Sept. 30, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
31:58
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| Hi folks. | |
| Welcome back. | |
| Great to have you, Rush Limbaugh and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network. | |
| Happy to be here with you. | |
| Half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair. | |
| Telephone number if you want to be on the program 800 28282 and the email address. | |
| Lrushbaugh at EIB net dot com. | |
| Have you heard CNN has decided to drop their plans to do their documentary on Hillary? | |
| You hadn't heard that? | |
| Do you know why CNN has decided to drop their documentary on Hillary? | |
| No, it's not that they couldn't find a 75-year-old actress. | |
| That's that's not it at all. | |
| They claim at CNN that they were pressured by top Hillary advisers to drop it. | |
| They said that they were met with a stone wall when it came to getting information. | |
| So apparently the Clintons can dictate to any news organization what will and will not be said about them. | |
| If CNN decided to do a documentary on me, and everybody I know stonewalled them, do you think and then I said you guys you better not do this? | |
| Do you think that they would cancel a documentary on me because I didn't want them to do it? | |
| They would do a documentary on the stone wall in addition to the documentary on me, and it wouldn't matter whether they got anything right or not. | |
| But all that had to happen here was the Clintons put pressure on CNN and they caved. | |
| Next up, NBC. | |
| NBC has a Hillary documentary planned. | |
| And or wait, did they already announce they're dropping theirs? | |
| Wait a minute, somebody did because it was going to be produced, remember by Fox. | |
| Not the news channel, the studios, Fox Studios. | |
| Maybe maybe NBC already did. | |
| Anyway, now CNN knows how the Republicans felt when they tried to get information about Benghazi. | |
| Well, I mean trying to get the truth out of Hillary about Benghazi, and then Hillary said, What is the difference it make? | |
| What difference it make anyway? | |
| So CNN is saying, what difference does it make whether we do a Hillary documentary or not? | |
| I guess the NBC Hillary project is going forward. | |
| That's the one that that's going to be released in the theaters. | |
| Maybe maybe the Clintons consider NBC to be a little bit more uh what dependable than CNN. | |
| I just was made aware there's an a commentary piece at Bloomberg by a member of their editorial board, a guy named Christopher Flavell. | |
| Flavell. | |
| And the headline of his piece, who cares if the public doesn't support Obamacare? | |
| Right. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Who cares? | |
| Republicans seeking to shut down the government over Obamacare are right about one thing. | |
| More Americans oppose the law than support it. | |
| Does that make it less legitimate? | |
| Or is it the new and worrisome normal for important government policy? | |
| If public support were a prerequisite for government action, the U.S. would be in serious trouble. | |
| A poll last week showed that just one third of Americans think the Federal Reserve has a significant ability to promote economic growth. | |
| Benjamin Applebaum noted delicately in the New York Times, as he noted, that puts most Americans at odds with economists who generally agree the Fed has helped, but they do disagree about how much. | |
| Another recent example of the public good colliding with public opinion, the 2009 stimulus. | |
| The package of tax cuts, infrastructure spending, and state aid that saved the country from an even deeper recession. | |
| And you see Right there. | |
| Mr. Flavell, I don't know who you are, and I don't mean that insultingly, I just haven't heard of you. | |
| But that is not what the stimulus was. | |
| The stimulus was not a package of tax cuts and infrastructure spending and state aid that saved the country from an even deeper recession. | |
| This was a money laundering scheme to prop up union jobs and to keep them from being lost. | |
| The vast majority of stimulus money went to union jobs, government union jobs in all the states. | |
| Where was all this infrastructure spending? | |
| I mean, we can't, if we can't even report in a story about public opinion, really doesn't matter. | |
| In an opinion piece which says, look, we can't we can't be governed by what a majority of American people want. | |
| That would never get anything done that way. | |
| And then to misquote what the stimulus was on. | |
| The American people didn't want the stimulus because they knew what it was. | |
| You can't stimulate something by taking something out of it and then putting it back. | |
| Another recent example says Americans railed against the stimulus while favoring its component parts. | |
| The public's view on Obamacare is a continuation of the same trend. | |
| A poll last year showed that 56% oppose the law, but strong majority support some of its components. | |
| 82% favored preventing insurers from denying coverage to those at pre-existing conditions. | |
| Yeah, but then if you look, those are called the uh the the high risk pools, and if you look at the number of people that signed up for them, uh it's nowhere near being similar to that 82% who favored the policy. | |
| So he says here, if if officials can't persuade the public that something is a good idea, even if it accomplishes a goal the public favors, should they still proceed, is good government better than popular government. | |
| This this whole piece is written to basically establish claim that public opposition to Obamacare really doesn't mean anything. | |
| is not important, and it shouldn't be considered. | |
| We can't let majority opinion, not stand-polls, but however it's found to be expressed, Thank you. | |
| In other words, the elites know best, they are the ruling class, and they can't be bothered with what you think because you just don't know. | |
| You just don't know enough to know what's good or bad for you. | |
| You don't know enough to know what's good or bad for the country. | |
| So it's up to politicians to make you think that they are taking your opinion into account while they go ahead and do the right thing anyway. | |
| And I think this is a very nice encapsulation of the whole divide here that exists. | |
| Let's let's take this business of Congress being subsidized in Obamacare. | |
| If every American knew it and was then asked about it, I dare say that a big bunch of a huge majority would oppose it. | |
| But we would probably be told, well, that doesn't matter because these are our leaders, and they're doing everything they're doing for us, and we've got to make it so that they can remain in their jobs undistracted by normal everyday concerns. | |
| Because they are so important to us. | |
| But that does, by the way, I still maintain that if you want to if you want to do anything legislatively here on these continuing resolutions, make the Democrats defend the idea that members of Congress and the people that work for them will have their health care subsidized up to 75%. | |
| Make the Democrats defend that. | |
| It'd be akin to making them defend the way the House bank operated. | |
| ... | |
| If you weren't around for that, 1988, 1989, it was learned that members of Congress could write endless amounts of checks to either pay bills or for cash when they did not have the money in their accounts to back up the checks. | |
| It didn't matter. | |
| The House bank covered it all, and there were these IOUs that built up, which in many cases never had to be paid off. | |
| And the end of the game, end of the day, it really didn't matter what a congressional salary was because many of them were not living within it anyway. | |
| They were just able to write checks whenever they wanted to. | |
| They were able to convert donor checks to personal use by running the checks, if you will, washing the checks in the House bank. | |
| Now that was easily understood. | |
| When people found out about that, all hell broke loose. | |
| And that is one of the reasons the Democrats lost the House four years later in 1992 or 1994 in those elections. | |
| It took a while, but then there was a House Post Office scandal. | |
| Well, this is much the same. | |
| It's not quite as outrageous. | |
| This is not these people writing themselves money, but members of Congress who make far more than the average or mean salary in this country are claiming that Obamacare is simply too expensive. | |
| They need it subsidized. | |
| And they were told by Obama that that's fine. | |
| He'll see to it that their health care gets subsidized. | |
| So members of Congress do not have to live. | |
| um Under the terms of the law like you and I do. | |
| If most people knew that, they'd probably object to it, and then we would hear, well, that doesn't matter. | |
| We can't, you know, when it comes to running the country, we can't just list and by the way, by the way, I understand this to a certain extent. | |
| That's what a representative republic is. | |
| We're not a democracy in that sense. | |
| We're not, and we don't throw things up to popular vote. | |
| But remember 2007 on amnesty. | |
| I mean, the American people rose up, they wanted no part of it, and they shut it down. | |
| And that ticked off the elites at the uh at the same time. | |
| So there are a number of things happening in the media today that are being constructed to defend the Democrats and Obamacare and everything happening here in relationship to this shutdown. | |
| Well, none of it was unpredictable. | |
| It was all very predictable. | |
| And the and the Republicans knew this going in. | |
| But now they've made the stand here. | |
| They can't, they can't. | |
| They can't back out of this. | |
| They they can't be the ones to um to blink. | |
| But the pressure on them is incredible. | |
| Uh let's go back to the audio sound bites. | |
| Dan Pfeiffer, who is the White House Senior Advisor for Communications, was on with Wolf Blitzer this afternoon. | |
| Wolf said the other day, you were suggesting it was almost like terrorism, what these Republicans are doing. | |
| And he said, Dan, those are pretty strong words. | |
| I wonder if you wanted to correct the record or give us an explanation of what you meant by that. | |
| That's not my metaphor. | |
| It's the metaphor the Republicans themselves have used. | |
| Senator McConnell said two years ago that the global economy was the hostage worth taking. | |
| Other Republicans have said on the record that they were willing to, quote, blow up the economy and use that as leverage to get what they want. | |
| I mean, I don't know how much you want to describe their position. | |
| Really, I don't remember it. | |
| I'm pretty much aware of Mitch McConnell doesn't talk that way. | |
| Mitch McConnell said two years ago the global economy was the hostage worth taking. | |
| He might have been talking about Democrat policy. | |
| This might be something totally out of context, but Mitch McConnell doesn't talk that way. | |
| Anyway, blitzer then said, well, a lot of people to raise this, Dan, and I asked my Twitter followers what they would ask you, and a lot of people pointed out the administration already has delayed implementing various parts of Obamacare, as it's known. | |
| Why not delay a little bit more and just get it ready? | |
| There have been last-minute glitches, even as we know these last few days. | |
| Why not take some of those steps in order to make sure the government as a whole doesn't shut down? | |
| There are millions of Americans who've waited years and years and years to have access to affordable health care. | |
| They have lived every day in fear of being one disease away from bankruptcy. | |
| They have foregone health care that they needed because they couldn't afford it. | |
| Starting tomorrow, they will have a chance to access that. | |
| Why should we delay that process just so the Tea Party Republicans can finish the grieving process of the 2012 election? | |
| I don't think it's fair to ask those people to wait to get the health care they need and deserve. | |
| That would be denying millions of Americans, many of whom live in the districts of these Republicans who are forcing this shutdown, denying them access to health care. | |
| Say there you have it again. | |
| The Republicans want to deny millions and millions of Americans health care. | |
| That's what they want to do. | |
| Okay, quick timeout. | |
| Back to your phone calls when we return. | |
| And back to the phones, Dave in Bloomington, Illinois. | |
| Great to have you, sir on the EIB network. | |
| Hi. | |
| How are you this afternoon? | |
| Very well, thank you. | |
| I wanted to bring to your attention, I'm a insurance agent broker, have been for over twenty-five years working with group and individual health insurance. | |
| And myself as well as I don't know how many other agents out there are currently enduring one of the glitches of the Affordable Care Act. | |
| And that is we've completed the web classes. | |
| We've taken the exams and then went to part two, which is you go to the CMS web portal, and there you establish your user ID and a password, and then you get into the system where you get your secure ID so that you're registered to be able to sell in the exchange marketplace to people starting tomorrow. | |
| One problem that website's now been blocked for the majority of the last two weeks. | |
| You can't get in past your user ID and password. | |
| It keeps holding you up because it indicates things like your uh user ID or password are not correct. | |
| Uh if you send in a request to get a new password or refresh you because you can't remember your password. | |
| In my particular case, it sent back my password in all capital letters, which isn't the way that I'd originally sent it in, so that wasn't going to work. | |
| Well, we have heard that there are all kinds of software glitches in this. | |
| I'm just wondering right now how many agents are actually currently blocked out of this going into tomorrow. | |
| Um are we just going to be sitting tomorrow with navigators and the consultants, which are basically the people hired by and paid by the government? | |
| Well, what are you gonna do if you if if you can't get in? | |
| Well, I'm just we're we're all just continuing to try to get in. | |
| I've talked to other agents who are sitting in the in the same capacity, they're blocked, they're they're just keep trying. | |
| Uh I talked to one gentleman who said he sat on the phone for a couple hours, finally got through to somebody and they uh gave them a website to go to, and that was no help. | |
| Um help us out here. | |
| What is on this website? | |
| What is is somebody going to get hold of you they're contacting the exchange and they want to buy policy because now they have to. | |
| So you are gonna access this website in order to facilitate their their their their desire to demand whatever it is, and you're not gonna be able to. | |
| Once you're a li an agent who has all of the credentials, then you will be able to have people come to you and just as if they were buying insurance privately, they can come to your office, you can sit down with them at your computer, go out onto the system, they have to enter in an ID initially, and uh once that establishes them with an ID, then you enter your ID, and that basically makes them your client. | |
| And then as you go through the process and you help them identify whether or not they want to go on to the federal exchange or whether they would want to buy a private policy comparable to or possibly better than the uh items being offered in the metals plans, they would have that option. | |
| What an absolute mess this is gonna be. | |
| I mean, even if it was working, what a mess this is gonna be. | |
| Correct. | |
| It's it's so much more complicated. | |
| You can't tell me that the vast majority of low information people that you're gonna be hearing from are gonna have the slightest idea what's in store for them. | |
| Even if this thing is working tomorrow. | |
| Correct. | |
| One of the reasons they'll be coming to us is the fear that they don't have the skill set to go out on the web themselves and and do this, even if they even have access to the web. | |
| Most of them aren't even gonna know they have to. | |
| Correct. | |
| And and as you've already stated earlier today, many people uh are operating under misconceptions about the plan, some saying it's free. | |
| Let me tell you, I know people that are scared to death of the new iPhone operating system. | |
| They haven't seen anything until they try. | |
| I mean, if you got people afraid of their own telephones, what in the world is gonna happen with the Obamacare website system? | |
| Well, and the the question is, uh, I don't know of any other system that has ever attempted to take on this volume of people. | |
| And the NSA does it every year is basically in a test pattern right now as to what its capacity is before it'll blow up. | |
| No, that's true. | |
| Well, the NSA does it every day. | |
| That's true. | |
| There are people that manage huge databases each and every day. | |
| Um Apple computer just to they have four hundred million credit card customers on file worldwide. | |
| That's larger than the American population, and people are able to figure out what they have to do on Apple's website, and they're buying stuff there. | |
| It is possible to do, but not when a bunch of bureaucrats put it together and and have their IT specialists design it. | |
| I know this is a disaster uh waiting to happen. | |
| And so uh what'll happen is a new government program to fix this one. | |
| I don't know. | |
| There's part of me that that's kind of excited to see this thing blow up. | |
| John and Frederick Maryland, great to have you. | |
| Hello, sir. | |
| Hi, Rush. | |
| I'd like to take your uh recharacterization of the continuing resolution one step further. | |
| And what we need to do is stop referring to that as the delay in the individual mandate and start referring to it as the one-year delay in the individual tax penalty. | |
| Most people don't know what the individual mandate is yet, but they understand more what an individual tax penalty is, and that's what's really being delayed. | |
| Well, you know, I understand that we're always looking for ways to communicate the truth to people, what's really um about to happen to them. | |
| Uh and y you've got a good idea, but who's gonna do it? | |
| The House should be doing that because the Affordable Care Act is nothing but a tax, according to the Supreme Court, and they should just be talking about this as stopping the individual tax penalty, especially because individuals will now have to buy their own insurance since their employers who had to provide it will not necessarily be providing it because the employers have a one-year delay on having to provide it. | |
| So it's fundamentally unfair to require individuals to pay the penalty that would have otherwise gone to their employers had they not gotten a delay. | |
| Well, you'd be talking you have a point about one thing. | |
| I I think the Republicans do make the mistake, and a lot of people that are that that live and work in this whole political arena, they talk about things with the assumption that people know what it is they're talking about. | |
| Individual mandate is an example. | |
| Um it's pretty self-explanatory, but out of context, the low information crowd may not even know what it is, nor care. | |
| So your idea is don't call it the individual mandate, call it the individual tax. | |
| The individual tax penalty is being delayed one year, yes, exactly. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, if any of them are listening, they uh they might have heard it, and maybe they'll do it. | |
| Okay, great. | |
| All right. | |
| Great to talk with you, Russ. | |
| Thank you, John. | |
| I appreciate it. | |
| Uh Dean in Powell, Michigan. | |
| Great to have you. | |
| Hi. | |
| Hi. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Uh if if the thing was starting to round, the Democrats would be parading an endless stream of people that have been hurt by it. | |
| Why don't we do that? | |
| Why don't the Republicans put out there people that have lost their house? | |
| Um, have lost their health insurance. | |
| I've been listening to talk radio for years and I've on other uh radio talk shows. | |
| I hear people calling in. | |
| One guy called in uh Friday who said that uh his insurance company called him up. | |
| He had been paying three hundred dollars for a policy that covered him the way he wanted. | |
| They informed him that it was gonna be over nine hundred dollars to keep his policy because of Obamacare. | |
| Another guy uh called in and said he lost his job because his uh company was downsizing, so they weren't affected by Obamacare. | |
| He was two months from losing his house at that point. | |
| At this point, he probably already lost his house. | |
| Put a face on it. | |
| Show what Obamacare's done to people in companies that have been proactive in getting ready for this and show that this is going to happen to the rest of the country. | |
| You know, the um Democrats make a habit of doing that. | |
| It is part and part and pa part and parlance of their policy. | |
| They just they constantly have this endless parade of victims of uh of Republican policy, that they're always or you know, any time the budget's cut, they uh propose to be cut, they bring up all of these people that are gonna lose everything if it if it happens. | |
| The Republicans um don't. | |
| I you know we we can sit here all day, and we do, and give advice what the Republicans should do and uh things that they could do. | |
| I don't think that they uh haven't thought of this. | |
| I'm sure that some of them have. | |
| I can't explain to you why they don't. | |
| I could only hazard guesses, and the best guess would be that their re that that their excuse or their reason for not doing it is nobody will cover it. | |
| And I'm telling you, you don't don't laugh. | |
| That is what a good majority of them believe about any strategy that they might conceive, that it'll occur in a vacuum, that the media won't cover it, and nobody will ever see it, and so there's no point. | |
| I can't tell you the number of times I've heard that. | |
| That excuse. | |
| Same thing with presenting alternative ideas. | |
| Oh, nobody's gonna cover it. | |
| They're gonna give us a fair shake on it, and so forth. | |
| There's there's a uh there's a a built-in beaten down characteristic that right now defines the uh Republican Party. | |
| They don't whatever they do, they don't think anybody's ever gonna hear about it, honestly. | |
| They have an endless parade of victims up there. | |
| What they're afraid of is that the media will mock it, make fun of it, um, and try to, you know, say that the people were paid to say what they said. | |
| They'll delegitimize it somehow. | |
| And they some of them say, why should we just do everything the Democrats do and so forth? | |
| We need to come with different ways. | |
| But um we just have to wait and see how this plays out. | |
| Now, folks, correct me if I'm wrong on something here. | |
| When I first heard about this, the Republicans essentially forcing the shutdown. | |
| The first thought I had was, well, some people are gonna be happy now. | |
| The Republicans are at least standing up. | |
| They're not just bending over and letting it happen. | |
| And I haven't heard that. | |
| Despite the Republicans doing this, people are still mad at them, still ticked, still critical. | |
| Not doing enough. | |
| Some people have emailed and said, hell with this delay, Rush, why not just go for the full defund? | |
| Well, they tried. | |
| Cruz and the boys tried. | |
| This was the best that the House could come up with. | |
| Uh but I uh there they're even activists on our side. | |
| I hear from everybody. | |
| Folks, some, I mean, more than I care to. | |
| And it's it's amazing the amount of criticism that that I get and I hear. | |
| And you need to tell him, and you need to say this, you need to call him up, and you need to say it's gotten to the point the Republicans can't make anybody happy very many times with whatever they do, it seems. | |
| And I know why, I know. | |
| I'm just I'm just sharing with you the the reaction. | |
| I was curious. | |
| When I when I heard about this uh what was it, Saturday afternoon, Saturday night? | |
| I was curious what Republican voters' reaction would be. | |
| And it it's still populated, filled with uh a lot of criticism. | |
| And I gotta take a break again. | |
| Constraints of time, the busy programming format. | |
| Be right back. | |
| Don't go away. | |
| Let me ask you a question. | |
| Would you go on television as part of this Republican strategy to the parade of Obamacare victims? | |
| Would you go on TV and tell your story of how Obamacare has caused you great strife and harm and distress and all that. | |
| I don't think there are a whole lot of people would. | |
| They remember what happened to Joe the Plumber. | |
| They know what the media would do to them. | |
| The media would give him an anal exam. | |
| The media start looking at who are these people lying about what Obamacare has done to them? | |
| And they start destroying their reputations and embarrassing their families and so forth. | |
| People are cowed, I think, into doing this kind of thing. | |
| Just my wild guess. | |
| That's not such a wild guess. | |
| I mean, I know a lot of people that wouldn't do it because they remember what happened. | |
| And Joe the Plumber just asked Obama a question. | |
| And the state of Ohio mobilized to destroy him. | |
| And I'll tell you what's going on with this. | |
| What this is all about from the perspective of Harry Reed and even some Republicans is destroying the Tea Party. | |
| That's what this is about breaking the back of Tea Party influence on the Republican Party. | |
| That's what all this is about. | |
| Let me give you a little news here, folks. | |
| In a straight party line vote. | |
| All 54 members of the Senate Democrat caucus voted to reject the House passed amendments to the funding bill. | |
| That is, they rejected the delay of the individual mandate, individual taxes, some callers, and the removal of the medical device tax. | |
| Predictable. | |
| Dingy Harry said that was going to happen. | |
| Ted Cruz has issued a statement about the vote. | |
| Ted Cruz said this very interesting point. | |
| Harry Reid wants a shutdown because sadly, Democrats are putting politics above the needs of the American people. | |
| And the New York Times explained why. | |
| Because, as the Democrats believe, now is the time to break the power of Tea Party Republicans. | |
| And I think that's what this whole shutdown is about. | |
| I think what's happening here, I think the Democrats are hoping to accomplish what they wanted the sequester to accomplish, but didn't. | |
| If you remember, the Democrats thought the sequester would turn the American people against the Republicans forever. | |
| Because it was shutting down the military and shutting down Medicaid, Medicare, and shutting down various important government functions, and it's turned out that the sequester is painless. | |
| And so the Democrats want a do-over, and that's what all of this is. | |
| They want the pain, and they want it blamed on Tea Party Republicans. | |
| And I'm told the Republican conference is meeting now. | |
| You know, Boehner and the boys are telling the caucus what's up, and a number of different Republicans uh have their turn at the microphone. | |
| Peter King has just uh been trashing Ted Cruz in the in the Republican conference. | |
| So there is an effort ongoing to break the back of Tea Party, Republican influence on the uh on the Republican Party, which they can't do. | |
| I mean, they they might they're not the Tea Party's you and me, and no one care what they do, they are not going to wipe us away or out, if you will, but they're trying to do so within the uh the House Republican caucus or conference. | |
| I'll tell you, if the if the GOP tries to break the Tea Party, they're only going to end up breaking themselves. | |
| And that appears to be what they really want to do. | |
| By the way, Jay Carney is a big shock. | |
| White House press secretary just said that seniors, women, and children, hardest hit by government shutdown. | |
| Yep, just left out minorities. | |
| And it's the only thing he left out. | |
| Okay, folks, we're off and running. | |
| New week of broadcast excellence. | |
| You sit tight back. | |
| We will be in 21 hours. | |
| We'll look forward to it. |
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