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Sept. 13, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:28
September 13, 2013, Friday, Hour #2
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Documented to be almost always right 99.7% of the time.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network.
It's Friday, my friends.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
Now, what is Open Line Friday?
Well, what's the big deal?
On the surface, it doesn't appear to be any different than the other day, but it is.
Because underneath the hood, we make changes.
Things that you never see.
Like the call screening process.
The only people that ever see that are when we have visitors here at the Southern Command.
And they sit in there on the other side of the glass wall, and they watch and listen to Snerdley screen the calls.
Well, their mouths are wide open and agape quite a bit of the time as they listen to the call screening process.
See, Monday through Thursday, it's very tightly screened.
You've got to talk about what I'm talking about, what I'm interested in, because I don't want to sit here and be bored.
But on Friday, that gets thrown out.
And whatever the caller wants to talk about, unless it's complaining about the electric bill or whatever, is fine.
And so it's a fundamental under-the-hood change.
And it's an opportunity for callers to bring up things that haven't been discussed that they think should be, or to ask questions, make comments, whatever, that they might not be allowed to make Monday through Thursday.
I mean, I am a dictator, benevolent dictator, nevertheless.
There is no First Amendment here except for me.
But once you make it here, once you get past the scrutiny of the screening process, and it's all yours, Friday is where we basically turn it over to you.
And that's what's different about it.
Telephone number, if you want to be part of the program, 800-282-2882.
Email address, Lrushbo at EIBNet.com.
I want to go back to our last caller, Ken from Livonia, Michigan.
He buys his own insurance.
He doesn't, he's not part of a company policy.
He actually went to a health insurance company.
So I want health insurance.
Now, I don't know if they pooled him with a group of other like-minded people or not, but it was not part of a group, as far as they knew.
He wasn't part of an employee group or any of that.
And he bought what he could afford, $180 a month with a $1,000 deductible.
Now, I don't know how extensive his insurance is.
I didn't get that to him.
The point is that his company told him that his prices are skyrocketing, at least going to double.
And it's because of Obamacare, because of the requirements being brought to bear, the pressures being brought to bear on private insurance companies.
The objective of Obamacare is to slowly force them out of business.
And the way you do that is zap them with a bunch of rules and regulations that up their prices beyond what their customers can afford.
And if the customer can't afford it and there's no subsidy, you're gone.
They're out of business.
And that's the objective.
To shrink the private sector insurance market and thereby force people into the state-run exchanges or the federal exchanges.
Now, there technically is not a federal exchange as per the law, but they're going to have to do something because not all states have agreed to set up an exchange.
It's a mess.
So he was calling to just warn people that are in the same situation that he's in what's coming.
And he also opined that when this starts happening to people, that finally people are going to see what Obama is causing, and they're going to be mad at him, to which I reminded him, don't think that.
Don't be so quick to make that conclusion.
If we can have record high unemployment, record job loss, just an absolutely anemic economic recovery because of Obama's policies, and he's not blamed for it, what makes anybody think he's going to get blamed when an insurance company starts doubling their premiums?
People are going to blame the insurance company.
Not going to blame Obama.
They're not blaming Obama for anything else.
Although, not actually, Obama's approval numbers, you're not seeing this reported widely, but his approval numbers are falling and in some places dramatically.
In one poll, support for Obamacare is under 40% now.
In the same poll, I forget what it was.
Obama's performance, job performance approval rate is just over 40.
He's not at 50% approval in any poll.
That's why they've stopped reporting it, by the way.
When's the last time you saw a presidential approval poll?
Off the top of your head.
You can't remember, right?
Because it's not worth reporting.
They're covering it up.
Obama's job performance is plummeting.
So it's the same old argument.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody's there, does it make a noise?
Well, if Obama's job approval is plummeting, but nobody knows it, are they going to realize it?
And the answer is no.
By the same token, the Democrat Party has an enemies list, and it's anything that has to do with capitalism.
So any big corporation or industry, big oil, big plastics, big tree, big, you name it, have been targeted and have been enemies for years.
Big insurance.
Everybody hates the insurance companies.
They despise them.
So Ken thinks that people are going to walk in and find their premiums doubled, people in his shoes, and then they're going to finally blame Obama.
And then people are going to get mad.
And that's going to be the tipping point.
And I'm not so sure people are going to blame Obama.
They think Obama's trying to help.
They think Obama, I mean, Obama said their premium is going to come down.
See, the way he set this up, he promised people he'd keep their doctor.
Promised people, they like their policy, they get to keep it.
Promised people their premium is going to come down.
When none of that happens, why would they blame him?
They're going to blame the insurance companies for savaging the first black president.
The insurance company is going to be called racist or Republican, mean because they're trying to harm Obama when all he's trying to do is help people.
I'm just warning you, don't be surprised.
Some people blame Obama.
It's going to increase, but it ain't going to be this blanket tipping point that people think.
Now, Ken's problem, people in Ken's situation, the Wall Street Journal has a piece about this today about the self-insured.
And thanks to Obamacare, more and more companies are going to just stop offering insurance to individuals.
So there's going to be even less competition on top of the increase in premiums because all of the Obamacare mandates, those are what's driving prices up.
Just about every week, we see some insurance company announce that it's going to stop selling individual plans in some state or another.
And there just aren't that many health insurance companies to begin with.
And if they drop out, then the universe of options that people have shrinks and competition obviously is lessened, which means prices rise.
Now, the skyrocketing of these premiums is going to be somewhat disguised by the taxpayer subsidies that are available over at the exchanges.
Another reason Obama is going to get praise.
The evil insurance company is going to tell you if you're a self-insured person that your premiums are doubling.
Then you go over to the exchange and you find out, oh, wow, it's not going to cost that much.
No, Obamacare has said it.
Oh, really?
Obamacare is saving my bacon is how some people are going to look at this.
This is how it has been structured.
Now, most self-employed people do not qualify, won't qualify for taxpayer subsidies.
It really is an assault.
You would think that the self-employed, that the entrepreneur, they'd be the ones getting the break, but they don't.
They are not going to be able to access subsidies like employees will be.
But it's the taxpayers they're going to have to pay for the higher premiums.
We're all going to be paying through the roof here.
One way or the other.
Everybody is.
Here's the latest health news in the healthcare stack today.
Republicans introduced plan to stop Obamacare without shutting down government.
Republican Representative Tom Graves and 42 House co-sponsors introduced a budget plan yesterday to defund Obamacare without forcing a government shutdown, placing pressure solely on Harry Reid, it says here.
Graves' Security Stability and Fairness Resolution is a continuing resolution budget bill that offers a fiscal year 2014 budget that keeps the government open but does not fund Obamacare.
The Obama regime has already delayed the law's employer mandate till 2015 after the 2014 midterms.
The defund Obamacare campaign, spearheaded by Ted Cruz, has been accused of seeking a government shutdown if Cruz's demands aren't met.
Tom Graves' legislation relieves Cruz of that burden and puts Harry Reid on the crosshairs.
Theoretically, I mean, that's how it's designed.
Not that easy, as I read this, but that's how it's designed.
Now, folks, man-made problems have man-made solutions, and Obamacare is a man-made problem.
So there is a man-made solution to this.
And I want to throw something out there.
And I will admit that it's easy for me to say I'm a guy on the radio.
I am not a politician.
I do not campaign for votes.
And I realize that if I did, I couldn't do it by making people hate me.
Or not making, but having people hate me.
So I realize they're in a different universe than I am.
And so it's easy for me and you and everybody else to sit from the outside and say what we would do if we were them, what we want them to do.
We elect them, there are representatives.
But if you take as the fundamental problem here, that Obamacare fundamentally transforms this country from a capitalist to a socialist nation,
and if you think that is one of the worst things that could happen, then why would you put any limits on damage incurred to stop it?
If you want to save the America that was founded, and in the process, the government might shut down.
So what?
But if you want to save the country as founded, but oh my God, government shutdown, oh, can't do that.
Then maybe it's not that really important.
A government shutdown, big whoop.
Now, I know what you're saying, but Rush, a government shutdown, is going to be blamed on the Republicans, and they're going to lose in 2014, and they're going to lose.
I don't know.
Have you seen?
I've got it here in the stack.
Conservatives have elected leaders in three countries in the last couple of weeks, Australia, Norway, and someplace.
One guy, Australia, the conservative that was elected, ran his number one agenda item was anti-global warming.
I think the Republican Party is totally missing the boat.
I think a conservative agenda is the route to massive victory, 2014, 2016.
Opposing what's happening now, stopping what's happening now.
But Rush, but Rush, there might be a government shutdown.
If you're going to let the fear of a government shutdown stop you, then what you're doing, you may not even consider.
That to me is a small price to pay.
If you really believe that this Obamacare thing is that bad, but again, I say, easy for me to say I'm not an elected official.
And if the government does get shut down, I'm not going to get blamed.
Well, I probably will, but I don't care.
I'm frankly not that upset by a two-week government shutdown anyway, because it never really shuts down.
The dirty little secret is it never really shuts down.
All of the entitlement checks are continually cut.
People do not stop receiving their benefits.
I just, if in if we're if we're trying to save the country as founded, we're pretty close objective-wise to what the founders were trying to do in establishing the country.
We're trying to save it.
They tried to establish.
Do you think whatever the equivalent back then of a government shutdown would have caused them to give up the revolution?
No.
I've always been uncomfortable with this idea.
Oh, we can't do that.
There's a government shutdown.
What's so bad about that?
Well, 1995, Russia, remember what happened?
We got shut up.
Well, we actually didn't.
It was not the debacle.
I mean, it was in the media, but in real life, it wasn't.
But for way too many people, what's in the media is real life, and what's real life isn't real.
Anyway, the plan here apparently defunds Obamacare.
It's a House plan.
Crew is in the Senate.
House plan defunds it while keeping the government open.
That's fine if they can do that.
It doesn't matter.
I'm just questioning how serious are you if the fear of a government shutdown is going to stop you.
I know it's not going to bother the supporters of defunding it.
I know our pals in the Tea Party, Freedom Works, and all these other grassroots.
You think they would stop their efforts to defund Obamacare because there might be a government shutdown?
But again, they aren't elected officials either.
Well, they're close to them and are responsible for quite a few of them being elected.
But it really is.
I mean, if you listen to people talk, they think what's at stake here, saving the United States.
Many Republicans have that opportunity.
Man-made problem, Obamacare, man-made solutions.
Save the United States.
And they control the House.
There's more power there than they realize.
I know the House leadership is not in favor of it for a various and sundry number of reasons.
I've got to take a quick time out here, my friends.
Sorry to interrupt myself, but it's the only way I stop talking.
And back to the phone, Spirit Lake Iowa.
This is Jill.
So glad to have you on the program today, Jill.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
Happy Friday the 13th to you.
Thank you.
You know, you're right.
I've forgotten that.
It didn't even register.
I called for two reasons today.
The first one is to wish you and I a happy anniversary tomorrow.
21 years ago, tomorrow, I started watching your TV program when it started, and that began you as a part of my family.
21 years, you know, the day, 21 years ago, you start.
I wouldn't know that.
If somebody asked me what day did your TV show debut, I wouldn't know.
Well, I was talking to my husband about it because I knew we got married in 92, and we'd only been married for a few months when we first started listening to you.
My parents had listened to you for a long time, so I knew of you, but I didn't really ever listen to much.
And so we were newlyweds, and my mom said, hey, Rush is going to have this new TV show.
And so we started watching, and then from there we started listening, and we've been listening ever since.
And we knew, my husband, I was trying to remember when the show started, and so I looked it up online, and it was September 14th, 1992.
Congratulations to you.
And me too.
But thank you very much.
You flatter me.
You really flatter.
I appreciate that.
Real quick, I have a 911 story for you.
911 story.
Yes, to add to your list of 911 stories.
You mean like in Port St. Lucie, that kind of 911 story?
Okay.
Absolutely, yeah.
I went over to my, my son was at his friend's house, and I went to pick him up the other day.
He was over there hanging out.
And I go in, and his mom was telling me the story about how there was a bat in her house, and she couldn't get it out, and she couldn't get it out, and so she called 911.
I know.
Look at it.
Somebody called 911 for a spider.
Somebody called 911 for a spider on the back of the sofa.
And a fire, a policeman actually went to the house to kill a spider.
Yeah, yeah, a police officer came to her house and got the bat out.
Yep.
Why wouldn't you call it an exterminator?
I don't know.
That kind of, I didn't really say anything.
I just kind of laughed.
You know, more importantly, how does a bat get in your house?
That's what would worry me.
If I had a bat in my house, is this the only one?
And where did it come from?
That would bother me tremendously.
Well, anyway, that's great.
21 years ago, TV show debuted.
I did.
Would never have known that.
Over the years, ladies and gentlemen, I have recounted for you the statistics on poverty in this country as prepared by Robert Rector, who has devoted much of his scholarly life to the pursuit of examining census data and analyzing it, codifying it, and putting it in form people can understand.
And it has always been a shock when I've shared with people what poverty in this country is.
It surprises people because of what it isn't.
And I've always gotten into trouble.
Every time I have quoted Rector, every time I've mentioned it, elements of the drive-by media react and talk about how heartless and mean-spirited I am toward the poor, because I simply report what Rector says, and that is that poverty in this country is not poverty as measured around the world.
Now here's another source.
And it comes right from the Census Bureau.
This hasn't been analyzed by anybody at Heritage.
It's very brief.
New report from the Census Bureau found that 81% of households considered poverty stricken have cell phones.
I don't know how many of them are Obama phones, but it doesn't matter.
They have them.
81% of people in poverty have cell phones, along with landline phones.
58% have computers.
96% of people in poverty have televisions.
83% of people in poverty in America have some sort of DVR, TiVo.
The percentage of Americans in poverty who own a refrigerator, 98%.
The percentage of Americans in poverty who own a gas or electric stove, 96.5%.
The number of Americans living in poverty who have microwave ovens, 93%.
The number, percentage, percentage of Americans who have air conditioning, who live in poverty, 83%.
83% of people who live in poverty have air conditioning.
I wonder what the number is for people who are not in poverty.
Well, the reason I say that there are a lot of people in certain parts of the country who don't have air conditioning, who can afford it because of the climate.
And there are people who are not in poverty, who can't afford it and don't have it.
But 83% of Americans in poverty have air conditioning.
The number or the percentage of Americans living in poverty who have a washer, 68%.
The percentage of Americans living in poverty who have a dryer, 65%.
The percentage of Americans who live in poverty who use their washer, I don't know.
I just thought I would throw that in.
Only 45% had a dishwasher.
So they're sacrificing there.
People in poverty are washing their own dishes.
Half of them are.
So poverty in this country isn't poverty.
Everything's relative.
But that's not bad.
And that's why we, I say here, get 99 weeks of unemployment.
90 million Americans are not working, but they're eating.
90 million Americans not working, but they've got their flat screens and they've got their cell phones.
Well, that's a good point.
That is an excellent point.
The reason why only 45% have a dishwasher is because things like chicken McNuggets don't come with dishes.
How many people do you think take their McNuggets home and put them on a plate and grab a knife and a fork and a napkin and sit down, maybe a bottle of wine?
It's not happening.
So if you're eating McNuggets or what have you, you don't need.
And let's not leave it at McNuggets.
Let's include Big Macs in there just to avoid any of the leftist trolls out there.
I want to try to draw.
Did you know that Mikhail Gorbachev is a Christian?
This, folks, this news has the potential.
You'll never see it, but it has the potential to really upset the left.
Gorbachev, again, for those of you who are under 30, in fact, a cookie had a great idea yesterday.
It would never have.
A cookie told me that she was really moved by my opening hour monologue on American exceptionalism.
She said, you know what?
You ought to condense that into an op-ed and submit it to the New York Times.
There has to be the opposing point of view in the New York Times.
If they give Putin op-ed space, they ought to give it to you.
They never would.
No, no, no.
Snurgy, they wouldn't do it.
And I started yesterday by saying, those of you under 30 have no idea if you had been born 30 or 40 years ago and something like the leader of Russia or the Soviet Union with an op-ed in the New York Times trashing our president in our country would have not been tolerated.
It would have been an outrage.
It would have been a major news story.
Yesterday, it's a whole hummer.
And by the same token, if you are 35, 40 years old, you really don't know much about Mikhail Gorbachev.
You don't, I mean, you know the name, but you don't know the, for example, you don't know what a gorbasm is, unless you, or your parents or regular listeners here.
But Mikhail Gorbachev was the last of the living, breathing Soviet dictators.
Jean Kirkpatrick, the late great foreign policy specialist, I once attended a lecture she gave when I was in Sacramento at the University of California, Davis.
And it was a lecture for the students.
UC Davis, satellite, University for Moscow.
She said in her lecture, and Gorbachev, to Reaganites and concerned, Gorbachev was no different than any other Soviet leader.
The media in that day tried to present Gorbachev as something brand new and different and not your typical communist and so forth.
And Kirkpatrick said, the only difference between Mikhail Gorbachev and previous Soviet leaders is he is alive.
And the students in that lecture hall at UC Davis just erupted and hooted and howled.
They were mad as hell at her because they loved Gorbachev.
The media tried to get everybody in America to love Gorbachev and hate Reagan.
Reagan was the dangerous cowboy.
Reagan was the irresponsible, stupid dunce with his finger on the nuclear button, and he wanted to nuke the world.
And it was Gorbachev who was the savior.
Gorbachev was the reasonable leader.
Gorbachev was going to save us all from Reagan blowing up the world.
This is how it was all portrayed.
And then after the Soviet Union fell apart, because what Gorbachev tried to do, he tried to have it both ways.
He tried to introduce limited freedom for the citizens of the Soviet Union while at the same time maintaining a communist structure.
But the cat was out of the bag.
The people of the Soviet Union had learned that they'd been lied to about life in America because they finally got video cassettes of such shows as Dallas.
And they saw that the portrayal of America they'd always been told was a lie.
And they wanted that.
And then they found blue jeans and they wanted those.
The Soviet Union was a third world country with a first world military.
And they used it in an expansion-aggressive way.
And they were a genuine threat.
And they had to be contained.
It was Reagan and his policies, for lack of a better word, which ended up defeating Soviet communism.
Not all of communism, but Soviet communism.
And there were battles between the Soviets and the Chikoms for leadership of the communist world.
Soviet communism plummeting was a big deal.
Berlin Wall came down.
And after Gorbachev became a big hero.
He was always a big hero.
And Gorbachev understood the West.
And the first thing Gorbachev did after the Berlin Wall came down was to become an environmentalist wacko.
He started a foundation called a Green Cross or some such thing, which was designed to save the world from global warming.
So the American leftists just glommed onto Gorbachev and they loved him.
He ended up being hated in the USSR after the fall.
There was an assassination attempt against him.
And he blamed the forces close to Boris Yeltsin for that.
Boris Yeltsin was too drunk most of the time to run an assassination attempt, but he could order one.
I met Gorbachev.
Gorbachev, for those of you who've not seen it, had a big birthmark on his head, forehead.
And I honestly, if you look at that birthmark back in like the 1980s, you could see the eastern seaboard.
You could see Cape Cod.
You could see Maine.
You could see the East Coast, and you could see the Florida Peninsula in that birthmark.
And I swear, all during the two terms of Reagan, that birthmark expanded typical Soviet expansionism.
And we had a little fun with his first arrival in the United States for a summit meeting with Reagan in Washington.
And that's when the first known gorbasm took place, is when he landed and got off the plane.
The left in Washington, the media, they were orgasmic because finally the guy that was going to save us from nuclear devastation had arrived.
It didn't work out the way they wanted.
I finally met Gorbachev.
I met him at a birthday party, 80th birthday party for George H.W. Bush at Reliance Stadium in Houston.
And we had a picture taken standing next to almost wearing the identical suit, the gray suit.
And when the picture appeared on my website, that birthmark was on my head.
It's amazing how that happened.
Gorbachev loved George H.W. Bush.
This was when Poppy, that's his nickname, he parachuted the next, it was a Saturday on Sunday, parachuted out on his 80th birthday, and it was very windy, so he had to do a buddy jump, couldn't do it alone.
Gorbachev was right there applauding.
Anyway, the news hit yesterday that Mikhail Gorbachev, the last communist leader of the Soviet Union, has acknowledged his Christian faith for the first time.
He paid a surprise visit to the tomb of St. Francis Assisi.
Accompanied by his daughter Irina, Mr. Gorbachev spent half an hour on his knees in silent prayer at the tomb.
His arrival in Assisi was described as spiritual perestroika by La Stampa, the Italian newspaper.
St. Francis is for me the altar Christus, the other Christ, said Mr. Gorbachev.
His story fascinates me, has played a fundamental role in my life.
Mr. Gorbachev's surprise visit confirmed decades of rumors that although he was forced to publicly pronounce himself an atheist, while he was a communist leader, he was in fact a closet Christian.
And it casts one of his meetings with Pope John Paul II, 1989, in a new light.
Mr. Gorbachev, who is 77, was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, and his parents were Christians.
In addition, the parents of his wife Raisa were deeply religious.
His wife's parents were killed during the Second World War for having religious icons in their home.
I'd like you to think about something here, but I've got to take a break, so I'll pause it when we come back.
And we are back.
El Rushball and the cutting edge of societal evolution.
Now, the Gorbachev, admitting he's a Christian story, is actually from 2008.
It's a UK Telegraph story.
And I don't know how many of you knew it.
The person who sent me the story thought it was from yesterday, but it is not.
It's a five-year-old story.
That's not the point, though.
Here's something I would like to raise.
This is something to think about.
Closet Christian pretending to be an atheist.
Now, he was, by the way, he was a typical Soviet leader.
He had to be to survive.
But it was Gorbachev who did come up with perestroika and glasnost.
And those were two policies, perestroika openness, and glasnost.
They were characterized as reforms to modernize the Soviet Union that were oriented a little bit in freedom and liberty.
Not much, but it was a closed society.
This was to open it up.
A lot of it was for PR.
Here's a man whose wife's parents were killed because they had religious icons in their home.
Do you think it's a coincidence?
Here's my point.
Is it a coincidence that the leader of the Soviet Union at the time of its demise was a closet Christian?
I think that's a coincidence.
His wife's parents were killed because of religious icons in their home.
He's Russian Orthodox, what he was, or is.
And by the way, after that photo that Gorbachev and I took, the birthmark was removed.
They grafted skin from one of the buttocks.
No, from his back.
And they got rid of the birthmark.
Anyway, I guarantee you that when this story popped in 2000, I don't know how many leftists remember it or even knew it happened in 2008.
The idea, I mean, this guy was everybody on the left's favorite Soviet thug.
And now they learn he was a Christian.
And then they're going to learn that this is the guy that they were praising for ending the Cold War.
Reagan had nothing to do with it, folks.
If you weren't alive, Reagan had nothing to do with it.
It was all Gorbachev.
Gorbachev saw.
Soviet Union could not continue as it was.
Closet Christian, disguised as an atheist, leading the Soviet Union during its demise, praising Pope John Paul II.
Michelle Obama thinks you are not drinking enough water.
Michelle Obama wants you to drink more water.
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