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Sept. 30, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:38
September 30, 2013, Monday, Hour #2
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So did you watch the finale of breaking bad last night?
Do you watch Breaking Bad?
You don't watch it.
You watch Breaking Bad.
Did you watch the finale last night?
Oh, so I better not say anything.
Oh, gee.
No.
Um, I didn't spoiler alerts.
Nobody likes spoiler alerts.
Okay, then I won't get any details.
I'll just uh I'll just say that as season series finales go, this one was good.
This one, I think everybody's expectations are gonna be met, or were met, depending on whether or not they've uh they've seen it.
Anyway, great to great to have you back here, folks.
Rush Limboss serving humanity while executing assigned host duties flawlessly, zero mistakes.
Great to have you.
Telephone numbers 800-282-2882 and the email address Lrushmo at EIB net.com.
This next bit of news, this is stunning to me.
ESPN has banned all of its reporters from tweeting.
ESPN, in an internal memo released a couple of days ago, outlined a rigid new policy toward the use of social media by its on-air talent and writers.
The new guidelines immediately sent shockwaves through the sports community and raised questions about the ownership of one's personal thoughts and comments and how they can be published via Twitter, Facebook, or other digital means.
And the news broke on the personal Twitter feed of ESPN NBA analyst Rick Booker.
He tweeted the hammer just came down, ESPN memo prohibiting tweeting info unless it serves ESPN.
Kind of figured this was coming.
Not sure what this means, but I'm probably violating some sort of policy just by telling you.
In any case, stay tuned.
So anyway, the upshot of this is that if you work at ESPN, you can't tweet what you think about sports or anything else that impacts CNN or ESP,
and I guess what they're trying to do, my guess would be, and I don't really know this, my guess is they're trying to reserve everything their paid columnists and writers say for their own websites.
But this is not gonna sit well.
You know, Twitter to people in the sports, Twitter to everybody is just it's it's become an addiction.
It's become a habit, a daily part of life tweeting for the people that do it, and for an employer to come out and tell people at work there you can't do it anymore.
And all I mean, if you look at uh every sports writer tweets everything, and a lot of a lot of sports writers break news in their tweets, not on their own websites.
They break the news in the tweets, and then they hope to get their followers and they hope to be talked about, and then at some point they get into detail on their own websites about what it is they've broken.
And ESPN has just said nope, you can't do it anymore.
And it's gonna raise questions like do they have the right to do this?
But I'm I'm sure what they're thinking is that they want all of this reserved for their website or sites, that if they're paying somebody to opine on sports, they want it to be on their sites, not out there on Twitter.
Now I must confess, this story is dated September the 28th, which is a couple of days ago, and I haven't seen anything else about it.
I have not seen any uh you know massive outrage or protest To it or any of that, which kind of uh surprises me.
Is that tweet from 2009?
They haven't gotten rid of the rule, though, right?
Well, if this if this if this if this original tweet was 2009 and nobody's obeying it.
Well, the ban is in effect.
The internal memo is dated back in 2009, but it obviously hasn't been very effective.
Well, no wonder there hasn't been a whole lot of hell raised about it.
Uh I don't know how well they're doing enforcing it.
Anyway, it in a way it doesn't surprise me.
Because I think I think a lot of organizations are going to say, look, if you're gonna do this, do it on our website.
Not your personal Twitter feed.
You don't exist if it's not for us.
You don't have a name if it isn't for us.
That's what they're gonna tell these people.
You think anybody cares about you before we hired you?
That's gonna be what they're thinking is.
We own you, and we own what you think.
As long as we're paying you.
So we shall see.
The internal, the the internal that well, the the tweet that alerts everybody here is in fact back from uh from 2009.
And I will bet you the person who sent me this does not know that.
This is another thing about Twitter.
You can read something on the damn thing and think that it's just happened when uh it may be years old.
But there hasn't been a whole lot of hell raised about this, nevertheless.
But this kind of thing is coming.
Now, I want to go back to this business of the government shutdown and build on a little bit what I was talking about with our previous caller right at the end of the first hour.
And it is this.
He said that the continuing resolution proposal needs to be brought back and a new one sent over to the Democrats that forces their hand.
Now, forget for just a second all of the distractions and all the the external um things that are being said and done for public consumption.
Let's talk about the sausage making for just a second.
The actual business of having a piece of legislation that is successfully passed and voted on.
In this case, you have a lot of things going on.
There's a showdown over Obamacare.
Now the Republicans have sent a continuing resolution over, which delays the individual mandate for a year, eliminates the uh the tax on uh medical devices, which includes a lot of sexual devices, and it exempts the military from some of the onerous regulations for a while.
The Democrats are saying, they no way, pal, no way, and Dingy Harry and the Senate not even showing up to 2 o'clock today, and they're saying there's nothing in you guys, they're they're positioning it as the Republicans are trying to deny people affordable health care.
This is this is in the AP story today, and again, this is worth repeating, because this is how literally outrageous this has become.
Chris Van Holland, who is in the Democrat leadership in the Senate, is saying that the Republican effort to delay the individual mandate, and again, I want to be clear.
I go through this, I don't really know how many people even know what I'm talking.
The individual mandate is a fundamental requirement in Obamacare.
It mandates, it requires that you have health insurance or you pay a fine.
Now, we can argue all day long over whether it's constitutional.
The Supreme Court said that it is, but in a purest sense, it isn't because the federal government cannot require you to buy something.
The Commerce Clause expressly prohibits this.
But that's another issue.
Still it still infuriates me.
They got around it by calling it a tax, if you'll remember, but bottom line is the individual mandate is an onerous thing.
It is a sign of an oppressive statist, pure socialist government.
They have the government mandating, requiring citizens to buy anything, in this case health insurance.
The Republicans are trying to stand up for that.
They're trying to stand up for the idea that it's unconstitutional, it's not right, it's not the role of government.
It's got to stop.
They want to delay it for a year.
Some people think they should have gone for the full defund.
They didn't have the guts, the votes, whatever to do that, so they've done this.
Delay the mandate for a year because the employer mandate was delayed for a year by Obama.
The employer mandate requiring employers to provide insurance has now been waived until 2015.
Again, the reason for that is that the real objective of Obamacare is to destroy the whole private sector insurance market.
If the employer doesn't have to provide insurance, that is obviously a reduction in guaranteed customers for the insurance companies.
And if you as an employee cannot depend on your employer providing it, then what?
Well, here's the personal mandate, the individual man, you've got to have it.
So now it's on you to go get it.
And you've either got to sign up at an exchange starting tomorrow, or you've got to find private sector policy, or you pay the fine.
And most people are going to pay the fine because it's cheaper first couple of years by design.
Obama is happy as hell people not buying insurance for a couple of years.
That destroys the private sector market, and eventually the only place you're going to be able to get insurance will be at a government exchange.
Now, until that time comes, the Republicans are trying to delay this individual mandate to go along with the employer mandate to scoop the guts of Obamacare.
If you eliminate the requirement to have it, you have scooped quite a bit out of Obamacare.
Democrats aren't going to go for that.
There's no way that this continuing resolution is going to get one Democrat vote.
And it doesn't have a prayer without any Democrat votes.
Just talking strictly about sausage making, it doesn't have a prayer without any Democrat votes.
Nothing does.
Because of the current lay of the land.
So the Democrats working with the Associated Press Notice and the media are now characterizing the individual mandate as compassion.
And they're saying that the Republicans trying to delay it for a year means that the Republicans don't want you to have health insurance.
And so they're out there in conjunction with the AP saying that the Republicans are willing to shut down the government to make sure that you do not get insurance.
That's the degree to which this has been bastardized.
It couldn't be further from the truth.
The Republicans are not trying to deny anybody health insurance.
The Republicans are trying to save the American medical system from being destroyed because it's taken over by a government and run by people who haven't the foggiest idea what they're doing and don't care.
To them, it's simply the latest measure for total control of the people.
But to the low information crowd who read the AP wherever the story gets posted, Republicans want to eliminate your ability to get health insurance, and they're willing to shut the government down.
So that's not going to get any Democrat votes.
So there might be a shutdown, which is the Democrat Party's opening move in the 2014 campaign, in this case, for the House.
That's their objective.
So what could get Democrat votes?
Because the caller's idea was, we're going to have to turn the tables on this at some point.
And the Democrats are going to have to be put on the defensive.
And there might be a way.
Remember, because of the lay of the land, nothing the Republicans propose that doesn't peel off some Democrat votes in the Senate as a chance of actually happening.
So if we go the shutdown route, then that's going to be determined, you know, who wins that by who blinks first.
And you know how that's gonna go.
The media is just, I mean, they're gonna get an endless parade of suffering people because the government should.
It's all gonna be lies and it's all gonna be exaggerated, it's all gonna be made up.
But it's been done before.
We've been here and done that, it's all deja vu.
So what might work otherwise?
Well, there's something out there that's happened that I really believe if a majority of the American people knew about it, they would be fit to be tied and would not tolerate it.
And that is the fact that members of Congress and their staff are getting their health care subsidized.
75% of the cost of health care insurance for members of Congress and their staff will be paid for by taxpayers.
Now that could be, if you could write a CR that deals with some of this, send that over to the Senate, repealing that.
In other words, make the Democrats vote to defend their getting a subsidy.
Particularly the Democrats that are up in the Senate in 2014.
You you send something over there that makes them vote for that.
And theoretically, and I'm just talking off top of my head, that might, and I could be whistling Dixie here too.
I may not have the slightest idea what I'm talking about, but that might be embarrassing enough that you could peel some Democrat votes off.
That some Democrats might not want it publicly known that they are voting for you to pay for 75% of their health care.
Because that right now is the law of the land.
They bitched and they moaned about the price.
These are people making upwards of a hundred to a hundred and seventy-four thousand dollars a year.
They complained about the cost to them of Obamacare, and they wrote it in many cases, the staff, and they've certainly defended it, but then they did a said they couldn't afford, and Obama trying to stay head off a problem at the past, went over there and promised them they would be subsidized.
Not through the exchanges, but through the Office of Personnel Management.
Still taxpayer dollars, but they're not gonna be subsidized through the through the exchanges like those who will be subsidized will have it taken care of.
They're not gonna have to mess with exchanges.
They're gonna be taken up with another government agency.
Okay, that's law of the land now.
They're gonna be subsidized.
Send something over that that cancels that.
Put in your bill, the Republicans, put in your your your defund or your delay bill, and also we want to remove this subsidy for members of Congress.
The original bill said that members of Congress have to go through everything just like everybody else does, and now they don't.
So put it in your bill that they have to live with it just like everybody else does, and pull out this subsidy they've got, and then put them on the defensive of having to vote to defend something you can't get.
Now that might turn the tables, and it might get some Democrat votes.
But in the real world, for whatever the Republicans are proposing for it to eventually work, they're gonna have to get some Democrat votes out of it, no.
Southern New Mexico, we head next back to the funds.
John, glad you called, sir.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Hi.
Not there.
And so we'll try Costa Mesa, California.
This is John again.
Welcome, sir.
Great to have you.
Thank you for taking my call, Rash.
You bet.
Okay, so I'm sitting with my wife this weekend, and I was talking about maybe making a job change and I didn't know anything about the insurance, and I told her, I said, Well, you know, I really need to find out about the medical insurance that we have on this new endeavor.
And she said, Well, why?
Because we could just go to that free one.
Now, my wife's a low information.
I listen to you religiously, but it gives you an idea of what people that don't follow anything but Channel 2, 4 and 7, that's all they know.
And as far as the Republicans, it's over, Rush.
I listen to you daily, and what I get from you, the vibe I get from you, it's over.
The Republicans don't have the fight because all they really want, like you said, is the power and the money.
Hey, they don't have it right now.
They're just gonna go with whatever's gonna happen.
It's never gonna be the same, Rush.
It's never gonna turn back.
We can't turn back what the Democrats have pushed forward.
It's over.
I don't even know why even talk about a fight anymore.
Because it's done.
It's never gonna be the same.
Give them everything they want, and let's see what happens.
And I believe even if this rolls all the smithereens, people still will not ever believe that one person or one party was responsible for this.
It's just the luck of the draw.
Well, I live in the world.
Look, I you're you live with an admitted low information voter.
I can understand your attitude.
But what are you gonna do?
There's no what can you do, Rush?
You you have to let it play out.
I don't blame the Republicans for not putting up a fight.
No, no, no, no, no.
That's not what you said.
You said there's no point in it playing out because it's over.
It can't go back to ever the way it was.
So what are you?
I mean, personally, what are you gonna do?
Just stop paying attention to this uh stuff and then move on.
Now, I I basically wish I listened to you every day now just to see if there's a glimmer of something that actually so he's given up.
So did you uh did you like the homeland uh premiere?
You did?
Okay.
And you watch Boardwalk Empire.
You like that last night?
You watch, but you don't watch Breaking Bad.
Yeah.
Okay.
It's it's not everybody's cup of tea, obviously, but it uh as far as television is concerned, it was really well done.
Now, our last caller.
The guy called, his name is John, he calls and says that his wife is a low information voter.
Can you imagine?
I I didn't get a chance to talk about that aspect with him, but I can't re I can't I can't imagine the frustration that would be.
Well, no, I guess I can.
I just didn't marry them.
Didn't didn't I dated liberal women now and then, but that was more a professional exercise.
That was more on the challenge side of things.
And it was education.
I was doing it for the career.
Dated liberal women for the career.
I wasn't doing it for the romance.
Wasn't possible.
But I'm I'm he the guy admits his wife thinks that Obamacare is free.
He knows it isn't, and he cannot persuade her.
And yet she is saying, don't worry about any of this, honey, just choose the free route.
And in and so what he does is call here and vent on how rotten and bad the Republicans are.
And how that there's no way we can ever turn this around.
Now, for him and and others who might be tempted to agree with him.
I have a story here from the Washington Post, and I know when I pass the contents on to you, you're not gonna believe it.
Or if you believe it, you're gonna say it's meaningless because it has no practical application in reality.
But the headline of the story, Americans are more conservative than they have been in decades.
Now, the only problem with this, see, let's see, is the I've got two stories here.
I'm wondering if they're both using the same poll.
The second one, the Washington Examiner does use public policy polling, and that bunch has just been totally discredited.
Public policy polling poll the California or the Colorado recall election over guns.
Uh what was it three weeks ago now, whatever it was?
This is this outfit, this liberal polling unit out of North Carolina.
And their polling on the Colorado recall election had it pegged.
They were dead right, but they never released the poll because they couldn't believe it.
They're a Democrat liberal polling unit, and their poll indicated that the Democrat in the safe district would win, or no, would lose big time.
Their poll predicted exactly what would happen.
But they thought it wasn't possible.
They thought their poll was flawed, and they never released it.
Which led to a number of discussions about well, what if these people won't release their own data just because they don't like the results?
Should we trust them on anything?
And I've I've held public policy polling up for ridicule oftentimes on this program.
Now they they happen to be the source for one of the stories on this.
Americans are more conservative than they have been in decades.
James Stimson knows as much about public opinion as anybody in America.
He's been tracking the nation's policy preferences for more than 20 years.
He uses what's called a policy mood index, derived from responses to a wide variety of opinion surveys involving hundreds of specific policy questions on topics ranging from taxes and spending to environmental regulation and gun control.
Now the again, this is the Washington Post, the latest update of Stimson's policy mood series suggests that the American public in 2012 was more conservative than at any point since 1952.
Now, again to our previous caller who gave up, announced that it's pointless, his wife's the low information voter.
I would ask him, what do you think the election returns of 2010 meant?
He said, We can't go back, Russia.
It's over.
The Republicans, we can never roll this back.
We can never go back to the way it was.
We can ever go back to the America that we used to have.
We can have it's over.
His point was the socialists have won, the Republicans are powerless, the Republicans are gutless, whatever the point he was making.
Well, we can never go back.
In 2010, don't forget the Republicans retook control of the House because the vast majority of voters it turned out hated Obamacare.
And no matter what poll you look at, a majority of Americans still oppose Obamacare and don't want any part of it.
Every poll.
There was a New York Times poll that was uh shown up today or discussed yesterday on Meet the Press, which I had never heard of, which said that 56% say go ahead and let it implement, which that that was a new one.
That's the only one I've seen.
This guy has a poll here, James Stimson, that Americans in 2012 are more conservative than they've ever been since 1952.
Okay, Sonya, you might look at this.
So what good is it doing anybody?
And you might hear this can't possibly be true.
If the American population was more conservative in 2012 than it's been since 1952, then how the hell did Obama win?
And those would be logical questions.
If the American public is more conservative today than it's been at any time since 1952, how is any of this happening?
And that would be a legitimate question you could ask.
So the I guess the question would come down if this is true, if the American population is more conservative now than it has been even since 1952, then what explains Obama being reelected And what explains the Democrats dominating?
What explains all these conservatives just sitting out there and taking it?
Why aren't they doing anything about it?
And the answers to that, I think would get pretty intricate, because then party politics comes into play.
Yeah, they to say the guy's right.
If the Republican Party is not representing that, how many of these conservatives are actually showing up to vote and participate?
We know that four million of them didn't in 2012, four million Republican voters who did vote in 2008 did not vote in 2012 because they were dissatisfied with Romney or who knows whatever else.
The Washington Examiner story, 76% of the GOP is now conservative.
And uh in a poll by public policy polling, they have identified Ted Cruz as the person they would choose for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.
According to this PPP poll, which has Cruz as the top choice for the Republican nomination 2016, those who describe themselves as very conservative make up 39% of the GOP, add in those who consider themselves somewhat conservative, and conservative voters comprise 76% of the party.
Now, if that happens to be true, well then you've got a recipe there for real disgust, because the Republican establishment is not 76% conservative.
The Republican establishment in Washington is not conservative at all, yet most Republican voters are.
Now, I understand people are going to look at this and say, it doesn't mean anything, Rush.
I mean, I'm not trying to be phony positive with you, and I'm not trying to say it means anything that you can grab onto, put your arms around, and make predictions for the future about.
Not that at all.
Because it's a disconnect.
It doesn't make any sense.
For some guy that polls the American people to say it's more conservative, the American population more conservative today than at any time since 1952, where's the evidence?
Is a legitimate question.
I happen to think it's true.
I happen to think that particularly in how people live their lives, particularly in the moral foundations of most people.
That's why I continue to have faith in the future.
It's why I have not given up.
That's why I don't think we've lost the country yet.
But it's hard to point to such things as election results or what's going on in Washington for any evidence of it.
But the fact is there's a disconnect, and we've been we've discussed this too, ruling class versus country class.
And there's a huge disconnect between both parties, ruling class, both party establishments, and the American population at large.
It's huge.
It's a great disconnect.
And it leads to so many people having so much frustration.
And most people feel powerless to do anything about it.
Conservatives by nature are not going to take to the streets and protest like Occupy Wall Street does or any of that, even when they're asked to.
It's just not who they are.
And absent that, the Washington establishment doesn't think that there's anything to worry about.
Doesn't think, despite the 2010 midterms, they don't think that there's really anything to worry about from the people.
They think most of you have signed on to big government, amnesty, gun control, whatever it is, gay marriage.
They think, and even if you haven't, then nothing you can do about it.
That's where they are.
Got to take a break, folks.
More phone calls when we get back, do not go away.
Okay, so really, what would explain it?
Let's take this story at its word, just for the sake of it.
Let's let's accept, for the hypothetical discussion it follows, that the percentage of Americans who are conservative is at an all-time high since 1952, and that that is most Americans.
Most Americans.
So what then would explain Obama being re-elected?
What would explain Obama getting so much of his agenda?
If the people of this country are more conservative than they've been since 1952.
Well, dare I mention it.
There's two possibilities here.
One is the limbaugh theorem.
And maybe just because somebody's conservative doesn't mean that they automatically understand a liberal when they see one.
And the limbaugh theorem is the explanation for Obama not having any accountability for the policies that are his.
Obama constantly positions himself as an outsider, campaigning to fix what's wrong when he's the guy that's broken everything.
But he's never seen that way.
It's never reported that these are Obama policies.
He is constantly running against evil Republicans.
He had a little statement today.
Grab somebody 25.
It's a great example.
He had a little photo op here and a brief mention sitting in the Oval Office fireplace next to Bibi Netanyahu.
And he got a question from a reporter.
Are you resigned, Mr. President, to have the government shut down at this point?
The reporter shouted, and that's what Obama said.
The Senate has passed a bill that keeps the government open, does not have a lot of extraneous issues to it, that allows us then to negotiate a longer-term budget and address a range of other issues, but that ensures that we're not shutting down the government and we're not shutting down the economy at a time when a lot of families out there are just getting some traction and digging themselves out of the hole that we've had as a consequence of the financial crisis.
I've said before, Congress has two responsibilities.
All right, that's enough.
Pass the budget.
The money in here, not just a government shutdown.
Now we're shutting down the economy.
Now the Republicans are shutting down the economy.
That's number one.
Number two, we're not shutting down the economy at a time when a lot of families are just getting some traction and digging out of the hole that we've had as a consequence of the financial crisis.
So the hole that we're in has nothing to do with him.
You see.
It has everything to do with everything that happened before he got elected and immaculated.
And he continues to operate this way, and therefore he escapes any accountability.
And maybe, even though some of these people in the country are conservative, they just do not see Obama in an ideological way.
And that could be explained by the fact that there aren't very many people who talk about Obama in an ideological way.
Certainly not the Republican Party.
So it's either that, the Limbaugh theorem, or they've just given up.
But they still went ahead and answered the question, honestly.
But I think it's clear that Obama has escaped practically all attachments to everything happening in this country policy-wise for five years.
Other than Obamacare, which people don't like.
I mean, that's got his name on it.
You can't really conclude that he's got nothing to do with that.
But even there, what did he say?
Your premium's gonna come down $2,500.
It's gonna be free for people, and they're gonna keep your doctor.
Most people, contrary to what you might think, just do not want to believe anything bad about their president.
It took the Democrats four years to create the monster that was George W. Bush.
You could even argue it took him longer than that because they started on that uh even before he was inaugurated because of the Florida aftermath.
Those are the only two things I could come up with to explain.
If we accept that the vast majority of people are conservative, then how the hell is any of this happening?
If you have any ideas, feel free to weigh in.
We have an hour left on the exciting busy program today, and we've got to take another brief time out here at the top, but we'll continue when we get back, so don't go away.
Well, that's it, ladies and gentlemen, for another exciting excursion into broadcast excellence hour.
But we have one more exciting hour to go here, and uh your telephone calls will be included.
800-282-2882 is the uh is the number.
We'll continue discussing this government shutdown as the Senate gets back to work, supposedly here in mere moments.
And the uh word is that Dingy Harry and the boys is gonna ignore all of this, and they're gonna lay this off on the Republicans, nobody's gonna blink, and that the shutdown will occur in uh 10 hours.
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