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Aug. 2, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:52
August 2, 2013, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
What the heck is going on here?
Have you seen it?
US to temporarily shut down embassies around the world Sunday amid security concerns.
Well, I was gonna say, have they shut down YouTube or something?
Did that guy get out of jail?
It made the YouTube video.
Did he make another one?
Live from a Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
Somebody must have made another video that has enraged the Arab Street because we're shutting down our embassies.
CNN, a random act of journalism.
Jake Tamper.
Breaking big news.
The CIA involved in an unprecedented attempt to keep Benghazi secrets secret.
To keep facts.
They're giving pe there were 12 or 15 CIA people on the ground in Benghazi.
It turns out it may have been about gun running the Syria.
It turns out that may have been what was going on.
Anyway, it's Friday, folks, open line Friday.
And here we are, day two of our 26th year of the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Great to have you.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program today.
I 800-282-2882, the email address, L Rushboat, EIB net.com and uh rules on Friday.
Pretty much uh open-ended.
Monday through Thursday, this is a benevolent dictatorship.
Monday through Thursday.
This is as close to liberalism as the program will ever get, net being, you have to talk about something I care about.
You can say whatever you want about it, but I have to care about it.
But on Friday, I don't have to care about it.
Whatever you wish to discuss is fine.
Uh no, President Obama did not call me or email me or reach out to congratulate me for being on the air for 25 years.
I'm sure he meant to, but he's busy.
A lot of things going on.
I understand I'm not a priority.
And I uh I'm not taking that seriously uh at all.
It's tough to get through the 800 number.
And uh I'm not so certain if the White House called it snurderly would hang up on them anyway.
Anyway, uh we have some just a little housekeeping here.
We have we have some sound bites from yesterday that were put together for the uh little anniversary show that I didn't get to.
Cookie went together, she went out there, she put together a sound bite in which I identify all of my top ten favorite female names.
And she thinks it's hilarious, and so she submitted it to me again today, because I didn't get to it yesterday.
What?
Yeah, she told me she's not giving up on it.
She submitted it uh yesterday.
I didn't have a chance to get to it.
She submitted it's on the soundbite roster again today.
Since I mentioned yesterday at the close of one of the sound bites featuring the interview with my grandfather on his 100th birthday back in 1991.
Uh I mentioned that he spoke at length about when he thought the United States actually became a superpowered great nation, and it was with the advent of the Navy as a full-fledged military force.
So we've got that answer if I have a chance to get to it.
I mean, it's a lot here to do.
Uh so we got the second hour of the Greta Van Susterin interview tonight on Fox.
And I got a note from Greta this morning saying that 85% of what's going to air tonight has not been aired.
There's a l some of what it was she aired on um, what was it, Tuesday night will be repeated, but not very much.
Most of what is airing tonight has not been seen.
So she basically got two full hours out of this sit down that we did on Tuesday, and that's tonight at uh at 10 o'clock.
Of course, there's there's economic news out the wazoo today.
Folks, it it is it's all over the it's all over the ballpark, and none of it is good.
Much of it, most of it is being portrayed as good and positive in the media, which of course, in a lot of people's minds is going to mean it's good.
But it isn't.
From the AP, Christopher Rugaber, U.S. employers added 162,000 jobs in July, a modest increase, and the fewest since March.
The gain was still enough, though, to help lower the unemployment rate to a four and a half year low of 7.4%, a sign that's hopeful in an otherwise lackluster report.
Not true.
It's not hopeful, there's nothing good about it.
And speaking of CNN, let me find it here because they've done a random act of journalism again.
Grab soundbite number eight.
I mean, I could tell you this.
But I want you to hear this on CNN, and not enough people are watching CNN for this to have impact.
So we're gonna give them a little amplification here.
This was on their program this morning that's anchored by Carol Costello.
She spoke with their business correspondent Allison Cossack about the July jobs numbers.
And Costello said investors are getting their first chance to digest the latest jobs report, Allison, Allison Cossack at New York Stock Exchange.
What do we see?
The problem is that lower unemployment rate that came in, it may be for the wrong reasons, because the number of people counted in the labor participation rate fell.
So people literally left the labor force, they gave up looking for work.
That's really not the reason you want to see uh the unemployment rate tip lower.
You want to see people getting jobs, and that's the reason you want to see the unemployment rate go lower.
You gotta give them credit.
I mean, she's trying.
She she's she she pretty much she got it right.
You have to give them code.
What'd you say, HR?
Giving up, giving up is never good.
Here's the thing.
I mean again, the labor force participation rate, that number is what I'm talking about when I tell you that nine million jobs have vanished since Obama took office.
The universe of available jobs in the country is down by over nine million.
They just don't exist.
It's like enough factories closed that there are nine million jobs no longer retainable.
It's not the jobs are waiting to be filled, they're not there anymore.
There's nothing good about jobs in this country.
There's not anything, not one bit of news of any substance whatsoever that's good.
Nine million plus jobs.
We lost some more.
That's what she was talking about.
Labor force participation rate.
So the unemployment rate goes down because the number of people out of work divided by the number of jobs available.
Of course, the percentage is going to come down.
If there were nine million jobs still out there waiting to be had, the unemployment rate would be almost 12%, folks, if the labor force, if as many people, there if there were as many jobs today as there were when Obama took office, and the number of people that were working were factored against that number, the unemployment rate would be almost 12%.
That's how bad it is.
And Allison Cossack got it right.
The unemployment rate went down because it's a mathematical uh uh phenomenon here, has nothing to do with jobs being created.
And it's one of the fallacies in the way this number is reported.
You would think that if the unemployment rate went from 7.6 to 7.4 that we're adding jobs.
And your average low information doofus out there is going to think Just that.
But it's the exact opposite.
The labor force participation rate makes up two things: jobs that have vanished and people no longer looking.
Because there aren't any that they want.
In addition, the number of jobs that were added, 162,000, modest increase, the fewest number of jobs per month since March.
But Rugaber here in the AP is entirely disingenuous and maybe dishonest, I don't know.
When he then writes, the gain was still enough to help lower the unemployment.
The gain, that 162,000 jobs had nothing to do with the unemployment rate going down.
That 162,000 doesn't compensate anywhere at all for the jobs being lost and closed down.
Ladies and gentlemen, we used to be told that it took 200,000 jobs a month to lower the unemployment rate.
Or that just two months ago, we were told 175,000 jobs created in May were too few to lower the unemployment rate.
Well, to grow it, to grow the unemployment to get on a job creation rate that would start making a dent in the actual jobs lost beginning in 2009 would require 500,000 jobs a month.
And in fact, if you go back to the 80s and the Reagan recovery, that's what you'll find.
You'll find that in any real economic recovery, there is no economic recovery when 162,000 jobs are added.
So CNN, God bless them, swerved into the truth.
AP is continuing to present BS.
Trying to make it look like, well, it's not a whole lot of growth, bud, it's growth happening out there, a hopeful sign in otherwise lackluster report.
But what of the kind of jobs being created?
We've talked about this, not come as a surprise to you.
Here are the ballpark numbers.
So far this year, 900,000 jobs have been quote unquote created.
How many people have found work?
How many of them, Rachel, take a wild guess?
You don't pay much attention to news until you're here.
So these are a good case history here.
I mean, you do, but you're don't miss no, no, no.
She's got a family and she's out running around.
900,000 jobs so far this year.
How many of them are full-time, do you think?
200,000.
Over 700,000 of the jobs created this year are part-time, which means what?
They don't qualify for benefits.
They don't qualify for Obamacare.
Some of these jobs, part-time, are because employers are downsizing.
And they are converting full-timers to part-timers.
But most of the new jobs this year are part-time.
Our old buddy, Jim Pethokoukis, the American Enterprise Institute.
The quality of jobs created was a big complaint by the Democrats when Bush was in office.
Retail and restaurants, two of the lowest-paying sectors, accounted for more than half of all job growth in this 162,000 jobs created last month.
Retail and restaurants, two low-paying sectors, more than half of the jobs.
Part-time economy.
What we really have is people leaving the job market.
Actual number is that the labor force participation rate.
No, I wasn't right.
If the labor force participation rate were what it was in July of 2012 last year, the unemployment rate would be 7.8%.
If the labor force participation rate were what it was in January 2009 when Obama took office to be 11%.
Not 7.4.
Some people have now become comfortable not working.
It's a result of government encouraged dependency.
4.2 million people have been out of a job for over six months.
4.2 million people.
Every one of them, though.
By the way, you know, people are getting mad at me when I say this.
When I say, but they're all eating.
I get email.
Who would you expect them to starve?
Yeah, that'd be kind of good because maybe to be forced to go out and find work.
No, I don't expect them to starve.
Open your minds.
I'm trying to make a point.
There's no incentive to go out and find a job.
There's no disincentive to being unemployed.
If you have very little ambition.
Being unemployed in this country meant you didn't eat.
That's why you had to go out and find a job.
Number of other things.
I think it's a being unemployed today, you still have your cell phone and your TV.
It's a factor, it matters.
That's not cruel.
I'm giving you a fact of life observation.
Yeah, but it sounds like you disagree with it.
It sounds like you think people ought to be starving.
So you want to go back to the days when you were a kid when being out of work rent really pain and suffering.
Well, no, I mean, change is change and it happens.
But I understand human nature.
And if you don't have to work for anything, you won't.
Not good for America is the point, and it's not good for anybody.
So 953,000 jobs created in 2013.
77% are part-time.
731,000.
Another way of looking at it, for every full-time job created, there are four part-time jobs created.
I don't care how you slice it.
The jobs news isn't good.
And let me add one other statistic to this.
The Senate Amnesty Bill, the Gang of Eight Pathway to Citizenship Immigration Bill, according to the vaunted Congressional Budget Office, says that there will be 46 million immigrants in America by 2033.
That's just 20 years.
In 20 more years, 46 million new people thrown in to this economy and job market.
Stew on net, while we take an obscene profit timeout.
Now remember, President Obama said that Benghazi is a phony scandal.
It's something a Republicans has made up.
It's just something the Republicans made up to try to criticize him and to go after the Democrats.
But it's a phony scandal.
Meanwhile, CNN, Jake Tapper, has uncovered exclusive new information about what is allegedly happening at the CIA in the wake of the terror attack in Benghazi.
Four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed in the assault by armed militants last September 11th in Eastern Libya.
Sources are now telling CNN that dozens of people working for the CIA were on the ground that night, dozens.
The agency has gone to great lengths to make sure whatever it was doing remains a secret.
Here is Drew Griffin from CNN.
CNN has learned the CIA is involved in what one source calls an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency's Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out.
Since January, some CIA operatives involved in the agency's missions in Libya have been Subjected to frequent, even monthly polygraph examinations, according to a source with deep inside knowledge of the agencies working.
The goal of the questioning, according to sources, is to find out if anyone is talking to the media or Congress.
It's being described as pure intimidation with the threat that any unauthorized CIA employee who leaks information could face the end of his or her career.
What's the big deal?
Why bother?
It's just a phony scandal.
The president said so.
And so did Jay Carney, just a phony scandal.
These polygraphs, monthly polygraph exams.
Intimidation, probably phony polygraphs.
Only phony lie detector tests.
Incredible.
In fact, I'm going to go back.
We have an interesting setup for this.
I've got to take a break, though, folks.
Don't go anywhere.
We're only just getting revved up here.
What do you mean?
No, I've not left the economic news.
I'm just moving on to CNS.
Look, I've got a lot of stuff.
I wish I could mention everything first today.
Um I want to stick with the Benghazi thing, right?
And it's fascinating.
But look, I was telling Snerdly, Sudley came in today, and I said, Have you heard about the latest news involving the millennials?
And he said, No.
According to a study from the Pew Research Center, 36% of the kids in the millennial generation, that's age 18 to 31.
36% are living at their parents' homes.
That is the largest number in 40 years.
Twenty-one point six million young adults still living at home.
And these are the people who are voting for Obama.
If people under 30 weren't allowed to vote, Romney would have won in a landslide.
I'm not suggesting that.
I'm just giving you interesting statistical information.
Twenty-one point six.
That might my point.
I don't want to hear about a roaring economy.
I don't want to hear about great economic news.
I don't want to hear about the unemployment numbers down, all kinds of jobs being created.
Nothing happening out there that equals progress in the traditional sense at all.
We have a major transformation and regression taking place.
So no, I was going to split up the economic news.
I want to stick with the Benghazi thing because early on, one of the rumors out there was that what was actually going on, one of the reasons Obama was so secretive about this, was that the ambassador's real reason for being there was to spearhead a gun running operation to Syrian rebels.
And people who had heard that and then mentioned it were were called Kox.
The usual names were thrown at them, conspiracy kooks or ten foil hat people or what have you.
But it has uh it's come back up again.
Here's Trey Gowdy last night on Greta on the Fox News channel.
She said, I'd love to interview these survivors.
The phony survivors.
Because it's a phony scandal.
She said I'd like to interview the phony survivors, but the administration is doing everything it can to hide these phonies.
They're dispersing them around the country.
And, you know, even the CNN report shows that CIA operatives who were there are being intimidated from above, Monthly lie detector tests.
Folks, those are a pain in the rear.
I mean, if a polygraph is tough enough once, but to do one every month to see if you're lying or leaking, I mean, this this is major intimidation taking place.
Whatever was going on there, the regime does not want anybody knowing.
I mean, people's careers and worse are being threatened if they talk, if they leak.
The polygraphs, these phony lie detectors in the phony scandal are designed to intimidate people.
So Greta is asking Trey Gowdy about all this.
He's a congressman from South Carolina Republican, said this.
Including changing names, creating aliases.
So you stop and think what things are most calculated to get at the truth, talk to people with firsthand knowledge.
What creates the appearance or perhaps the reality of a cover-up?
Not letting us talk to people who have the most amount of information, dispersing them throughout the country, and changing their names.
It's almost like the witness protection program for people who were involved in this phony scandal.
Benghazi, Fox News Channel, America's newsroom this morning, Rick Fulbaum, interviewing Daryl Issa.
Said you've heard these reports about CIA employees being intimidated, trying to get them to keep quiet about what they knew about the Benghazi attack.
Have your phony investigators been able to uncover anything phony on that front.
We are aware that there's a pattern of saying you must coordinate with their bosses before talking to Congress.
Of course, that's not consistent with the law, and it leads to a general belief that you shouldn't talk to Congress, and that happens to be obstruction.
It's illegal under the statutes.
There's no such thing as illegal for Barack Obama.
Under the statutes, that's not consistent with the law.
Oh.
You know, our buddy Daniel Henninger, I didn't get to this yesterday.
Things were just popping all over the place.
Dan Henniger in the Wall Street Journal wrote a piece singing my song, things that we've discussed on this program, I don't know, for years.
But that he was crossing the uh T's and dotting the I's.
And basically what he was saying was that this administration doesn't care about the law.
And Obama's out there admitting it.
Obama's telling everybody all you gotta do is listen to him.
This week in speeches, last week in speeches, when he's out there talking about jobs, he's saying things like, and if Congress won't do it, I'm just gonna have to take care of myself.
I'm paraphrasing, but those are the kinds of things he's saying.
If Congress won't cop won't cooperate, I'll I'll just do it myself.
And people are applauding this, by the way.
This is a robust violation of the separation of powers.
The Constitution was written, and the branches of government had various checks and balances on each other, so this kind of thing would not evolve.
But in order for it to work, you have to have law-abiding people.
You have to have people willing to obey the Constitution, willing to follow the law.
Obama doesn't care.
He is the law.
And this to me ought to be readily apparent to anybody, particularly members of Congress.
And I like Darrell Issa.
Don't misunderstand anything here.
I just I probably I join a lot of you in getting a little frustrated when I hear members of Congress say, well, that's not consistent with the law.
It leads to a general belief that uh shouldn't talk to Of course it's not consistent.
That's the problem.
The law does not constrain Barack Obama.
The law is something to be avoided, overrun, gotten around.
And it has happened.
One of the things that Henninger did in his piece yesterday, Wall Street Journal was chronicle instances of it.
It's like anything else.
If there's no pushback on it, I mean, we've got laws against murder, but if nobody attempts to apprehend a murderer, then what good's the law, right?
You have to have enforcement.
Illegal immigration.
What good are the laws if you're not going to enforce them?
Well, we have constitutional laws, statutory law that this administration just doesn't like and is not going to be bound by it.
And this Benghazi phony scandal is one instance of it.
We can't just sit here and rely on this regime to follow the Constitution.
They don't like it in the first place.
They've said that too.
For years, folks.
Very open about their word, anger or frustration, disagreement, very open about the fact they don't like the Constitution, that they think it is deeply flawed.
Because it is too limiting on the government.
That's its express purpose is to limit the government.
This is the guy, Barack Obama, January 2009, said transparency and the rule of law will be touchstones of my regime.
And like most liberals, they do the exact opposite of what they say.
What they say is designed to create the illusion that that's what they're doing, and they get away with it with a slavish and compliant media who don't call them on it.
I want to go back to January 23rd of 2013.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
Hillary Clinton was still the Secretary of State.
She was testifying.
Rand Paul, Kentucky, asked her question.
Is the U.S. involved with any procuring of weapons, transfer of weapons, buying, selling, anyhow, transferring weapons to Turkey out of Libya.
To Turkey?
I I I will have to take that question for the record.
Nobody's ever raised that with me.
It's been in news reports that ships have been leaving from Libya and that they may have weapons.
And what I'd like to know is the annex that was close by.
Were they involved with procuring, buying, selling, obtaining weapons, and were any of these weapons being transferred to other countries, any countries, Turkey included.
Well, Senator, you'll have to direct that question to uh the agency that uh ran the annex.
You're saying you don't know.
I do not know.
I do not know.
And now it's beginning to see this whole thing has surfaced again, and running guns, weapons to Syrian rebels appears to be one of the things that might have been going on.
There's something the regime's trying to keep quiet.
There's something the regime doesn't want anybody to know.
There's something Obama is intimidating people for it.
There's there's something he doesn't want said.
There's something he doesn't want known.
And they're going to extreme measures to do so.
Do you guys you remember a guy named Peter Fenn from the Monica Lewinsky era?
Peter Fenn was a Democrat consultant.
He was on television every night defending Clinton.
It was on with it's either he or Lanny Davis.
They were out there.
He hasn't gone away.
He's still a consultant in the Democrat side.
He has a piece.
It's run in U.S. News.
He's a Democrat political strategerist.
He's head of Fenn, it's F-E-N-N, Fenn Communications, one of the nation's leading political and public affairs media firms.
And his piece goes back to May the 9th.
Benghazi is a tragedy.
It's not a grand conspiracy.
It's not like Iran Contra was.
That's a conspiracy.
That's a violation.
That's was evil.
Iran Contra.
He goes on to point out that there wasn't any violation of the Constitution.
There wasn't any effort to get around Congress, meaning the Bolden Amendment.
There wasn't any secret funding going to people, the Congress said shouldn't be funded.
He's an unlike the 1980s Iran Contra scandal.
There are no questions of illegal acts, no secret funds, no shredding of documents, no efforts to directly circumvent a law passed by Congress.
It appears there's all of that and maybe more.
If the Republicans have come to their senses here and perform oversight and really push back on this, the Benghazi mystery, the phony Benghazi mystery might be real unraveled.
Waiting for CNN to do this isn't gonna cut it.
People need to be put under oath.
Waiting for CNN to go further and unravel this, that's it's time to get to the truth on this.
And this has the attention of the Democrats.
Democrats are scared to death of what Benghazi could mean to their party.
Because they remember Iran-Contra.
They remember what they were able to do with that.
And if the Benghazi cover-up reveals a CIA role in a weapons program that wasn't authorized by Congress, and that's where everybody's looking now.
Then the Republicans might want to remind their friends across the aisle how they've looked at Iran Contra all these years.
They wanted Reagan, and they're gonna use anything to get Reagan.
And their Ron Contra was their last best chance.
They wanted to impeach Reagan.
And now we've got a situation where Obama directly involved in a phony story about a video being responsible for a protest that got out of hand.
This is there's some there's a there's a lot of smoke here.
We know there's a fire.
Will we find out what's going on?
It's up in line Friday, Rush Limbaugh.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Still a case?
It's always gonna be the case.
Here's Nicholas in Cotton, California.
You're up first, and great to have you.
Hi.
Oh, Mr. Will, it's an honor to finally talk to you.
Thank you, sir.
The reason I called today is that I wanted to apologize to you, sir.
Apologize to me?
Yes.
Yes.
For many years, most of my well, um actually more more of my life than not.
I grew up as a liberal.
Had a liberal family, liberal friends, and I wanted to apologize to you for how I thought of you in those days.
How did you think of well?
I think I probably know.
You're a liberal, you probably thought that I was all the things that you heard about me in the media.
Absolutely.
You were racist, you you know, you were homophobic, yada yada yada.
Did you ever listen to the program back then, or did you just rely on those critics who were saying that stuff?
I just relied on the critics.
I'd never listened to you.
So how did you end up listening?
I mean, what made you want to listen if you had that attitude about the program and about moi?
Well, what happened was I I always had doubts, although I I pushed them down deep, you know.
I never let the doubts interfere with, you know, the way I I knew the world really was, of course.
But um, after the attack on 9-11, the first one, of course, I I I knew that there was something really wrong with my worldview.
So I was just flipping through the radio stations on the was in the car one day, and you were on, and I said, Well, everything that I knew was w had been taught was there it was flawed.
So let me listen to this man is really to say.
And I learned conservatism from you, sir, and I wanted to apologize and thank you for that.
Thank you very much.
I just have one other question.
What I'm I'm trying to figure out what it's like, somebody like you.
I mean, you've for all these years, you you you were dead certain what I was.
You were dead certain what this program was all about because you'd been told that people that you trusted.
Then all of a sudden by accident, you run into this program and you find out that that hasn't been true at all.
What did that make you question everything that you'd been told or led to believe?
Yes, yes, as I said, you're my professor.
I learned conservatism from you.
Yeah.
I I knew there were problems.
I I I had always pushed I had doubts.
I mean, the whole global warming thing and ever bought into.
I knew that was ridiculous.
And racism I could never comprehend.
It wasn't until I started doing some research years later, I realized that the basis of liberalism is racism.
But I'd always put those down deep.
When I started listening to you, those those little doubts I had crystallized in there, realized how my whole worldview was skewed.
That has got to be an awakened.
That has got to be.
I can't imagine that.
I can't imagine seriously.
I can't imagine growing up one day and realizing everything I thought was wrong.
I don't know what I would do.
That's a start, folks.
The Politico is reporting the House of Representatives passed a bill, 232 to 185 to ban the IRS from enforcing Obamacare.
232 to 185, House of Representatives banning a bill or passing a bill to ban the IRS enforcing Obamacare.
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