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Jan. 2, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:41
January 2, 2014, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 247 Podcast.
And greetings to you, music lovers, thrill seekers, conversationalists on across the fruited plain.
We're back.
We're back at it, Il Rushbow, back in the saddle here at the EIB's Southern Command, the distinguished the indispensable Limbo Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program today is 800-282-2882 and the email address lrushball at EIB net.com.
You know, I remember back when this program started back in uh August of 1988.
We started with 56 radio stations.
And they were stations that had no idea what they were carrying.
They were stations left over from a program that this one, this program was replacing.
It was a program hosted by the late Owen Span.
And the stations were in small towns and cities across the country.
And it was then up to me and us to build our audience and hopefully expand the network and acquire huge dominant radio stations, or alternatively, make huge dominant radio stations.
And we did both.
And the it was it was a fascinating experience.
It had never been done before.
It had never been tried this way.
Syndicated talk radio had always been something that was accepted in the broadcast industry as nighttime programming.
Nighttime and overnight, midnight to six, the Larry King hours.
And the Wizards of Smart in broadcasting all wished me well.
Well, most of them did.
But they all concluded it wouldn't work.
You couldn't syndicate a program in the daytime, because at the time the prevailing programming opinion was that all programming had to be local.
Local issues, local carrot cake recipes, local sewage problems, local phone numbers, local callers, local guests.
And if you didn't do that, it wouldn't work.
And I always said, well, do people who watch Donahue care where it comes from?
Do people who watch the Oprah care where it comes from?
They don't.
So why why should radio be any different?
It's a good show.
People will find it to listen to it.
And what happened is historic.
We went from 56 radio stations to, in the first year or two, over 450, and we finally climbed over the 600 mark.
Um, I think by 1993, 1992, something, some somewhere around in there.
And it was exciting.
Practically every day in those first two to three years to it, or every week, we were announcing a new station.
Welcoming a new station to the EIB network, and it was always a fun and exciting thing because it was it was growth before everybody's eyes, right?
In front of everybody's eyes.
The growth was taking place.
And we got all kinds of stations.
In some cases, we got stations in large markets that did not have big audience that we turned into dominant stations in the market.
In other places, we got the dominant station in the market.
And ended up there.
And it was just it was fascinating.
And it was it was, by the way, it was fraught with uh uh a lot of stress.
There were a lot of competing uh ambitions, even within the EIB network.
So you look back and uh I've always had a theory that that when you look back at your history nostalgia, you're reminded of the good times.
And you are.
But at the same time, I mean it was it was fraught with a lot of tension and a lot of negativism and a lot of pessimism at as well as the optimism.
And there were people that didn't want it to get that big because they didn't want to work that hard.
200 stations, it'd be fine.
We can manage that and everything would be cool, but I didn't want to settle for 200 stations.
I'm gonna move to New York to to take over and be legitimate number one.
the reason I did it.
So I remember that the first major market station that we had was WABC in New York, and that was the flagship.
And the next, I forget the order.
I think I think Detroit was next.
But very near the beginning was Los Angeles.
AM640 KFI.
And it was uh it was it was momentous.
The here's uh let me give it a little inside baseball.
In terms of the business of radio, the top 25 markets, if you're on a decent station in the top 25 markets, you are reaching 80% of the population of the country.
And that's relevant in terms of the business side advertising.
You've got, I mean, you can be on 600 radio stations, but if you're not in the top 25, nobody's gonna hear you.
And it's not just in the top 25, you've got to be on stations in that market, those markets people listen to.
Well, today, to cut to the chase here, today we are moving, and it's it's kind of like the old days of announcing new stations, the excitement of that and growth.
In Los Angeles, we are moving across town to a station named after me.
AM 1150 K E I B. K.E.I.B.
in LA.
We're starting there today.
We're going to be simulcasted on KFI for a period.
I think it's a month, and it might be a little bit longer than that.
Uh the stations are co-owned by EIB.
So we have not created any enemies here.
We're simply expanding our market in LA and moving from KFI to K E I B. In New York, we are moving to WOR.
Just down the dial, AM 720 in New York, W O R. And today is the first day for both of those radio stations.
And it is momentous.
It is it is monumental.
It's a it's a it's a huge thing.
It may not be much to those of you out there.
I mean, this I'm giving you inside baseball stuff.
In terms of the uh inside baseball business aspect, these are big moves, and there's a lot involved here in the move that I'm not gonna get into uh the reasons for it and so forth.
Just suffice it to say it wouldn't be happening if I didn't want it to.
It wouldn't be happening if it weren't what was the best for the EIB network and for the audience.
Uh what?
What what what is the you have this blank Oh uh Mr. Snerdley, a uh a veteran of the New York Radio Wars, is explaining to people on the other side of the glass uh New York radio station history, explaining WOR to um to the people on this side of the glass.
So anyway, we're making the move.
It's official today.
Those are the two news stations.
There have been others we've we've uh we've moved in in in previous years to previous uh times, different stations and so forth, but these are you know, this is number one and number two market wise.
And uh there's obviously some people are not gonna know, and they're gonna tune in the old place and not find it there.
And other people who didn't know we were coming have turned to radio.
So, what the is this?
And so we're here and we're not going anywhere.
And we got the opportunity here to build a couple of more radio stations.
WR New York, which is established it's a legendary station, and K E I B in Los Angeles.
Now, there's some ancillary things that have happened, but I'm not gonna talk about those because that would not be good manners.
It would it would not be classy to talk about some aspects of what has happened here as a result of the move.
What?
Well, it it effectively is the end of liberal talk radio in Los Angeles.
But I but I don't want to really get into details of that.
Uh that that wouldn't be wouldn't be classy.
I also, I'm not gonna mention any names here, but I have to, I was I was humorously amused.
Is any other way to be amused?
I was humorously amused over the over the break, a um a person who had been in politics and then jumped into talk radio thinking it would be easy, quit.
Well, I'm not going to mention any names.
It's not the purpose here.
It's not that the but the what fascinated me was the reason given by the person when they decided to drop out.
The person who quit blamed the syndicator for not getting him an audience.
That's right.
And I remember when I started in 1956, it was totally up to me to get the audit.
The syndicator, you know, there was a there was a combined effort to get radio stations.
I mean, yeah, you've got to go out and get affiliates, and that's key, and you try to get try to get the best ones that you can.
And of course, we would not allow this program to be cleared at night.
That would defeat the whole purpose.
We were going to be on noon to three, and that was it.
If you wanted the program, you had to carry it noon to three.
If we would allow people to take the program at night, you'd have never heard of this program.
And I remember the KAB in LA, KABC, the guy George Green was his name.
He offered, you remember the stories?
He offered to buy the program and then shelve it, not air it.
Keep it off the air in LA.
And I was worried that syndication partners might go for the money on the deal.
And they didn't.
I was wrong about it.
But I mean, those kinds of things uh happened in the same token.
I was not going to permit this program to be delayed to nighttime or weekends.
In Pittsburgh, they said, well, you know, we're not sure.
Well, how about we take the program on weekends and test it?
I said, guaranteed failure, everything on weekend, there's nothing you're gonna move from weekend to days, we're not doing it.
So we would stay out of markets rather than go in and lose.
And I just I just found it I found it fascinating that I just never had the luxury of saying that the syndicator to get my audience.
Must be a well, it is a liberal attitude to think somebody else must do it for you.
Um at any rate, uh, let's see what else we have here.
Oh, Conan O'Brien has totally, totally ripped off this program.
Totally.
And I will illustrate that in mere moments coming up.
Also, the inauguration of the new mayor in New York.
Well, I I found the Bible.
They found the Bible at about five o'clock in the afternoon, the FDR Bible, on which the new mayor took the oath of office.
They lost it.
They didn't know where it was until 5 o'clock in the afternoon.
Somebody, a policeman or somebody, found it.
Don't know any more than that.
No, if they thought it was silver.
I I don't know.
But but I'll tell you, this I've been trying to organize my thoughts.
Been thinking a lot about America culture, uh, where we are, where we're headed in in this country, and trying to present it to you in some sort of an organized, coherent way.
And I'm not, I'm not quite there yet.
I could probably do a decent job, just add living off the top of my head.
But for example, I've got a picture here of Mayor Doomberg and Amanda Burton, who used to date Charlie Rose, who was the daughter of Babe Paley, who is some head honch on a New York City, city planning, commissioner planning, uh, whatever, some bureaucracy.
And they're walking on a floor plan of 200 and 300 square foot apartments that New York residents are going to live in.
Affordable housing in New York has become a 200 to 300 square foot Trash receptacle and to be piled on top of each other in high-rise apartments.
It is a jail cell.
But here's the thing.
They're doing it to make it affordable, and they're doing as Domberg says nobody needs any more space in there.
Nobody's home anyway.
All you do at home is sleep.
And we need affordable housing.
And I couldn't help but think this is what liberalism has gotten us.
This is exactly where they've taken us.
Their own policies have created this.
You know, they talk about the income inequality and the unfairness and the disparity of the halves and the have nots of New York State.
Who've been running that city for all this time?
Who has created the underclass in this country?
It's the Democrat Party.
The American left has created the underclass.
The Democrat Party needs an underclass.
They need a permanent underclass to vote for them.
The Democrat Party needs it.
That's why they're so interested in illegal immigration.
Because as people, it doesn't happen so much anymore now with the Obama economy.
People used to move out of the middle class.
There was upward mobility in America.
And as people moved out of the middle class, the Democrat Party needed new people to move into it.
Not so much a problem anymore because there isn't all that upward mobility out of the middle class, particularly in towns run by liberals.
And so look left to their own devices.
Look at the absolute horror show that liberals make and create for humans to live in.
Take your favorite city that has been run by Democrats and Liberals for all these years, and it speaks for itself.
And now the solution to affordable housing and not enough room is a three hundred square foot apartment.
A bunch of them in one building, meant for families with kids with foldable furniture.
And they're patting themselves on the back for coming up with this idea.
The economic circumstances for the majority of Americans plummet when liberals get their way, and then they end up creating these massive problems, and then they come to town with their own solutions to problems they have made and created, and it's just utter disaster.
You're right, Snurley, these are no bigger than jail cells.
I know Doomberg's got three or four mansions.
I know not just the one in Bermuda.
Anyway, de Blasio's gonna fix that.
He's gonna, he said, we're not gonna wait.
We're gonna just do it now.
We're gonna we're gonna get rid of this income inequality, and we're gonna make sure that there's fairness.
It's gonna, this is gonna be hilarious to watch from afar.
It's not gonna be fun for people that live there.
But it's gonna be hilarious to watch from afar.
I have never been happier to have been out of a place.
For a uh host of reasons.
Anyway, folks, I got to take a brief time out here.
We will do bitter cold.
How about how about the uh how about the global warming excursion to Antarctica?
Ha ha ha!
Yes, sir, Rebob, a bunch of global warming scientists embark on a cruise to Antarctica to document melting sea ice to document global warming, and they get stuck in ice that they didn't expect to find.
It was thicker and bigger, it was colder than they even knew, and they needed to be rescued, and it required rescue efforts by fossil-fueled icebreaker boats from China, helicopters.
What?
Yeah, what the icebreaker, the first icebreaker got stuck.
I was getting there.
Everybody wants to finish my sentences for me.
I don't know what I'm going to say.
Okay, let me take a brief commercial time out and try to remember where I was going next, because if I don't, the staff will tell me.
Okay, so I remembered where I was going.
Yes, the global warming crew.
It's so classic.
I just love it.
They're going down to Antarctica, the South Pole, For those of you in Rio Linda.
And they're going to prove that there's so much global warming that there isn't any ice or very little ice, that it's melting, and uh they it's a cruise, and they get stuck in the ice far, far away from their intended destination.
So icebreakers are called in the icebreakers get stuck as a ChICOM icebreaker that got stuck.
They needed all of these fossil fuel gigantic ships to rescue them after a week.
And every news, every one of them.
Let me put this way, not one news story makes the connection that these are a bunch of hypocrites.
Not one notes the irony.
They just talk about a brave bunch of scientists needing to be rescued in Antarctica.
Meanwhile, we have more record lows last year than record highs.
And in Green Bay for football this Sunday, oh in Green Bay on Sunday afternoon, 4.25 Eastern time, the San Francisco afforders will show up for a wild card playoff game against the Green Bay Packers.
Quarterback by Aaron Rodgers, who uh said this week he's not gay.
Now that's a fascinating thing to me, too.
Folks, we're gonna be hopscotching all over the place today because I've been gone a little bit over two weeks.
I'm just getting back here in the saddle, and it's gonna be a stream of consciousness show, which means I don't even know what I'm gonna say next.
But thankfully I have the helpful staff to help me finish my sentences here.
Well, because apparently there were internet rumors that Aaron Rodgers is gay, which I had not seen.
This is a fascinating media study.
I had not seen it.
Now, granted, I'm out of town, I'm on vacation, and I am off the grid.
I didn't turn on the television until New Year's Eve to watch that stuff.
And even that was a chore.
So I wasn't aware, and I was I was I was I was doing show prep with the computer, but even at that, I didn't see any of this.
But apparently in social media, it was out there Aaron Rodgers was gay.
But I didn't know it until he chose to deny it on his radio show.
Now, and therefore what's fascinating is a media study, his denial is what made it a national story, not the allegation by whoever was making it.
He chose to deny it.
No, no, no, no, I love women.
I don't know where this and he laughed it off.
But up until then, nobody even knew it.
So I only mention it as a it's a great illustration of how media works, because we've talked over the years.
You know, I am continuously attacked, mercilessly so.
In fact, folks, I've got sound bites that when I was gone, they're still beating me up over this Pope business.
They got these sound bites, it's just incredible.
And you know what I find most fascinating about it?
The left finally is happy they've got a church again.
Because of me, the left has felt comfortable now.
You'll hear it, embracing the Catholic Church.
This is a phenomenal achievement on my part.
There aren't too many people who could have turned atheists into huge supporters of the Pope.
Or agnostics, whatever.
Oh, by the way, that means I have to thank the guest hosts.
And the guest hosts we had Mark Stein as usual was in, and Mark Belling and Eric Erickson of Redstate.com, and uh he sent me, I can't tell you, two or three email notes thanking me for the opportunity.
He told me it's it's been a lifelong dream of his to uh to sit behind the golden EIB microphone.
And he loved it.
And he you know, he he told me, he said, I know that your show is the most listened to, but I found evidence.
I, after doing your show, he's got his own show at Atlanta, and after doing your show, I started hearing from people that I haven't heard from or known in in years, who heard me on the radio for the first time.
He was all excited.
But I want to thank all those people for uh coming in and hosting the program.
We sincerely appreciate it.
And they all do uh a bang up great job.
And most of them only lose about 60% of the audience, which is about that that's much better than most.
I'm sorry.
told you it's gonna.
It's gonna be that I made that up, folks.
It just totally I lied.
I just having fun with it here.
I told you it's gonna be a stream of consciousness program today.
So anyway, back to back to Green Bay and a quarterback who isn't gay, Aaron Rodgers, hosting a San Francisco Fortiners 425.
The forecast is three degrees for the high and minus 15 for the low.
The wind.
Oh, the wind is is gonna blow enough that there will be a wind chill.
I haven't I haven't seen actual numbers on the on the windshield.
Now, I don't expect this to happen, but I won't be surprised if the league postpones the game because it's just too cold.
And it's gonna be cold in other parts of the country too.
But but my point I would love to see it this I'd love to see Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Al Gore sitting outside 50-yard line, Green Bay the whole game, and then afterwards do a presentation for us all on global warming.
Sit there the whole game outside.
Do you know that the NFL, and I've been on this kick for a while, they've got a problem.
They probably are aware of it.
As we speak, three of these four games are not sold out, and including Green Bay.
The Green Bay Packers, if they don't get rid of, I the last I heard it was 8,500 tickets.
It's probably fewer than that now.
By some time today, then there's gonna be a blackout.
Now we all know there won't be a blackout.
Jay-Z or somebody will move in and buy the tickets.
Or Jesse Jack, no, Jesse Jackson won't.
Uh somebody will move in by the there won't be a blackout.
The NFL will not allow that to happen.
But it may take an effort beyond normal commerce to sell out tickets in three of the four.
The other two place, Cincinnati and Indianapolis.
Playoff games.
This is there's something going on with, and it's I don't think it's just the weather, and you can get a much better experience at home.
I think there's more to it than that.
I think the economy is definitely a factor.
And I think there are other things going on as well that are helping to create this uh this problem.
Now, back to de Blasio in New York.
We've got some sound bites of the inauguration.
John Fund of the of National Review was there, uh, wrote a little bit about it.
The the uh the keynote was provided by well-known communist and communist sympathizer Harry Belafonte.
And I don't say that laughingly or joking, he is a pro-communist.
He's 86, he's got a history of extremism.
He's been a house guest to Fidel Castro.
You might remember that Harry Belafonte called Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice house slaves of the Bush administration.
Last year he compared the Koch brothers to the Ku Klux Klan.
So that's the guy doing the keynote at the inauguration of the new mayor, Bill De Blasio.
And he said we no longer, we will be no longer a divided city.
He compared today's New York to a Dickensian nightmare, as in Charles Dickens, as Mayor Doomberg sat there looking on stonefaced.
Because these people ripped in, all the de Blasio people, all the speakers just ripped into New York as it is.
And Bloomberg is sitting there on the dais as the outgoing mayor, and he's stone faced because he's being insulted left and right.
At some point, Bill Clinton got up to speak.
He swore de Blasio in.
Clinton got up to speak and was the first guy to say something decent about about Bloomberg and the crowd booed.
This crowd, the crowd that showed up to see the inauguration of de Blasio.
I mean, folks, we're we're these are not just leftist Democrats.
This is the extreme far left of this country.
One of the first things De Blasio said he's going to do is eliminate the horse-drawn carriages in Central Park.
Just gonna get rid of them.
And not just in Central Park, but everywhere.
Just gonna wipe out and why why do you think that is?
Don, you love animals.
Why do you think the new mayor of New York is going to get rid of the horse-drawn carriage?
Now keep in mind, keep in mind that these people believe that automobiles are responsible for destroying the planet.
Keep in mind these people think that automobiles and fossil fueled vehicles are destroying the climate.
And would love to take us back to the horse and buggy days, except the new mayor of New York thinks it is cruel and inhumane for horses to pull carriages with people in them.
If horses are pulling, you know, carts and manure, I guess that's okay.
But if they're doing it for the pleasure of human beings, then it is abuse of the horse.
And we're not gonna have it.
We're not gonna be an inhumane city anymore.
We're not gonna treat our animals like animals.
We're not we're not gonna be inhumane.
We're not gonna have horses pulling carriages around with a bunch of fat people in them.
For the pleasure of these people and putting these horses out, that's inhumane, and we're not gonna do it.
Does this guy have no understanding of the history of horses?
Does he have no idea they were created as beasts of burden among many other purposes?
Next thing you know, he's gonna say it's inhumane to ride a horse.
Would you like to be ridden?
And of course a bunch of left will say, well, yeah, every night I'd love to be.
I wonder, and I'm sure De Blasio knows that Teamsters run the carriage rides in Central Park.
He's he's just he's wiping out a teamster concession.
But that's that's not the point.
The point is he's doing it because it's cruel and inhumane to the horses to pull carriages.
And we aren't gonna be for that in New York.
We are not gonna be seen as Central Park in in one respect was designed with horse-drawn carriages in mind.
And I thought I thought the left wanted us to go back to horses, the horse and buggy, to get rid of fossil fuel vehicles.
This is the kind of of time-wasting minutia that that occupies these people's minds.
And and this is the kind of move that De Blasio is convinced people will see that he's a caring and feeling and touching and sensitive, compassionate individual, and all it does is telegraph his utter ignorance of history.
Anyway, I'm I'm sure this is something that's gonna pop up as, and there's gonna be more than this.
This is just the beginning, folks, of the ongoing adventures of what's gonna be happening here to New York City.
That's going to sound bites from the inaugural Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Conan ripoff, I've got it here.
I get to it here in just a second.
I mean, I'll tell you what it is.
We were the first to discover and document how the media, all of them, will yet use the same word or phrase in covering a story.
We put together a montage.
When Bush chose Cheney to be his vice presidential running mate in uh in 2000.
The media used the word gravitas to discuss and describe Cheney and the move.
And we put together a montage of at least 20 different media people, all using the phrase.
All using the word.
And whenever we have found it happening again, we've put together another montage.
Well, I guess last week sometime Conan did the same thing, as though it had never been done before.
And the media is talking about what a brilliant comedic bit it was.
And the media is talking about, oh my God, look at what Conan's discovered.
And the media is out there.
My gosh, this is incredible what Conan's discovered about the way the media operates.
And I will bet you that the 20 writers that Conan O'Brien has will each win an Emmy for this.
Even though our gravity testing, when did we first air this?
No, this was 2002.
It has to go back to 2000.
Has to be 14 years ago now.
And we've been airing it a lot since.
Well, anyway, that's the Conan ripoff.
And I'll get to that in due course.
But first, here is Bill Clinton.
Yesterday in New York City at City Hall, as Democrat Bill DeBlasio was formally sworn in as mayor.
Before the swearing in, Clinton spoke and uh he felt the need to praise Doomberg.
This inequality problem bedevils the entire country.
But it is not just a moral outrage, it is a horrible constraint on economic growth and on giving people the security we need to tackle problems like climate change.
I meanwhile, global warming scientists stuck in the middle of Antarctic ice, they didn't even know it was there.
Inequality in New York, Clinton's in the super rich now.
He's part of the problem.
The Democrat Party creates this inequality.
Again, folks, the Democrat Party needs a permanent underclass.
That's their base.
That's who elects them.
They need people who are in poverty.
They need the poor to stay poor so that they need government benefits provided by they think Democrats.
The Democrat Party and their policies ever since FDR's New Deal and moving forward to LBJ and the Great Society have created this inequality.
This gap of income inequality, this gap of habit.
It's not the rich that are creating this.
You have to find out, if you want to find out why this gap exists, you have to look at what is it that's keeping the poor poor.
Now, what the Democrats want you to do is focus on the rich and hate them.
Democrats want you to focus on the rich and the successful and resent them and hate them, and to think that they're stealing from you, and to think that the rich have what used to be your money.
They've somehow found a way to take it from you, even though you never have it, uh, and they're not giving it back to you.
Proof that trickle down doesn't work.
And so the Democrats are going to come into play Robin Hood, and they're going to take it from these rich people who took it from you, and they're going to give it back to you.
And they've been doing this for I don't know how long.
The Democrats have been redistributing wealth ever since FDR.
And the underclass has stayed the underclass, hasn't it?
While it it since LBJ's great society, starting in 1964, there has been over eight trillion dollars of income redistributed since 1964.
And 8 trillion might be low.
Over $8 trillion has been taken via taxation from the wealthy, from the achievers, from successful people, and transferred to the poor.
And the poor are still poor.
And according to Democrats, they're poorer than ever.
And the gap is wider than ever.
Well, to find the answer to this, or the explanation, you have to find out, you have to ask who's keeping the poor poor, or who is preventing the poor from escaping poverty.
And then you ask, who is it subsidizing poverty?
Who is it keeping people?
And your answer is always going to take you back to the Democrat Party, who, while they're responsible for it, continue to mount their soapbox and blame others.
Back after this.
Man, I don't know where it's going.
The first hour, fastest three hours in media is in the can.
Folks, I can't tell you how good it is to be back.
I just love being with you here each and every day.
Look forward to it.
I can't believe it.
It's great to be here.
And I know that you feel the same way.
So we'll take a brief time out here at the top of the hour.
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