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Sept. 16, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:42
September 16, 2013, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
It's raining out there and it's raining really hard.
As a result, this program will be delayed until the rain ends.
And I feel safe coming in here to once again execute broadcast excellence.
No, I melt if I get wet, and I'm not going to do the program if it's raining.
I'm just not going to do it.
I'm going to make everybody understand how sensitive and concerning and caring I am about things.
Anyway, just teasing, my friends, second week in a row, a National Football League game has been delayed by rain and lightning.
We not understand the lightning, but what would they, you know, get the players off the field, but the fans are still out there exposed.
I mean, they can't get all those fans undercover.
Anyway, happy to have you here, folks.
Another full week of Broadcast Excellence underway.
The telephone number, if you want to be on the program 800-282-2882, the email address, LRushbo on EIBNet.com.
So we had a shooting in the Washington Naval Yard today.
Multiple fatalities and many people are wounded.
The government is saying that it is not terrorism.
That is only reserved for when they think the Tea Party is involved.
And if they think the Tea Party is involved, then they will start speculating immediately that it is terrorism.
But in this case, we're being assured right off the bat that it is not terrorism.
Navy officials say at least six are dead in this shooting.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Navy officials say one suspect killed by law enforcement in the Washington Navy Yard shooting.
And Fox News is reporting at least 10 people shot, multiple fatalities reported at the D.C. Navy Yard.
Tell me, have you heard, is the Tea Party being blamed for this yet?
Well, give it time.
And there's not a video to explain this yet either.
No, no.
Well, so nobody knows really what this is all about, which means everybody's wide open to guess, which means that everybody can be a journalist here, which they're now going to be deciding in the U.S. Senate.
Dianne Feinstein actually wants to decide who is going to be a senator.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to get into this in due course.
I just want to set you up for this.
The pressure that is being brought to bear on what remains of any opposition to this government, this administration in the Republican Party is daunting.
The pressure being brought to bear on people like Ted Cruz and others is intensifying.
The President of the United States is joining with other Republicans and supposed conservative media, and they are doing everything they can now to get rid of the last remnants of any opposition to what is happening in Washington, even as far as Obamacare is concerned.
You know, there was an incident, I guess, a provision where members of Congress and their staff were going to be required to get their health care like everybody else according to the Obamacare law.
And members of Congress, their staffs, objected, saying that they couldn't afford it, that it was too expensive, and they wanted an exemption.
And they got it.
Members of Congress and their staffs got an exemption, and their health care via Obamacare will be subsidized, not through the exchanges, but rather through the personnel department and the federal government.
It's a different way, but it adds up to the same thing.
They are going to have their health care subsidized.
And it turns out that an effort in the House and the Senate to defund Obamacare is being undermined by Republican staffers who don't want to upset what they have achieved for themselves, along with Democrat staffers in terms of their Obamacare being subsidized.
There actually are Republican staffers who aren't, they have no interest in defunding Obamacare.
It really is a dwindling number.
Even though, now you look at the polling data, even though the Pew Center poll is out today, the number of people who want Obamacare is dwindling.
The number of people who support it is dwindling.
It is nowhere near, and it hasn't been for a long time, nowhere near majority support for Obamacare.
There is vast majority opposition to it.
But the ruling class in Washington, having taken care of itself and essentially exempting itself from the rules and regulations of Obamacare, is just fine and dandy with it.
And it is a, I'll tell you, there's another thing that there are two stories here that dovetail, and it's about the income gap in this country.
And it is widening.
Under the Obama administration, the income gap is widening.
The 1% is getting richer and richer.
The 99% are falling into deep poverty.
This is an AP story.
And the 1%, most of them live and work in Washington.
The median income in this country is $51,000 per household.
$51,000.
That's the median, not the average.
And for those of you in Riolinda, what this means is that there are as many households earning above that number as there are households earning below it.
An average does not mean that, but a mean does.
There are four counties in the United States, four counties where the mean household income is over $100,000 a year, and three of them are suburban Washington.
Two of them in Northern Virginia and one in Maryland.
The other is out in New Mexico, I think, near the nuclear installation there.
Now, we also know that all of Washington, Washington, primarily the suburbs, there is no recession there.
There is no unemployment there.
The unemployment rate in the metro Washington area, 3.5% to 4%.
And now the median household income, $51,000 in America, but there are two counties, maybe three in suburban Washington, two in Virginia, one in Maryland, where the median household income is over $100,000.
The point is that the people in Washington are fine.
There is no recession.
There is no unemployment.
They have their exemption from Obamacare.
There's no problem.
They don't see what's wrong.
They're fine.
It used to not be this way.
And of course, the Democrat Party is comprised of people who have amassed power under the false premise that they care about the little guy, that they care about the downtrodden, and that they're going to do everything they can to make sure that the little guy doesn't get stomped on.
And they're going to do everything they can that the little guy gets elevated and raised and does okay.
Well, that has never really been the case with the Democrat Party.
The Republican Party has always stood for everybody doing better.
We want everybody to do well.
We don't like this income gap business.
We want everybody to do well.
That's what equals a great country.
We want everybody to have a good car and a nice house.
We want everybody to do well.
We're not selfish.
We're not hoarders.
We believe in an economy that can grow and expand and accommodate anybody who wants to work hard and put themselves out, you know, engage in a little ambition.
We believe in everybody doing well.
But now it appears there's nobody looking out for the little guy.
Everybody's looking out for themselves in this time of economic malaise.
It appears that leaders who in the past have always cared, at least professed to care, about the middle class and what was happening to those people, are now totally absorbed in are they okay?
And if so, that's it.
That's enough.
There appears to be enough data to indicate that this is true.
You look at the nation's capital and there are none other than Metro Washington.
That's a whole other story there, but outside of Metro, D.C., you look at the whole, not Metro, but the actual city.
You look in the entire suburban area, and there is no recession, and there is no unemployment, and everybody's doing well.
It stands to reason.
That's where all the money is.
And everybody in Washington's found a way to get their hands into that pile somehow.
Now, that's always been the case, but you at least used to have people who, by virtue of the notion of service or ideological belief, wanted to, by virtue of policy, structure things so that economics could be something that everybody would benefit in.
Now, I'll tell you what's happening.
The economic circumstance in this country is so bad.
The future is so dismal that even among the ruling class in Washington, what appears to be the case now is that everybody there is simply grabbing everything they can for themselves and trying to hold on because that's about all they can hope to do.
It's almost like it's an every man for himself mentality now.
You know, women and children get to get off the boat first.
That's not true.
The ruling class gets off the boat first, and they don't care who's left on it and don't really care if it sinks.
All they want to make sure is they're nowhere around when it happens.
Well, social Darwinism in a way, and by the way, folks, I mean, there's just two stories I have here that form the basis of this thought.
One of them is the AP story.
The gap in employment rates between America's highest and lowest income families has stretched to its widest levels since officials began tracking the data 10 years ago.
Rates of unemployment for the lowest income families, people earning less than 20 grand, have topped 21%.
U.S. income households with incomes of more than $150,000 a year have an unemployment rate of only 3.2%.
Now, it stands to reason that a household income of 20 grand, there's something going on there that says you're really not qualified for much.
But it still is a number, and it's still, those are people.
They're still human beings.
And now you have U.S. households with incomes of more than $150,000 a year have an unemployment rate of 3.2%.
Now, if you go to the story here on these six counties in the U.S. with median income greater than $100,000, four of them are in the D.C. metro area.
And here they are, Loudoun County, Virginia, Falls Church City, Virginia, Fairfax County, Virginia, Los Alamos County, New Mexico, Hayward County, Maryland, and then there's one in New Jersey, Hunterton County, New Jersey.
And all six of those are the only counties in America where the median income is greater than $100,000.
Elsewhere, everywhere else, the median is $51,000.
So the people in the ruling class in Washington have found a way to take care of themselves.
And since they've done that, then to hell with it.
Now, you've known people like that.
You've known them all your life.
You could actually say four of the six.
Howard County is close to D.C., Howard County, Maryland, too.
So four of the six are suburban Washington.
Four of the six.
I'm telling you, there's no unemployment there, 3%.
There's no economic strife.
There aren't businesses closing down.
None of that is happening.
Where these people live, the news media, members of Congress, it isn't happening.
And that's fine.
That's all that matters.
Everybody's taking care of themselves now.
Even America's leftists who have always done that, but they've gotten away with enriching themselves while supposedly caring about the little guy.
Well, there's a whole bunch of people that think of themselves as a little guy, and they're hoping to be taken care of or thought of or accounted for in government policy, economic policy.
But it isn't happening.
And all of this is happening after five years of a Democrat, a liberal Democrat, an extremist radical liberal Democrat president.
The Democrat Party was the one always complaining about the widening income gap.
Look at the administration under which it's wider than ever and continuing to get wide.
The ruling class in Washington, less and less defined by party affiliation.
So it's intense.
When you have people in Washington who stand in opposition to what's happening in that town, Ted Cruz, there aren't very many of them.
I'm telling you, the onslaught is in place.
David Brooks was on PBS, I guess, on Friday night.
Yeah, the news hour with Judy Woodruff and just impugned Ted Cruz.
I've got the audio sound bites here.
We'll get to it in just a second.
At the Wazoo, there's an all-out assault on anybody opposing the defunding of Obamacare, anybody opposing anything in the Obama agenda.
There's an all-out assault on dealing with those people.
One way or the other.
I got to take a break here, folks.
You sit tight.
We'll be back and continue with much more after this.
Don't go away.
Now, today, ladies and gentlemen, Obama, President Obama seeking credit for an economic turnaround using the fifth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers to highlight signs of recovery and to warn against potentially market-rattling fights over the federal budget and the nation's debt ceiling.
That's right.
You heard me.
The president is scheduled to address the state of the economy today in the Rose Garden.
Now, I don't know if this is still on what with the naval yard shooting, but the original plan, and it may still be in place, was a state of the economy speech in a Rose Garden to talk about how great it is, how wonderful it is.
Massive recovery, folks, in five years.
We're going to talk about how great Obama has recovered this economy.
He will be accompanied by a selection of Americans the White House says have benefited from regime policies.
The event marks the start of a week-long focus on the economy after a month of preoccupation with the crisis in Syria.
So they're just making stuff up now.
What in the world are they taking credit for?
The only place where there's anything to crow about is Washington, D.C., economically, and the areas of the country where there is fracking for oil going on and a couple of other pockets.
But there were 90 million Americans not working.
The labor force participation rate has plummeted.
Unemployment, if the same number of jobs existed today as when Obama took office five years ago, the unemployment rate would be near 11%.
There is no economic recovery.
Try this.
Over 65,000 U.S. bridges in need of repair.
Again, the AP reporting.
An Associated Press analysis of 607,380 bridges shows that 65,000 were classified as structurally deficient and 20,000 as fracture-critical.
And of the 65,000 structurally deficient, 20,000 fracture-critical, almost 8,000 were both.
I read that and I said, well, now that's impossible because we did a stimulus.
We had the now famous stimulus bill in March of 2009, two months after Obama was inaugurated, to deal with this.
We rebuilt all the roads and bridges.
While we were at it, we rebuilt all the crumbling schools.
And while we were at it, we rebuilt some roads.
And then rebuilding the roads or rebuilt the bridges.
What is this?
20,000 bridges are fracture critical.
After how many stimuli?
And the president's going to run out there in the Rose Garden today.
That's the plan with a bunch of Americans who supposedly have benefited from his policies, claiming credit for a robust economic recovery.
And this is all to set the stage, the media helping, of course, to alarm anybody over the fact that Republicans might shut down the government.
No, not the Republicans can.
Oh, no.
This is how it happens.
We'll be back.
Sit tight, my friends.
Well, that Rose Garden event that I was talking about is happening now.
They moved it indoors because of the rain.
And the president right now is giving some remarks on what they don't know about the Washington Naval Yard shooting.
So the speech on the robust economic recovery or the event on the robust economic recovery still on.
And he's giving a speech, and he's got the props up there.
This guy said he didn't care about style points.
It was asked about Putin's op-ed in the New York Times.
I don't care about style points.
I'm not into style points and imagery and all that.
As he is surrounded by supposed success cases in this massive economic recovery.
The White House report on the economy just came out, adjusted for inflation and population growth.
Only 45% of wealth lost during the recession has been recovered.
That's from the White House owned report.
It's in a daily caller piece.
So we're out here getting ready for the 2014 midterms, and we're trying to head off what might be an effort to defund Obamacare in Congress via the next continuing resolution.
So we're throwing a party, and we're going to throw a party about economic recovery and how great this recovery has been.
Why we finished that recession in 2009 and we've been going gangbusters.
Why, ever since the recession happened, we've recovered 45% of the wealth that was lost.
That's how great this recovery has been.
That's right.
Not even half the wealth that was lost in the market plunge and job losses, you name it.
However, you can tabulate the loss of wealth.
And by the way, that's an aggregate number.
That means everybody loses, not everybody's wealthy, but when you add up the amount of money that everybody lost, the category is called wealth.
And this recovery has been so robust that even the White House own report claims that we have recovered roughly 45% of the wealth lost during the recession.
Now, this report does say that over the past three and a half years, our businesses have created 7.5 million new jobs.
Our businesses have created 7.5 million new jobs.
Well, the population has grown 7 million roughly through the arrival of 5 million immigrants.
The report does not mention wages or salaries, even though they have dropped for nearly all Americans since 2009.
It doesn't mention inequality, which has risen since 2009, which I just, again, mention.
I mean, this is, they're just making it up.
And they're making it up at the White House because they know they can.
Low information voters are going to believe it.
The media is going to amplify it.
If anybody stands up, try to speak truth to power, they'll be shouted down as an extremist member of the Tea Party who's a racist and doesn't like the president because of his race.
So they just get to make it up.
Yeah, I think the low information people believe it.
Snerdley just, you know, the low-information people believe it because they're the ones suffering.
Yeah, we'll have to wait and see.
You know, the presidential poll approval poll numbers are all falling.
But again, nobody knows that.
It isn't being reported.
And so I don't know that the low-information people who are suffering, I think what's likely to happen, Snerdley, since you asked, is since it's not, look at what's being reported.
We're going gangbusters.
Economy coming back.
Whoa, 7 million new jobs.
If you're a low-information person, you're saying, my time is near.
My ship's about to come in, and I'm going to make sure I'm not at the airport.
You're going to think positive.
You're going to think it's starting to happen for everybody.
It hadn't happened for you yet, but your time is coming.
That's exactly what they're going to count on.
Everything is imagery.
Nothing's real here.
The only place in this country, the only geographical area where there is no sign of any economic trouble whatsoever is Washington.
I kid you not.
And even there, if you go to inner city Washington, there are signs of economic problems, but nobody talks about that.
But where the ruling class lives and works, there isn't any economic problem.
And there wasn't, even with the collapse, everybody got bailed out.
I keep hearkening back to that great piece that we quoted at the time it came out, Angelo Coteville, whose piece I quoted extensively from the ruling class versus the country class.
That would be us.
And, you know, thanks to the drive-bys, things are the reverse of what everybody thinks is the case.
And remember, when in the Bush years, things were doing absolutely great.
There was a legitimate and real economic recovery coming out of 9-11 and a recession.
And the news media for five years spent every day telling people that a recession was coming.
It was right around the corner, the beginnings of it, and they made people believe it.
They made people believe there was a recession, and they made people start behaving as though there was one.
So now things are the reverse of when we were told that we were suffering under Bush, and everybody thought it must be somebody else.
You know, you'd go into a neighborhood and say, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
I'm doing great.
But I look on the news and I see a lot of people unemployed and losing their business.
Yeah, I feel bad about it, but I'm doing fine.
Now, you go in the neighborhood, how you doing?
Gosh, I can't find a job.
I'm doing horribly out there.
But I look at the news and 7 million people found a job.
So my time's coming.
I'm feeling good.
Country's coming back.
That's how the low-information people are going to hear it, Snerdley.
They're going to hear positive news.
They're going to assume it's positive for everybody else but them, but their time is coming.
Well, if you disagree with that, I want you to show me the evidence of where there is any national clamor for there to be a change of what's happening in Washington.
Outside of the Tea Party, I want you to show me where is this, where is the low-information uprising?
Where is the low-information voter national clamoring for change?
There isn't any.
It's just the, it's this exact, and again, the numbers are what they are: the income gap between rich and poor is the what?
The employment and wealth gap, the two things: the employment gap between rich and poor, widest on record, wealth gap between rich and poor, widest on record.
Again, under a Democrat regime, these people spend their whole time talking about reducing that income gap and that wealth gap.
How unfair it is.
But the truth of any liberal, quasi-socialist regime is being borne out here.
They always do well for themselves.
They do extravagantly well for themselves.
And they get away with making everybody think that they care about them as well.
So it's going to get this is going to be a tough week, folks, attitudinally.
It's going to be a tough week psychologically because the pressure is being brought to bear on anybody who opposes this myth that there is an economic recovery, that the myth that Obama's policies have brought us to a new economic reawakening, a burgeoning reawakening.
Why are we on the verge here of economic progress, the likes of which we've never seen?
That's what this week is going to tell us.
We beat back the Syrian bad guys.
We stopped the spread of chemical weapons.
We're ready to take it to the Iranians.
It's a miracle.
All of the wonderful, great things.
And anybody who opposes it, and anybody who says it isn't happening, anybody who disagrees with it is going to be targeted for some kind of attack that is designed to discredit them, impugn them, or worse.
By the way, again, if the economy is so great, you know, why have we been printing all this money?
Speaking of which, speaking of which, Larry Summers wanted to be the chairman of Federal Reserve.
This is the former, he's a Treasury guy, he's a well-known money guy.
He does really good with QuickBooks and TurboTax, stuff that Geithner didn't know how to do.
And he was the president of Harvard.
And he happened to say something truthful one day.
He said that women just, you know, so hot at math and science.
And the feminazis just skewered him and they got rid of him.
And he's been languishing in reputation gulch ever since.
He happened to, those were academic truths that he uttered while president of Harvard.
He didn't have any animus.
He doesn't hate women.
I mean, he just made the mistake of speaking truthfully, which opposed the feminist agenda.
Stood in the way of it.
So the feminist faculty at Harvard rose up and he's gone.
Says he wanted to be chairman of Federal Reserve.
And that would be a pinnacle.
But he pulled himself out of the running over the weekend because he knows he didn't have a prayer.
He knows the feminazis and the feminist leadership would descend on him like they did Clarence Thomas.
So he pulled out of there and he said, I don't want to bring any discredit, disfavor, unrest to the Federal Reserve.
I don't want to be a circus act.
It's a big thing.
Really, really, really wanted it.
I met this guy at a business conference in Sacramento some years ago.
We're in the same speaking schedule, and I couldn't believe how much time he spent talking to me.
And it was right after the Harvard thing, and we were talking about it a little bit.
So, anyway, it looks like the Federal Reserve position now held by Ben Bernanke.
Conventional wisdom is it's going to go to a woman, Janet Yellen.
Now, I don't know much about this woman except this: she opposes quantitative easing.
She wants no more of it.
So, she has said: no more printing money, no more digitizing money and transferring it to the accounts of people that would buy loads of securities and stock with it.
And the market will accordingly panic, and you will see it.
So, it'll be that'll be somewhat interesting to watch.
But she apparently has an entirely different monetary policy than she wants to get rid of low interest rates.
She wants to bring interest rates back up.
She doesn't like this money not costing anything.
She wants interest rates to come back.
The exact opposite of what has been going on with the Fed all of these years.
And that's going to cause some unrest in the so-called capital markets.
I'm a little long.
I got to take a brief time out.
Don't go away, folks.
Coming right.
Okay, grab some phone call time.
This is Helena in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Great to have you on the EIB Network, and you're up first.
Hello.
Hi, Russ.
I just wanted to start out by saying that you are my absolute favorite.
I love listening to you.
I've been listening to you for years.
Well, thank you.
I'm flattered.
I appreciate that.
Yeah, no problem.
I called you because I'm really concerned with where this country is going.
The last job that I had, I worked for a company here in Wyoming, and I was actually told that my hours were being cut so that they wouldn't have to give me health insurance, so that they wouldn't have to provide it for me.
And, you know, it really, it really disturbed me, you know, the process of what America has been going through for the past 10 years.
It's just, it's going in a spiral downhill.
And, you know, when the United States went through the Great Depression, it wasn't the government that got us out of it.
It was the mindset of the people.
It was the will of the people.
And the mindset now is just, it's scary.
It's really scary.
You're telling me, I can imagine what it's like for you at 19.
You're looking here, your life is all ahead of you.
You've got great ambition, lots of designs on things, and you're looking out and you're seeing a country where opportunity may be limited and you don't see that many people concerned about it.
I know.
And it's another thing that really worries me is, you know, when I was growing up, my father was a big believer in, you know, you work for what you want.
And he worked his entire life.
You know, a lot of elbow grease was put into it.
And he made his money.
You know, he earned what he had.
And now, you know, people are just feeding off the government.
It's just, you know, the government dependency in this country is getting out of control.
And it's really scary for me.
It really is.
I agree with, I know.
I have a sense some of these old tried and true beliefs, philosophies, the old saw, for example, work hard to get where you want.
There will be a payoff for hard work.
So many people think that's corny now.
So many people think that old philosophies, I mean, tried and true, not just expressly American, but just human philosophies are greeted with skepticism and disbelief.
So many of them are.
It's disheartening.
It's amazing.
I completely agree.
I hope it's cyclical.
I worked my butt off at this company.
You know, I worked my butt off for them for about a year.
And then, you know, I came into work one day and they told me that I wasn't going to be getting more than 30 hours anymore.
And I can't live off of that.
You know, I can't make a living doing that at this point.
Yeah.
Let me, you're 19, right?
Yes, sir.
Yeah, you got five years to go.
And then when you hit 24, you're going to all of a sudden be afraid of me.
I just want you to enjoy these next five years while you can.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, no, I, you know, I really am doing the best I can, but the way this country is going and the people that are ruling this country that are telling us what to do and where to go, it makes me feel like I'm not even going to have a chance.
No, no, no.
Helena, here's the way you need to look at this.
You can't affect, you can't by yourself do anything other than be in charge of your own direction and place in life.
You need to look at it this way.
You need to take advantage of the fact that so many other people are not going to be competing with you.
You need to take, do not, you know, you can't, you can't let this stuff, it gets you down as an American.
It gets you down because you love the country, but do not let it dissuade you from your own, what you know to be, truthful philosophy about hard work equaling success.
Continue to go for it.
It'll pay off.
It always has.
It always will.
And in the process, help show other people.
Do not cave to this.
You need not do that.
Folks, I misspoke about Larry Summers and Jessica or the yelling babe.
It's the other way around.
She wants to continue QE, priming the pump.
It's Summers that wanted to tighten money.
And I'm sorry, I got it right.
Listen to some idiot that I ought to know better.
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