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Jan. 21, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:43
January 21, 2014, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Hi, folks, and it is the moment that you have been waiting for for 21 hours.
You have been eagerly anticipating the resumption of the EIB network and the Rush Limbaugh program, and here it is.
And we are coming to you from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
It's a delight, and it's a thrill to be with you.
The telephone number, if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882, the email address, lrushbaugh at EIBNet.com.
Some of the things on the agenda today, Juan Williams, very concerned.
Juan Williams at Fox News read the interview of Obama in the New Yorker, that 18-page thing written by David Remnick.
And he said, you know what?
It sounds to me like Obama's given up.
It sounds to me like Obama's defeated.
It sounds to me like Obama's figured out he can't change the direction of the stream significantly.
And he's just phoning it in.
And David Remnick went on Charlie Rose and said, you know, Obama's really not unhappy with Obamacare.
He just knows everybody else is, so he's faking being mad about it.
We have audio soundbites to support both these contentions coming up.
Obama has to perform anger over Obamacare in order to relate to people.
Because as far as he's concerned, it's actually working.
Charlie Rose, now into Obama's sixth year, admits he still hasn't figured him out.
So we'll go back to that soundbite around election time in 2008 with Charlie Rose and Tom Brokaw trying to figure out just who Obama is, admitting to each other they haven't the slightest idea who he is, while nevertheless endorsing him and recommending that everybody vote for him.
There's news from the Mayo Clinic today.
Science news.
They have concluded at the Mayo Clinic that modern mothers are lazier than mothers in the past.
And they've got the headline of this is science doesn't lie.
Modern mothers are lazier.
Energy expenditure has decreased by 9 to 21 hours a week as modern mothers are getting bigger, as in obesity bigger.
They're expending less and less energy in the task and the daily routine, the job, if you will, of motherhood.
The NFL, Roger Goodell, admits they're thinking of doing away with the extra point.
And the main thing they've got to figure, if they do that, that's a TV timeout they're going to lose.
So they've got to figure out how to recapture, and they will, the money they're going to lose by doing away with the extra point.
Gallup has an interesting story today.
Obama's job approval in five years has never been positive.
Obama has never had positive job approval after the honeymoon of his first year.
In other words, Obama's job approval has never been north of 50%.
After the honeymoon period, the stimulus and all of that.
The drive-by media claiming that wealthy donors interested in donating to Chris Christie are rethinking it.
And F. Chuck Todd at NBC News and others are saying that it is over.
That Christie's hopes are done.
Because once the big money starts to abandon your cause, it's over for you.
I also have, I want to get into something a little philosophical.
Well, I say it's philosophical.
It's probably the way I'm going to approach it.
I ran into a piece today by Dr. Eamon Butler at the AdamSmith.org webpage, and he comments on a book that he's reading.
It's Daniel Hannon, the English member of Parliament, who has a new book out called How We Invented Freedom and Why It Matters.
And it illustrates a major difference in the perception of freedom on the continent, meaning in Europe as opposed to Great Britain, the island, and Great Britain.
Well, actually, it equates the two.
And it points out the differences in the way we in America have always looked at freedom versus the way it's always been looked at in Europe, and not just the socialist democracies of Europe, but also the communist countries.
And it's one of these esoteric things, but it actually isn't esoteric.
It's fundamentally important.
And the best way to illustrate it is this.
In the United States, we as citizens presume that everything is legal until a law is written making it illegal.
And that is something that we're taught, but it's something that we just assume.
So important is freedom to us and so adequately, precisely defined and spelled out in our founding documents.
All men are created equal, endowed by their creators.
So we're born free.
We are born yearning to be free.
That's the natural spirit, the natural human spirit.
And we just assume everything's legal until there's a law saying it isn't.
But you go to Europe and many other parts around the world, and the presumption is just the opposite.
It is that everything is illegal until there's a law making it legal.
And what that, to me, is fascinating.
I think there's no question about it.
And it actually illustrates why and how so many people are totally subservient to the state.
When you assume as an individual that everything is illegal until somebody makes it legal, you are essentially denying, whether you know it or not, the basic tenets of freedom as you were born.
And it also leads to statism.
It leads to all-powerful governments.
It leads to people giving up freedom and assuming, in fact, that they never had it, that freedom is what is given to them by the state.
That's never been us.
And I tell you, this is one of the things I've been dancing around the edges of this for the longest time.
For example, and again, not to frustrate you here, but as you know, as a hobby and for a whole lot of other reasons, I read tech blogs every day.
And these tech blogs are written by young people.
And they are people who think they're very bright.
They're very smart, smarter than anybody else.
They're typical youth, they're arrogant.
Some of them, not all, but I mean, If you had to assign attitudes to the majority of them, they're arrogant and condescending and think they've got all the answers and they're brilliant and all this.
And they, if I had to say, given the way they react to things that are political, they probably more closely resemble Europeans in assuming that everything's illegal until the state says it is.
And it manifests itself in these people in a belief that the state's infallible.
And whatever the state says, be it the United Nations, be it the United States government, be it the president, whatever the governing authority says is without question.
There is one exception I found in this group, and that's the NSA scandal.
And they are opposed to that.
They're very much bothered by it.
And they're suspicious.
But you let the same people who are spying on them spread this hoax and every lie about global warming, and they believe everything the state says about it.
They believe everything any professor says about it.
They believe anything the United Nations says about it, just without questioning it.
And because they believe that people involved in this are just like them, uppercrust, elite, scientific-oriented, scientists don't lie, science isn't lies, blah, blah, blah.
And so the same people who will intellectually be suspicious of spying by the government via the NSA on anything else, the government's infallible.
It's a scary thing to me.
I remember Ron Paul, in his so-called farewell address to Congress when he retired, said the most surprising thing to him was how difficult, how hard a sell freedom is.
And that hit home with me.
And I've always wondered why it's a hard sell.
It's not just that with freedom comes individual responsibility and self-reliance.
Those are no question-daunting things to a lot of people.
It's easier to be dependent.
It's easier to count on somebody else than yourself.
And ultimately, it's easier to blame somebody else when you fail rather than blame yourself.
So reliance on the state and the quasi-acceptance of freedom.
I think our future hinges on this.
I think our future hinges on how the people of our country view freedom.
And if more and more of them adopt the European attitude, which is see, they get the order wrong here.
If they assume that everything is illegal until a government or a Congress or a law comes along and makes it legal, then what is their starting point?
Their starting point is they have no freedom.
The only freedom they have is that bestowed upon them by the state, by the central authority, by the omnipotence, the magnificence, and the goodwill of the state.
Whereas I'm sure most of you are like me.
Everything's free until we pass a law saying it isn't.
And then let's take this further.
Where do we, a free people, where do our laws come from?
What is it?
If the starting point is that everything's legal, And then it's not until we pass a law saying it isn't.
It is our culture, therefore, that will be the single most relevant defining characteristic.
Our morality, our culture will define for us what's right, wrong, good, bad, good, evil, legal, illegal, so forth.
Whereas the other viewpoint, everything is illegal.
The human being is totally subservient to whatever the state decrees the human being can do.
Have you ever run into people, I know you have, have you ever run into people who are afraid to violate any, no matter how small, restriction, law, tenant, or whatever, because of abject either fear or an inordinate faith and respect for governing authorities.
I run into these people all the time, and they are really threatened when there is opposition to what the state has said is illegal or legal.
And I could give you personal examples.
Let me just give you one that I've talked about.
Here in South Florida, we have this law that eight months out of the year, we cannot have lights on in the backyard because the state has concluded that lights on in the backyard might cause sea turtles who are hatching from their eggs to come ashore rather than go to the ocean as they should.
Now, I, as a person born believing I should be able to turn on my lights whenever the hell I want to, naturally oppose this, am suspicious of it, and question the so-called science behind it based on my actual experience of being a homeowner on the beach and watching this.
And whenever, to certain, whenever I voice my disapproval, disagreement with this, and whenever I've toyed with the idea of civil disobedience on this one, like keeping a light on, just say to hell with you, some people get scared to death and run away and don't want to be anywhere near me if I'm actually going to do this because they don't want to run afoul of the authorities.
And even if they think the authorities are wrong, they are petrified of crossing them.
And they thus do not see this eight-month ban on outdoor lights on the beach as an encroachment on their freedom.
It's just the government says you can't do it, and that's it.
And I'm sure that's never good enough for me.
And herein, I think, resides, in many ways, the answers to the future of the country.
This is how many people are just unwilling to stand up to.
Like the light bulb ban.
That's another one.
This incandescent light bulb.
It's absolutely fatuous and silly and based on fraudulent science.
It's simply science masquerading as politics again.
The idea that the incandescent light bulb is causing global warming.
We got out of these compact fluorescents.
That's crony capitalism.
The compact fluorescent lobby has succeeded in greasing the skids, a member of Congress.
We got a ban on the Edison light bulbs.
I'm not one that just sits by and without passion accepts it.
Now, I don't break the law.
Don't make a mistake here, any wrong conclusion, draw an incorrect conclusion.
I'm talking about attitude.
And just this, this, particularly among the young, when it's this blind acceptance that whatever the state says is gospel.
You better obey.
You better not challenge it.
You better be good.
It's frightening to me.
I saw a picture the other day, the number, a stack of pages of actual law written, signed by the president into law, passed by Congress and signed.
And it was, oh, I don't know, three inches high.
And then there were three stacks, six feet high, of regulations written by the EPA and other bureaucracies, which had not followed the legal.
They were just regulations that had become law, and nobody had the opportunity to say no.
It was extra-constitutional.
These various bureaucracies do not have the right to regulate us the way they do.
And the number of laws that we have is obscene anyway.
And you stack that relatively small stack up against three six-foot-high stacks of regulation just in this year, by the way, or last year.
Daunting is what it is.
I got to take a break, folks, as we're up against it on time.
Our first obscene profit timeout.
Don't go away.
Be right back after this.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me give you somewhat of an illustration.
It's a story from the French news agency.
202 million people globally, 202 million are unemployed.
Now, I don't know what basis that's decided because there are billions and billions and billions of people, but we'll just accept the number.
202 million people globally unemployed, 92 million, almost half of them in the United States.
How can that be?
How in the world?
And while we're told we have a growing economy and 44 months of job growth, as Obama told David Remnick, and we've got the economic rescue that happened and the stimulus and healthcare and everybody being covered and their premiums going, how in the world can this be?
And one of the people quoted in this piece, some guy named Guy Ryder, United Nations Labor General Directory, or Director, there is a cleared linkage between these unacceptable levels of unemployment in the world and growing inequality.
Oh, really?
So that's why we've got half the world's unemployment in the United States because we lead the world in inequality?
Doesn't that just delve nicely with Obama and the Pope?
Hi, how are you?
Welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, off and running a brand new day of broadcast excellence here at the Limbaugh Institute.
The photograph that I described of all of the new regulations added to the Federal Register last year versus the number of pages of new real law was provided by Senator Mike Lee.
I have the picture.
I'm going to turn on the ditto cam.
I've got it zoomed in so you can see this.
And by the way, I just sent the picture up to Coco at rushlimbaugh.com, and he'll be posting it there.
If you want to go to the website, see it if you don't have a ditto cam.
Now, what you're going to see is a bookshelf, a glass-case bookshelf, with two and a half stacks of regulations that just became law without going through Congress, without being signed by the president, just virtual decrees by various bureaucracies.
In the upper right-hand corner, as you look at this, on top of the bookcase, you will see a very small stack of paper.
That small stack is actual new laws that were passed in 2013.
This does not include Obamacare.
That was 2010.
Don't forget.
So, without any further ado, there we are turning on the DittoCam, and you can see those two and a half stacks of paper are regulations that became law simply by decree from the EPA, the FCC, the FAA, you name it.
And up there in the upper right-hand corner are the actual new laws.
80,000 pages of new regulations in the Federal Register last year.
Most people don't even know that this has happened.
Not even aware.
Senator Mike Lee put this together.
Most people are not even aware of it.
And they don't think there's anything you can do about it when they find out about it.
But it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, and it's nothing new, it happens every year.
I think, I don't know if it's to this degree or not, but I'm telling you, this presumption that, like, and this is most people in the world, this again goes to the whole concept of American exceptionalism, how we are the exception to so many things in the world.
And in our country, we are born, and the presumption is everything is legal until a law is passed saying that it isn't.
Furthermore, it is our cultural experience, morality, and so forth, from which our laws spring, not authoritarianism, not statism.
That's what's so different about Obama.
And we have statism here.
We have authoritarianism.
Half these regulations are his.
By the way, those do not even include executive orders.
The rest of the world is born thinking everything's illegal.
They are born criminals.
They are born in violation of the law.
Until their state says something is legal, everything's illegal.
Imagine that.
And this became, well, I became aware of it via website, adamsmith.org, a piece written by Dr. Eamon Butler, who is reading Daniel Hannon's new book, How We Invented Freedom and Why It Matters.
And here's the passage that alerted Dr. Butler.
The response is always the same.
But the old system was unregulated.
The idea that absence of regulation might be a natural state of affairs is seen as preposterous.
Meaning in socialist totalitarian countries, a circumstance, the idea that no regulation, no rules, what?
That's preposterous.
That's silly.
We can't have that.
There have to be rules on everything.
There have to be regulations on everything.
In continental usage, meaning the continent of Europe, unregulated and illegal are much closer concepts than in places where lawmaking happens in English.
And Dr. Butler's is a profound point.
We've all heard about the differences between British, specifically English and continental law.
In English common law, rules are decided by courts in response to some specific problem arising.
In continental Roman law, rules are laid down by authorities.
So in Britain, things are presumed to be permitted unless there's a law to stop them.
On the continent, things are presumed to be prohibited unless there's a law to allow them.
And believe me, America's left and leftists all over the world subscribe to the belief that everything is illegal until they say it's okay.
So you have lawyers and lawmakers who end up believing that nothing's legal until they proclaim it.
And they believe that law shapes culture, except in an authoritarian state where the ruler would use law backed by force to dictate to the majority.
Now, in free societies, and this is my point of view, we are one.
In free societies, culture dictates what the law is, not the other way around.
The other way around, the state dictates culture.
The state dictates right and wrong.
The state takes what's criminal and what isn't.
And this precisely, folks, this is precisely, like Drudge has his headline today: 55 million abortions since Roe versus Wade.
That's 1973, 55 million abortions.
If you want to know why Roe versus Wade has been such a debacle in our society, it is because, precisely because the state, in this case, the Supreme Court just proclaimed that abortion is constitutional.
There wasn't anything democratic about it.
The American people didn't vote on it, and this is not the way we do.
This was, in fact, in direct contravention of our culture at the time, and it still is.
Our culture really does not say that babies in the womb are worthless, but Roe versus Wade does.
And that has been rammed down everybody's throats because the state has presumed to say what's legal and illegal rather than the culture deciding it, which in most cases is defined as the majority in a Democratic, Republican-Democratic sense.
If the states, for example, had been permitted to, I don't know, evolve their own abortion laws.
Some would have permitted it on demand.
Some would have forbidden it in all instances.
Most states probably would permit it, but highly regulate it.
But regardless, there wouldn't be this raging controversy because it would have been whatever the end result would have been because the American people had participated in whatever the outcome of the decision was state by state.
So, this presumption that the state knows everything, that we are born illegal until the state okays our behavior, specific behavior, or the state has the total authority to proclaim something.
This is my problem with the Supreme Court in general and a lot of other people's too.
I'm not alone.
How do we get to the point where every piece of controversial law or every controversial issue ends up being proclaimed legal or illegal by nine people?
And look at the willingness of so many Americans to accept it.
Supreme Court is the final authority.
Well, why?
Particularly if a decision comes that's in direct contravention with our culture.
It is a it's it's a truly fascinating and maddening thing too.
It's one of the reasons why our society is so embattled by this because of the way it has happened.
A brief timeout again will continue much more straight ahead here as we roll on on the EIB network.
Don't go away.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Rush Limboy here behind the golden EIB microphone.
And telephone number is 800-282-2882.
Michael Barone has a piece today at the Washington Examiner, Millennials Unhappy With Obama's War on the Young.
Oh, speaking of which, did you millennials?
Did you see what Patrick Kennedy said?
Patrick Kennedy, former member of Congress, Patrick Kennedy, says that President Obama is wrong about the dangers of marijuana, saying that the drug today isn't like what Obama smoked in his choom gang days.
You know, Obama was a big doper.
And he wrote about it.
He is in a chum gang.
They'd sit in cars, close the windows, and go to town with their weed.
And Obama said the other day in this New Yorker interview that alcohol is much, much worse than marijuana.
Much, much worse.
The same interview where he said he wouldn't let his son, Trayvon Martin, play football.
Wild, by the way, he was watching a football game.
And Patrick Kennedy said, no, wait a minute, Mr. President, I don't think you may not know, but marijuana today, the pot that's out there today, it's much worse than alcohol.
He said, I think the president needs to speak to his NIH director in charge of drug abuse.
It turns out, by the way, that this guy also has gone public saying that Obama really doesn't know what he's talking about here.
So Patrick Kennedy is saying that pot has become much worse than alcohol.
It's a much different drug than when the president smoked it.
And there it is.
It's right here in Politico.
We're talking about the president of the United States.
Pretty soon, it's going to be common no matter who we elect, but still is relatively a new thing.
Patrick Kennedy, hey, this is much, much worse than the drug the president smoked in his youth.
He said, I think the president's NIH director in charge of drug abuse would tell the president that, in fact, today's modern, genetically modified marijuana, it's so much higher in THC levels, far surpasses the marijuana the president acknowledges smoking when he was a young person.
And Patrick Kennedy said that government research shows that marijuana is harmful.
Well, you know, this is another potential illustration of what we're talking about.
Okay, this is government research shows that marijuana is harmful.
Yet, Two states have just made it perfectly fine to engage in it recreationally.
Colorado and Washington.
Ironically, the two states from which hail the two Super Bowl teams.
So, how do you justify that?
Government research shows that marijuana is harmful, and yet two state governments have said, hey, have at it.
Go to it, dobies.
Perfectly fine.
You want to engage in recreational use?
Have at it.
Patrick Kennedy says, he's wrong when he says that it isn't very harmful because the new dope is not the old dope.
We need to have presidential decisions made based upon public health and the sound science that the federal government has invested in.
This is probably one of those areas where some people think the federal government's all wet.
Now, when the federal government comes out with running health care, they probably buy everything.
But when they start saying marijuana is dangerous, you have people disagreeing with it.
But Patrick Kennedy said that if the president believes that alcohol is more dangerous, he should be concerned about legalizing and commercializing marijuana because we don't want another big tobacco or big alcohol.
By the way, have you seen the latest that there are many more carcinogens in marijuana than in tobacco?
And the same anti-smoking Nazis, which are now invading the e-cigarette, I had a piece yesterday.
I didn't get to it.
Some young guy, some 24, 25-year-old guy, posted a blog piece complaining about his wife, but basically complaining about his lack of freedom.
Hey, he can't smoke an e-cigarette in the house.
He has to go outside just because his wife doesn't like the way it looks.
He tried to tell her, but honey, it's just water vapor.
And it smells good.
She didn't care.
She wasn't going to permit it.
It didn't look good.
It looked too much like a real cigarette.
It made her uncomfortable.
So he had to go outside.
And he must have written seven, maybe a thousand words about this.
And he ended up caving.
He ended up acquiescing.
So he takes his e-cigs outside.
They're totally harmless to bystanders.
They may be totally harmless to users, but they're certainly totally harmless to bystanders.
I used to smoke the damn things.
I was over to Big Island, Hawaii, and after a round of golf, went to the bar.
I'll tell you where it was.
It was the Four Seasons hotel over there.
We played their golf course, and we went to the bar, which is a standard operating procedure for after a round.
And I'm standing there, and I got an e-cig going.
And some executive manager of the bar of the hotel comes up and says, Mr. Limbaugh, I hate to tell you, but we serve food and smoking cigarettes is not permissive.
It's not a cigarette.
It isn't?
No, no, it's an e-cig, I said.
In fact, this one's cherry-flavored.
I said, here, and I vaped and I blew it in his face, and it smelled good.
Oh, okay, no problem.
He came back about 10 minutes later, said, Mr. Limbaugh, it'd really be easier if you just refrain.
I said, why?
Well, there's a couple of diners complaining.
They don't like the way it looks.
And it's a bad, bad image for young people.
And I looked around.
I don't see any young people.
This is not a place where people bring their kids.
I said, I don't see any.
Well, I said, who is this?
Well, I'm not going to.
So I started scouting her, and I could see.
It didn't take me long.
I could see who it was.
You could just tell.
But I didn't put it in my pocket.
I didn't buy some.
This is not harming that woman.
She can't smell it.
It's not a cigarette.
There's no flame.
There's no fire.
There's no carcinogen.
There's no tobacco.
Nothing here that can harm her.
And I'm heck if I'm some PC babe.
And the guy was really good about it.
And I turned around so my back was to this particular woman.
I mean, I didn't flaunt it.
But now I've got to take a break.
That's not actually how the thing ended.
It's pretty close.
But still another obscene profit timeout.
Don't go away.
Chris Christie is giving his, or he was giving his inaugural address moments ago after having been re-elected for second term.
And among other things, Governor Christie said that we must shun partisanship and work together and take action on behalf of the people.
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