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Jan. 2, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:40
January 2, 2014, Thursday, Hour #2
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The views expressed by the host of this program documented to be almost always right, 99.7% at a time.
Happy to have you along, folks.
I am Rush Limbaugh, America's real anchor man.
America's truth detector, the doctor of democracy, all combined here in one harmless, lovable little fuzzball package.
Happy to be with you.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program 800-282-2882, the email address, Lrushbo at EIBNet.com.
And again, we welcome a couple of new stations to the network today, W O R AM 720 in New York.
710, sorry, AM 710, and K E I B in Los Angeles, AM 11.
Now you got me confused.
I think it's 1150 in LA.
It doesn't matter.
People will find it.
They'll just search and scan and hear my voice, and that's it.
Locked on forever.
Anyway, we continued our massive expansion here at the EIB.
No, what was I thinking?
720.
Something was in my mind on 70.
It is W-O-R-A-M 71.
Okay, uh I owe you a couple of sound bites.
I promised them from the De Blasio swearing in.
We've played Clinton.
Here's Harry Belafonte, just to give you flavor for this stuff.
This is Belafonte after swearing in the new mayor of New York yesterday.
Changing the stop and frisk law is as important as it is.
The change of the law is only the tip of the iceberg in fixing our deeply Dekensian justice system.
Dickensian justice system.
So these people are standing up and they are reciting a litany of things wrong in New York City.
And aside from Mayor Giuliani, this place has been run by leftists forever.
Every problem that exists in New York derives from liberalism.
Everyone.
Now, I want to repeat something here.
What these people are all talking about...
Well, Belafonte's talking about the prison system and uh the racist way that justice is handled in New York and the prison population.
But the rallying cry for de Blasio was this income inequality, class warfare, class envy, which of course is easy because the numbers of middle class and poor people vastly outnumber the rich.
Plus the rich are not interested in defending themselves.
Uh nothing in it for them.
So there's never any sympathy for the rich.
Not that there should be, but there isn't.
So playing the class warfare card is easy for the Democrats, and in terms of the shotgun approach, you're simply going to probably achieve more accolytes or attract more accolytes by going after the rich.
They can't outnumber you, the, but the middle class and the poor combined can.
This is what the Democrats have always done.
But the question of income inequality is a is a real one.
And the question of prosperity and how to achieve it, those are real questions, and there are real economic answers.
There is a way to increase prosperity.
It's called capitalism.
There is a way to increase what people earn.
It's called capitalism.
It's called productivity.
It's not the answer to this is not the government.
It isn't redistribution, because the government doesn't create anything.
The government can only destroy wealth.
It cannot create it.
Well, a caveat to that.
They can print money and give it to the stock market, like they've been doing.
But on the whole, they can't create wealth, and they don't.
They don't produce anything.
Government simply destroys wealth.
And this is what the Democrat Party in many things is as many ways has become.
They've got voters who want them to destroy wealth.
And the belief is that they're going to take the money from the rich and the Democrats somehow are going to give the money to the poor in the middle class.
And there have been people voting Democrat 50 years expecting to get rich in the process.
They haven't.
They've either stayed economically the same or they've gotten poor.
And again, if you want to find out why income inequality exists or why there is a wide gap between rich and poor, you have to, if you're going to intellectually honestly approach this, you have to ask, who is it that's keeping the poor poor?
Because somebody is.
Somebody who benefits from the poor.
Who benefits from the fact that there are poor people?
And that answers the Democrat Party.
It's in their vested interests to keep people poor and then promise them every four years they're going to fix it.
It's in their interest to keep people poor and tell those people they're poor because of evil rich people and Republicans.
And that only Democrats can fix it.
But the Democrats, in truth, are not interested in upward mobility.
Whenever there are two groups, let's let's look at education.
Let's look at the one of Democrats' creationist outcome-based education.
In a school, this actually happened.
You have high achievers, people get good grades, very smart, and then you've got people not doing so well.
Kids.
The Democrats look at that and they say it's not fair.
These kids are getting A's and learning a lot and much faster than others.
It's not fair.
And what are the Democrats do?
Try to slow them down.
The Democrats punish the achievers.
They do not ever attempt to elevate the people at the bottom.
The way the Democrats go about seeking equality is to lower people at the top.
The Democrats' dream is if they're, I mean, what they want people to believe the dream is, is that there would never be any rich.
The Democrats are going to see to it.
A lot of people vote Democrat thinking this, that the Democrats are going to wipe out the rich.
They're finally going to wipe them out.
They're going to take their money and they're going to give it to the poor and they're going to give it to the middle class.
They're going to give everybody a host, house, and a home and whatever they want, and we're going to have equality.
And nobody's going to have to work for it.
All you have to do is vote Democrat time and time again, and that'll happen.
And that's what the Democrats promised.
That's that's basically one of the fundamental aspects of their campaign, year after year after year.
And in the process, they have kept people poor.
They've destroyed work ethic.
They have destroyed people's ambitions.
They've taken away their drive.
It's really, you talk about inhumane treatment of horses and so forth.
What the Democrat Party has done to the vast majority of people to vote for them, to me, is near criminal in the political sense.
The lives that they've destroyed, the ambition they've destroyed, the dignity they've taken away, the families they've busted up, all in the pursuit of their own power.
And while they do this, they blame a bunch of hapless Republicans.
They blame the rich.
And of course, nobody, very few people, let's put this way most people would love to be able to blame everybody else or somebody else for their problems.
And the Democrats even provide that.
You're not doing well?
Fine.
You're getting screwed.
The rich took your money.
You're not doing well?
Fine.
The Republicans don't care about you.
They like the fact that you're poor.
They want your money to go to the rich and the oil companies and the pharmaceutical companies.
And so forth.
But it's a Democrat Party that's responsible for the widening gap between rich and poor.
It's a Democrat and their policies that are responsible for income inequality.
The Democrat Party has done its best to impugn capitalism and the very route to prosperity.
They've turned people away from it.
They've convinced people it's unfair, it's unjust, and it's immoral.
And it's led to a disaster.
And wherever Democrats have ruled the roost for years, you see the evidence.
And I've let me let me find this picture that I've I talked about this in the first hour.
And here it is.
This story is from the New York Daily News, and it goes, it's back on December 22nd.
Micro apartments could lead to major psychological problems, a report shows.
The City of New York plans to build a residential tower of apartments between 250 and 370 square feet at 225 East 27th Street in Manhattan.
But health experts say that placing people in their 30s and 40s in such cramped spaces can increase the rates of domestic violence and substance abuse.
It's also in the Atlantic, well-known leftist magazine.
Studies have shown that children raised in tight spaces can end up withdrawn and struggle to study and concentrate, according to Susan Sagert, professor of environmental psychology at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
City housing officials contend that the smaller apartments will create more affordable units that can be made cozy with adjustable furniture.
They'll be miserable, but it'll be affordable.
Micro apartments planned in New York City.
A residential tower of apartments between 250 and 370 square feet.
What this is is the equivalent of people living in what amounts to cargo containers stacked on top of each other.
Or as Mr. Snerdley pointed out, jail cells.
Now let's be clear about something.
This is a solution.
This is a solution that Mayor Doomberg and others in New York think is a brilliant idea.
This is what liberalism has wrought.
Their own policies have created massive gaps in the price of real estate.
Massive gaps in what people earn.
Massive gaps in standards of living.
Widening, ever widening gaps in what people earn.
So the Democrats come along, their own policies create circumstances where there isn't any quote unquote affordable housing.
Their own policies create this nightmare.
And their solution, and they're patting themselves on the back, and they're being that they consider themselves compassionate is 250 square foot cargo containers as homes.
I don't know how these people get elected.
Who in the world thinks this is a good idea?
Obama's brother lives in a place like this.
A hut.
Now Obama's brother lives at a place at six by nine in Kenya.
These places are not that much bigger.
And this is a solution.
These 270 square feet, 250, 370, these are intended for families.
You've got to have a toilet in there.
You've got to have beds and adjustable furniture.
This offends me greatly.
This offends my sensibility.
The idea that this is praiseworthy.
The idea that this is a solution.
This is how New York creates affordable housing, and liberals who come up with this idea want to get applauded, and by the way, the people coming up with this idea wouldn't set foot in this building, much less one of these apartments.
These people coming up with these ideas live in massively large houses.
So you also have the specter of a bunch of liberals devising plans for other people to live that they themselves wouldn't even, kind of like Obamacare.
None of the people who wrote Obamacare want anything to do with it.
None of the people responsible for Obamacare can afford it.
They all want subsidies.
None of the people that gave us Obamacare have any desire to actually go to healthcare.gov and sign up.
That's for you and me to have to do.
But there's a picture here of Mayor Doomberg and Amanda Burden and some housing authority guy, and they're in a building with these 250 square foot places marked off on the floor, proudly displaying how many of them will fit on one floor and praising themselves for what a brilliant housing idea.
And meanwhile, they're going to ban horse-drawn carriages because it's inhumane to the horses.
But it's perfectly fine to stack people in 250 square foot cargo containers.
We're not talking about the homeless folks.
We're talking people who are going to pay for these.
They're going to go out and get mortgages, maybe subprime for a 250 square foot cargo container in an apartment building in New York City.
And they want applause for a great idea.
This is their solution.
Don't think that you are immune to this just because you don't live in New York.
These people want to run the country.
This is how, by the way, you need people live here, they're going to have no way they're going to have a car, not going to be permitted to have a car.
They're going to have to use transit, mass transit, the Hoof Express, whatever it is.
This is called reducing the standard of living.
This is called lowering the standard of living.
This is not reducing any income gap.
This is making people poorer.
And the purpose of this story is to point out how it's going to make them crazy.
Literally crazy.
You put a mom and dad and a kid or two in this space?
Yes.
And say the family must do everything it normally does in that space.
And this story is pointing out you're going to have people going nuts.
Literally going crazy in this kind of space.
As their home.
Sit tight, my friends, much more straight ahead as we roll on today.
It is the indispensable Rush Limbaugh program on the EIB network, our first one of the new year.
2014, I remember Mayor Doomberg refused to move into Gracie Mansion, which is the official residence of the mayor of New York.
He refused because it wasn't good enough.
It wasn't big enough.
It wasn't good enough.
They said the security wasn't good enough, but it just wasn't good enough overall.
And Mayor Doomberg wants to overturn.
There's a law dating back to 1987 in New York that requires that an apartment be at least 400 square feet.
And now progress, 250 to 370 square feet.
Here's Karen in Tucson, Arizona as we hit the phones.
Karen, thank you for waving.
Great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Thanks, Rush.
I'm about jump out in my skin.
You know, we used to hear about the McMansions during the Reagan Bush one era, even the Clinton Bobble era.
But now the Democrats, we're getting Soviet block housing in apartments.
It's like watching House Hunters International.
You know, this watching House Hunters International.
I don't know why that amuses me, but it it humorously amuses me.
I love that description.
Soviet bloc type housing.
Exactly.
It's exactly what it is.
It is Soviet bloc type housing.
Well, you got a communist in office now in New York City.
Yeah.
Well, um I I don't think that that's wrong.
I I really don't think that's incorrect.
I mean, you've got at least a pro-communist supporter, if if not.
Look, Folks, let me again uh point something out.
I oftentimes make a mistake of assuming too much.
Um in talking about income inequality and the gap between the rich and the poor and the Democrats.
That's not what this is really all about when they talk about that.
They think uh de Blasio, de Blasio's made this big deal.
He's gonna he's gonna-that's the first thing he's gonna do.
He's gonna go in there and they're gonna fix this income inequality.
But the first thing well, the the horses, they're gonna protect the horse, save the horse is the first thing.
And then income inequality.
That's not what it's about.
It's about control, folks.
It's about New Yorkers surrendering even more control over their own lives, surrendering more of their own self-determination.
This is about people who wish to control every aspect of the way you live.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have rush limbaugh with half my brain tied behind my back.
Just to be fair about things.
Brad in San Diego next, great to have you on the program, Brad.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
Thanks for having me on.
You bet.
I heard something on the radio last week on uh uh what I listened to KFI, and apparently people who have suddenly lost their insurance going on to the.gov website to see about other plans that were available.
And they put their information in to get to the level where they could do a review and decided not to buy anything.
Then that information was apparently released to independent sales reps.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And well, as a doctor, we're required by the HIPAA law to keep all this information very protected.
Yeah, HIPAA law schmippa law.
I learned that the HIPAA law doesn't mean beans.
If law enforcement wants your health records, they're gonna get them.
If the if the if this regime wants your health records, they're gonna get them.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Well, it's $250,000 penalty per event.
So the people whose insurance information or protected information because it was related to insurance, uh, it should look into how they should pursue that.
Well, you know, this was one of the first things people learned about when healthcare.gov have you heard the latest in this by the the the regime is saying that we never said seven million signups was our target.
We never said that.
You know, life is easy if you can lie.
If you can lie about everything and nobody ever calls you on it and get away with it, life is easy.
And this is what they do.
Obama lied for three years.
You get to keep your doctor if you like it, get to keep your insurance if you like it.
No, you didn't.
And Obama said, no, I didn't say that.
I said, if nothing changes in your policy, you get to keep it.
He did not say that.
He promised, period.
If you like your plan, you get to keep it.
The White House health care website still makes that promise.
There are certain, I think Mary Landrew, I maybe not her.
But there are certain Democrat senators.
Their website still maintain, if you like your plan, you can keep it.
Now, last year, before healthcare.gov opened for business, the regime said they needed seven million before the end of the year, before this day they needed seven million.
And over the weekend, they were doing hoops and making dances and having parties because they claimed that the corner had been turned and 2.1 million people had signed up.
And then somebody said, Well, wait, wait, you said you needed seven million.
And they're saying no, we didn't, but they did.
It's on tape, it's in print, but they're just denying it.
We didn't say seven million.
Nobody ever said seven million.
And in a political sense, this is the Republicans don't know what to do with this.
I do you know how to deal with a liar.
It is a challenging thing to deal with a liar.
These people, this is a political party that just lies as a matter of course.
And the problem with it is that the impressionable, low information people who vote for them believe all these lies.
And then they create life, lives based on a series of lies.
And then standards begin to crumble, and then promises mean nothing.
And then honor and integrity come to mean nothing.
And then standards don't exist.
And then there's nothing accountable and nothing anybody can depend on.
And so there aren't any guardrails, and that's where we are in in many ways in our culture.
Let me give you an example.
Let me let me use a football example.
Let me find the story.
And I gotta be very, very careful about this.
This is one of these things where if I am not careful, and by careful I mean really being detailed, because this is the kind of thing a lot of people would love to take me out of context on.
It involves Peyton Manning of the Denver Broncos and the passing yardage record.
Peyton Manning, the quarterback of the Denver Broncos, turns out will remain the league's single season record holder for passing yards.
In the last game of the season, Peyton Manning only played one half.
He was taken out after setting the record.
The pass that broke the record was a seven-yard pass to the Broncos receiver Eric Decker.
And that seven-yard completion gave Peyton Manning the single season record for passing yardage in the NFL, breaking the record held by Drew Brees of the New Orleans Saints.
Now, because the in-house, the press box, the stadium statisticians gave Manning the record, the Broncos sat him down in the second half, and he didn't play anymore.
Had he played the second half, he would have racked up even more passing yardage.
By default, he's going to complete passes in the second half if he plays, but he didn't.
Well, it turns out that some people thought that that seven-yard pass that gave him the record wasn't a forward pass, that it was a lateral.
So they looked at it on videotape.
They looked at it on a series of still shots taken from the videotape.
And if you looked at it, you would conclude, like a number of other people in the media concluded, that it was not a forward pass, that it in fact was a pass backwards by one yard.
I have looked at it over and over again.
Looked at it on the way back home yesterday, last night, and looked to me, I mean, countless times.
This is not a criticism of Peyton Manning.
It's really not a criticism of anybody specific here.
I have a much larger point that I'm trying to get to here, but I got to set up the details of the circumstance.
I didn't see the game.
I didn't watch the game.
I only became aware of this when others in the sports media began to question whether or not it was a forward pass.
Well, the official statistician of the NFL is the Elias Sports Bureau.
The Elias Sports Bureau is the final word on statistics in the NFL.
And the Elias Sports Bureau was given this play to look at.
And they decided not to change it.
The play will remain as a completion, and Peyton Manning will hold the record after further review.
But it was a backward pass.
Again, forget that Peyton Manning's even involved here.
This is not about Peyton Manning.
I have no opinion.
If he sets the record or not, it's not any consequence to me.
I'm not a Peyton Manning fan, don't dislike none of that.
To me, this is about standards and controversy and the avoidance.
And it may be in the big scheme of things a minor point, but I think there's a whole lot of little things like this going on that portend big problems in our culture.
Because what it adds up to is what's right isn't right.
What's wrong isn't wrong.
It's what somebody wants something to be that is.
Now it could well be that the Elias people are figuring, you know what, we don't want to be involved in this.
They said at the stadium it's a forward pass, and we're not going to be the ones to take the record away from Pate Manning.
It ain't gonna fall down on us.
This okay, it ain't gonna be us.
So they leave it alone.
Or it could be that somebody at the Elias Sports Bureau said, well, you know, okay, so the in-house statisticians blew it, but it happened real fast.
They didn't have the the benefits of replay to look at it, but you can fix this any time.
But Peyton would have played in the second half if if this if this had been rulilateral and he hadn't set the record on this play, they would have played him in the second half.
He would have broken the record, so we're gonna go ahead and count this, even though he didn't break it, he would have broken it.
But he didn't.
Now there are mitigating circumstances.
Actually, he did, because they said he did.
Now the Pittsburgh Steelers were denied a playoff spot because the referees in the San Diego, Kansas City City game blew a huge infraction on the Chargers.
Now let's take these two things.
The Chargers had an illegal formation when the Chiefs kicked a field goal, it would have won the game against the uh the Chargers in the last game of the season, four seconds left, and the kicker for the Chiefs missed it wide right by inches.
There should have been a flag thrown.
Because the Chargers had more than six men lined up to the right side of the center.
You can only have six men lined up on either side of the center in a kicking formation, field goal or extra point.
Chargers had seven.
This rule was put in place for safety, so there wouldn't be as many concussions, there wouldn't be as much brutality, so there wouldn't be so much unfairness.
Putting seven guys up against five, it's unfair.
It's brutish, we're not going to do this.
So they put the rule in.
Chargers broke the rule.
The refs didn't call it.
The kicker missed the kick.
Had the refs called a penalty, there'd have been a five-yard penalty, and the 41-yard field goal would have been attempted again from 36 yards, where the field goal kicker would have had a better chance of making the field.
Now, why in this case didn't they go ahead and say, well, you know what?
The kicker would have made the kick.
If they're saying, well, Peyton would have broken the record in the second half, because he would have played if they hadn't counted the seven-yard pass as a forward pass and therefore seven yards and he breaks the record.
He would have played.
Well, I mean, the kicker would have made the kick.
I'm not, no, I couldn't care less about this.
The Steelers didn't deserve to be in the playoffs anyway.
That's not the point, Mr. Snurdly Sterley to say I'm doing Steeler homerism.
I'm not.
I I'm, folks, I'm I'm worried about we're we're becoming mushy, squishy as a culture and a system.
Camille Padier has written about this extensively.
There's a great piece on her uh what she thinks about this Wall Street Journal I've got here in the in the stack.
Her piece about manliness and how we're we're diminishing it in our culture for all the wrong reasons, and to our uh great great, we're gonna have many problems as a result of getting rid of manliness and so forth, and it's all being done in the interest of fairness and not offending people and war on women and all this specious stuff.
But to me, uh There are absolutes, but since absolutes offend people, we're gonna water down the absolutes.
We're just gonna take the easy road.
It doesn't offend anybody, that doesn't upset anybody, doesn't cause any controversy.
And we'll just we'll just do that.
And I'm telling you, in the process of doing this, it's a slow cumulative, and it's been going on a while.
This is not the beginning of this.
Such things as, well, we're gonna penalize that kid's team 55 points at the start, because they're just so much better.
The other team doesn't even have a prayer.
So that team's gonna start minus 35.
Or we're just not gonna keep score, because we don't want to humiliate the losers.
Or we're just we're not gonna give A's anymore since nobody, since not everybody can get A's.
We're just gonna give everybody the same grade so that there isn't any humiliator.
Whatever it is that we're doing.
But in the process here, what is absolute is being diluted.
What is right and what is wrong is being diluted.
Watered down.
Blurred, and then in the end, you end up lying to yourself.
You end up believing you've done something when you haven't done it.
Or conversely, you didn't do something that you think you did.
And it just the whole all of this troubles me.
What's happening with with the the left just lying about everything?
And the things that their acolytes, their low information, they believe this stuff.
It is a it is an ongoing problem.
And it's creating not just ignorance, it's creating a bunch of people who are dead wrong about things they fervently believe they're right.
Anyway, I've I'm yeah, this is one of the things I told you before I left.
I've been developing, trying to come up with cogent ways to uh explain what it is about this kind of thing.
It's troubling me, and I'm gonna have to keep working on it.
I think it's a big deal.
Uh it has it has horrible consequences for our culture uh down the road that we're already seeing the ramifications of now.
I gotta take a break.
I just saw the clock.
I'm late.
Uh we'll be back after this.
Don't go.
The thing that troubles me here, folks, is that we are dumbing down every standard, every rule.
And the problem with this is how can we how can there ever be excellence or real merit when the standards are constantly being eroded?
Maybe it's nothing new.
Maybe it's something going on ever since the beginning of time.
I'm sure it is.
I just don't believe it's been happening on this scale.
If if kids can't read when they graduate, graduate them anyway.
If they can't pass their final to graduate, lower the standards.
If somebody can't pass a test to become a fireman, lower the standard.
Too dumb to get into college, lower the standard, raise the price.
People too fat to be accepted in the military, change the standard.
We're defining everything down.
And it just it it's not gonna end well because it there how can how can there really be excellence or even any real merit when there's an asterisk by every achievement, which is where we're headed.
Then you couple that with the assault on achievement that is taking place in much of our culture and society, and it is uh it's it's it's problematic.
The worst thing is you end up lying to yourself.
And you end up teaching the lesson that getting close is the same thing to accomplishing something when it isn't.
All right.
Um I promise I'm gonna try to focus on calls.
I'm gonna do the Conan bit.
I have not been teasing you with this.
I've just said other things on my mind first.
We'll do a bunch of stuff, including getting to more of your phone calls the next hour when we get back.
Happy New Year, everybody.
Great to be with you.
Our new stations today, W-O-R-A-M-7-10 in New York, and K E I B AM 1150 in Los Angeles.
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