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Jan. 15, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:25
January 15, 2014, Wednesday, Hour #2
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Talent on loan from God.
You have to say God.
You just say talent on loan from God.
Just doesn't work.
You have to say talent on loan from God.
And that's me, L. Rushbo, back at it for another exciting excursion into broadcast excellence.
It's a thrill and a delight to have you with us.
Telephone number is, as always, 800-282-2882.
And if you want to send an email, uh, it's L Rushbow at EIB net.com.
So if you're just joining, if you're uh welfare recipient just getting up and just turning on the radio is about a half hour ago.
And I posed a question to the audience.
So if you were going, this is 20th anniversary this year.
This year marks 20th anniversary of a pretty big scandal in sports.
And the scandal involved agents of Tanya Harding attacking her rival and competitor, Nancy Kerrigan during practice, or right after it, um, and eliminating Kerrigan's chances competing against Harding.
And they're gonna do a 20-year look back or a 20-year anniversary documentary on ESPN.
They're gonna take a look at this scandal.
And I asked you, if you were going to do this, or if you were going to watch something like that, on whom would you think the 20-year anniversary would focus?
Tanya Harding and her agents or Kerrigan.
Who is the victim?
Kerrigan.
But no, no.
In the look back on ESPN, you might say they're gonna make Tanya Harding the victim here.
Now that may be a bit of a stretch.
Let me tell you what this is about.
And here's here's the details if you uh don't remember this.
It was just weeks before the 1994 Winter Olympic Games in Lillahammer.
Speaking of Lillahammer, Snerdley, did you see that they've already have committed for a third season of Lilly Hammer.
If you haven't seen it, folks, this is hilarious.
Uh Little Stephen Van Zant of uh Springstreen's East E Street Band and uh Sylvia Dante on the Sopranos in the in it it's exclusive to Netflix to the eight-episode miniseries.
He's a crime figure, he's a is a mobster, and he turns state's evidence, and they send him into the witness protection program, and he chooses Lily Hammer because he liked it watching the Olympics.
So they send him to Lilyhammer.
And it's just it is it is so uproariously funny that the the people that live in Lillyhammer are the I mean the stereotype of every touchy feely liberal you have ever encountered, imagined, or seen.
And they throw this guy into the mix, and he just can't help it.
He ends up corrupting everything he gets involved.
He criminalizes and to watch it play out, it's it's just it's hilarious.
And the first season was relatively popular, and the audience demanded another one, and they got it, and it just was posted on Netflix a couple of weeks ago, three weeks ago now.
And the way Netflix does this, they post them all.
You can binge episode the whole season of one day if you want.
They're gonna do that with House of Cards next month, the next what is it, 10, 11 episodes, whatever that is, House of Cards with Kevin Spacey and uh Robin Wright that goes up against they just announced a third season of of Lily Hammer.
Uh, it's just a movie, uh Robert De Niro, uh, and and some people started a movie called The Family, And it was about a mobster who gets relocated to Europe and is spends time in various parts of France and other places with the New York mob trying to catch up to him.
But it not nearly as funny as Lily Hammer is.
So anyway, just a little aside, their little plug for Lilyhammer on Netflix.
1994 winter Olympics were in Lillehammer.
Figure skating darling Nancy Kerrigan was whacked on the knee by an unknown assailant wielding a club shortly after a practice session on the ice.
She was coming off the ice, and an assailant ran up and whacked her on the knee.
injured her severely.
This attack later revealed to have been plotted by the then-husband of Kerrigan's rival, Tonya Harding.
So So the story has all the hallmarks of a soap opera classically beautiful brunette from the Northeast, very aristocratic looking, Kerrigan.
And you had on the other side, Tanya Harding, trailer trash.
Well, that's what the Northeastern sect would think.
Scrappy blonde tomboy, is how ESPN describes it.
Wrong side of the tracks.
A backstabbing plot to literally eliminate the competition.
The injury to Nancy Kerrigan took six weeks to...
Took her six weeks to recover from her injury and go for Olympic gold against Harding.
So 20 years later now, Price of Gold, a documentary premiering at 9 p.m.
Thursday on ESPN's taking a new look at the scandal, which the producers say here this is unlike anything that's ever happened in sports before.
Now, the director of Price of Gold is Nanette Burstein.
It says, occasionally athletes try to injure a competitor on the field, but it certainly never happens off the field.
And for it to have occurred in a sport that's all about grace and poise and beauty seemed particularly shocking.
Upon whom would you focus?
If you're gonna pick one, if you're not gonna focus on both of them, if you're gonna pick one, who would you focus on?
You would.
You would focus on the perp.
Well, okay, well, that that's that's that's what they're they're doing.
Um Price of Gold features new interviews with Tanya Harding, who's now 43, remarried with a crumb cruncher, as well as journalists who covered the story of the time, including Connie Chung and coaches for both Kerrigan and Harding, and Kerrigan's husband manager, Jerry Solomon.
Burstein edited the film to focus on Harding, her abusive mother, her outcast status in the sport, even while thinking she might get a sit-down with Kerrigan, which didn't fall through until the last minute.
Kerrigan hasn't said a word about it and isn't going to until an NBC documentary, which will air during NBC's coverage of the 2014 games in Sochi in the Soviet Union.
And the producer here said, Yeah, I've always intended for it to be much more focused on Tanya because I think I think Tanya's story was far more complicated.
Nancy had an admirable story.
She was injured and had six weeks to come back from that injury with a media maelstrom and actually win the silver, but beyond that narrative, there's not a lot more to say.
Well, I'm sorry, that just strikes me as a little strange.
And let me see if I can explain why.
Okay, so you have this described here.
Uh what is it?
Uh well Kerrigan is uh admirable.
She was injured.
Uh, she had six weeks to come back.
Nothing to see here.
Instead, let's focus on Tanya Harding.
Okay, fine.
Well, why was she injured?
This is This is like the Menendez jury acquitting the brothers of murder because they weren't gonna have their mothers anymore.
And the juror was asked about it.
The woman juror, well, yeah, they're not gonna have their mother because they killed their mother.
And it's so sad.
Don't you think they're gonna have the rest of their lives and not their mother?
So Kerrigan, I guess, is boring.
She's minding her own business.
She's out training.
Some thug associated with hardening comes up, blasts her knee, causes her a six-week injury.
Nothing to see there.
Let's go focus on Tanya Harding.
There's not really anything to the Kerrigan story.
Really?
The Kerrigan story is what makes a documentary.
If something hadn't happened to Kerrigan, there wouldn't be a reason to do the documentary, right?
I don't mean to make too big a deal out of this.
To me, it's media study, folks.
It's simply media study.
And what's amazing about it is that the left-wing media is focused on victims everywhere they can find them in our culture.
And in this case, they're making Tanya Harding a victim, apparently.
Wrong side of the tracks.
She's just rough cut.
You know, really had no business being in the skating business.
She wasn't nearly classy enough.
And it can't just.
I don't know.
Minor little point.
That's all I'm going to say about it, as I say, it's media study to me.
The victim, the real victim here, is considered not interesting enough to spend any time on it.
Yeah, she's skating.
Yeah.
She got her knee beat up.
Yeah, six weeks' injury.
Yep.
Had to come back from it for the Olympics.
Nothing to see here.
Instead, we're gonna focus on whatever.
Democrats.
Do you did I didn't watch the Golden Globes?
You watch the Golden Globes.
Apparently, did you watch the Golden Globes?
Apparently, Julia Louis Dreyfus came out smoking an electronic cigarette.
Yeah.
And got a stream.
The Hill.com.
The Hill, it's a political newspaper, The Hill.com.
Democrats miffed at NBC for smoking gag during Golden Globes.
Senate Democrats, honestly, God, I'm not making this up.
Senate Democrats, not amused to see Julia Louis Dreyfus puffing away on an electronic cigarette during the Golden Globe Awards.
The Senate Democrats said that Julia Louis Dreyfus helped glamorize smoking on the broadcast.
And they are pressing NBC Universal to ensure that the e-cigarettes are not featured again.
United States said we've got an economic recession going on.
We're about to lose Iraq to Al-Qaeda.
We've got all kinds of absolute disasters taking place.
And Senate Democrats are upset at NBC Universal because one of their stars was smoking a harmless economic or electronic cigarette.
Well, yeah, I know.
She plays the Veep in a comedy show on HBO.
Big whoop.
I have electronic cigarettes right now are the rage in Hollywood.
You can't watch a Hollywood movie without every other character smokes throughout the movie.
Who started who started the e-cigarette trip?
Yes, I know.
I wonder who they I know I did.
I was on the cutting edge.
I've been there, done that.
I know I wasn't even going to mention that.
But they are the rage out there.
I just, this is this to me is just hilarious.
There was actually a letter signed by Senators Dick Turbin, Richard Blumenthal, Sherad Brown, Edward Markey, and they sent it to the NBC Universal CEO Steve Burke and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association president, Theo Kingma.
The senators cited studies showing that on-screen smoking contributes to young people adopting the habit.
And they said such images amounted to celebrity endorsements of the behavior.
During the show, Julia Louis Dreyfus was seen puffing on an e-cigarette in an exaggerated manner after hosts joked that her award nomination in a film category had made her too cool for TV actors.
There's a story I have it here later on in the stagger.
It might have been from yesterday.
There's actually been a study now.
The e-cigarettes have been out long enough.
There has been a study, and it has been proven, and I tell you this, guarded, because I think all of this study stuff in the media, to me, I'm suspicious of all of it.
But this study happens to say that e-cigarettes actually are reducing smoking real cigarettes.
It actually is helping people quit real cigarettes.
There's nothing in these things.
It's water vapor.
They're flavored.
Sometimes you can smell the flavoring, but it's not, there's no tar.
There's no tobacco.
There's no fire.
There's no flame.
There's no carcinogen.
There's nothing.
There's nothing in them.
It's water vapor.
Well, you have nicotines in there, but what what's the problem with nicotine?
Now, nicotine, I'll tell you this.
There's that video of the devil baby.
Fox is finally running it.
This is hilarious.
Cutting edge again here on the EIB network.
Nicotine is the most addictive drug on the planet.
Hands down, not even close.
You know how you can tell.
No one has a pleasant first experience with it.
In fact, everyone's first experience with nicotine, i.e.
inhaling a cigarette, sometimes vomiting, sometimes hacking, coughing, sometimes I'm never doing this again.
Five minutes later, they're lighting the next one.
Look at this.
Obama's in North Carolina, but North Carolina Senator Kay Hagen, nowhere near the state.
She didn't want the ride on Air Force One.
She didn't want to be with Obama.
She had to get her hair done.
She didn't have time.
And Obama's announcing, get this, a new partnership between colleges and businesses to build electronics.
Mr. President, that market's kind of owned now by two or three, four companies.
What do you mean a partnership between colleges and businesses to build electronics?
And you know, the dunderheads in the audience are now, oh, yeah, that really sounds great, Mr. President.
Wow, jobs, yeah, man jobs.
And he's saying that the pieces are now in place, finally, for all this job creation to start happening.
And a new partnership between colleges and businesses to build electronics.
I don't know, folks.
Our intelligence is insulted every day.
This guy opens his mouth about the economy.
I know, I know, doing all this on purpose.
I know, I know.
Still, it's it's it's it's it's insulting.
I mean, we're in the midst of five years of abject failure.
We're in the midst of five years of evidence that Obama's way is disastrous.
Not only does it not work, it's destructive.
It's not an innocent well-intentioned mistake.
This is just sheer utter incompetence, rooted in an arrogant, egoistic belief in the primacy of his socialist ideology.
Julia Louis Dreyfus.
How long was she on this show puffing the e-cigarette?
A minute?
Max.
All these senators send off letters to NBC.
You better not do that again.
We're going to come after you.
You realize the bad example you're setting.
What about all the sex and violence?
We're told that none of that that happens on TV influences little people, young people.
With the video games, they laugh at you if you suggest that there are influences in the media that could cause a wacko kid to go gunning people down in a school.
You bring up well, look at what the video games look at the TV.
Don't be silly.
Those things don't influence anybody.
But now one minute of smoking a healthy alternative to a real cigarette.
And the world is about to end, as far as these Democrat senators are concerned.
Here's uh here's Todd in Tampa, Florida.
Hi, Todd.
Glad you waited.
Great to have you in the EIB network, hi.
Hey, Ross, you're the man.
I just want to tell you, you know, a couple of things before I hit Obama, but um, you know, the National Football League in this settlement, I think, is a just a travesty of all travesties when you know I watched Joe Namit get blasted against the Oakland Raiders growing up and no 15 yard penalty, no hundred thousand dollar fine, none of this.
This lady has never been she has she ever stood at the 50 yard line and watched these guys clock each other and then run back to the huddle and do it again, shouldn't know what she's talking about.
This this whole settlement is a disgrace to the National Football League, to the American fan who pays the bills around here.
Now, if the players had come to us and said, hey, you guys are doing good, we need to help the rest of the guys out that are hurting and and and need some financial help, then that that that's what the money should be for.
But don't come in here while Ray Lewis and Tim Tebow and everybody else are running over people and and and and and tell me that you know you guys get money and the other guys don't.
It's a disgrace.
Uh amen, bro.
Amen.
Hey, Rush, I just wanted to tell you Obama's a I I'm sure he didn't go see my man Billy Graham in North Carolina and say you broke two tenants of the Christian.
Wait, wait, wait a minute.
Hit the bleep button.
He can't say that.
Now I think um I think Todd was talking about the PHD who said that concussions are not such a problem in the NFL.
No, maybe not.
Because he was mad at the woman, and I would think.
Judge, yeah, he's oh, he's mad at the judgery, mad at the judge who said it wasn't enough money.
That's who he's mad at.
And and uh he's got a point.
This this concussion lawsuit is not happening because of concussions, and most lawsuits don't.
It's happening because it's money.
And there's not even past judgment on that.
That's standard operating procedure in America.
I don't want to get into individual criticism of people joining the suit.
I mean, some of these guys don't have any money, and if somebody's gonna come along and give them an excuse for their current uh lot in life, and yeah, it's because you played football.
Yeah, they didn't tell you to go hitting guys with your head and your helmet, you're gonna get concussions, and they didn't tell you it's gonna lead to suicide, and he didn't tell you it's gonna lead to not being able to walk.
It didn't tell you it's gonna be slobbering all over the place.
Oh, really?
Yeah, they didn't tell me how much am I owed?
And they have his big sum of money, and it turns out the judge says it isn't enough.
4,000 plus players, $765 million, do the math, it isn't very much, even if they divvy it up equally, which they're not gonna do.
Some players are gonna get zip, and some players are gonna get four million, I've read, depending.
I mean, that's so the judge came back because that's not enough money.
The NFL and the players' union and everybody else thought they had a deal.
Judge said, Well, you did have a deal, but I don't like the deal.
It's not enough money.
You're not you're not paying nearly enough for the damage that you've caused.
Meanwhile, Daniel Flynn, and we've interviewed Flynn here at the Limbaugh Letter.
He has become uh noted expert on the National Football League and what is happening to it.
The the cultural pressures, the trickyfication.
Uh let me just get into this right now.
I was going to get into some Obamacare stuff, but since I brought this up, Dan Flynn wrote a book called The War on Football, Saving America's Game.
And that's what we interviewed him for when his book came out last year.
And he is the editor at Breitbart Sports.
Is it tracing the provenance of the myth that NFL players kill themselves at dramatically elevated rates is a lot like playing the children's game operator, only in reverse?
Yes.
Now, what this is, and I referenced this story early on in the program.
What Flynn does here is trace, go back to the beginning.
How did this assumption start that playing football is an indicator of suicide?
And that suicide rates among people that played in the National Football League are much higher than national average.
This is something that somebody put in the media some time ago, and it's now established.
It's considered settled science.
Flynn had never seen any data.
He'd seen all the stories, he wanted to find out about it, so he traced it back.
And what we have here is a story that is more proof of how journalism is failing us by being so easily manipulated by people who push a false narrative.
Center for Science in the Public Interest, a bunch of activists, the global warming hoaxers, they created a uh brilliant hoax that manipulated all the media.
They had them believing it was going to be global cooling and the new ice age in 1974, and they manipulated them into believing the end of the world was going to happen in 2010 because of global warming.
And it is really the people at Center for Science of Public Interest are just a bunch of emaciated skeletal people that are not content to live their dull, dryball, boring lives themselves.
They want everybody to live the way they do.
So they set up this Center for Science of the Public Interest.
It's some guy and a woman, they've got three or four more people now.
They got a fax machine, they got a logo, and they wrote up all of the stuff that's killing people.
And they said the standard ordinary food groups that the uh nutritionists and the AMA have been using is bogus, is not true, and they rewrote that and they sent that out, and the media started using it without even finding out who these people are.
The key to manipulating the media with a false narrative is coming up with one that you know they're going to want to believe.
And the easiest way to come up with a narrative that's false that the media will nevertheless be manipulated by and believe is if it blames conservatives, Republicans, or traditional American values for the problem.
And it's exactly what's happened to the NFL with regard to concussions.
It's exactly why we've got Obamacare.
It's why we've got Obama.
It's why we've got global warming in it.
Now they're trying with this income inequality business.
And this is how we end up with low information voters.
We send out absolute BS as news, and they end up believing it.
Here's a pull quote from Flynn's story.
The pattern generally sees one article attribute the claim that an astronomically high number of NFL players commit suicide to another article, which cites another article, which cites still another article,
and the end of this chain always references a specific organization, which, when contacted by Breitbart Sports, proved incapable of producing a study to buttress the shocking statistic that NFL retirees kill themselves at six times the national average.
So he in the short version here is that what Flynn found out was there was one article that claimed the suicide rate among NFL players is six times the national average.
That article was picked up by somebody else in the media, and the first article was cited.
Then the third paper or organization picked it up and cited the first two as authorities.
And that chain kept happening as new news networks, organizations, newspapers picked up the story.
They Credited the previous articles and bestowed upon them credibility, and the chain, thus, was begun.
And the media was essentially establishing credibility amongst themselves.
Nobody, after the original article was published, ever went to the source.
They simply accepted what the what the first media story about it was.
And then they accepted the second media story.
Flynn went back to the source for all of it.
And he found that the specific organization which is responsible for this idea, that six times the number of NFL players commit suicide as the general population has no evidence.
They have not one study.
They don't have a single statistic.
It was just a bunch of people with PhD and doctor before and after their names that were quoted.
So again, the pattern generally sees one article attribute the claim that an astronomically high number of NFL players commit suicide.
Well, in the Center for Science Public Interest case, you had one article attribute the claim that coconut oil raised cholesterol levels and led to premature death.
So we had to stop using it in movie theater popcorn.
And that claim then gets picked up and picked up.
And this is how, by the way, every day practically, certainly every week, you see a new revelation in health.
That smoking actually can help with Parkinson's disease, or the next day smoking might give you cancer, or that oat brand is the latest health ad.
You can remember all these things, and people end up believing them because they're in the media.
So the one article attributes the original claim.
The second article comes along citing the first article, not the experts in it, but the article itself, and the chain continues.
Take, for instance, a producer of NFL awards ceremonies who claimed on a blog on December 5th of 2012 that the suicide rate for men who have played in the NFL nearly six times the national average.
That blog post referenced New York Times columnist Frank Bruni.
In that Times column, two days earlier, Bruni, who announced that watching football troubled his conscience, referenced a San Diego Union Tribune series.
The New York Times blog said that the San Diego newspaper reported that the suicide rate for men who've played in the NFL is nearly six times the national average.
The San Diego Union Tribune series, an otherwise outstanding piece of investigative journalism about the death of Junior Seao, dispenses with nearly and reports the suicide rate for NFL players is just asserts is six times the national average.
According to GamesOver.org, a not-for-profit organization that provides transitional resources to benefit retired professional athletes.
Now, GamesOver.org was started by a former left tackle for the Green Bay Packers, Ken Rutgers.
And he found he had trouble transitioning to real life when he quit.
And a lot of players were having problems with it, so he set up this, sets up this organization.
And they end up claiming that just out of the blue, folks, there's there's no statistical documentary evidence for it.
They just end up claiming that the suicide rate for active and retired football players is six times greater than the national average.
And so a lot of people picked it up and ran with it because it fit a template.
Football's dangerous, football's bad.
We shouldn't be playing it.
We're exploiting people for our own entertainment.
All that had begun.
The statistic just fit right in.
Anyway, Flynn tracked it down and found out there's no statistical evidence.
More than a week.
Here's his quote.
More than a week after I first asked.
And a decade after journalists began relying on the allegation to illustrate the dangers of the game.
GamesOver.org hasn't produced any source material buttressing the much referenced but unsupported claim that six times the number of people play the NFL commit suicide as the general population.
There's not one study that's been done.
There's there's the there's nothing mathematical scientific, there's no data.
It was just an assertion that was made, picked up by a bunch of media that wanted it to be true, amplified it on up the chain, and causing, by the way, a whole bunch of people to react to it.
Lawsuits and everything resulted from this.
People ended up having to pay big money because of these claims.
There was never any evidence to back it up, according to Daniel Flynn, who looked hard and found it.
Now, this uh ladies and gentlemen, is classic.
This is how all of the lies of the the practically everything in the media, this is how it it happens.
There was a group that attempted to illustrate this.
Supposedly a bunch of doctors.
They created a logo and a press release, which said that the AMA's food group chart was bogus and wrong and dangerous and could end up causing illness.
And they found the media ran with it just as fast as they could.
There were stories all over the place that what you've always believed about the food groups, the food chart, the pyramid, dead wrong.
And this group finally came out and said it was a scam.
We were trying to prove a point of how easy it is to manipulate the media.
So if you know that they're a bunch of leftists, if you know they're a bunch of of of uh liberal Democrats who want to blame private sector interests and corporate America and so forth, you can easily come up with fake news to manipulate them and have it end up in the mainstream.
This is how it happened.
So I checked the email during the break, and people say, okay, well, so what is the truth, Rush?
If they're not right, if they're making it up.
About the suicide rating six times, what's the truth?
Well, here's as much as I've been able to find out.
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found that X NFL players actually commit suicide at a lower rate than the national average.
That does ruin everything.
Now, the news that the suicide rate among retired NFL players and active is six times the national average.
It's been out there for ten years, folks.
It's been out there for ten years, and it's why when Junior Sayao committed suicide, most of you thought, aha, football.
And nobody knows.
But this group, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found that X-NFL players actually commit suicide at a lower rate than the national average.
So what are we to do here?
What are we to believe?
Well, they've got data, at least.
The group that says six times the national average doesn't have any data, never has.
Bill in Cedar Park, Texas, great to have you.
Welcome to the EIB network.
How are you doing today, Rush?
I'm very well, sir.
Glutzy, thank you for calling.
Uh, just wanted to uh get with you real quick.
I've been thinking about this.
You know, Obama is talking about this trickle up economy, and I for the life of me, I just can't imagine anybody's thought process as to a trickle up uh economy.
And the only thing that I can compare it to, which does work in this business, quote unquote, is the mafia.
When you think about it, everybody's got to pay for security and all this other stuff.
So you're not sure.
You're bouncing off something Obama said that trickle up doesn't work?
No, no, Obama saying trickle up works.
And it can't.
Oh, Obama's a trickle up work.
Oh, yeah.
That that the left believes that the the rich get rich off the poor.
They they convinced the poor to spend all of their money on the rich and the rich end up getting rich that way.
The math has never worked out on that for me but that's what they claim.
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