Rush Limbaugh Program - August 6, 2013, Tuesday, Hour #1

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Aug. 6, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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August 6, 2013, Tuesday, Hour #1

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	Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
	Police!
	Please stop telling me that Jeff Bezos' politics are unknown.
	Come on!
	How stupid do they think we are out here?
	The guy just held a massive event with Obama.
	The guy endorses every Democrat in the state of Washington.
	He's a big booster of gay marriage.
	But the drive-bys are telling us that Jeff Bezos' politics are held close to the vest.
	And actually, I read someplace yesterday where somebody, Jeff Bezos is a libertarian.
	Jeff Bezos of Amazon just bought the Washington Post, and it shocked the drive-by world.
	I mean, it shocked them everywhere.
	There was no leak on this, which means the Obama administration was not involved.
	There was not one leak.
	Bob Woodward didn't know about this before it happened.
	I mean, not one Washington Post journalist was able to ferret out that their newspaper was on the market.
	Folks, the mainstream media is, for all intents and purposes, dead.
	The dead tree mainstream media is dead.
	All the actors are moving to social media.
	That's where they're all headed.
	It's just a matter of time.
	Even Bezos, I think, said 20 years, the Washington Post will not actually be published as a paper.
	It's all going digital.
	Anyway, greetings.
	It's great to have you here.
	Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network of the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
	Telephone number if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882.
	The email address ilrushbaugh at EIBnet.com.
	We'll get into the Bezos Washington Post thing and what it means in mere moments.
	But there is a somewhat shocking report that I came across today at a website run by Doug Ross.
	It's called a conservative report.
	And he maintains, Doug Ross maintains here that Valerie Jarrett gave the orders to stand down in Benghazi.
	Valerie Jarrett, who constitutionally is not in the chain of command and cannot do that.
	And that's why this, if true, is a bombshell.
	Valerie Jarrett nixed the raid on bin Laden three separate times, remember, and the adults had to come in and basically act on the intel that they had as to where bin Laden was.
	It was Valerie Jarrett who put off three separate times an attack to either capture or kill bin Laden.
	It was Panetta and Hillary and some others, apparently, who just finally overruled her and started the operation.
	They pulled Obama off the golf course for the photo op after the event had already begun.
	But Doug Ross is saying here, confidential sources close to his report have confirmed that Valerie Jarrett was the key decision maker for the regime the night of the Benghazi terrorist attack on 9-11, 2012.
	Here's the chronology.
	At 5 p.m. Washington time, reports came in through secure channels that Benghazi was under attack.
	Leon Panetta was the Secretary of Defense.
	Martin Dempsey was the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff.
	They summoned Obama and they briefed him on the crisis face to face.
	Now, remember, this is the meeting where Obama is reported to have said to both, well, actually, all three, Panetta, Martin Dempsey, the chairman of Joint Chiefs, and Hillary, you guys do what you have to do.
	And he vanishes.
	This is the best intel that we've got.
	And the story for the longest time, where was Obama?
	Because he was off the grid for the next seven hours.
	Nobody knew where he was.
	And remember, throughout all of this, we're all asking who issued the order to stand down?
	Because that can only come from the top.
	I don't know how many times that I made the statement on this program.
	The Secretary of Defense cannot order people to stand down.
	The Secretary of Defense cannot order, on the other hand, forces from, say, Italy to enter the theater and engage.
	That has to come via the chain of command.
	It has to come from the top.
	And the top in this case is Obama, not an aid.
	So if this is true, this really, really is a bombshell.
	So at 5 o'clock Washington time on the day of the Benghazi attack, the Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, and the chairman of the Chief Joints of Staff said that on purpose, Martin Dempsey summoned the president and briefed him face to face.
	Subsequent to that brief meeting, Obama went to the White House to dine in the residence.
	After supper, Obama had a phone conversation scheduled with Benjamin Netanyahu.
	And as that meeting drew to a close, Valerie Jarrett, who is the assistant to the president for public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, went from the living quarters to the White House situation room where the attack in Benghazi was being monitored by Panetta and Dempsey and other top-ranking officials.
	Now, it's not known whether she was instructed by Obama to go there or if she went of her own volition.
	It is only known by her and Obama if she went there on her own or if she was told to go there.
	A critical question that needed to be answered in the sole military order that could have launched offensive actions neutralizing the terrorist attack on the mission and its subsequent attacks on the adjacent CIA annex was the issuance of cross-border authority, an order that can only be issued by the commander-in-chief.
	And cross-border authority was denied.
	First, it was reported that an Army Special Forces team was present with a C-130 on the tarmac at Tripoli, and it was ready to go.
	It was equipped with weapons that sync with laser designators, like those that Woods, Doherty, and Ubin had on that.
	Remember now, one of the things that always intrigued or puzzled me, these four guys, well, these three guys plus the ambassador, they were ordered to stand down and they went anyway.
	And I think it was Woods who was painting the enemy location with a laser because he thought that there was aircraft in the sky that was going to aim laser-guided bombs at the target that he was painting.
	That didn't happen because there was no C-130 up there.
	There was no air support.
	They were on their own.
	The order to stand down had been given.
	But they went anyway.
	It was their instinct, their sense of duty.
	So what Woods ended up doing was giving up his own location rather than painting an enemy location for a laser-guided bomb to come from that C-130.
	Now, had that C-130 been on station over the CIA annex in Benghazi moments before the mortar rounds were fired, instead of awaiting further instructions, the entire outcome of this fiasco would have been different.
	But somebody gave the stand down order, and this website, Doug Ross's website, is claiming that Valerie Jarrett did it.
	And so the question that is unanswered, did Obama tell her, here's what's amazing about this.
	Leon Panetta is no slouch, folks.
	Leon Panetta knows the Washington game.
	He knows the Constitution.
	He's a Liberal Democrat.
	He was chief of staff for Clinton.
	To survive the Clintons, you have to be a number of things.
	You have to be an excellent suckup.
	But you also have to be a force of your own to stand up to it.
	And he did, and he pulled it.
	He's no slouch is the point.
	In the normal everyday flow of events, he's not going to accept an order.
	The Secretary of Defense is not going to accept an order from a domestic advisor to the president.
	That's not how things happen.
	That's not the chain of command, particularly in a circumstance like this where the necessary order to be given could only come from the commander-in-chief.
	So we don't know that this website's asserting that Valerie Jarrett gave the order and that Panetta and everybody abided by it.
	Stand down, they stood down.
	They didn't do anything.
	So the question is, did they simply, one of two things, think that Valerie Jarrett was speaking for Obama?
	Remember, he's off the grid by now.
	Or was she on her own exercising her own authority?
	Remember all the stories that we've had about the number of really powerful women in the Obama inner circle that have a lot of autonomy and do call a lot of shots.
	And Valerie Jarrett is one such person in this administration, eminently trusted by Obama, and is a genuine Linsky, roll-up-the-sleeves community organizer acolyte.
	I mean, she is Obama.
	This is one of these people that would not have to be given an order by Obama to know what he wanted.
	And in fact, it may be that Valerie Jarrett often tells Obama what it is he wants.
	No, no, that may sound funny, and I'm not even going into feminist male-females.
	I'm just telling the structure of this place and the value that Obama has placed on Valerie Jarrett and the power that she has.
	It was Valerie Jarrett, again, that pretty much has been documented three times prevented the bin Laden operation.
	She's extremely powerful.
	Panetta would know this.
	The chairman of Joint Chiefs would know this.
	There was also a team of green berets on the ground to secure and or evacuate the annex, the CIA annex.
	And the outcome would have been two SEALs still alive and a mess of dead terrorists if they had been given the order to engage.
	But they weren't.
	They were all told to stand down.
	Now, Doug Ross writes that the second and most troubling aspect of the refusal to issue cross-border authority is who issued it.
	Rather than the president, the commander-in-chief, making critical decisions, granting or denying the authority to initiate offensive actions, the decision not to take action was made by a person the people did not elect, nor did the Congress have confirmation power over.
	The military order not to initiate action, saving our men in Benghazi, was issued by the president's advisor, Valerie Jarrett.
	This is what they're trying to say is a phony scandal?
	Now, if this is true, it would certainly explain, ladies and gentlemen, all of the serial lies and the cover-ups and the obfuscation and all of the efforts that were made to distract people's attention from this.
	Somebody had to give the order and Obama was off the grid.
	That has always, to me, been one of the most interesting aspects of Benghazi.
	5 o'clock, he tells Panetta and whoever else, we were originally told that Hillary was Secretary of State, she was there too, and that you guys handle it.
	I'm off.
	And there's been a bunch of speculation.
	Maybe he's playing basketball, shooting hoops.
	Who knows?
	Putting green.
	But people were trying to find out where he was.
	He's off the grid for five to seven hours.
	And yet somebody issued the order to stand down.
	And as I say, Doug Ross here is making the case that it was Valerie Jarrett.
	Now, this is by no means mainstream news yet, folks.
	I mean, the number of people who know about Alex Rodriguez compared to this is like a factor of a thousand to one.
	Maybe ten thousand.
	Speak Alex Rodriguez.
	Alex Rodriguez has decided to take a page out of the Clinton playbook and treat Bud Selig and the New York Yankees as Ken Starr.
	What Rodriguez is going to say is, why me?
	Why these other guys got suspended for 50 games and you're giving me 211?
	Why are you singling me out?
	Why didn't you offer me 50?
	How come you're taking away all this money from me?
	He's going to say that they've got a vendetta against him.
	He's going to say that they don't like him.
	He's going to say that they got big problems with him.
	And then he's going to say, he hasn't denied any of this.
	He was asked point blank yesterday at the press conference whether he took any of these performance-enhancing drugs.
	He denied.
	He said, I'm not going to talk about it.
	This is not the place for this.
	I'm just so excited to be back in uniform.
	So excited to be back in the game I love.
	And they were really, the answers were really confusing.
	But what he's going to do is make the case if he's got till Thursday whether he's going to fight this or take it.
	And if he fights it, it goes to arbitration.
	He continues to play.
	The arbitrators, well, we won't have a decision on this till November or December.
	So it's going to drag on.
	And Rodriguez is, as I said yesterday, going to say that the commissioner's singling him out.
	He's got a vendetta.
	Nobody likes him.
	He's victim, treating him unfairly, not like all the other people.
	12 of them, I think, been suspended.
	And then he might even assert that the Yankees are culpable because they misdiagnosed his injuries and they mistreated, therefore, his injuries.
	And they forced him to go elsewhere to get well.
	The problem there is that it was Rodriguez who chose the surgeons involved.
	He actually chose the doctors to operate on his hip.
	And I think there was another knee operation involved in this timeframe.
	Might be just the hip.
	At any rate, the thing is, is it's going to drag out and continue.
	And Rodriguez, Snerdley came in today.
	He said, you know what he ought to do?
	He ought to use Roe versus Wade.
	It's his body.
	He can do whatever he wants with it.
	I said, there's a problem.
	That only applies to women and abortion.
	Snerdley, get a hold of yourself.
	Not even husbands can use their body and their right to do whatever.
	It only applies to women and abortion.
	And I said, besides, the union has rules that they've agreed to that they're not going to take these drugs.
	So we've got sound bites from all of that.
	And the Jeff Bezos purchase of the Washington Post, this is fascinating on a number of levels.
	I can't wait to get into all of this in greater detail, but I must take an obscene profit break here.
	We'll do it and be back after this.
	Your guiding lights, El Rushball, America's real anchorman, a truth detector and doctor of democracy.
	I think a lot of people, I was one of them, misunderstand Jeff Bezos.
	They look at Amazon and they say, it's never shown profit.
	Now, what the hell?
	How's the guy worth $25 billion?
	He never shows up.
	How come Wall Street loves Amazon and hates Apple?
	And by the way, that is an accurate statement.
	Well, this all puzzled me, folks, because Amazon doesn't show a profit very often.
	And when they do report a profit, it's really tiny.
	But yet Wall Street is perennially, I mean, the analysts from all the brokerages are always very high on Amazon, very bullish, love Amazon.
	And it's just the exact opposite with Apple.
	So I had to talk to some people who are expert in this because on the surface, it doesn't make any sense.
	Why would investors love a company that doesn't show profit?
	But they do.
	I mean, in the real world, they do.
	And I got an interesting answer to it that I'll share with you as the program unfolds.
	In fact, we'll probably get into that when the next segment commences.
	But this Benghazi story with – folks, you don't just – a White House advisor who's not elected, not in the chain of command, is not going to go to Leon Panetta and be listened to.
	They just – Panetta's not a pushover.
	What anybody says?
	There's something really fishy about this.
	Dawn just asked me, you never talk about that show Ray Donovan.
	You watch this.
	Yeah, I do.
	And it is the most depraved, depressing, perverted, filthy television shows.
	John Voigt is great.
	I'll grant you that.
	John Voigt is absolutely, and so is Schreiber.
	I don't know how to pronounce his first name.
	Live, Live, Liev.
	That's how you pronounce it Lieb Schreiber.
	But good Lord.
	I mean, the M's, it's a sewer.
	It portrays life as an absolute sewer.
	Of all people, I would think you'd be leading the moms opposed to this kind of crap on TV.
	There you are, loving it.
	I'm shocked.
	I'm stunned.
	I can't believe it.
	Yeah, I do watch it.
	I watch, you know, I go back and forth on television.
	Sometimes I really get into shows, and other times I get a big drought.
	Anyway, welcome back, folks.
	Rush Limbaugh and another exciting excursion into broadcast excellence.
	I'll get back to this Benghazi thing in due course.
	I just am struck by this revelation that Valerie Jarrett, one of the henhawks in the regime, has this kind of power.
	Well, no.
	Well, yeah, I guess that is what it is.
	But this is a serious thing, the order to stand down.
	Four Americans died because of that order to stand down.
	American troops were told not to respond.
	Valerie Jarrett?
	Obama's off the grid and Panetta listened to it?
	Panetta abided by it.
	Anyway, Jeff Bezos purchasing the Washington Post for $250 million.
	Now, there are a lot, you know, I was thinking about this.
	A lot of print media is in dire straits.
	The New York Times just sold the Boston Globe for $70 million after buying the Globe for over a billion.
	The New York Times takes a 93% loss.
	You can go back not too many years, back to the 90s.
	And the Washington Post Company could have commanded a billion dollars.
	And now it's discarded in a fire sale.
	$250 million purchased by a guy with a net worth estimated to be $25 billion.
	So there's a real question here.
	If you want to have fun and be serious in analyzing this, this is play money for Jeff Bezos.
	$250 million is play money for somebody who has $25 billion.
	I'm fascinated by the media all proclaiming his politics are unknown, or he might even be a libertarian.
	I mean, the guy just had a joint meeting with Obama in Chattanooga.
	The guy endorses every Democrat he can run across and gives money to in the state of Washington, big proponent of gay marriage.
	The idea that Donald Graham, who runs the post, is not going to sell that paper to anybody but a leftist.
	There were other buyers.
	Allen and company went out and handled the sale.
	New York Media Investment Bank, they went out, they handled this.
	They put together the list of suitors.
	And I guarantee you, if I had gotten a group together, wanted to buy the post, there's no way they would have sold it to me.
	The idea that they're going to sell that newspaper to somebody other than a full-fledged leftist is a pipe dream.
	And a real question for me is, is Bezos going to run this as a toy?
	Is this just playtime for him?
	Or is he serious about it as a business?
	Because looking at all of these dead tree news publications and every one of them, Washington Post, New York Times, Boston Globe, in the last two weeks, they have all written extensively about my demise.
	They've been denouncing me.
	They have been predicting my imminent demise while it is they who are fading away.
	It is they who can't compete.
	It is they who can't keep up.
	It is they who can't sell advertising, who can't sell ad pages.
	It is they who are dwindling away.
	And at least in the dead tree portion of their businesses, it is their demise that everybody is chronicling and talking about it.
	But don't be comforted by that because just because a dead tree newspaper happens to fade away or become irrelevant doesn't mean anything.
	The leftists now exist and thrive in social media and on blogs.
	You know how many people get their news from Twitter every day?
	Put together a Twitter newsfeed, and that's where they find out what's going on.
	And that's simply citizen journalism.
	That's just a bunch of leftists scouring other news sites and retweeting or reposting what they find interesting.
	But the left owns Twitter.
	That's where they're all headed.
	They're abandoning Facebook because Facebook is being taken over by the elderly.
	In fact, I have a story on that in the stack.
	Young people are getting all ticked off and leaving Facebook because old people are getting on there and they don't know how to use it.
	And the story that I have in the stack sites is an example.
	Elderly people, and to the young, elderly is 50, 55 plus.
	They don't know that LOL means laugh out loud.
	They think it means lots of love.
	So they're sending all these notes around with LOL after lots of love.
	And they say, this is embarrassing.
	We got these old fuddy duddies and these gummers here on our network and don't even know what it is.
	And they're abandoning it.
	They're all going to Twitter.
	And Twitter, certain parts of it, have become a leftist cesspool.
	So for every newspaper demise, the people that work there are going to end up online doing the same thing that they do.
	And young people, more and more, are not watching television either.
	They're doing everything online.
	They're watching video TV shows.
	They're either buying them a day later or they're pirating them or something.
	But fewer and fewer people are getting media in conventional ways.
	And I know some of you people are probably saying, well, how are you surviving?
	How are you surviving?
	Because radio, AM radio particularly, is one of the oldest.
	Why is it still around, by the way, when all of these venerable institutions of once dramatic greatness are fading away and their ultimate demise is clearly seeable?
	How come old Limbaugh and AM radio, which is as old as newspaper?
	How come it's still out there?
	And there is a simple answer to this, and it takes me to a fascinating story.
	What did I...
	Oh, here it is.
	It's a...
	It's a story at LinkedIn, by the way, another website.
	It's by the chairman of Sequoia Capital, which I think is a hedge fund.
	His name is Michael Moritz, and he's writing about Bezos and what he might mean to the Washington Post.
	And let me give you a pull quote.
	It won't come as a surprise that Bezos explains that pleasing, if not thrilling, customers is Amazon's most important task.
	In his 2009 letter, he writes letters, investment letters every year to stockholders.
	2009 letter, he provided a peek into the internals of Amazon, explaining that of the company's 452 detailed goals for the ensuing year, 360 of them were related to the customer.
	The word revenue, eight times.
	Free cash flow was used only four times, although that's a big deal to Bezos, as I have learned, and I'll explain as program unfolds.
	Net income, gross profit, margin, operating profit, not even mentioned in an investment letter.
	Now, even though there's no line item on any financial statement for the intangible value associated with the trust of customers, this by far and away is Amazon's most important asset.
	His point here is that you've got a guy who is totally customer-oriented.
	Well, the way I would define that, content.
	Now, the answer to the question: well, how come you're still around Russia and all these venerable newspapers are going by the wayside?
	And publishing, news publishing is losing money left and right and selling assets at pennies on the dollar.
	How come you're not?
	And they're writing of my demise, by the way, while they fade away.
	And I'm not in the middle of a demise.
	There is no demise going on here.
	The EIB network is thriving.
	The EIB network is growing.
	We're not on television.
	We have a digital presence, but we're thriving and growing.
	What is it?
	It's content, folks.
	Content has always been king.
	And as you know, I do this program for one group of people and one group of people only, and that's you.
	The audience is king.
	Now, as we've discussed, journalists, the mere employees at newspapers and television news networks, they don't want to have to be worried about the audience.
	They view the customer with contempt more often than they view the customer with respect.
	You ever called in a complaint to a newspaper about content?
	What do you get?
	Well, you don't know enough to know how we do our business.
	Or, well, you don't know what you're talking about.
	We're not biased.
	You get hung up on or shouted at or what have you.
	You're the customer, but you are not respected.
	You're the customer, but your opinion doesn't count a hill of beans because they're a bunch of elitists and it doesn't matter to them.
	They're not owners.
	I'm talking about the rank and file reporters and editors.
	In fact, they often ask to be exempted from the bottom line pressure.
	They don't want to be in the equation that mentions profit.
	They don't want to have to worry about it.
	They think they've got a constitutional role, so they ought to not be encumbered by the demands of the pressure to make money.
	Well, that ain't Bezos.
	See, this is why it really matters how he views this purchase and why he did it.
	If this is just a media toy for him, then it's going to continue as it is, and he's going to use it as a platform to advance his politics while being at a distance.
	Because he has said he's not going to be day-to-day.
	He's not going to move to Washington.
	He's not going to run this thing day to day.
	But if, you know, Bezos is who he is, and Amazon is clearly devoted to the customer.
	Amazon clearly devoted to customer satisfaction.
	Clearly, clearly, they are all about customer service.
	News people aren't.
	They couldn't care less.
	So it's going to be interesting to see if Bezos brings that aspect of the Amazon business to the Washington Post.
	Because if he does, it's got the potential to turn the place upside down.
	Because journalists, folks, they don't write for you.
	They write for other journalists.
	They really do.
	They write for a reaction from other journalists.
	Wow, where did he get that?
	Wow, what a lead.
	Wow.
	I wish I'd have thought of that.
	Wow.
	How did he get that source?
	Wow, how did he get away with getting that piece?
	Writing for the consumer, that's a foreign concept.
	In fact, journalism is even taught that way.
	Journalism today is taught as an agenda to advance liberalism.
	And if you don't get it, that's your problem.
	They're just going to work harder and harder at pummeling you with what they think you ought to believe or what they want you to believe.
	But what you want to see in the newspaper, the hell with that?
	Well, that's not how Bezos runs Amazon.
	So it's going to be fascinating to see.
	And we won't know for a while, but the best indication will be to watch the reaction of staff journalists at the Washington Post.
	They will be the first ones to let us know what's going on in there.
	Because if the management paper makes decisions that are designed to grow readership, if that's one of the primary objectives that Bezos has here, you may think this sounds strange, but that's going to be a red flag to people in a newsroom because that to them is compromising their integrity, giving the audience what it is.
	Because the audience is a bunch of idiots.
	By definition, the audience doesn't know anything until the journalist tells them.
	Yeah, I know.
	I'll be back, folks.
	Now, what's happening?
	A bunch of Washington Post journalists are now posting suck-up tweets about Jeff Bezos.
	This is what's happening out there.
	I'll tell you, wait till the left remembers that it was Amazon.
	Amazon runs a massive server from it.
	Amazon Cloud Services provides the cloud service operation for a whole bunch of companies, their servers, their vast data center operation.
	And WikiLeaks used the Amazon data centers, Julian Assange.
	Now, wait till the left remembers that Bezos pulled the plug on WikiLeaks when they first started posting their stuff.
	The left is not going to be happy about that.
	And there were a bunch of, there's a bunch of hackers out there that go by the name of anonymous.
	It's a group of guys, people, and they specialize in hacking people that they think deserve to be hacked because they're not doing right social justice and this kind of stuff.
	That bunch tried to shut Amazon down when they yanked WikiLeaks.
	And Amazon doesn't pay even what the Washington, D.C. city council calls a living wage to its warehouse people.
	$12.50 an hour is what they're demanding that Walmart pay, Washington, D.C. City Counseling, Amazon $11 an hour.
	Now, he can't get away with paying people at the Washington Post $11 an hour.
	However, however, Jeff Bezos is going to encounter something that I'm fairly certain he doesn't have to deal with at Amazon.
	And that is, wait for it, labor unions.
	So, a lot of fascinating, interesting things here, just for the fun of it.
	And yeah, I'll get into the whole answer about why a company that shows no profit is so exciting to Wall Street analysts in the next segment when we get back.
	Well, I'd stand a little bit corrected.
	Bezos does have some experience with unions, especially Germany, and he is fighting them tooth and claw, tooth and nail.
	So, anyway, sit tight.
	We just barely scratch the surface, folks.
	Your phone calls yet to come and a bunch of other exciting stuff.

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