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Oct. 14, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
31:27
October 14, 2013, Monday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Greetings, my friends, and welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
It's great to have you here as we are beginning the week in Los Angeles here in our super secret bunkerized location.
Your telephone number if you want to be on the program is 800-282-2882 and the email address lrushbaugh at EIBNet.com.
So over the weekend, food stamp credit cards went down due to a computer glitch caused by a power outage.
And you know, the NSA is having the same problem.
They're getting, they're losing data, which some people are not unhappy about at some of their new installations because of power glitches.
So the cards did not show any limits on purchases.
And when these EBT cards, the food stamp cards, when they don't show any limits, the unscrupulous food stamp users are going to go out there and take advantage.
And they did.
Did it surprise anybody?
It's not that they weren't able to buy anything.
It's that there was no limit on anything, and they all went to town.
Now, in one sense, folks, I mean, you can understand it.
You've got an economy in the tank.
90 million Americans not working.
All they've got is what they get from the government.
They don't have any hope of providing for themselves.
And many of them don't even think they should anymore.
And so they've just been conditioned.
And they're very smart about how it is they get what they get.
And they see no limits.
And they just go to town on it.
And they get a bit of run on Walmart stores.
And you have to wonder, why would Walmart go ahead and ignore the limits and allow use of the cards when there were no limits on them?
And obviously the answer, customer service.
You don't want to make the customers mad.
You don't want to make the government mad.
Nobody wants to make the government mad at you.
If the government causes a problem, well, okay, we'll deal with it.
But I guess if you know what, they feared if they enforced limits, even when there are no limits on the cards, I'm sure they feared rioters would destroy the stores.
They feared the government would come down hard on them for being mean to people.
I mean, look at, so this is the basis for a federal program.
So we've got, well, I don't know how many people on food, half the country, 48%, is on food stamps.
And the government advertises for more.
We have 90 million Americans not working.
They become, what is it?
48 or 49 million, yeah, 48 or 49 million on food stamps.
And more all the time because the government's advertising for it.
And we have 90 million people not working, not knowing where they're going to next eat or anything.
And so they're very sophisticated.
Once the limits are missing from the cards, it's Katie Bar the door, let's go to town.
And it just, I guess what bothers me about this, folks, if I could somehow express it, look at how tenuous our hold on order is.
Look at how narrow the thread that everything is kept in order and civil, if you will.
And look at how much of that is dependent on government.
And it all relates to this Obamacare business because this has yet to happen in Obamacare, and it's going to happen to Obamacare, and it's going to happen a lot.
There are people, despite what you think, there are all kinds of people out there who still think that Obamacare is just another food stamp.
Just show up with whatever they have, their card, and they get treated, and it isn't going to cost them anything.
And they're not going to have to have insurance.
They don't know any of this.
And they're going to end up in the system.
And one day the system's going to get a glitch and there isn't going to be any medical service available.
And look at, look at how, I can't think of another word to put it.
Look at how totally incapable so many people are of taking care of themselves.
And then to add insult to this, we have an entire political party who likes that and then promotes that and tries to increase that number of people who are totally dependent on I remember when I worked for the Kansas City Royals.
It's just a little microcosm of a story.
Nothing bad happened, but there was in the offseason, various teams did their winter sports dinners where they gave awards to great players in the previous season.
They'd attract the players in.
They'd sell tickets to the dinner.
There's a way to keep interest in baseball alive during the winter.
And one year, a Royals player was invited to go to one of these things in Minnesota or Milwaukee.
And he called, lost an O'Hare.
Didn't know how to change planes.
Did not know what to do.
And had to be walked.
We had to tell us what the sign said.
And he had to be steered down a particular hallway to the terminal, to the gate.
Didn't know what a gate number was.
Because when you travel with a baseball team, you get on a bus at the stadium.
The bus takes you to the airplane.
When you get to the hotel, the traveling secretary is there with your room key.
You don't check in.
You don't do incidentals or any of that until you leave.
And halftime you skip out on those.
That was just a little, it was a microcosm lesson.
This guy had never made his own way through an airport.
Well, here we have people don't have to feed themselves.
And when something, when a glitch happens, something goes wrong, look at the chaos.
Look at the near-riot potential that existed here.
Now, it bothers me.
You know, I could easily say, you know, it doesn't affect me.
I'm never going to be in that situation.
I couldn't care less.
Those people, it bothers me because it bothers.
It bothers me that this is happening in the United States of America.
This is not the kind of thing that should happen here.
Not to the degree that it's happening.
Not in the level of the masses of people that it's happening.
Shelves in Walmart stores in Spring Hill and Mansfield, Louisiana, were reportedly cleared Saturday night when the stores allowed purchases on food stamp cards, even though they were not showing limits because a frenzy ensued.
But our hold on order here is just by the thinnest of threads.
And you see how easy a mass riot could occur.
Now you move this forward to the Obamacare plan or program.
There's a story out from Forbes magazine today.
Obamacare's website is crashing because it doesn't want you to know how costly the plans are.
That's the headline of the piece.
A growing consensus of information technology experts outside and inside the government have figured out a principal reason why the website for Obamacare's exchange is crashing.
Healthcare.gov forces you to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping.
This in turn creates a massive traffic bottleneck as the government verifies your information and decides whether or not you're eligible for subsidies.
Health and human services bureaucrats knew this would make the website run more slowly, but they were more afraid that letting people see how much it was going to cost would scare people away.
And so they've, what these people are saying is that the slowdown and the near shutdown is actually somewhat purposeful in order to keep people at this stage, first days, early days implementation, from learning what it's actually going to cost them.
And if that's true, I totally understand it.
They were more afraid letting people see the underlying cost of the insurance plans would scare people away and force them out of the system and not sign up.
The answer is, this is a pull quote from the story, the answer is Obamacare was not designed to help healthy people with average incomes get health insurance.
Obamacare was designed to force those people to pay more for coverage in order to subsidize insurance for people near the poverty line or those with chronic or costly medical conditions.
So the purpose was to get healthy people with average incomes to sign up and then gouge them.
But the IT experts say the regime didn't want them to see when they signed up they were getting gouged.
So they caused the glitches that caused the slowdown so that people would keep trying to sign up while not being able to, all because the regime can't afford at this stage for people to learn that there isn't going to be a $2,500 discount in your premium.
There isn't going to be free health care.
There isn't going to be anything Obama's promised for healthy people with average incomes.
They think that they are the chosen group.
These people that vote for Obama healthy, they think they're in it and Obamacare is to get this for them free or much cheaper than what it would cost them if they had to leave their employer.
And of course, the dirty little secret, and it always has been, I mean, by design, is that healthy people who are not going to access the system for treatment because they're healthy are going to be gouged and their higher premiums are going to cover the cost for those who do need treatment and the people who can't afford it.
Well, that dirty little secret can't afford to be discovered.
The regime, this is the theory in this Forbes story.
Another pull quote.
It's quite possible that much of this disaster could have been avoided if the regime had been willing to be open with the public about the degree to which Obamacare escalates the cost of health insurance.
Fat chance of that.
There was no way they couldn't have sold it.
They couldn't have got it passed if they'd have told people what it was actually going to cost them.
But the Forbes writer says that if the regime had been honest about it, then a number of the problems with the exchange's software architecture would have been avoided.
But that would require admitting that the Affordable Care Act was not actually affordable and it was not accurately named.
This is a profound piece, folks.
It makes the case here that health and human.
Now, you and I know this.
I mean, but the fact it's in the news now, well, it's Forbes, and it's still there.
Health and Human Services didn't want users to see Obamacare's true costs, and political objectives trumped operational objectives.
So this is kind of frustrating, too, because now the truth is out after the fact.
And the people at Writing Historic Students, if just the regime had been honest with people and told them that the healthy and the young were going to be asked to pay more in order to pay the freight for everybody else, and we wouldn't be having these problems.
We also wouldn't have Obamacare if they'd have been honest about that.
So they couldn't very well admit what the real end game here was.
And of course, when you're got a food stamp card and unlimited shows up one day, or when you're one of the 90 million not working and you're still eating, why are you going to be worried about what something costs when you don't have to be now?
So here comes Obamacare, and Obama sold it.
You get to keep your doctor, you get to keep your insurance plan if you like it, and your premium is going to come down $2,500.
Except none of that's true.
And they couldn't afford for people to figure that out at time to implement or roll out the program.
So they engineered healthcare.gov to shut down and be a debacle.
And that is the political calculation trumping operational objectives.
And so once again, you've known this and I've known it.
You've known the truth about Obamacare from the get-go.
The truth now comes out after the fact, after it's signed into law, after it's passed, now after it's been implemented, the truth is starting to trickle out.
It isn't affordable.
It isn't going to be cheaper.
And it's actually designed to screw young, healthy people who are going to be paying more.
And eventually, their fines are going to be higher than what the cost of a policy would be after they've been lured in with the idea that, oh, I'll pay the fine.
That's going to cost anything for a couple of years.
And after that, the fine becomes more expensive than the policy, which is outrageously priced.
Now, this is why Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and all of the defund and delay people are out trying to stop this, folks.
It's because the utter debacle and disaster this is known.
Now, you might be saying, okay, Rush, this is even more evidence in.
We should sit back, do nothing, let this thing implement, let these people find out how they've been lied to, how they've been screwed, how they've been shafted, and the Democrats and Obama will get the blame.
Okay, well, I'll tell you what, then let's just sit back and let the shutdown happen.
And let's just sit back and let's let the debt limit come and go without raising it.
And let's let the Democrats get blamed for that.
I mean, if it's good for Obamacare to sit back and let all this disaster happen so that everybody naturally concludes that it's Obama's fault or the Democrats' fault, let's do it on the shutdown.
And let's do it with a debt limit.
Would I like to see the debt limit not raised just to see if all this stuff is true?
You know, here's the thing.
The debt limit is a big lie.
We've got the money to pay the service on the debt.
This is all this is what I meant earlier by everybody inside the Beltway is totally absorbed in this.
They really think the end of the world is at hand.
It's their world.
They live in it.
Oh, my God, the government right now.
I mean, any Fox journalists, you name it, they're all into this.
You and I know this is not true.
I'm not sucked in by it.
So, I mean, I wouldn't care that the debt limit wasn't raised because I know just like the financial crisis of 08 was not the end of the world.
Y2K was not the end of the world.
This isn't the end.
Nothing.
Government not getting what it wants, government not doing something that it wants, that is not the end of the world.
Government not getting what it wants is good news to me.
Government not being able to get every dime it wants, spend every dime it wants, that's the objective to me.
So, yeah, if we can deny them, let's see what happens when the shutdown happens or the debt limit goes by.
We haven't raised it.
Just for the abject.
But just like the stock market today, they were fully expecting the market to crash today because of Christine Lagarde.
They were expecting it to plummet and it didn't.
And they're upset by that.
I've got to take a break here, folks.
Sit tight.
We'll be back and continue after this.
Now, I mentioned a Gary Bauer soundbite.
Graham soundbite number five.
This is Friday, the Values Voter Summit.
And Gary Bauer spoke, and this is some of what he said.
Rush Limbaugh said the other day that he felt we were living in a dying country.
I love Rush, but I would disagree to a certain extent.
I believe we're living in a country that's being killed, not just dying.
Whether it's our culture, our values, our faith, our history, all are under attack from the radical left.
Day by day, step by step, America as we have known it is being pooed out by its roots from the rich soil, the nurturing earth of Judeo-Christian civilization.
Look, I don't want to take issue with him.
I know exactly what he's saying.
It may be six of one half dozen or the other.
His point is it's being done on purpose.
His point, the left is actually attacking the traditions and institutions that have made the country great, and I believe with that.
There's no doubt.
That's not even arguable.
But in Gary's case, I mean, it's frustrating to everybody because the majority of people don't want this to be happening.
I'm convinced the majority of people do not want this country killed and they don't want the country to die.
The question is, how many people really know that it's happening?
Something we're not aware of.
Dick Parsons.
Now, Dick Parsons used to be the CEO of Time Warner.
And he's now reruns something called Providence Equity Partners.
And he was on CNBC's squawk box this morning talking about the government shutdown.
Joe Kernan said there are a lot of Republicans that don't want to give anything to the president.
And the president, you can almost see his revulsion to even dealing with a lot of people on the other side of the aisle.
I mean, Dick, is it really, really bad out there?
There's a new breed of politician.
I think a lot of the highly conservative element that's come in, they're actually anti-democratic, not anti-Democratic.
It's like the will of the people, the will of the majority, is no longer relevant.
It's relevant what I want and what my constituents want.
And that stems from the fact, you see, that Obama won the election.
And the people like Parsons and these guys, well, that's the will of the people speaking.
I mean, the vast majority of people spoke and they elected Obama.
The people on our side don't think that's what happened.
Yeah, Obama won the election.
We don't think it was a madcap endorsement of Obama.
There were 4 million Republicans that didn't show up because they weren't happy with the nominee.
There were 4 million Republicans that didn't show up because they're dissatisfied with the Republican Party, and they simply wanted to let it be known.
But even so, you know, even when Bush won, I don't remember the Democrats or Dick Parsons sitting around saying, well, you know, Bush won and gets whatever he wants.
Well, you know, Bush won.
I guess he gets his Supreme Court nominees, whoever he wants.
You know, Bush won.
He wants to go to Iraq.
We need to support him.
Oh, you know, Bush won.
We need to go along with the tax cuts for the rich that Bush has authored because that's what's going to be needed to get the economy.
They didn't go for any of that.
In fact, they started running around whining about the tyranny of the majority.
I'll never read Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi every day on the floor of the Senate and the floor of the House, practically crying about the tyranny of the majority.
And how the rights of the minority need to be heard.
The rights of the minority need to be respected.
The minority needs to have power.
They were just crying and moaning about it.
But now here comes old Dick Parsons.
And because people that didn't vote for Obama just don't want to sit by and let all this anti-American stuff be enacted, why they're anti-democratic.
They want to ignore the will of the people.
It's always a one-way street with these people.
By the way, you might be interested in knowing Dick Morris, or Dick Parsons, currently sits on the board of the Commission on Presidential Debates.
So this is one of the guys that's going to be deciding the format, the guests, the moderators of the 2016 presidential debates.
His wife is a community activist.
So he himself is a hardcore leftist.
And I don't remember Dick Parsons ever sitting around telling his people, you know, Bush won.
We need to support the president.
The will of the majority spoke and we're in the minority.
I don't remember them ever.
All they've ever tried to do is undermine.
Now, I want to, who was against stimulus?
Oh, I know.
None of Obama's policies have ever been popular.
The majority oppose the stimulus.
A majority oppose Obamacare.
A majority oppose most everything he's doing.
But he does win the election, and we all know why.
We all know why.
It's a matter of race and the fact that that silences the opposition.
It literally shuts them down.
They're literally afraid to offer any criticism of presidential policy because of how they're going to be treated.
There's no question that's why.
That was also predictable.
Here's Randy Gilbert, Arizona.
As we head back to the phones, I'm glad you waited.
Great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Well, thank you, Rush.
It's an honor.
I've been listening for 20 years.
Now, in 1988, my mother called me and said, hey, you need to listen to this Rush Limbaugh guy on the radio.
And I've been a listener ever since.
Thank you very much for watching.
Well, I appreciate that.
I really do, especially on days like this.
Thank you.
You bet.
The reason I called, I wanted to relate to you my experience in ordering on your website, 2FIT.
I've always wanted to get this and never got around to it.
I have a son that's attending West Point Military Academy, and anything I can do to help lighten his days there, to bring a little joy to his life there, I like to do.
So I went on your website, 2FIT, and I want to tell you how user-friendly it is.
I'm close to your age, Rush, and things like this aren't always easy for us.
Well, we've made it easy for people to spend their money at our website.
I mean, that was our primary objective.
And we want to make it as easy and simple as possible.
And we want, I'm just, Catherine's out there.
Oh, no, no, don't say that.
I'm just being funny with you.
I appreciate it.
Because really, that is an objective.
It be as user-friendly.
We want it to be fun.
Want people to go there even when they're not interested in buying any tea because so many other things there to see.
Well, it really was easy.
I mean, I clicked here, clicked here, clicked here, and your website says it'll ship within three days.
Well, I got an email later that day.
This was on a Friday and said it had already been shipped.
And then there's also a link to allow you to track it through FedEx.
So I followed it.
And sure enough, this was on a Friday.
On Tuesday, it showed that it was delivered to West Point.
And bottom line is my son loved it.
And on top of that, there's no shipping, Rush.
That's a great little perk there that you click on the price, and that's the price.
You don't have to add shipping.
I know.
There's no Obamacare trickery at 2F by T. There are no hidden expenses.
There's no prohibitive cost.
And we don't try to trick you when you get there.
Well, you've made my day.
Have you, by the way, Randy, have you gone to healthcare.gov yet and tried to sign up for Obamacare?
No, no, Rush.
I'm staying away from that for as long as I can.
I haven't done that.
I've got a good healthcare plan.
I'm just wondering how long I'm going to be able to keep it.
Yeah, that's going to be the question.
How long are you going to be able to keep it?
Right.
Well, look, Randy, I want you to hang on.
I know we've got the shipping address in our database, but I want you to hang on.
I want Mr. Snerdley to get FedEx address for you because I think I want to send you a couple of 2F by T tumblers, the Turvis tumblers that we have from our secret stash.
And they're immensely popular.
We cannot keep them in stock.
But I've got a couple I want to send you.
You're great.
You're very nice.
I appreciate the call.
And in fact, you've been here 20 years.
And again, I appreciate so much what you do.
Well, we all have our roles, Randy, and I'm just grateful people like you are out there.
So hang on, and Mr. Snerdley will get your vitals and keep a sharp eye out on FedEx for some other stuff.
As a sign of appreciation for your son, too, at West Point, okay?
Oh, okay.
He's already talking to Snerdley already.
You'd rather talk to Snerdley and give him the address than finish with me.
That's fine because we've got a brief time out.
We'll take it now and be back and continue after this.
Randy in Gilbert, Arizona.
Tell what we're going to do.
Randy, we're going to send you a signed copy of my new book, Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims, Time Travel.
That's what we're going to do.
I wanted the Tumblr's Tube.
We're going to send him a signed copy of the book.
He will get it after it's released on October 29th.
We're not going to send it out now.
We're not going to get any trouble with the public.
Yeah, we've got boxes of them.
We're loaded with them.
I started signing them.
But we'll send him one because he's such a, it was a great guy.
We have unsolicited consumer testimony about how much fun and how much ease it is to use the 2FBT.com website.
I guarantee you, we did not spend $698 million setting it up like they did the Obamacare website.
And it didn't take us three and a half years to set it up.
It cost us nowhere near that.
We set it up almost overnight and it works flawlessly.
So that's what we're going to do, Randy.
We're going to send you an autographed copy of the book that comes out on October 29th.
So you'll get it right around there.
Now, the media folks that drive by are just beside themselves.
They're all now waited, baited breath, because there's a 3 o'clock meeting at the White House between Obama and quote-unquote bipartisan congressional leaders.
Wonder why they waited till 3 o'clock.
But there is this big meeting.
CNN seems to think that a deal will be struck.
They say, I've been watching it, CNN says that Reed and McConnell are optimistic.
Uh-oh, oh no, breaking news update.
Oh, no.
The 3 p.m. Eastern Time meeting with congressional leaders has been postponed to allow Senate leaders more time for talks.
Well, either Reed and McConnell are really close and they need more time to nail it down or they're not close.
Or maybe Obama needs more photo op time at the food bank.
I don't know.
But the 3 o'clock meeting, interesting, it was scheduled for 3 o'clock, isn't it?
Obama and bipartisan congressional leaders scheduled for 3 o'clock.
Reed and McConnell, supposedly close to a deal.
Now it's been moved.
Brief timeout.
We'll come back and wrap it up right after this.
Don't go away.
Okay, it's hard to say what would be the big news of the day.
I think for me, one of the biggest stories is the Forbes piece that we end up getting about 2 o'clock Eastern Time, about an hour ago, that the information technology people that put together Obamacare purposely structured all of these glitches in order to keep certain people from finding out what this is going to cost them.
See, Obamacare was not designed to help healthy people with average incomes get health insurance.
It's designed to force those people to pay more.
Healthy people, average incomes, get soaked in Obamacare, but the Forbes story says the website got bogged down so that they wouldn't figure that out at this stage of the game.
Because, of course, it was sold as either free or cheaper for everybody.
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