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Oct. 17, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:47
October 17, 2013, Thursday, Hour #1
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Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Okay, folks, got to do this level check test one day.
Hey, everything sounds good.
How about that?
It wasn't sounding good in the warm-ups.
Well, I mean, don't do warm-ups.
It wasn't sounding good in the pre-show, but everything's cool out there.
So, cool, great.
Great to have you here, folks.
Fastest Week in Media.
Here we are, rearing and ready to go Thursday at the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
And as you know, we are here in Los Angeles this week.
And it's about ready to wrap up the week.
It's been good.
It's been a lot of fun.
Nice change of pace.
You saw that.
You saw that.
I ran into the paparazzi last night, folks, and I didn't know.
They were from TMZ, but I didn't know that.
And they were there when I got there.
And I rolled in around, I guess it was six minutes after seven.
I told a driver I want to be six minutes late.
Be stylish about it.
So I got in at six minutes after seven, Toscana in Brentwood.
And walk in, there's this video camera guy and a steel camera guy.
And I just walk past them and they're dogging me.
And if they're saying anything to me, I can't hear it.
I wouldn't have answered anyway.
I just kept walking in.
In there for a couple hours and walk out, and there they are.
And I'm walking to the car and they asked me some inane question about people.
I didn't know who they were asking me about.
And that's why I said, I know who you're talking about.
Who?
And I got in the car and drove off.
I didn't know they were TMZ.
I didn't find out it was TMZ till this morning when somebody sent me the league.
How did you see it, Snerdley?
How'd you run?
Which website?
You go to the TMZ website?
Oh, you heard about the fact that I was on there.
You don't normally daily visit the TMZ website.
So anyway, yeah, it's the number two bang story there.
And it is a short little video, five or ten seconds.
You know, yeah, they were very nice.
They're very nice.
I mean, it was, you know, Mr. Limbaugh, but I mean, they're just, I don't know.
What they do.
I mean, look at how these guys live their lives.
They live their lives by following everybody else around and watching them live theirs.
And, you know, these guys, the number one story at TMZ is that Kim Kardashian's big butt is back.
So I came in second to Kim Kardashian's butt.
Now, would that have happened 10 years ago?
I don't know.
But I'll take it.
It was harmless.
Anyway, folks, we're here.
The telephone number, again, if you want to be on the program is 800-282-2882.
The email address, El Rushbo at EIBNet.com.
Now, I understand.
I just know that a lot of you are down, depressed, forlorn, hopeless, wondering where the heck do we go now, particularly from this point.
You may have seen Obama spiking the ball at his little presser minutes ago, where again I live in his head.
He told everybody, stop listening to these talking heads on the radio.
Stop listening to those people and stop listening to the bloggers and stop listening to the lobbyists and stop listening to everybody but him.
Now, folks, I have had an ongoing theory for the last two weeks.
And I know that many of you have Wanted to believe it, but you wonder whether I was just trying to keep you up or whether I was ignoring reality.
And that ongoing theme and theory was that through all of this, two things were happening.
The media was covering this in their standard horse race, how does this help Obama narrative?
That's the only thing they care about.
The inside the Belway narrative is how does this help Obama and how does this destroy the Republicans?
And so they go to polls and they get the polls they want and they show that the Republicans are supposedly hated and that Obama is supposedly loved and now everything's right with the world because the government's back up.
Did you see this tweet from this Jim Acosta guy at CNN?
This is hilarious.
Oh, another thing in explaining this theory, which I'm going to detail coming up here, is I'm going to tell you where the media narrative in Washington's wrong.
They're missing the big story.
And they got a call yesterday, Rush, how, or maybe it was two days ago.
How are you, why are you still laughing?
How are you so not affected by this or seemingly?
And I don't want you all thinking that I'm coming in here at all holly jolly and so forth and not affected by it.
But I mentioned to you yesterday, life goes on and this isn't over.
The battle for freedom and liberty really never is over.
And there are really low points in it, but I'm not giving up and I'm not going to engage in phony pep talks either.
All I do here every day is tell you what I think about things.
And I get my own share of grief from it, even from my friends.
I've had some of my friends say, would you stop?
You're not making this sound bad enough.
You've got to make this sound really bad because that's what it is and that's what your audience wants to hear.
And I said, well, I don't live that way.
I don't go home and huddle away in the corner, cower in a corner and worry about how bad things are because we can always change everything.
Or at least we can try.
And this theory that I've had the past two weeks is that when it comes to policy, just like the 95 budget shutdown, the Republicans actually came out of that in a substance and policy sense very strong.
And the same thing here.
The case can be made.
And I'm going to try to make.
And in fact, our old buddy, Peter Beinart, who is a well-known leftist journalist, he writes at the Daily Beast and a bunch of other places.
He used to be able to think of Beinart and Fareed Zakaria GPS is in the same league.
And they're a little distant now.
They're both leftists.
They're both pro-Obama.
But Beinart has a piece today in The Daily Beast, which is in the belly of the beast, which almost it's not, it dovetails exactly with the stratagems and the theories that I have been trying to share with you all past two weeks, and that is that it was the Republicans who were winning here.
In fact, there's some stuff in this piece that's almost word for word for what I said.
And I'm not charging plagiarism, but he makes the point, just as I did two days ago, and I got grief from some of you in the email.
I made the point that Obama's agenda since he was reelected has basically stalled.
We haven't gotten anywhere on amnesty, and they're trying to gin it up.
They haven't done anything on gun control, even though they've tried.
That went the other way for them in Colorado.
In a sense of policy, the sequester was not given away.
The sequester staying in place means that there is a new baseline from which all budgeting will now come, and that the level of spending is now at 2008 levels in terms of baseline budgeting.
It's a victory.
The sequester holds.
And I'm going to explain all this in great detail.
Well, in great detail, I'm going to get into it as the program unfolds today before your very eyes and ears.
But at the same time, I'm not in denial, and I don't want anybody thinking that I'm in an artificial place here, just trying to keep you.
And I'm not artificially laughing, and I'm not, if I sound like I'm enjoying myself, it's not artificial.
It's real.
I try to do that with life ever since it really hit me once long ago that there's only one of these.
And it's really easy to get caught up in the day-to-day.
Day-to-day has a lot of depressing things happening.
Day-to-day has a lot of downers in them.
But most people do not employ all the leverage they have over their own lives.
It's just standard, ordinary human nature.
And I've always tried to just do what I want to do.
And as I define happiness and contentment, pursue it and do the best I can within that framework.
And especially, I try not to get depressed over what people I can't control do.
And we really can't control what these people in Washington are doing.
We can't really day-to-day control it.
We can have an impact on it in other ways.
And it's engaging in that where optimism can be found, I believe.
And I'm just trying to share a little of that with you.
And I really think intellectually, morally, substantively, I think there's no question that we occupy.
Well, how would I put it?
We occupy the best place.
We're not lying to ourselves.
We're not destroying anything.
We're not engaging hero worship of anybody.
And I just, I think our place is not that bad, especially as the future presents itself, coupled with the unknown that the future always contains.
And within the unknown, there are always going to be surprises on the upside, positive as well as negative.
It's all what you make of it.
So don't think that I'm doing anything artificial here.
Don't even think of it as a pep talk.
I'm just great thing I have with this show.
Turn on this microphone.
I can just unload as I actually am.
And that's a great liberating thing, not have to act, not have to say what I think you want to hear, do what I think you want to do.
And I look around and I find all kinds of things to laugh at in this.
For example, Jim Acosta, CNN.
He went to work today and he was so excited.
He was so excited that government's not shut down anymore.
He was so excited.
Here's what he tweeted.
And I'm not making this up.
Word for word is a verbatim quote from a CNN info guy, Jim Acosta.
He's a senior White House correspondent.
Hearing the roar of the federal government coming to life, our White House crew tells us that National Park Service employees are back with their leafblowers.
Oh, be still, my beating heart.
All is right with the world.
A CNN info guy is rejuvenated.
Life is worth living again because the federal government has come back to life as typified by leaf blowers being used by the National Park Service.
Right.
They're probably aiming them at World War II vets as they try now to get into the World War II memorial.
They probably turn off the leaf blowers when the illegal aliens show up to protest the World War II vets.
Can you imagine, folks, this guy's dead serious?
Can you imagine that kind of being happy, ecstatic, being twitterifically happy that the federal government has come back to life and it was never dead?
It was never even on life support.
I'm telling you, these people, I don't care whether they're so-called media politics lobbyists.
This inside the Beltway mentality is so distant.
It's so removed from all of us outside of the place.
It flyover country or whatever you want to call it.
And I wonder how many people today, just like the day Obamacare was signed into law, I wonder how many people think today that since the government is back in business, that healthcare is free and it's okay to go to the exchanges and sign up for free healthcare.
I wonder how many people thinking that.
Because that's, folks, that is a continuing disaster that is going to unfold.
I have the people at Heritage have published a fabulous chart.
I happen to be holding that chart right here, my formerly nicotine-stained fingers.
It prints out perfectly on one page.
I will show it to you there.
Show it to you there on the ditto can.
That's what it looks like.
What it does, state by state, it tells you what your health insurance premiums were before Obamacare and the exchanges, what they will be after, i.e., when you go there, and what percentage change it is for an adult age 27, an adult age 50, and a family of four.
Now, I'm going to show you this.
If you look at the colors, the bright orange and the next faded orange represent states, and I want to take a look at the column on the left as I show it to you, because that's for age 27.
Up 100% is solid bright orange.
Up 51 to 100% is the next shade of orange for age 27, the millennials, state by state, right here where my index finger is.
I don't have time to zoom.
I don't know how well the colors are actually transferring here.
But do you see all of that color?
Right there by my hand, that's the whole column, top to bottom.
That color stands for massive increases in premium costs For 27-year-olds, the average millennial age, the supposedly healthy, who earn a decent income, whose premiums are going to skyrocket in order to pay for the insurance and treatment and coverage for Nanaw and Grandpa,
and freeloaders and whoever else.
And I'll get into details with the numbers too.
If you can call me state by state, I can tell you.
There's one state where the prices are going to go down.
One state.
It's New York.
And that's because all of the state and Obamacare mandates there are in place.
There's a convoluted reason for it.
It's temporary.
It's going to balloon everywhere.
But the increases are anywhere from 71 to 100% in that age group in many of the states.
So let me take a brief time out here.
Government's open again, folks.
Government's open.
So we can all just, I learned this from the Republican establishment.
We can just sit back now and wait for the government to collapse on its own.
Ha, welcome back.
Do you know, ladies and gentlemen, that in this deal, there's all kinds of pork in the deal.
There are all kinds of hidden goodies in there.
Do you know federal workers get a pay raise in January under the deal?
And these people are also getting their Obamacare subsidized.
Not all federal workers, members of Congress are their staff.
That's still under, still the case.
I mean, the Obamacare subsidies will be paid to congressional staff, federal workers, the poor people who were laid off for two weeks.
They had to sit around starving and thirsty and couldn't go anywhere.
They couldn't buy anything.
It was really bad for two weeks out there.
But they're going to get compensated a pay raise, federal workers in January.
Of course, you pay for that, folks.
Adrian Peterson.
Turns out there's a couple of more kids.
And I didn't finish that yesterday.
And that was my bad.
That was an utter lack of professionalism yesterday.
I totally misjudged how much time I, I mean, when I had 25 minutes left in the program, I feel like I, and by the time I got to it, I didn't have enough time to do it right.
So I've got to revisit that today.
This is the Phil Mushnik controversy, Adrian Peterson.
And another baby mama from Houston has popped up.
He said, oh, no, no, no.
There's a couple more here.
And so I got a, you know, he's seven kids total now.
That's what it says here.
He's fathered seven kids, not five.
Adrian Peterson's baby mama.
This is another one.
And she's a former dancer.
Oh, look at Snerdly.
It's a TMZ story.
So I made the same network as Adrian Peterson's baby mama.
Now, I think this I find funny, too.
I'm sorry.
I'm actually in a giddy mood.
From the Associated Press, relief around the world as U.S. avoids debt default.
Relief around the world.
Next story.
Reuters dollar slides as relief at U.S. debt deal fades.
I don't know.
Look, you've got to be able to laugh at some of this stuff.
And this is the absolute incompetence of the media.
Forget whether it's bias or whether it just utter incompetence.
Same thing with Obama, folks.
Here's one thing.
At dinner last night, I was talking to some people about this.
And we went back and forth like I'm sure you all do when you go to dinner.
You're talking to people.
Why don't the Republicans do X?
Why don't they accuse Obama of what he's actually doing, attacking the Constitution?
Friend of mine said, to hell with that.
You don't even have to go there.
Why don't they just stand up and talk about how incompetent the guy is?
He's not doing anything right.
Let's give him the benefit of the doubt for the sake of persuasion.
Say he's trying to be a good president.
He's screwing it up royally.
Why don't they even say that?
America's real anchor man, me, Rush Limbaugh, America's truth detector, me, Rush Limbaugh, America's doctor of democracy, me, Rush Limbaugh, here in Los Angeles, meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
So Cookie says, now you mentioned a TMZ thing and people want to know what it sounded like.
So she sent me the audio.
And I don't like doing this.
I don't like playing this stuff that's about me.
As you know, I delay this as long as I live.
I mean, there's soundbites.
I got CNN London blame me for the shutdown.
I have that in the soundbites.
I'm moving that to later on so that not everything hears about me.
But here's what it sounded like.
And by the way, as I read the transcript, I didn't hear half of what these guys said.
You know, my hearing is such that it's a real blessing in disguise sometimes.
So this, what, just 21 seconds.
Here it goes, folks.
Rush, I'm a ditto head.
Hey, Mr. Limbaugh, how do you feel about us?
It's good for you.
How do you feel about Howard Stern and Jesse Vintern, 2016?
Who?
Howard Stern and Jesse Vin Turin, 2016.
I don't know who you're talking about.
Hey, were you celebrating the reopening of the government, the Republicans?
Khan Cavegan?
I didn't hear him say that.
I was in the process of getting in a car, shutting a door.
I didn't hear him taunt me about the shutdown.
And I didn't hear the kid lie and say he was a ditto head.
But anyway, that's what it was.
It was just that fast.
As a highly trained broadcast professional, some people would have hung around and done an interview and then tried to find it or gotten a fight with him.
If I'd have been Alec Bald, I'd have beat him up.
And then I would have had some bank call and ask me, do you want to be our spokesman?
We love the way you beat people up.
And we don't want to have any conservatives speaking for us.
But if you're going to beat up photographers, we'd love to, what is it, Bank One?
Bank One loves spokesman, Capital Bank.
They love people that having spokesman that beat up the paparazzi.
So I probably could have gotten an endorsement account had I beat up these little guys.
But I just, evening was over.
Get in there and get out.
Okay.
Now, again, I find this the CNN London thing.
All right.
It's soundbite number one.
This is CNN's newsroom.
And it's the Time Magazine Bureau Chief.
I'm sorry.
Time Magazine London Bureau Chief on CNN International.
The co-anchor is Hala Gorani.
And she's speaking with former Time Magazine London Bureau Chief Jeff McAllister about how the government shutdown was seen throughout the world.
And Gorani said, we've heard from China.
We've heard from Russia.
We've heard from other European countries.
We heard from the heads of global financial organizations saying, Washington, get your house in order.
Is this more symbolic than substantive?
It's the right question, and it depends on whether it happens again and again and again.
Do the Republicans take from this, as they seem to, that this tactic of trying to hold the government hostage to get their way isn't going to work?
The Rush Limbaugh, Fox News kind of echo chamber where conservatives think that they're doing the right thing, that everybody supports them, when in fact it turns out in this case that it's not the case.
Those factors are still there.
Will there be change in the elections next year?
Will Republicans lose?
That's the kind of thing that has to happen to really change the political dynamic.
See, look, I don't want to spend a lot of time deeply analyzing this, but that's typical, even though this guy's a former London Bureau Chief.
This is typical analysis you get from inside the Beltway, which is totally absent any recognition of other reality.
I mean, what is inside the Beltway, there is a reality, it's theirs, but it is far removed from ours.
And they exist on templates and narratives, and that is the Republicans are losing and they're almost out of existence.
And it's because of Ted Cruz and Rush Limbaugh and so forth.
And they look at it strictly poll by poll, horse race by horse race.
Did Obama win?
Oh my God, did Obama win?
Oh, I hope Obama won.
That's the only thing that matters to them.
But throughout all of this, I honestly said I could make the case that Republicans are winning this on matters of substance.
Winning this on matters of policy.
And I don't know if Fox News and me are an echo chamber, what is the drive-by media?
I feel like they're the Grand Canyon of Echo Chambers.
These people, this is another thing.
So I and Fox News, me and Fox News, we're echo chambers?
What?
What are they?
They're mind-numbed robots.
They're actually puppets.
Somebody's yanking their strings each and every day.
They're not independent actors at all.
They're not independent thinkers.
They're not independently curious.
They're all programmed from journalism school all the way through to the casket.
They're purely programmed.
There's no critical thinking, no independent thinking, no curiosity.
And as such, they're not journalists.
They're hacks.
They're pure party hacks.
But there are exceptions.
Now, this is a perfect time to tell you about this Peter Beinhart piece in the Daily Beast: why the shutdown is a Republican victory.
Listen carefully to this.
I'm going to excerpt parts of this.
And here's the subhead of the story.
Thanks to the shutdown, the press and the public can't stand the Republicans, but Republican ideological influence is increasing.
Wait a minute, how can that be?
I mean, Ted Cruz is hated.
Mike Lee is hated.
I mean, there are two prominent conservative columnists today who write essentially the same piece.
And you know what it is?
If I can summarize it, it's okay, kids, meaning Cruz and Lee and those who supported him.
Okay, you better not do this again.
You better not break this window again, or it's going to be a real price to pay.
You've had your fun.
You went into fantasy land, but you better not ever do it again.
We are not going to commit suicide with you.
This is the haughty, know-it-all, snarky, arrogant condescension from the right, from so-called conservative columns on the right, who themselves are prisoners of the inside-the-beltway establishment thinking.
And more and more, in order to rank in inside-the-beltway thinking, you have to believe the Republicans are doofuses, stupid, blowing it every time they do something, making grand mistakes.
That gets you in the club.
And more and more of our so-called conservative media people have walked right in the door and filled out the membership form.
But there is another reality: Republican ideological influence is increasing.
Now, I can imagine somebody, come on, Rush, don't lie to us.
Don't try to phony, falsely buck us up.
I'm not.
This guy happens to write what I have been trying to say the past couple of weeks.
Here's how he starts.
The news from Washington is all about Obama's impending triumph in the government shutdown debt ceiling standoff.
Boehner Blinks declared recent headline in the Washington Post.
Republicans are working out the terms of their surrender, said ABC's Jonathan Carl.
And then Beinhart writes, if this is Republican surrender, I hope I never see Republican victory.
This guy is not a Republican.
He's not conservative.
He's card-carrying, you know, fared, zicarious, GPS-type liberal.
He writes here, to understand how upside down the current media analysis is, you have to go back a couple of years.
In 2011, with Republicans threatening to provoke a debt default, President Obama signed the Budget Control Act of 2011.
The budget control, this is the sequester.
The Budget Control Act of 2011 cut government spending by $917 billion over 10 years.
The agreement also created a congressional supercommittee charged with finding additional cuts.
And if that committee failed to find those additional cuts, automatic cuts totaling $1.2 trillion over 10 years would kick in at the end of 2012 via a process called sequestration.
So Beinart simply reminding everybody of actual American history.
And by the way, this deal includes another supercommittee charged with doing the same thing.
And these committees never sit.
They don't find anything.
This committee that was set up in the Budget Control Act of 2011, if you'll recall, we had another crisis.
They failed to come to an agreement and the sequester kicked in.
And we're living under its terms today.
And this is what Beinart is essentially calling a Republican victory.
Now, just hold your thought.
No, I will hold my thought.
You keep your attention right at that.
I'll come back and complete and fully explain this right after this.
Now, by the way, folks, in this deal that opened the government and whatever else the hell of deal did, whatever it stopped.
I don't even know.
There's another supercommittee in this deal.
And this supercommittee is supposed to come up with a new way to negotiate a real budget.
The super committee back in 2011 was supposed to come up with another budget that had real cuts in it.
And if it didn't, sequestration would kick in.
The super committee in 2011 didn't do anything.
They never do.
And so sequestration kicked in.
Sequestration, don't forget, was an Obama idea.
It's something Obama doesn't want to claim credit for, but it was his idea.
He believed that the Republicans would never, ever allow the Defense Department to experience such large cuts, and they didn't blink.
And so the sequester kicked in.
And this deal now contains another supercommittee that's supposed to get this, come up with a way to negotiate a real budget.
We already have that way.
It's called you sit down and talk.
What do you mean, a new way to come up with a real budget?
And it's in there to address the complaint that the Democrats never produce or allow a real budget.
But nothing's going to come of this.
They're never, as long as Obama's president, there's not going to be a budget.
They might do one if they win the House 2014, but they're not going to spell out their policy agenda in a budget before 2014 and lose.
They're not going to do that.
Now, I can summarize without reading Beinart's whole piece, but I'm still going to read excerpts.
I can summarize it for you.
He's upset over really one thing, and that is that in all of this, the Republicans managed to slow the increase in spending via the sequester.
And this deal didn't kill the sequester.
And so in the liberal world, the world's still upside down.
And that's why Beinhart is saying, what do you mean Republicans lost?
They instituted some spending cuts in 2011, and we haven't got rid of them.
And so the Republicans on policy are not losing.
Now, the cuts are minuscule, I understand, but they still are cuts, maybe even reductions in the rates of growth.
But this sequester ticks the Democrats off like you can't believe.
And they weren't able to get rid of it.
So right now, agenda item number one is going to be killing the sequester along with amnesty.
Those are the two things that are going to tick up here.
But let me continue reading some excerpts of this.
You know, I read the paragraph where he explained how the sequester happened back in 2011.
Fast forward to the beginning of this year, despite months of negotiations, a supercommittee failed to reach an agreement.
So this March, automatic sequester cuts kicked in.
If Democrats disliked the 2011 Budget Control Act, they disliked its bastard stepchild, the sequester even more.
Republicans, being less supportive of federal spending on things like education, energy, and medical research, were more supportive of the sequester.
Indeed, as recently as last month, Republican leaders described locking in the sequester cuts via a clean, continuing resolution that extended them into 2014 as a major victory.
In a memo to fellow Republicans on September 6, Eric Cantor boasted that by signing a continuing resolution at sequester levels, the president would be endorsing a level of spending that wipes away, this is key.
Cantor sent this memo out, and he bragged in it by signing a continuing resolution at sequester levels, the president would be endorsing a level of spending that wipes away all the increases he and the Democrats made while they were in charge and returns us to a pre-2008 level of discretionary spending.
And that lowers the baseline.
And lowering the baseline is blasphemy.
And the Republicans have, whether they intended to, and I think they did because they held firm on this.
This is, in the real world, folks, this is a real victory.
And the Republicans were not talked out of the sequester.
And then Beinhardt writes, most of the press is missing this because most of the press is covering the current standoff more as politics than policy.
If your basic question is which party is winning, that's easy.
The Republicans are losing.
They're the ones suffering in the polls.
But the partisan balance of power and the ideological balance of power are two completely different things.
And in this situation, the Republicans are winning.
And then he details here the following.
Despite overwhelming public support, gun control is dead.
Comprehensive immigration reform, once considered the politically easy part of Obama's second term, looks unlikely.
And the other items Obama trumpeted in his State of the Union, climate change, infrastructure, universal preschool, voting rights protections, a boost in the minimum wage have largely been forgotten.
Exactly the point I've been making last two weeks, Sarda Yell.
Obama's agenda has been stalled.
And that's because the Republicans held firm in the sequester and Ted Cruz and Mike Lee.
Now, I'm up against it on time, but I will be glad to answer any questions you have about this because there's more to explain.
Sit tight, my friends.
We'll be back and continue after this.
But wait a minute, Rush, wait a minute.
What about didn't sequester spending a new trillion dollars?
Didn't that raise the baseline?
Yeah, it did, but the sequester took it back down below 2009, and they can't do anything to change that with continuing resolutions, which is why they're going to be targeting the sequester to be gotten rid of next.
All will be made clear.
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