Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Wildebeests.
Wildebeests.
That's what the drive-by media heard me say.
No, I take it back.
They did not hear me say it.
They read in the Politico that I said it.
Wildebeests compared the rhinos not defending Christie to Wildebeests.
They all found that amusing.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
I sit here and I'm honestly, folks, I'm surprised at the reaction on the Republican side to what is happening to Chris Christie.
When that press conference was over yesterday, all of these opinion makers, well, practically all.
I mean, there's some exceptions to this.
But all of the wise men, all of the wizards of Smartson, you know what?
He handled it perfectly.
Why?
He was honest.
We hope he was honest.
He was right in there.
He did a 107-minute print.
He went out there and he nailed it.
Christie was absolutely superb.
This is just, and they are now stunned that the media isn't letting go of it.
These are Republicans who can't believe.
They thought Christie buried it yesterday.
They thought Christie's press conference was just the greatest thing it ever heard and it buried it and it ended it and they can't believe.
And this is quite telling, folks.
I mean, this, the Republican wise men are confused over what's after witnessing what's happened to George W. Bush, after witnessing, pick your favorite Republican, pick it, after witnessing years and years and years of how they are treated, they actually thought Christie was going to be able to and had buried this yesterday.
And now they're wringing their hands and they don't quite know what to make of this.
They're worried, maybe does somebody know Christie was lying?
Because they thought Christie nailed it.
Because he came out and he told the truth.
He fired a couple of people and he spent two hours with the media.
I mean, he did it exactly right.
Except, have you seen the statistic?
In one day, the media has already spent, well, it's a phenomenal comparison.
The amount of time the media spent on Christie versus the IRS scandal.
In one day, they have equaled what took place in 17 days or some such thing.
That's not it.
I've got it here in the stack.
I'll get to it.
But it's not a surprise to you and me how unbalanced the media coverage is.
It's stunning to me, though, how surprised the Republican intelligentsia is over this.
Anyway, how are you, folks?
I hope you have a great week and weekend coming up.
It's Friday here at the EIB network, which means Open Line Friday, which means not much different, except when we go to the phones.
There are few, if any, restrictions on callers.
Monday through Thursday, the callers have to talk about something I care about.
But on Friday, we broom that requirement and open it up.
Here's the phone number if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882, the email address, El Rushbo at EIBnet.com.
Some of the Republican intelligentsia believe that Christie's biggest problem now is wait for it, talk radio.
Some Republicans actually think that the biggest problem Christie has is right here.
Talk radio.
I'm not the one, and nobody else I know on talk radio is spending all this time trying to destroy Christie.
It is their buddies in the drive-by media who are trying to do that.
It is their buddies who will not let go of this.
It is their buddies who, you know, when Rom Emmanuel engages in typical Chicago thug behavior, they call it tough politics, sharp elbows.
With Christie, they call him a bully and worse.
So we're going to get to all that in due course, but the jobs number came out.
And I'll tell you, I have never seen anything like this either.
We now have 92 million Americans not working.
We created the equivalent of 1,700 jobs per state in December.
December, one of the highest employment months of the year.
December's hiring traditionally is so good that the experts in the drive-by media were expecting 196,000 jobs to be created or begun, recorded in December, and the number came in at 74,000 jobs.
74,000 jobs, and half of these jobs are part-time, meaning under 30 hours.
The media is scratching their heads over that.
They can't figure it out.
Have you ever heard of Obamacare?
Half of these 74,000 jobs, or almost half, it's statistically pretty close, are part-time jobs.
The unemployment rate with 92 million Americans not working, with 74,000 jobs created in December, that is the lowest number, I think in three years.
It's bad.
It is horrible.
So 92 million Americans not working.
Labor force participation rate continues to shrink.
92 million Americans not working.
74,000 jobs created versus the expectation of nearly 200,000 jobs that they thought would be created.
Half the jobs are part-time.
And are you ready?
the unemployment rate fell to 6.7%.
It simply isn't possible.
You cannot have an unemployment rate of 6.7%.
And the reason this is important is because that's the number the low information voter sees.
That's the number the low information voter hears about.
And that number is down from, what, 7, 7.1%?
So the unemployment rate that the government puts out, that one number makes it look like we have a gang-up job creation market that's just cranked up and going full speed.
And the only reason that number is 6.7% Is because the vast majority of the 92 million Americans not working are not counted as unemployed.
And do you know why you do by now?
Because a vast majority of them have been unemployed for so long, they've stopped looking.
And if you're out of work and you stop looking for work, you are not counted as unemployed.
The only way you end up being counted as unemployed is if you are unemployed, but trying to find a job.
But we are paying people so much not to work that 92 million Americans can survive with three meals a day and whatever else while not working.
Stunning.
George W. Bush had at his peak an unemployment rate of 4.7%.
And that was a real 4.7%.
That was that statistic, statistically, full employment.
Because the conventional wisdom is that even in a full employment economy, you're still going to have people in flux moving in and out of jobs.
And you're going to basically have between 4% and 5% of the population not working at any given time.
So they statistically say it's full employment.
So they're asking us to believe that we're just two percentage points away from full employment.
It's an utter disaster what is happening in this economy.
It's an utter disaster what's happening in the job market.
It's a human tragedy what is happening in this country.
It's happening in the United States of America and it's been happening for five years.
And there is no end in sight.
And let me put the cherry on top of this.
As you will hear in the audio sound bites later on in the busy broadcast, noted Democrats like Chuck Hugh Schumer and others are actually very happy with the unemployment news today.
Give you one guess as to why.
It helps them secure new legislation for extended unemployment benefits.
For the purposes of extending unemployment benefits, you're not going to hear Democrats talk about 6.7% unemployment.
You're going to hear them talk about how disappointing the job creation market was.
And they're going to find a way to blame it on Republicans and the sequester and the shutdown.
You know how that goes.
And they're going to say that the Republicans owe it to the people they're harming to extend unemployment benefits for at least three months.
So once again, absolutely, shockingly horrible news is welcomed, greeted with great fanfare and excitement by the Democrat Party.
The unemployment rate, 6.7%, is the lowest since October 2000.
That's before Obama was elected.
The experts thought that it would hold steady at 7%.
This is an absolute, this is one of the biggest misdirections, the biggest head faints that I can recall.
This number is meaningless.
It's literally meaningless.
The U6 number, which counts people no longer looking for work as unemployed, I think is now at 13%.
And that is a much closer to reality number.
All you need to do is ask yourself or anybody else, how in the world can 92 million able-bodied Americans be not working and unemployment is at 6.7%?
And again, your average TMZ viewer, e-entertainment network viewer, your average viewer of the HBO show Girls will not know that 6.7% is ridiculous and irrelevant.
They're going to just think, oh, wow, economy is really going great now.
We're creating jobs left and right.
74,000 jobs created in the biggest month of the year, 92 million Americans totally out of the workforce.
It's just, if I had any political power, elected political power, this would be the only thing I'd be talking about today and how unacceptable this is.
I wouldn't be talking about lane closures and this stuff, but Christie and all that is a perfect distraction from all of this.
So it will continue to be discussed.
More than half, again, more than half of the 74,000 jobs created were temporary, part-time and temporary.
That's just, and 20,000 fewer women held jobs in December.
According to the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of employed women 16 and over declined by 20,000 from November to December.
The number of women employed dropped from 67,882,000 to 67,862,000 from November to December.
Barack Obama grabbed me audio soundbite number 21 yesterday afternoon at the White House during his announcement of the first five promise zones.
President Obama.
We've got to make sure this recovery, which is real, leaves nobody behind.
And that's going to be my focus throughout the year.
This is simply incompetence and irresponsibility and prevaricating, lying, whatever you want to call it, on parade.
We got to make sure that this recovery, which is real, leaves nobody behind.
And that's going to be my focus throughout the year.
92 million Americans not working.
74,000 jobs created when the experts expected 196,000 jobs.
Half the jobs created are temporary.
And while this burgeoning recovery is going on, we're not going to leave anybody behind.
We have to extend unemployment benefits for yet another three months.
Quick timeout, my friends.
We'll be back.
We'll continue.
We're loaded today.
And I wasn't kidding.
Republican establishment class very upset at me for comparing the rhinos and their reluctance to defend Christie to a bunch of wildebeests.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have Rush Limbaugh executing assigned host duties, flawlessly, zero mistakes.
This number of people not working, labor force participation rate, this is a record 92 million people.
This labor force participation rate plunge equals on a percentage basis where we were in 1978.
Now, I realize many of you are too young to remember 1978.
We were in the third year of Jimmy Carter, well, the second year of Jimmy Carter's administration.
And it, folks, things were so bad back then that the misery index was invented as a way of expressing how bad it was.
Interest rates were in the 12 to 14 percent range.
Inflation was double-digit.
I mean, it was an absolute, total, utter disaster.
Jimmy Carter was giving speeches in the White House about the national melee.
He was telling everybody to turn down the thermostat and wear sweaters because the Middle East was restricting oil delivery.
It was absolutely disastrous.
It was on the heels of the mess caused by Watergate, but it was, again, the policies of a liberal Democrat president.
This is Jimmy Carter's second term, is what's happening here.
Barack Obama is Jimmy Carter's second term if he had won.
So we're now statistically right where we were in the middle of the Jimmy Carter disaster.
And especially when you look at the similarity as percentage basis of the labor force participation rate.
All of this is just either as an American, knowing that these are real people affected by this.
These are real human beings who are affected by all of this.
And yet, inside the beltway, they're looked at as statistics or recipients of extended unemployment benefits.
And we have the Democrat Party telling us the most humane thing we can do is continue to pay them not to work.
And when somebody suggests, well, maybe we ought to start finally focusing on reviving the job market, they're mocked and laughed at and made fun of.
You know why?
Because in Washington, it's now considered so impossible.
It's just an over the, you mean, jobs?
That's not going to help anybody.
We can't wait for that to happen.
That's a small indication of how distorted and bastardized normalcy has become.
Open line Friday, Rush Limbaugh back at it.
Who needs governors?
Governors are irrelevant.
Today, the governor of Utah need not stay in office.
He can just quit.
You might recall that in Utah, government officials just stepped in, a court just stepped in and said, you know what?
Gay marriage is not legal in this state.
Eric Holder, the Attorney General of the United States, says that the federal government will recognize same-sex marriage in Utah for the purpose of federal benefits despite the Utah governor's directive not to, pending the Supreme Court's review of the state's ban.
So the states, when you've got people like Holder and Obama in office, it doesn't matter what governors do.
It doesn't matter what the people of the state want.
What Holder and Obama want is what's going to happen.
Holder does not have this kind of power or authority, but he does if nobody's going to stop him or challenge him.
Here at the Department of Justice website, justice.gov, here is Holder.
He released a video where he announced that the federal government will recognize same-sex marriage in Utah.
The hell with what the governor says.
Recently, an administrative step by the court has cast doubt on same-sex marriages that have been performed in the state of Utah.
And the governor has announced that the state will not recognize these marriages pending additional court action.
In the meantime, I am confirming today that for purposes of federal law, these marriages will be recognized as lawful and considered eligible for all relevant federal benefits on the same terms as other same-sex marriages.
These families should not be asked to endure uncertainty regarding their status as the litigation unfolds.
Why not?
So the law doesn't mean anything.
Existing law doesn't mean anything if changes to it are being contemplated.
And so the people of Utah, same-sex marriage, yes, no, are now victims and the federal government is going to ride in and wave the powerful magic wand and say this is the way it's going to be.
So who needs governors?
So what you have now, you have the Attorney General engaging in executive actions, executive orders.
Just as if Obama were to do it.
Stalinists, folks.
Back to the audio soundbites on the employment situation.
They figured this out at CNN.
On their new day, I guess this is their early morning show, one of their co-hosts, Kate Baldwin, is talking to Christine Romans, who is the chief business correspondent about the December job numbers.
And Kate Baldwin said, the labor department's just released the December jobs report, the final jobs report of 2013.
And here's Christine Roman with the details.
Hello, Christine.
A big miss.
The economists really got this wrong.
74,000 jobs created in the month, the last month of the year, only 74,000.
You remember, you had economists all week revising upward their expectations, closer to 200,000.
Here's the real shocker.
The jobless rate drops, drops to 6.7%.
Which I should be cheering.
How can that be?
The lowest jobless rate since 2008, basically?
More than half a million people just left the job market.
Just stopped looking for work.
74,000 jobs.
That is a big disappointment.
When you look at the jobless rate, it fell in part because people simply gave up.
Wait just a second.
What just happened there?
Who do they think they are telling the truth about this?
This is CNN.
Why in the world are they being truthful about this?
CNN just went out there and told their audience the truth from top to bottom about the unemployment numbers.
Well, here's why Chris Cuomo, the other co-host, let the cat out of the bag.
That's going to be a problem.
It's going to affect policy, though, because they're fighting over extending those unemployment benefits right now.
And this speaks immediately to the need for the extension.
13.1% is the underemployment rate.
That means some people call that the real unemployment rate.
So that means those are people who are out of work.
They're working part-time, but would like to be working full-time.
When is the last time CNN talked about the real unemployment rate, folks?
When is that 13%?
That's the U6, the letter U-6.
In Bureau of Labor Statistics jargon, the unemployment rate that is reported every month is the U3 number.
That's what's 6.7%.
U6, that's 13%.
That counts everybody out of work, whether they're looking or not.
CNN never reports that number.
They never tell the truth about this, but they did today.
And Chris Cuomo let the cat out of the bag.
Why?
Because the Democrats want an extension in unemployment benefits, and they actually want it for the whole year, not just for three months.
And so to make it appear, you can't have the news be all that good.
Well, look at the unemployment rate.
Wowie, Zowie, Christine, it's down to 16%.
Hey, Kate, that is really cool, man.
Obama's got this economy really cooking.
And Chris Cuomo comes in and says, well, yeah, I mean, we're really going gangbusters.
I guess we don't need the extending unemployment benefit.
They can't have that.
So CNN tells the truth about how bad it is because what the Democrat Party wants is an extension of unemployment benefits, whatever it takes.
And of course, they know their audience is a bunch of low-information whoever's.
So this is just, it's made to order.
Here's Chuck Yu Schumer on Capitol Hill today with the Senate Democrats, a press conference to talk about unemployment benefits.
We particularly hope that the Republican majority in the House will not just block anything we do if we're able to come to an agreement.
If they do, it's going to hurt them in the election.
It's a different America.
It's a different political structure than it was even a year ago.
That's right.
Issues like the deficit in Obamacare are important.
Yeah.
But helping average people, getting the economy going and creating jobs is now number one.
Wait a minute.
Block things like unemployment insurance and minimum wage at their peril.
See, it's the Republicans' fault, folks.
All of this is the Republicans' fault because they're blocking everything that's designed to help people.
It's all the Republicans' fault.
So we've got to extend these unemployment benefits because now, finally now, creating jobs, that's number one.
It's worse than even it was last year, Chuck says.
It's been trending this way for five years, folks.
It's been trending in this direction ever since Obama's first major policy initiative, which was the $1 trillion stimulus that was designed to put everybody back to work, rebuilding roads, rebuilding screws, repairing bridges, you name it.
That didn't work, and nothing else has worked.
Three, he's pivoted to jobs four or five times.
He's done it at least once a year, and he's now starting his sixth year.
And at least once a year, Obama says, my focus now is laser-like on job creation.
Once a year, he does that.
This is why I sit here, folks, and I ask myself, how do they keep getting away with it?
I mean, this is real life.
There's lying about real, how did they get away being in power?
And of course, I have the answers, but I still ask them.
They're in power for five years.
They are creating the policy that causes this.
And they continue to get away with transferring the blame to the Republicans.
Obama has done it via the limb ball theorem.
The constant campaigning, the appearance that he's not even in Washington governing.
I mean, that's how he's done it.
Make it look like he's still fighting this powerful forces out there that he doesn't name.
There's Republicans in the Bush, maybe, but powerful forces working against him.
He's working so hard.
He's trying.
And he's going to keep working until he finally gets it.
He's finally gets it.
And people, he's a great guy.
He's working for hard for us.
He's trying.
Those Republicans, they continue to want us to suffer and be in pain.
And that's the Democrats pulled out with the assistance, obviously, of the media.
But you sit there, I sit here at some point, say, at some point, there's got to be an awakening.
Anyway, we're going to take a brief time out.
Your phone calls are coming up, and unavoidably, we now swerve back to the Christie crisis.
Don't go away.
It is Open Line Friday.
We always try to get into the phones in the first hour of the program since it's supposed to be a caller-centric day.
It doesn't always work out that way, but sometimes it does.
And I'm going to endeavor now, get started on the phones.
We're going to start in Syracuse with Sister Mary Joe.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Hello.
Hello, Rush.
I'm a charter listener, but first-time caller.
Heard you back when I lived in Baton Rouge.
That was one of the first stations that became part of your network.
Baton Rouge, so you would have been part of, well, that would have been in late 1988 then, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I called because on Thursday you were talking about your idea of different ideas of possible immigration reform that we don't have to go the way the liberals are putting it.
Ma'am, may I ask you a question?
Sure.
You're identified as Sister Mary Jo.
Are you a nun?
Yes, I am.
Okay.
I wanted to understand that.
Fine.
Yeah, I worked in Mexico for about 10 years operating an orphanage down there.
Okay.
And some of my boys are in the country legally and some are illegally.
I noticed that when I worked down there, the town that the orphanage was in was outside of Guadalajara.
And about, I'd say, of the population, it was a small town, at least more than half of the people had spent time in the United States working here.
And they didn't want to live here permanently.
They wanted to come here, raise some money, and go back and raise their families in Mexico.
And generally, and said they would really go for your idea about immigration where they could have a green card to come in and work, migrant, you know, for periods of the year and go back because that's what they were doing.
They would come into the country, work for a while.
Around Christmas time when the peso would make a jump, they would take all the money they'd saved up all year long, go back to Mexico and buy a piece of property.
They'd get married and their wife would live with her family and they would come back to the U.S., work for another year, go back to Mexico, put the first floor of their house.
Always contained a garage, and I always wondered why, but then I found out that what they would do is the wife would then move out from her family into the house.
She would use the garage and open a little store.
Did this keep families intact?
It did.
I mean, after each year, they would go back, they'd have another child.
But after about three years, they had the house built, and he would stay in Mexico, raise the family, they live together, but now they had all that they wanted from the U.S., which was the wherewithal to get started in Mexico.
Let me review for people who didn't hear the call you're talking, like the comment that you're talking about, what it is that you're saying, so they'll understand it.
Earlier this week, folks, there was a discussion held here on amnesty and immigration.
And we had a caller, young woman, 25 years old, who runs a farm.
Her family is a farmer in the Central Valley of California.
And she assured us that she was.
Her family died in the wool, ideological conservatives, but they had a problem.
They could only afford so much to pay people to pick their crops and do other work on the farm.
And she said what we've heard a lot of people say, that there are certain jobs that she has on her farm.
Americans refuse to do it.
And I said, well, there's a reason for that.
We're paying people not to work in this country a decent amount.
There's no reason to take a $10 or $15 an hour job if you're being paid more than that not to work.
And I said, the point that we eventually got to was she was trying to suggest that we need to do something that would allow her to hire migrant workers because she needs the work done, but she can only afford so much for it, and Americans won't do it.
And discussion eventually turned on the fact that we don't need to do blanket amnesty for 12 or 20 million people for this, that we could do what we used to do in this country, which was seasonal green card grants, seasonal migrant workers.
And I just threw it out.
It's not my idea.
We used to do it in this country, in fact.
As Sister Mary Jo has just said, we would grant people seasonal six-month, whatever the growing season needed to be, whatever the farm work, whenever it needed to be done, grant a green card.
They'd come in and leave.
And there was no pretense at becoming citizens.
There was no pretense at voting.
All it was was a job opportunity.
And they would come to the country and do it and then leave when the work was completed.
And so Sister Mary Jo is calling here saying that she'd been in Mexico.
She knows people who would gladly accept this.
Correct?
Yes, that's true.
I actually have two boys that I'm still in contact with here in the States.
One is illegally in the U.S. and the other is legally.
He has a visa.
The one who has a visa does the back and forth route because it's easy for him to get in and out of the country.
The illegal one is here and doesn't go back because he has to pay a coyote $500 to get him across the border every time he does.
So it's not feasible for him to do that.
So he would end up as one of these people wanting amnesty because he's been living here now for a long time and put his roots down now in this country because he can't go back.
Right.
Well, I'll tell you where the whole thing ended up, folks.
The point here is that my belief is that both political parties in seeking amnesty are looking at voter registration.
Because there are many other solutions to this problem that you can do that would cost much less and would have far less cultural and societal and legal impact on the country.
For example, if the old saw that there is work in America that Native Americans won't do, such as this kind of agricultural work, well, then give those farms some kind of a tax break, which allows them to keep more of the money they otherwise would send to government and use it to hire people.
They can pay a little bit more than they can afford now.
Or the seasonal work.
We have a lot of seasonal workers.
I think we already have over 2 million migrant workers in the country now.
And statistically, half of them are illegal, as Sister Mary Jo points out.
But the only, the real point of this was, is there are real problems out there in the agriculture community and other businesses.
And there are ways of solving the problem without blanket amnesty of 12 to 20, whatever the number is, millions of people, and totally bastardizing and corrupting U.S. law and essentially registering a whole bunch of new Democrats.
We don't have to do that to address the problem.
So I appreciate it.
Sister Mary Jo, thank you for the call.
I love personal experience testimony on this.
It is.
Not having any of those things is like a day off.
I can't, the stress level plummets like I No, I can't tell you what I'm talking about, folks.
It just happened a commercial break and did it the wrong time.