Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Greetings to you, music lovers, thrill seekers all across the fruited plane.
It's time for yet another excursion into broadcast excellence, hosted by me, the indefatigable, undoubtable, indoubtable Rush Limbaugh behind the golden EIB microphone.
Great to have you here.
Telephone number 800-282-2882 and the email address El Rushbaugh EIMEThen.com.
Martin Luther King endured unprecedented government surveillance.
Who did that?
It would be the Kennedy brothers that did that.
It would be Robert Kennedy, who was the AG at the time, the Attorney General, and the president, JFK.
And they were surveilling.
They were wiretapping.
They were monitoring Martin Luther King.
They had collected all the information that he was having affairs with numerous women.
And they were stockpiling this stuff along with J. Edgar Hoover over at the FBI.
It's a bunch of Democrats collecting all of this surveillance, conducting the surveillance.
Caroline Kennedy's dad, exactly Caroline Kennedy's dad, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s dad were monitoring, were wiretapping, bugging, if you will, the hotel rooms of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King.
It's one of the amazing facts of history that the real segregationists in this country leading up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were Democrats, particularly Southern Democrats in the Senate.
And of course, they had their fair share of Southern Democrats in the House of Representatives as well.
Somehow, it was never held against the Kennedys.
Never.
But they're the ones that were surveilling, wiretapping, bugging, and all of that.
Anyway, folks, great to have you here.
When does this thing start?
Well, I know it started, but I'm okay.
When does Obama show up?
Because the news media, I mean, I called this yesterday.
I mean, every news story is about what is Obama going to do?
And how is Obama going to do?
And how's Obama going to turn this into something in his favor?
Now, we opened yesterday talking about Syria.
And I'm not going to spend a whole much more time on it.
I do want to share with you a fascinating quote.
To me, this is really fascinating.
And it's not surprising, but to have it said is momentous.
I got this, I didn't see it on TV.
I didn't have the TV on last night.
I was reading John Fund today, I believe, at National Review Online.
And the title of his piece is The World Turned Upside Down Indeed.
And his point here is about Obama and the Democrats ignoring Congress in whatever they do with Syria.
And of course, it points out the obvious hypocrisy.
Back in 2002 and 2003, the Democrats demanding that Bush go through Congress, demanding that Bush go through the United Nations, demanding that there be a coalition.
Oh, is that right?
Obama expected to speak at 3 o'clock.
Is that right?
Is that, well, what a strange coincidence.
Holy cow.
Barack Obama is scheduled to speak at 3 o'clock this afternoon.
What happens at 3 o'clock, folks?
This program, somebody's not speaking at 3 o'clock, and that would be me.
Unbelievable.
I thought that Obama would kick off at 1 o'clock or something like that, but no.
Obama's at 3 o'clock.
How about that, folks?
Many people wonder what it's like to be me.
Well, anyway, John Fund, National Review, all the hypocrisy going on.
And of course, everybody says, there's no hypocrisy.
Don't worry about that.
That was then, this is now.
Obama didn't know what he was doing.
He didn't know the way of the world back then.
But now he does rush.
Now he's learned.
Now it's serious.
Obama didn't know when he was criticizing Bush.
He didn't know how the world worked.
He didn't know the Middle East a bunch of bad guys.
He didn't know that Al-Qaeda was a bunch of bad guys.
He didn't know all these various actors, groups, countries, and their hatred for the U.S. You understand it, Rush.
Right.
Okay.
Fund says that he was, let's see, he appeared last night with Lou Dobbs, Fox Business Network.
And also on the show was Mary Ann Marsh.
Marianne Marsh, she's from Boston.
She's a Democrat consultant.
Her clients have included the late Ted Kennedy and John Kerry.
And she showed up, as every Democrat on every cable TV show does, with the latest Democrat talking points.
And she dismissed any need for Obama to consult with Congress.
In fact, she called the Congress this special Congress.
And here is her full quote.
There is a special Congress that we're dealing with right now, Lou, that has the lowest popularity rating in history.
The Republicans are overwhelmingly opposing taking any action.
The President of the United States cannot be handcuffed by the same Republicans that are holding the rest of the country hostage on every other issue.
That's wrong.
So what she was saying, well, the reason Obama doesn't go to Congress is because the Republicans run it.
And the Republicans are illegitimate.
The Republicans, nobody should have to deal with them.
I mean, this is the same bunch of Republicans that are holding the rest of the country hostage on every other issue, Obamacare.
I mean, why should the president have to deal with Congress?
Constitution doesn't matter.
The Republicans have become so illegitimate that the President of the United States and the Democrat Party are almost required to ignore them because they're Republicans.
You know, no, but the Republicans running the Congress, the House of Representatives, the Republicans controlling it delegitimizes the Congress.
The Republicans dominating the House of Representatives means that the House of Representatives is not legit.
It's unjust.
This is what this means is that the attitude of the Democrat Party is that wherever there are Republicans, there's really simplistic here.
They are so bad.
They are so discriminatory.
They are so racist.
They're so bigoted.
They're just such reprobates that we can't afford to let them have any say whatsoever in what's happening.
Now, I'll tell you why this is a big deal to me.
I know it's a talking point, but they believe this stuff.
And the Republicans in Congress had better wake up and understand they're not.
The Republican leadership is doing everything it can to forge friendships with these people.
The Republican leadership is doing everything it can to agree with the Democrats on everything the Democrats want, and look what it's getting them.
This is some of the most profound disrespect I have ever seen.
This is worse than the way the Republicans were treated and viewed when Bob Michael was the House Republican leader in the wilderness years, the 40 years that the Democrats controlled the House prior to 1994.
She said, This is a special Congress that we're dealing with right now.
It's got the lowest popularity rating in history.
The Republicans overwhelmingly oppose taking any action.
Why should we go to them?
The Republicans disagree with us.
Why should we go to them?
We're going to do what we want to do.
We don't want to deal with people that can stop us.
Constitution doesn't matter, Lou.
We want to do what we want to do.
We're going to do what we're going to do.
And the Republicans would stop us.
Well, why are we going to put up with that?
To hell with them.
And then unstated is, what are they going to do about it?
And the answer is, come out even more so in favor of amnesty.
So every effort the Republicans make to be liked, every effort they make to be supportive of what the Democrats want, look, they're looked at them, they're insects.
They're no different than an anthill to be avoided when you're walking down the sidewalk.
Well, we don't, you know, in fact, it's not an anthill, it's a pile of dog manure.
The Democrats are walking down the street.
There's a pile of dog manure.
That's the Republicans.
Why are we going to go through that?
We'll just sidestep it to get where we're going.
Come on, Lou.
I mean, it's the lowest rating in popular history for the Republicans.
They oppose what we want to do.
We can't be handcuffed by these people who are holding the country hostage on every other issue.
And she says it with impunity.
She says it on Fox without any fear that the audience is going to understand and reject it.
She's basically saying that when we want to do what we want to do, there may as well not be a Congress.
I don't have to, we don't have to deal with them.
By the way, MSNBC says that the president will speak at 2:45.
Ladies and gentlemen, even on my own staff, when I issue edicts, commands, orders, ideas, you would think that there would be overwhelming blanket acquiescence, approval, and support.
When I, a year ago, issued this demand, this requirement, this ban, if you will, of MSNBC soundbites, not playing them anymore.
Not going to air any MSNBC.
Little snarky notes from members of the staff telling me, boy, it was really great what was on MSNBC last night, but we can't use it.
Well, let me tell you what's happened as a result of that ban.
I maintain to you that it was this program propping up whatever audience they had because in the year that we have banned MSNBC, their audience has declined by over half.
They barely have an audience.
Well, I don't know what the real numbers are.
I've got them here, so they're barely above being noted in wow, having a metal block on the TV.
Nielsen, they are they have continued every rating period since we instituted the ban.
They have lost audience, and the full year tab is in.
And they are down.
It's everybody inside baseball media is talking about.
Now, they're not, of course, associating it with being banned here.
Oh, there's much more in CNN.
I mean, you can't see them.
I'm telling you, they are the bottom of the barrel and the bottom is almost out of the barrel.
You need a microscope.
I mean, they are plummeting rapidly, and there's no end in sight.
And it coincides with my instituting a ban of all MSNB soundbites, MSNBC soundbites on this program.
You can't tell me that it hasn't had an impact.
This program yesterday's, this program, folks, is everywhere.
Yesterday, we hijacked unknowingly a Pac-12 college football coach conference call.
We'll let you hear how that happened when we come back.
Don't go away.
MSNBC is down close to 50% of its audience in the year.
This program has banned all sound bites from MSNBC.
I've got details coming up.
Yesterday was the annual conference call that the Pac-12 football coaches have with the media leading up to the upcoming college football season.
They do these things weekly.
This was the first one of the season with reporters.
And during the QA, we have here what happened when an unidentified operator and a radio host talking to Oregon State head coach Mike Riley.
And suddenly a clip of this program ended up being heard online during the QA.
This, and it went on for a full minute.
This is how it sounded.
We have a question from Jay Reese from the biggest little sports talk show in Oregon.
Hey, Coach Riley, how are you?
Hello, Jay.
Good.
I just wanted to know, Coach, were there any other positions that you contemplated as long as namely the starter outside the quarterback spot?
Well, you know, I think that we have North Carolina, but since you're a liberal and you support choice, hello, provider returns.
Hold on.
Dismembering children and not school vouchers for those who weren't dismembered.
I want to give you some options, Ed.
In fact, I'm going to describe the antics.
And professors, official campus groups, and invited campus speakers in North Carolina, and let you decide which constitutes the biggest embarrassment to higher education.
Number one, in the early spring semester of 2013, a women studies professors align the university.
Thank you.
Bondage and SNP.
All right.
Is everybody there for the panel?
I don't know if I'll listen to you or Rush Limbaugh.
So I don't really.
I think what happened here when you're on a telephone call and they put you on hold and you hear music or something, the radio station where the Jay Reese guy was working, they had me on hold.
And somehow the lines got crossed.
Somehow, this program ended up as one of the calls in the conference call with the Pac-12 coaches.
And I'll tell you, it happened when I was detailing some of the outrageous, outlandish curricula items that the militant feminazis have installed at the University of North Carolina system.
Can you imagine these guys?
They're sitting there, of course, taking their football questions.
This is the weekly teleconference, and Coach Riley gets a question about his quarterback.
And all of a sudden, they hear me talking about dismembering children and not school vouchers.
Bondage.
I was describing the feminist curricula at the University of North Carolina.
And they eventually got it figured out.
But at the moment, this program's everywhere.
It's the bottom line, folks.
No matter where you go, this show is everywhere.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
El Rushbo, your guiding light.
Times of trouble, confusion, tumult, chaos, deceit, and yes, even the good times.
The details on MSNBC are from Newsbusters.
New numbers show that some of the network's programs lost up to almost half of the viewers since last August.
The numbers just released by Nielsen show that MSNBC averaged 520,000 total viewers during prime time this month.
That's total viewers.
173,000 in the 2554 demographic.
May I put that in perspective for you?
Their total audience equals the New York audience at any given 15 minutes for this program.
It is for a program, for a network that claims to be a national network of any kind, to have half a million people nationwide is embarrassing.
And that's down 50%.
Then you get to the demo 173,000.
It is, I'll tell you what's interesting about this.
CNN is down.
The networks are down.
Conservative books sell through the wazoo and end up number one on the New York Times list.
The most listened-to radio talk shows are conservative.
The most watched cable news network is conservative.
So the obvious question: how do elections happen the way they do?
We own books.
We own talk radio.
We own cable news.
Well, the answer is we're nowhere in the pop culture.
We are nowhere in movies.
We're nowhere in television shows.
We are nowhere in music.
Nowhere.
And in the fiction side of books, we're nowhere in terms of what conservatism is, being cool and plot lines and that kind of thing.
We're not in the classroom.
We're not in academia.
We're not the professors and the presidents of universities.
We are not school superintendents.
And those are very crucial because they get people when they're young, young skulls full of mush, they get to flake and form those brains and basically propagandize them and indoctrinate them however they wish.
And you go program by program here.
Here's the bottom line.
Since August of 2012, MSNBC has lost 28% of total viewers, 32% in that 2554 demographic, 36% and 32% losses respectively in prime time.
The Rachel Maddow show, and she's supposedly the heroine of that network.
Rachel Maddow, that's the show, the defining show.
That show is the face of MSNBC.
And she just recorded all-time low numbers in total and demographic viewers.
She went down 43%, 47%, respectively.
The program called The Last Word, what is that?
I think that's the O'Donnell Lawrence O'Donnell.
He's down 40%, 42%.
This new guy that they've got in there, which I, you know, I better, I don't know, Rain.
They got a new guy in there.
I don't know.
Well, this new guy is down 50%.
And then this new guy took over the Ed Show, Sergeant Schultz.
Sergeant Schultz has been on weekends for a while, but they're bringing Sergeant Schultz back because the new guy making such a mess of things.
So it just, it cannot and is not a coincidence that the bottom has dropped out of MSNBC, coinciding with the decision made by me to stop airing any soundbites from MSNBC.
I just thought, why should I elevate?
I mean, it's nothing but fruitcake nuttiness.
It's really just, it's irrational insanity, if that's even possible.
And the entertainment value of it long ceased.
It's so insane.
It's like laughing at people that can't help themselves.
Anyway, another delay in Obamacare.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, the regime has delayed a step crucial to the launch of the new health care law.
That is the signing of final agreements with insurance plans to be sold in the exchanges starting October 1st.
The Department of Health and Human Services notified insurance companies yesterday that it would not sign final agreements with the plans between September 5th and the 9th, as originally anticipated, but instead would wait until mid-September.
Now, the reason for the holdup was unclear.
Sources attributed it to technology problems involving the display of insurance products within the federal information technological system.
It means they don't know what they're doing in getting the various options that consumers will have online.
So Health and Human Services just told the insurance companies, the evil, rotten insurance companies, that they won't be able to sign their final agreements as originally planned, which may delay the start of the exchanges, which were supposed to launch on October 1st, which will that's going to that that's going to put off the open enrollment period.
Never mind that the same federal government is spending, what, hundreds of millions of dollars to try to get people to sign up as quickly as possible to what?
They're trying to get millions of people to sign up.
And again, just to repeat why they want that done.
That's why Obama's not speaking.
That's why he's out conducting sales pitches.
They want as many people to sign up at these exchanges because that will cement the entitlement aspect of this.
As many people as they can get signing up at the exchanges is like thousands of people signing up for Social Security or signing up for Medicare.
Once they get those people signed in, locked in, that theoretically locks in the entitlement and makes it impossible to take it away from people.
So while they're out hustling and trying to get as many millions of people to sign up at the exchanges as they can, they have now said there's not going to be anything to sign up to because they've had to delay it.
The one thing that is not delayed is the individual mandate.
You still have to have the individual mandate.
You still have to have insurance or pay the fine.
That isn't going to change.
That's not going to be delayed in any way, shape, manner, or form.
And here's the way the formula on that works.
The IRS, there's another earth-shattering story.
The IRS yesterday finally issued their rules on this.
And let me leave it this far down in the stack.
Here we go.
The individual, if an individual chooses not to buy insurance, then that individual, i.e. you, subject to a penalty.
The IRS made it official yesterday.
They issued their final rules on the individual mandate.
And here's how it works.
The fines start at $95 per person per year or 1% of your income in 2014, whichever is the greater.
It eventually reaches $695 per person or 2.5% of income by 2016.
So you see here, I just mentioned this because I want to use this information to cement what has been the case all along and what I have been saying for a couple of years now.
The penalties, the fines, are incredibly low.
And the purpose is to suck in the poor and particularly the young.
They don't care in the first two years whether you buy insurance because they're making the fine so inexpensive.
$95 a year versus an insurance policy?
What are you going to do?
If you're 25, 30 years old and you don't have much of a job, you have much of an income, and yet the law says you have to have insurance or pay a fine.
Well, here's the option.
And your insurance costs, pick a number, $5,000 a year, or the fine is $95.
What are you going to do?
You're going to choose the $95 every day of the week.
Now, it may not be $95,000.
It's 1% of your income, whichever is the greater.
But it's still dirt cheap compared to having insurance.
However, what happens between now and 2016 when the fine goes from 95 to 695?
And then the next year after that, it doesn't take long for the fines to approach four figures.
So what do you do?
You opt in by paying the fine.
Let's use a rounded-off number.
You're a young person or somebody with not a lot of income.
So your option is a $5,000 insurance policy or paying a $100 fine.
You pay the fine and you're covered.
You're legal.
Next year, the fine's $150, and the insurance is $6,000.
What do you do?
You pay the fine, $150, and you're legal.
What are you not doing?
You're not buying insurance.
What happens to people who sell insurance when nobody's buying it from?
They go out of business.
The purpose of Obamacare, one of the many, is to make the fines so cheap that everybody will choose the fine rather than the policy.
And the more people paying the fine, the more people not buying insurance.
And right now, the only place to buy insurance is from a private sector insurance company or plan.
But if we go for two years with the vast majority of people not buying insurance, what happens to the company selling it?
Find it harder and harder and harder to stay in business.
There is no way that you're going to be able to get an insurance policy at $100 a year, anywhere close to it.
But, but, folks, here's the thing.
In 2016, the fine becomes $700 or more.
By 2016, there are going to be fewer insurance companies left selling insurance.
And the fewer companies, the less competition, the more expensive it's going to be.
It's going to get to the point where the fines are all of a sudden going to be really sizable.
And it isn't going to make any difference whether you pay the fine or buy a policy.
The difference is going to be that by the time the fines approach the same cost as the policy, you're only going to have one place to go to get the policy, and that's the government, the exchanges, because private sector insurance will have been destroyed.
What percentage of the American Utes and poor do you think will not do the fine?
I mean, you're going to have, this is for people who do not have, do not have insurance at their work.
And there are going to be more and more people who do not because companies are converting people from full to part-time.
The whole point of Obamacare is right here.
Government-run single-payer.
That's what's out on the horizon.
And the way we get there is to slowly dissolve private sector insurance as an industry.
Just get rid of it.
It's not there.
And the law says you have to have health insurance.
Pretty soon, the only place to get it is going to be at the government.
Quick timeout.
Back after this.
I'll tell you, there's another thing about these fines not really becoming costly until after 2016.
You notice 2014, the fine is $95 versus the policy, $5,000.
Who's going to buy the policy?
The next year, it's $150 big.
Whoop versus $5,000 for policy.
2016, the fines start getting big.
$695,000, $700, $800 after the elections.
It's another reason why the fines are cheap, drive private insurance out of business, and also to limit the damage to Democrats who own this bill, both in 2014 and 2016.
The big fines, the real big costs, are not going to hit everybody until after the 2014 and 2016 elections.
Here's Jim in Bergen County, New Jersey.
Hi, Jim.
Great to have you on a EIB network hive.
Thank you, sir.
How are you?
Very well.
That's great.
Rush, I want to go back to what you were saying when the program began, and that was, you know, how all these different news organizations, Rachel Maddow, that guy that O'Brien and all that, you know, their audiences are shrinking.
The New York Times is in financial trouble.
All these liberal media, I mean, it's like they're talking themselves out of a job.
And I'd like to get your take on it.
I mean, it just doesn't make any sense.
But they're not.
Now, there are liberals losing jobs in journalism.
And they are at the small and middle-market newspapers and starting to happen at the big newspapers.
New York Times is buyouts, Washington Post, L.A. Times, and so forth.
But for the most part, they're still in business, aren't they?
CNN's still in business with nobody watching.
MSNBC gets, every time they lose audience, they get even further to the left.
It's like they punish the audience.
It's like the Democrats, when they lose elections, they rip the audience and the voters to shreds.
How to explain this.
They don't think they're talking themselves out of a job.
They think they're holding on to their jobs.
The cause is everything.
The people that worked at CNN and the management at CNN were almost given awards for great heroism as their network was losing audience and money because they hung in there.
They hung in there with liberalism.
They didn't compromise.
They didn't give the audience what it wanted.
They continued to promote the cause no matter the professional pain.
And that's what's happening to people at MSNBC.
They're sitting there in denial and anger at their audience.
It means too stupid to figure it out.
Okay, we come back.
We'll get into the Martin Luther King anniversary today and the way much of it's playing out in the media.
And I must say, much in the way it's playing out is much the way I told you it would.