in there from going rogue with so many people doing things that not one person know, not one single person can know.
And it had struck me that health care is the same thing.
I in fact, I once ran into a former director of Central Intelligence, CIA director, and I said, were you aware of everything the agency was doing?
No, it's impossible.
I have a very distorted, immature, not immature, naive view of chief executives.
In my estimation, they know everything.
CEO of Exxon, I've always thought knows everything going on there.
But he doesn't, but I've always thought that a CEO did.
Obviously that's the delegate, but but in terms of knowledge, but the CIA director, the ex CIA director said, no, I can't possibly tell you everything going on in here.
I know that that's intellectually true, still shocks me.
Because everybody in there is following orders.
Somebody's giving them.
Health care is the same thing, folks.
This thing is so open-ended and wide with so many people in charge of it.
The areas of Obamacare in the law itself, where you'll find the phrase, as the secretary shall determine, the number of times that phrase appears is almost too many to count.
So here you have the implementation of one aspect of this law, which is not going to be made on time, a central aspect of it, small business, the uh the businesses and their employees, but the numbers of regulations added to this legislation every day, even now, Number in the thousands of pages.
It's simply not possible for any one person to understand health care in this country.
And what is health care?
You go to the doctor when you're not feeling well.
If you need surgery, you go to the hospital for an operation.
We've turned that into something so complicated that our way of dealing with it is inexplicable to people.
So now we've got this this provision, the state exchanges.
You wait.
You wait.
You know, I call yesterday afternoon.
What was her name from Tampa?
The expert on SSDI and all these other what was her name.
She probably gonna get closer to finding out how to scam the healthcare system than anybody actually in charge of it.
She's already figured out SSDI, SSI, the food stamp program, how to manage your your your prescriptions from one day to the next so that people don't figure out you're getting them every day.
It's amazing if you if you missed that call.
You've got a we've got it at Rushlimbaugh.com.
It was just a stunning.
In fact, Snerdley, I had people email me yesterday, said it was the funniest thing they ever saw.
They said watching it on the ditto came.
I didn't look at it.
People said you should have seen you.
The visuals of you reacting to that woman are priceless.
I didn't.
Ellen from Clearwater, Clearwater, Tampa, same difference.
But I'm I'm serious, folks, really, this is something as as routine as you get sick, you need to go to the doctor.
It's it's it's become something incomprehensible.
Nobody can explain how this is going to get done and how it's going to get paid for.
And just the simple the simple procedure of you getting sick and needing good to go to the doctor is going to become one of the most complicated things in everybody's life that nobody's going to be able to explain.
And it's in its own way, it's a microcosm of what interacting with the government on anything is becoming.
Let me take a time out here as I note the official programming clock.
We'll be back.
Sit tight.
Much more straight ahead right after this.
Well, it's official now, folks.
Stockton, California, or I should I should more correctly say Stockton.
That's how if you live out there.
I I I lived in Sacramento, as you know, my adopted hometown, and they've got a PBS station.
I forget the call letters.
Covers the Sacramento Stockton market.
And you know, every half hour they've got to officially identify the station.
And they've got the typical PBS voice.
They give the call letters.
Okay, da da da whatever it is.
Sacramento, Stockton.
Okay.
Regardless, Stockton, which is just south of Sacramento, and just eighty miles east of San Francisco, has gone bankrupt.
Which I mean, it's the first city, first American city to go bankrupt, probably since the Great Depression, but we're not in a depression.
We're not even in a recession.
We are said to be practically in a booming economy, at least according to the new normal of this regime.
But the story has now moved on from Stockton going bankrupt.
The question now is who is going to get paid.
Who's going to be first in line in the bankruptcy?
Stockton's creditors or the city workers, the union city workers.
The bondholders, Stockton, by the way, a city of 300,000 people.
Last June, They filed Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection.
The bondholders, people that have muni bonds for Stockton, took them to court.
The bondholders argued first that the city hadn't done everything possible to pay their debts, like sell real estate assets.
They then argued that the bondholders were being unfairly hit with most of the pain of the bankruptcy.
Although bonds account for only 7% of the city's total budget, the city of Stockton is demanding that the bondholders absorb 44% of the concessions.
In other words, the bondholders are being told to forget 44% of what they're owed.
Government unions, on the other hand, were not asked for any concessions in their pension plans.
And make no mistake, this is a bankruptcy due to the unfunded future liability of pensions that they can't possibly pay.
Meanwhile, we got all these things going on.
Obamacare can't possibly be implemented in time.
It's too massive, it's too big, nobody really knows what it is.
We've got the city of Stockton, California officially bankrupt, everything else going to hell in the handbasket of media.
Simply can't stop talking about the fact that Obama only sank two out of 22, what was it, free throws or shot.
They're embarrassed.
The media, we've got the audio soundbites coming up.
They're embarrassed Obama was so bad out there on the court.
Anyway, back to Stockton for just a second.
This is a city in bankruptcy because it cannot pay its promised pensions to union employees.
They just don't have the money.
So the bondholders have been told that they aren't going to be paid back very much.
So that the union workers of the city can get a sufficient amount of money in the bankruptcy.
Why is that?
Well, it's real simple, folks.
The bondholders don't need the money.
They are rich Wall Street maggots.
They're investors.
They can stand to lose a little money.
They ought to lose a little money.
Find out what it feels like.
They're the uh they're the parasites anyway.
They're the ones that run around and make all this money on Wall Street, and they live all these lavish lives, and they're and they're they need to find out what it's like here.
Same thing that happened with the bondholders at General Motors.
The bondholders come before stockholders in the natural pecking order in terms of investor importance, you know, where investors rank on the scale.
Bondholders are higher than stockholders.
The bondholders came under personal insult and criticism from President Obama during the GM bankruptcy.
They didn't need that money.
They were greedy.
They wanted their money back.
In the case, in the case of Stockton, this is this may well be the first American city to force bondholders to take less than the principal that they're owed on government bonds.
Now, you may be an investor in Stockton municipal bonds.
You may not know it, depending on what kind of IRA 401k, what kind of investment plan you have, somebody invests your money, you don't know where it all goes.
You could be a municipal bondholder in Stockton.
And you're not a Wall Street person, but you're not going to get anywhere near back as they divvy things up in bankruptcy.
What you've put in, even though you ought to be first compensated.
Bondholders ought to get it first.
The reason they're in trouble is they can't pay these pensions.
Stockton is probably not going to be the only California city to have to file.
Yesterday, the U.S. bankruptcy court in Sacramento, Judge Christopher Klein sided With the city and allowed them to continue restructuring under Chapter 9, and his ruling could very well mean that Stockton will be the first American city to force bondholders to take less than the principal that they are owed on these bonds.
Same thing Obama took over General Motors.
He told their bondholders to take a hike.
Their legitimate investment was deemed worthless.
They were pariahs and greedy for wanting their investment back in a bankruptcy proceeding.
And the company was given to the United Auto Workers.
So much the same thing is happening in Stockton.
The news media still shaking their collective heads over Obama missing all but two of his uh 22 free throws in the White House basketball court during the Easter egg roll on Sunday.
Let me ask a question.
Isn't it a little racist to assume that Obama would be good at basketball?
I mean, where is this lofty expectation of Obama on the basketball court coming from?
We have it at his word.
He tells us that he's good at basketball, and we already know from others who've worked with him that he thinks he's an expert at everything.
Maybe he thinks he's excellent at free throw shooting.
Anyway, they're they're they're very, very concerned about this.
Do I have a let's see?
I've got a soundbite.
Yes, sound audio sound by 13.
What is it?
It's the uh CBS morning show.
Bill Plant, CBS this morning.
And this is Bill Plant, and it is from today.
Surrounded by young fans and a couple of members of the NBA's Washington Wizards, the president lofted a few shots from the field and missed.
Then there was a free throw that sat tantalizingly on the rim before rolling out.
It ended with the president going two for twenty-two, including an air ball.
And a missed layup, but the president kept trying.
And he kept missing until finally he nailed a jumper.
And wasted no time getting off the court.
Well, if you needed any proof that Barack Obama is intensely competitive, that was it.
Really?
Who was he competing against?
There was free throws for crying out.
He's playing horse with somebody.
So he makes two out of twenty-two, and they're beside themselves.
Oh no!
And then he sank a jumper and all was well.
They were beside themselves.
But isn't it a little racist to assume here that he'd be good at basketball?
Why does anybody think he would be good at it?
Because he spends a lot of time playing it.
Well, he's not good at golf.
This we know.
Um, last uh last soundbite, Bill Plant's report, you just heard, and we've got a reaction to it.
Charlie Rose, Nora O'Donnell, and Gail King.
You know, he's got game.
It must drive him crazy.
I would think so too, Sean.
I know.
What did he hit?
Two out of twenty-two shots there in front of everybody.
And what did you call him commander and choke?
Yeah, no, the choking chief.
He went from the commander in chief to the choking chief, yeah.
Well, maybe, guys, he just didn't want to show up the children.
Yeah.
Maybe not.
Or was he just having a bad thing?
Maybe not.
What did you say, Gail and a bunch of bricks, right?
Yes, that's what they call in basketball land.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, folks, we're in real trouble in this country.
We've got cultural rot.
We've got economic decay.
And this kind of coverage of the president right there in the middle of limbaugh theorem.
All of these destructive things are taking place in our economy, and he's totally divorced from it, not attached to it in any way, shape, manner, or form, other than the perception that he's working hard trying to fix it all.
I remember, by the way, you might remember this too.
Obama claimed that he never made his high school basketball team because he played black style basketball.
Remember that?
He claimed the coaches didn't like black style basketball.
So what is missing 20 out of 22 free throws black style basketball?
He did, he said that.
That was in his book, I believe.
He didn't make the basketball team because the coach didn't like black style basketball.
Since we are talking about the world of sports, I called it, there are some people today who are starting to fret over the fact that these high school and college basketball players are subjecting themselves to potentially career-ending injuries in endeavors that they are not being paid for.
There hasn't been a move yet to ban college basketball because of the Louisville player's broken leg.
But right on schedule, people are now starting to talk about how unfair it is that these great warriors who go out there and play hard to entertain us aren't paid.
They aren't compensated.
They're like indentured.
And a player for the Seattle Seahawks, a defensive end Chris Clemens, was asked about the idea that one or more players in the NFL will come out and announce that they're gay.
But I'm going to tell you something about that, folks.
This drum beat to get an NFL player to announce he's gay is continuing.
It is unrelenting.
Stop and think about this.
Here's a story from last week.
Shows up at a sports website.
NFL player will soon come out.
The source was not the player, whoever he is.
The source was somebody speculating.
Oh, yeah, yeah, there's going to be a player come out real soon, but it wasn't the player.
A bunch of wild guesses going on, but nobody knows.
So what's the purpose of that story?
I think it's a I think it's a drum beat to try to nudge any gay players in the NFL to go ahead and come on out.
There are cultural things here that we gotta do.
And we need your help.
So come on out and let everybody know how normal it is in the NFL.
So that takes us to Seattle and their defensive end, the Seahawks defensive end, Chris Clemens, who said it would be a selfish act for an NFL player to come out of the closet during his career.
The defensive end for the Seahawks, Chris Clemens, made the comments through his Twitter account.
Following a CBS sports column, which noted that a current gay NFL player is considering coming out.
Clemens tweeted, who on God's earth is this person saying he's coming out of the closet in the NFL.
Clemens believes if somebody comes out as gay, the team's locker room is gonna be divided immediately.
He said, I'm not against anyone, but I think it's a selfish act.
They're just trying to make themselves bigger than the team.
Chris Clemens' point is is, I think, he said, what are we here to do?
We're gonna play football.
We're here to win football games.
What difference does it make?
Some guy announces, oh, by the way, I'm gay.
That's gonna become a total distraction.
It's all anybody's gonna care about this team, and in every story about this gun this team is gonna be about this gay guy and how he's uh treated and interaction and this defensive end says that would be the ultimate selfish act in a team sport for an individual to call attention to himself that way.
Now, how long is it gonna be before Chris Clemens is punished for this kind of bigoted reaction to what would otherwise be a day of great emancipation?
It could be a matter of if, but more likely when he's gonna have the riot act read to him.
Here it is from the Hill.com following a player's severe injury this past weekend, the NCAA basketball tournament.
A liberal advocacy group said Monday that the association should guarantee health care coverage for student athletes.
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee launched a new petition drive urging the NC2A to provide universal health care to injured student athletes.
On Sunday, Louisville, sophomore Kevin Ware's leg was broken in two places really gruesome to see.
Everybody was crying.
The bone was visibly protruding through his skin before he was carried off on a stretcher.
The NCAA does not cover the health care costs of injured players, leaving the students with expensive medical bills.
Oh, come really?
You mean to tell me this kid's not going to have this operation paid for?
That we'd have heard about this long ago if that was the case.
There are too many of these kinds of injuries, especially out there on the gridiron, where it's really, really putting your life on the line.
But here we go.
Here we go.
The Progressive Change Campaign.
The left has a group for everything.
Kevin Ware and other student athletes should not suffer tens of thousands of dollars in health care costs from sports related injuries.
The NCAA should require scruels to pay for universal health care for student athletes who suffer injuries.
This isn't a petition from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.
Had 4,000 signatures by late yesterday afternoon.
4,000 signatures.
Okay, Ray in Livermore, California.
Ray, I'm glad you called.
You're up first today on the EIB network, and it's great to have you here.
Hi.
Rush, it's great to have you.
You and your brother are national treasures, and I love what both of you are doing.
I'm in the city of Livermore, about 20 minutes from the city of Stockton, which is owned and operated by Democrats and has been driven into the ground.
There's out of control gang violence, crime and murder.
And now you have these city officials.
Why, why are you calling here in such mean-spirited extreme partisanship?
Rush, like you, I just state it as I see it.
And if you want to call me mean, well, I guess that's uh that's where I'll let it stand.
No, I was just asking.
Sure.
Um you understand.
Uh I I approach this the same way you do, Rush.
And um I try to.
I'm uh been studying here at the Little Institute uh almost since the beginning, and um still awaiting my degree.
Um you're talking about city officials in the city of Stockton who are nothing more than incompetent temporary politicians who've lavished themselves in large salaries and pension benefit packages.
They've built monuments to themselves through public works projects.
The city had just done a huge uh revamp of the civic center and built.
Wait, wait, just said you're right.
These are just they're stewards of a system.
They come and go.
They're not part of some super elite aristocracy.
They are passing personalities through the electoral scene.
They're stewards of something much larger than themselves, and they turn it into themselves being bigger than the system.
Now, you you said that that they have um built monuments to themselves.
What?
Give me an example of a monument to somebody in Stockton.
Uh, they just rebuilt, even though the city's broke and everybody knows and knew it was going broke.
They they uh expanded in the downtown city area, they built uh auditoriums, or I I can't remember it was a uh if it was uh uh an arena like a basketball arena or something of that.
Yeah, but wait, how is that a monument to themselves?
Did they name it after themselves or build it in the shape of themselves?
I mean, how is it a Yeah?
I don't know.
I don't know that they named it after themselves, but every one of the city officials will point back to watch and they'll say, Look what we did.
Look how crazy were I can tell you stories.
I'd I'd my family would disown me.
But I well I can I could tell I'm sadly out of time.
We got the drift.
We we really do.
One thing about extremists, they really get to the point.
I mean, just like that.
Here's an example.
Just one example of a circumstance illustrates why Stockton, California, is bankrupt.
The average firefighter, and we love firemen here.
Don't misunderstand, but the average firefighter in Stockton costs the city $157,000 a year in pay and benefits.
And this firefighter can retire at age 50 with a pension equal to 90% of his highest year's salary and free lifetime health benefits.
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