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Jan. 15, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:54
January 15, 2014, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Folks, before we get started here, I tell you, it's one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time, and I'm going to tell you about it.
Apparently, there's a new movie coming out called Devil's Baby, or Devil Baby.
And the people behind the movie have come up with a really clever way of promoting it.
They created a motorized baby carriage and they created a motorized baby.
And the baby has been made up.
It looks real and it looks devilish.
They have put the baby in a baby carriage, remote-controlled, and they're driving it around New York.
It is covered by a blanket.
People think it's an abandoned baby.
They walk up to the carriage.
They uncover it.
And they're scared.
They just run away.
They scream.
The baby starts puking on them as in the movie The Exorcist.
It flips them off.
It shouts at them.
And it's just, it's hilarious to watch these people literally get scared to death and start running away.
And then there are a couple of people totally unmoved by it.
And it's just hilarious.
It's impossible to describe this thing with any justice.
I just indiscriminately found it while doing show prep.
It's at the Drudge Report, and it's in the upper right-hand column.
So if you have a chance and you want to go there and you want a good laugh, it's a great way to promote this.
I never even heard of the movie until I saw this video.
I had Sterdley come in away.
He was laughing uproariously in here because it's one of those things I wish I had done.
It's one of those practical jokes on people that you wish you had had a part in.
It just works flawlessly.
And of course, New Yorkers is supposed to be unfazed by anything.
And it's just the opposite.
Anyway, it's already Wednesday here, the fastest week in media.
Great to have you.
Rushlandbought 800-282-2882.
The email address lrushbo at eibnet.com.
Folks, is it just me or does the drive-by media seem to be holding back on covering other news stories in order to keep the Christie Bridge scandal front and center?
I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on out there today.
A, do you young people know, I'm not making this up, in terms of Obamacare, the target demographic to sign up is young people, millennials, and primarily young men.
And they happen to be the smallest group that is signing up.
The most needed enrollees are the fewest.
The theory, you need young men who are working, who are healthy, buying health insurance, but not making any claims because they're healthy.
And the money that they spend, theoretically, will fund health care for our beloved and respected seasoned citizens who need health care daily because they're old and decrepit and infirm and everything else.
Well, it turns out that young men are the slowest to sign up because they're figuring out precisely because they are healthy that they don't need health insurance.
They'd rather pay the penalty.
There's also the sad reality, none of them have jobs and none of them have any money to enroll anyway.
Which I can't believe more people don't discover as the primary reason the target demo is not signing up.
Look at all the assumptions in this that are nutso.
The assumptions, young guys, everybody wants health insurance, they'll sign up, they'll pay the freight, but they're healthy, making no claims, therefore they're not going to cost us anything.
We'll take the money they're spending and we'll spend that on treating the elderly.
Do they not look at the employment situation?
These people in their target demo are not working.
Do they not see this?
Do they not see that the target audience has no money?
Do they not understand that the target demo is going to find every which way possible not to do this as a matter of principle?
These are people of an age that will automatically reject and rebel against authority.
You tell them they have to do something.
It'll do the exact opposite.
So anyway, the best-laid plans of the brilliant inside-the-beltway elites have crumbled by the wayside.
However, there is this little bitty news item here that ran in the Washington Times earlier this week.
A government investigator found that Medicare is paying twice the amount for erection assistance devices compared to private dividers, providers, private providers.
Now, I realize that many of you bring your children to this program each day that are not in school because it's a learning experience.
The next minute or so could be something you don't want them to hear because they could end up saying, Mommy, mommy, what, what if?
You probably don't want to deal with it.
So you might want to turn the radio down for a minute or so while I go through this.
I'll give you a countdown from five.
If you're still here after that, you're on your own.
Five, four, three, two, one.
Okay, investigators said that the cost of erection assistance devices, these are also known for those of you in real life as penis pumps.
You didn't know that.
That's the point.
You young people, here, let me cut to the chase here.
You young people, part of what you're paying for is so grandpa and grandma can still have sex.
You are paying for erection machines.
Part of your premium, if you sign up for Obamacare, will be paying for erection machines for Nanaw and Papa.
And I would love to be there when they find out that this is what they are paying for.
Investigators said the cost was grossly excessive compared with the amounts that non-Medicare payers pay.
That the federal government could have saved $86.4 million over the past six years going to the private sector for these penis pumps.
Now, anytime that Medicare pays twice as much for any piece of equipment or any item for which it provides coverage, a taxpayer ought to be concerned, which is true.
But wait till these target demographic young men find out what they're actually paying for.
Now, the article here in the Washington Times reflects a certain amount of outrage because Medicare is paying for this period.
But then they find out they're overpaying double what the private sector costs for these penis pumps.
My take is a little different.
What in the hell is Medicare doing paying for this anyway?
Have you ever seen one?
Do you know what one?
Don't answer that because if you have, then that gives something.
I know you don't want it.
Forget that I asked the question.
It could be very embarrassing to admit that because no clue what this is.
I mean, I know they exist.
I've never seen one.
And I'm not asking you, snurdy.
You don't have to answer the question.
It was a faux pas.
It was a slip.
Don't even go there.
As for the inevitable eyebrow raising, this is from the story over the government paying for this equipment.
Medicare has long covered similar medical supplies like Viagra.
If we're going to cover Viagra, why not pay for seasoned citizen erections, which are otherwise not possible?
It says there in the story, it's really difficult for people not suffering from the condition to judge whether or not the government should help pay for it.
Well, of course.
Of course, if you've never needed an erection pump, then who are you to be critical to the government providing them to seasoned citizens?
Now, we don't have a vote in it.
It's in there.
It's just like people have to pay for contraception for women, whether they need it, want it or not.
It's in there.
This is one of the many reasons why these Obamacare premiums are sky high.
It's because of the inclusion, the demand inclusion of things like this.
Contraception for women, whether they want it or not, whether they need it or not, it has to be purchased.
And now Medicare is providing these erection pumps, and they're overpaying by millions.
So anyway, that's one news story going on out there.
We have, Iran is declaring victory over the world with Obama and Kerry and their sanctions deal.
The Iranians are out mocking Barack Obama and mocking John Kerry.
The Iranians are saying, look, we negotiated a secret deal with them, and we are free and clear to develop whatever we want.
And Kerry is out there saying this is everybody knows this isn't true.
John Kerry's out there saying everybody knows that poverty is what causes terrorism.
It isn't.
Poverty is not the reason for terrorism.
Everybody knows that.
This is a dunce lame brain.
That theory has been debunked for years.
But anyway, that's a new story.
It's big.
The Iranians running rings around the United States on their nuclear program.
We have new developments on Benghazi, Senate Intelligence Committee report on the attack on facilities in Menghazi, finds the attacks were preventable.
It faults the state and defense departments and cites the failure of the Obama administration to bring the attackers to justice.
Now, just to remind you, the Senate Intelligence Committee is run by Democrats.
And the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is Diane Feinstein.
And there's a lot going on that she doesn't agree with or fine kosher and she's unhappy with and she doesn't believe some of the explanations.
Now, for the Senate Intelligence Committee, this is a direct repudiation of the New York Times story of a week or so ago, which said, oh, yeah, it was nothing more than a video, and there were no al-Qaeda there, and nothing to see.
And New York Times did a story to clear the decks for Hillary, to excuse her, to give her a clean slate, to essentially say that whatever happened in Benghazi, you won't find Hillary to be blamed fingerprints at all, nor Obama.
And it was just abject lies.
None of it was true.
They went back and blamed the video and all these things.
And here you have, this is breaking news.
It happened this morning.
Senate Intelligence Committee finds the attacks on the consulate in Benghazi were preventable.
They faulted the State and Justice Department, the Defense Departments, and they cited the failure of the regime to bring the attackers to justice.
That story's out there.
You're not hearing about it because the media is just obsessed here with Christie and the lane closures.
Iraq is being destroyed by al-Qaeda.
Fallujah is just one place.
And we're told al-Qaeda, nah, al-Qaeda doesn't exist.
I mean, we've decimated al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda wasn't in Benghazi.
Al-Qaeda had nothing to do with that.
We've vanquished al-Qaeda.
Iraq is one of Barack Obama's greatest successes.
Al-Qaeda is about to retake and destroy Iraq.
We have the Gates revelations in his book.
We have Obama's latest threat yesterday to start pretending he's dictator again, to bypass Congress with executive orders.
We have a thousand news items out there.
A thousand news, and the drive-bys are missing all of them.
They're obsessing on three-lane closures at the George Washington Bridge.
And we all know why.
And of course, I'm all over the audio sunbite today, in large part due to my accusation that Obama is being unconstitutional in playing dictator with his threat yesterday to start, hey, I've got a phone, I've got a pen, and I'm basically going to do what I want to do.
If I'm going to do whatever I have to do to make this country fair, I'm going to do it.
Screw it.
Whether Congress comes along with me or not, I reacted to it.
Fox News, Fox Friends played it, got reacts from other people.
We have that.
Fascinating story also.
How many of you, it's a little test here.
How many of you instinctively now believe that when you hear a former or a current, doesn't matter, man who played the National Football League commit suicide, how many of you now instinctively think it is related to his playing the game?
Raise your hands and be honest.
A lot of you.
It's not your fault.
You've been conditioned.
It's the same way that the wackos from the Center for Science and the Public Interest have got you believing a bunch of nonsense about food.
It's the same way the environmentalist wackos got you believing a bunch of nonsense about climate change.
Daniel Flynn, who is becoming an expert in all things NFL, decided to track down this notion that football players, because they played football, are committing suicide at a much greater rate, much more rapid rate than the general population.
And he tracked it down, and he found out that there was a group nobody had ever heard of.
And they had a fax machine and they came up with a logo.
And they published the claim.
And they sent that, they flooded the mainstream media with it.
One outlet, don't know remember who right off the top of my head, picked it up.
That gave it credibility, and other news items picked it up.
And it became automatically accepted with one press release.
Daniel Flynn, writing at Breitbart.com, decided to go back to the original claimant, the people who released the original press release and asked them for their evidence.
He found them.
They don't have any evidence.
There isn't any evidence that playing football makes you more susceptible to suicide.
It's a total scam.
And it is a great illustration of how a lot of absolute rot gut falder all ends up being believed by low information, and maybe not just low-information voters.
It is a classic illustration of how lies and untruth and BS end up as conventional wisdom throughout the drive-by media.
The key to it is the original claimant, in order to get the original story picked up, has to somehow satisfy the sensibilities and the bias of somebody in the media.
That's all you have to do.
So if you understand who it is that's in the news media and you want to get a fraudulent, bogus claim picked up as reality, then you write a story, create a study, fake one that will convince somebody who has preconceived notions about it, and you're off to the races.
And that's essentially what Flynn found.
So we got the details on that.
Fascinating stuff today, folks.
Tanya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan, ESPN doing a 20-year look back at what happened.
But that's not the point.
Wait till you hear this.
Do not go away, folks.
Sit tight.
So a lot of ditto cameras are saying, hey, Rush, what is that big black ball that's in the lower left-hand corner of your gigantic computer display?
That, my friends, is a microphone.
The new Mac Pro does not have a built-in microphone, does not have a built-in camera.
And the Sharp 3, never mind, the Sharp 4K display, which is twice the resolution of high definition, does not have a built-in microphone.
So I had to go out there and buy an external microphone.
And I decided, you know, microphones can be made the size.
I mean, the one in my cochlear implant here is the size of a grain of sand.
But I decided to get this thing because it looks like it's a robot of some kind.
It's about 25 times bigger than it needs to be, but it just looks good sitting next to the whole Mac Pro arrangement.
But that's all it is.
It's a microphone so that I can dictate.
I don't type much anymore.
I dictate on my iPhone and on the computer.
But the $10,000 computer didn't have a microphone in it.
So I had to go out and get one.
Hi, welcome back.
Great to have you, Rush Limbaugh, the cutting edge of societal evolution.
If you were going to produce a television documentary on the 20th anniversary of one of the biggest scandals in sports history, and that scandal is the Tanya Harding Nancy Harrigan scandal.
You remember what happened?
Nancy Kerrigan was minding her own business.
She went out there.
She's on the rink.
She was skating.
She was training.
And an associate of Tanya Harding's went out there and blew out her knee.
Just literally went out there on the ice and attacked Nancy Kerrigan and injured her sufficiently that she was not able to compete properly and at full strength in the Olympics that year, 20 years ago.
Now, if you were going to, if you work in a network like ESPN, you're going to do a documentary or a 20-year look back on who in that circumstance would you focus on.
I'm asking because it's kind of a little test.
Would you focus on Kerrigan or would you focus on Tanya Harding?
If you wanted to go back and look at what happened 20 years ago and examine it now in hindsight, upon who would you focus?
You think about that while we go to the audio sound bites.
We're going to start with the Fox News channel's Fox and Friends this morning.
They discussed my reaction to Obama pretending to, well, you know what?
He's not really pretending to be dictator.
He was threatening to do dictatorial things.
A couple of days ago, he said, you know what?
We still haven't dealt with the inequality and the discrimination and the unfairness that exists in this country.
You know what?
I've got a phone and I've got a pen.
And all I need to do is a bunch of executive orders and a bunch of executive actions and I can take care of it.
I can take care of the inequality.
I can take care of the unfairness.
I don't need Congress.
I'm tired of waiting on Congress.
I'm just going to go do it.
And they started discussing this on Fox today with Steve Doocy, who played an audio soundbite of my reaction to this.
Rush Limbaugh says what he's doing is not legal.
Executive orders to make things fair.
He can do executive orders and executive actions to get rid of the unfairness.
He's going to make this lousy country finally fair.
He's got these Republicans standing in his way.
He's like, fine, okay, I'm going to just start writing executive orders to hell with it.
I'm going to finally make everything fair.
Now, he might have a pen and he might have a phone, but what he does not have is the constitutional power to run this country like a dictator.
Okay, so that is what set up the discussion.
Up next, Brian Kilmead.
He's a constitutional lawyer on top of that, so he does know the difference.
But, you know, what President Obama would say is, yeah, you're right, jobs are scarce.
The economy is not having the robust turnaround he projected it to be and most economists expected.
That's why he needs to do these things because Congress is in his way.
I can almost hear the speech rolling off his tongue now.
He's a constitutional lawyer, and he should know, but he doesn't care.
He doesn't care about the Constitution.
Constitution is an impediment to Obama.
The Constitution is not something to be respected.
And it's not just Obama, by the way.
It's the vast majority of the intellectual leftist elite.
They really detest the Constitution because it thwarts them.
Some of you may not know this, but the United States Constitution was written to limit government power.
The U.S. Constitution, the first 10 amendments, specifically limit government's power.
Well, that's not cool if you're Obama or any of today's liberal Democrats.
That to you is shackles.
They call that a charter of negative liberties.
Now, stop and think of that.
A document founded in The belief, the proclamation, the declaration, the primacy of individual liberty and freedom is considered a charter of negative liberty, something that gives the people individual primacy and freedom and independence.
To the left, that's negative.
And the reason they call it a charter of negative liberties is because it limits government.
And they don't like that.
And that's what Obama was talking about.
You know, heck with it.
Now, Killmead says, okay, the economy hasn't turned around despite how he projected it to, and most economists expect who this is really a fundamental question for me.
What economists expected the stimulus to work?
Who are they?
We need names because they're no longer qualified to weigh in as experts.
People like Thomas Friedman, Thomas Lupe Friedman, New York Times, Paul Krugman, New York Times.
And I'm sure a bunch of Ivy League economists really believe this Keynesian belief, you just flood the zone with federal dollars.
You can't help but grow the economy.
The problem is, where do the dollars come from?
You have to take the dollars out of the private sector first before you flood the zone.
So it's a net zero effect.
Now, if you had a pile of money over there that wasn't being used, which we don't, and you flooded the private sector with that, then maybe we could talk about a short-term stimulus.
But that's not possible because we're $17 trillion in debt.
So there is not a pile of money not being used that you could throw into the private sector and stimulate it.
If you're going to throw in a trillion dollars, you have to first take that trillion dollars from somewhere, and that's done via taxes and regulations.
So, bring it down to a more personal level.
You're going to stimulate your annual income.
You're going to give yourself a $10,000 raise, but to get it, you've got to take it from your bank account.
So, you go write a check on your account for $10,000, get it in cash, and you put it in your back pocket, and you think, I just got a stimulus or a raise.
You didn't just transfer the money.
Net zero.
That's all that stimulus was.
And any economist that's honest and has any kind of economic understanding could have told anybody, there's going to be a net wash.
In fact, it's going to be bad.
It is not going to stimulate anything.
And the dirty little secret is that it was never intended to stimulate.
It was payoffs to government employee unions and insurance against them being laid off because all of that is a very intricately woven web of deceit called money laundering.
The federal government makes sure that union jobs are not eliminated.
The people in those jobs pay dues.
The dues end up back in the coffers of the Democrat Party and various candidates because nobody knows how much the unions spend funding Democrat politicians.
So here you take a trillion dollars somewhere, you put it in the private sector, but the vast majority of it goes to state employee unions.
Most of that money is going to come back to the Democrat Party.
It was a money laundering scheme.
There was no economic stimulus in this at all.
And any economist worth his salt and honest could have said so at the time.
Now, there are a bunch of leftist economists who are idiots and do not understand what I just told you and really do believe in this stimulus effect.
But it wasn't possible.
Mathematically, it wasn't possible.
Besides, the money was not sent to the private sector in areas that would stimulate any kind of economic growth.
The bridge repairs and road repairs and school spruce-ups.
None of the money went there.
Folks, it was bogus from the get-go.
It was a trick.
It was a gigantic trick, and it didn't stimulate anything except the Democrat Party.
That's all it stimulated.
And so the economy had no prayer of growing because of the stimulus.
Any economist who said so was simply grossly wrong or dishonest.
And so Obama is saying, well, you know, I've done everything.
I've tried.
I've worked as hard as I can to create jobs and grow the economy.
Those Republicans are standing in my way.
Hell with them.
I'm just going to start with my phone and my pen and executive orders to fix this.
Well, that's what the stimulus was essentially.
I mean, people voted on it, but it was the same kind of stuff that he's talking about doing.
Now, everything he's doing is resulting in shrinking the private sector, which is where your job is and where your career is and where your child's jobs and career happen to be.
That is shrinking.
Obama is taking more of it each and every day.
Health care takes one sixth of it.
You simply cannot shrink the private sector to the degree Obama has, and at the same time, expect there to be massive growth in private sector economic activity, such as jobs, such as careers.
Add to this, 92 million Americans not working, not in the labor force.
This is the biggest scam.
And so Obama, using a Limbaugh theorem, still on the outside, frustrated at every effort.
He really cares.
He's really tried.
He's wanted to create jobs.
He's worked so hard.
But there are these powerful forces, Republicans or whoever, that are not cooperating and they're not being bipartisan.
And they're racist and sexist.
And they're standing in his way.
And he's wit's in now.
He desperately wants to help people.
So he's just going to have to do it himself.
And that's essentially what this scam is.
Elizabeth Hasselbeck then weighed in after Killmead.
By the way, he promised way back before his first term that that would be something he would do, is bring everybody together, unite the United States of America.
We're going to bring it back.
Because they can't function together well, it then gives him the authority under what rule?
So there was Elizabeth Hasselbeck was wondering what happened to the Obama who was going to bring people together.
That Obama only existed when he went to the View.
He'd say that kind of nonsense on the View, and everybody watching the Views, oh, what a great guy.
He's going to unite us.
He's going to bring us together.
He's going to get rid of all of these arguments and partisanship and all this.
And everything Obama's doing has been a false promise.
False promise has been unify the people, great economic recovery, new direction for the United States of America, the world loving us again, our foreign policy being responsible.
Everything has been misdirection at best.
And so now people, I thought he was going to unify.
I thought he said that he was going to bring everybody together and unite the United States.
And see, it's also unnecessary, because if people would simply have understood socialists, liberals, leftists, whatever, then they could have, with intelligence, rejected Obama's promises as empty.
Because I'm telling you, there was no way that what he was promising was going to happen the way he was going about it.
Finally, before we go to the break, they asked Karl Rove.
This is actually last night, Greta took this whole thing up, too.
She said, Rush Limbaugh says that the president doesn't have the power to run the country like a dictator.
Is that what the president's doing with these executive orders?
Or is he doing something else?
I'm deeply troubled by the president's use of his executive authority and abuse of his executive authority.
We're seeing this time and time again.
Look, on Obamacare, we had those waivers in 2011 and 2012.
We had a year delay of the employer mandate.
Where was the authority to do that?
They moved the dates for the sign-up and the payment.
They have an exemption for certain union plans.
They now say that the individual mandate, if your plan that you wanted to keep was taken away from you, you can now declare a hardship and have a non-conforming plan.
Where's the authority to do that?
I think he's violating the law.
That's right, violating the Constitution.
There's no question about this, folks.
It's just a matter of whether people in power with the authority to do so want to stop it.
Because if nobody's going to stop Obama, he's going to be able to keep doing it.
Now, I'm going to take a break here, but the Wall Street Journal had a little editorial video on their website, and they're just really confused there, snurdly.
As you will hear, they are trying to figure out here.
So when Rush Limbaugh and these guys go after Christie, why would they want to pull down the one guy who can beat Democrats?
And that's the theme of the video, which you'll hear excerpts.
So we'll react to it.
Got to take a brief time out.
Don't go away.
We will be right back.
Anyway, I want to go to the phones here.
We go back to Newport Beach in California.
Steve, I'm glad you called, sir.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Rush.
Good to be here.
Love listening to your show.
And again, your comments this morning regarding the unions and the money laundering.
The money, exactly.
That's the term I was looking for.
The money laundering.
It's exactly what's going on out here in California with the bullet train.
The politicians in California, all the Democrats, have given all the public employee unions their payback, but they've got a problem.
All of the private sector union employees are still waiting for their payback.
The bullet train was supposed to be that.
All those contracts would be going to union shops only.
And that's why they're pushing that so darn hard out here.
You're going to get that payback.
Now, that's standard, ordinary, everyday Democrat union relationship stuff.
But a stretch to call that money laundering.
The stimulus bill, that was an abject lie.
I mean, that was the government telling the people, we're going to send a bunch of money, a trillion dollars to the private sector.
We're going to build roads and bridges and schools, and we're going to get this economy going.
And the money went, almost 60% of it went to public employee union members so that they would not be fired during the recession, so that they would continue to remain employed and pay dues.
Essentially, 60% of that stimulus or whatever ended up, a portion of it, back in campaign coffers of the Democrat Party.
You had to do, Obama couldn't go to the Treasury and write a check to the Democrat Party, but he can get the money through a circuitous route, and that's what the stimulus ended up being.
Okay, folks, that's it for the first exciting, busy broadcast hour.
And as is always the case, there's lots more straight ahead.
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