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Jan. 29, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
31:32
January 29, 2014, Wednesday, Hour #3
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The views expressed by the host on this program documented to be almost always right, 99.7% at a time.
Still waiting on the latest year-end opinion audit from my opinion auditing firm.
Back in Sacramento, California.
They uh were down in uh Southern California for a while.
And now they're back.
Haven't had an opinion audit report uh probably 60 days.
So it it's it's it's it's bound to change at some point.
It's been this way for a whole year.
Great to have you here, folks.
Uh 800-282-2882 is the number if you want to be on the program.
We've got more of your calls coming up in this hour.
Okay, the Republican response, you know, the Republican response is a no-win.
Any response is a no-win.
There's nothing you can do.
Um it's television, it's optics.
There's there's just no way.
You could you can have the nicest looking room and fireplace in the world, and nothing is going to compare to a packed house chamber.
And no matter who the president is, and no matter what he's thought of.
So it's it's uh it's a tough thing to overcome.
There's another, there's another thing here that that let me just so there's no confusion.
I like Kathy McMorris Rogers.
I think she's fantastic, and I really hope.
Well, uh I I really hope that really is I really hope she doesn't get totally co-opted by the establishment.
But I really don't want to say it that way, but I guess I just did.
Um great choice, I think, but here's the problem.
In the real world, the Republican Party, no matter who they put in there, is not going to actually close the loop because of the president's race.
What is it that's roiling the country right now?
It's Obamacare.
Oh and jobs, but but Obamacare, look, jobs are there's a there's a fail-safe for that.
It's called unemployment compensation.
If you are canceled, you know, the Democrat Party has for decades made people think that without health care, it's the you may as well be without oxygen.
Without health insurance, you may as well not have oxygen.
They've they've done a great job politically in convincing people they can't do without that.
They've they got people living in perpetual fear of getting sick.
Getting sick now equals potential bankruptcy, losing everything.
And I don't mean that as a just uh uh uh uh a half baked description when you fear that you might lose everything, no matter how much or little it is.
That is one of the most frightening things that can happen to you.
And the Democrat Party has convinced people that not having health insurance puts them dangerously close to the reality that simply getting sick, which is something you can't avoid.
Everybody's gonna get sick.
Everybody's gonna die.
Everybody's gonna get something someday.
You can't avoid that.
And the Democrats have made people think that when it happens to you, if you don't have insurance, you will go bankrupt.
You will lose everything.
And as a result, it is the most important personal thing.
That's why this Obamacare mess is as big as it is.
That is why the three years of lies this president told people about keeping their doctor if they like him, and keeping their insurance plan if they like it.
Their costs were gonna go down, their access was going to increase, premiums are gonna come down, copay is gonna come down, out of pocket was gonna come down.
Um, and it's just the opposite.
Premiums are doubling.
The uh uh uh other aspects are are are tripling.
The copay is going up, out of pocket is going up.
There's nothing the president said is truthful.
And now these cancellations, people are being canceled for real.
And there isn't anywhere to go that's affordable.
Healthcare.gov does not work.
Even after you go there and sign up, now you're told you may not be signed up.
They may not have a way to prove it.
It is an abject mess.
And I'm telling you, this has the people of this country.
The media is never going to tell you how much.
They can't afford to.
This Obama's big signature issue.
But this is huge.
And it is deeply personal, and it has people scared.
They were expecting the opposite.
And in the midst of all this, they are now figuring out that Obama is incompetent.
He doesn't know what he's doing.
He didn't claims he didn't know the website wasn't ready.
There's nothing.
There's not one thing in Obamacare.
Let's let me read.
There's not one thing in American health care right now that is inspiring confidence or making people feel positive.
It is a huge, huge deal.
And as a result, that is a huge, huge opportunity for the Republicans that they are totally missing.
Because they are afraid to go there, and they are afraid to go there because the president is African American.
And they are afraid to criticize him or anything he's done because they don't want to be called racists or sexists, bigots, or anything of the sort.
Now, in hindsight, everybody can do it.
You watch somebody do something, and the next day you say you could do it better, and that's easy to do.
And I'm not doing that with Kathy McMorris-Rogers.
But to me, if you're going to do a Republican response, I would think that one of the points that you would nail is— You would tell people that you know what a disaster Obamacare is.
You know, your own version of you feel their pain.
And then you would make the point.
You would drill home the point that not one Republican signed voted for it.
You make the point that the Republicans tried as hard as they could to stop it.
You simply remind people what the Republican Party's position on this was all during the process.
You make the point, and you take the occasion of your response to the State of the Union.
Doesn't matter what Obama has said about it.
Obviously, in the State of the Union, he's going to praise it and talk great it is.
But as a Republican, you have to know that the country is disillusioned and scared and mad and feeling all kinds of paranoia about it, plus anger.
You've got to make sure that people know you had nothing to do with it and that you want to get rid of it, and you have a plan to replace it with something to get rid of it and either go back to the way it was or turn it over to real experts to fix or what have you.
But you've got to make the point that you didn't have any role In it.
Let me go to the audio sound by just to illustrate something.
Frank Lunt's Focus Group on Fox after the State of the Coup address.
This is during Meghan Kelly's program.
And this is we got two of these.
This is this is Lunz.
I thought Lunch retired and then sold his company and moved to Hollywood.
But here he is back on Fox with his focus group.
Anyway, this is the first of the two sound bites.
How many of you so far have a favorable impression of the president's health care plan?
Raise your hands if you're favorable towards it.
Only one.
But you voted for him.
Some of you.
The promise is great.
The execution is miserable.
So when he talks about it, you still dial it down?
Execution failed.
Horribly.
So you're telling me it's not the style, it's the substance.
Not just the execution.
In fact, we found that now we can't keep her own doctor.
A lot of choices have been removed.
A lot of people's premiums have gone up.
Nothing is what we expected.
We were told we could keep a real help plan, and now that's been proved to be an outright lie.
See?
This is made to order for the Republicans to reduce speed in there.
Now, and I'm not saying you could do it in the wrong way.
You could do it in a way that would come off as childish and Bart Simpson like.
You don't want to do that.
You just want to, in a mature, honest way, tell people.
I would even go so far as to say we knew it wasn't going to work, but we didn't have the votes to stop it, and not one of us voted for this.
And we did everything we could to warn people that this was going to be the result.
Because the government doesn't know what it's doing.
The government cannot run this for you.
And we don't want to.
We want to turn it back to the experts.
Yeah, that's a little risky because you know people hate insurance companies and so forth.
But there's a great opportunity.
The Republicans are just not going to take it because the President's race.
The President's race.
That's why the Democrats hope it's going to be Hillary, and if not Hillary, maybe an Hispanic, because the next first ever female president, same protection.
Any criticism will be sexist.
If it's an Hispanic, first Hispanic American president.
Any criticism will be racist again.
This is how they silence the opposition, silence the critics.
But this is a to me a fundamental point that Republicans have to make over and over and over again.
And you can't assume that people know it.
Here's the next bite with the Luntz Focus Group.
What the president is asking for is patience.
Doesn't he deserve time to get it right?
No.
Why not?
When they're not, we've known the details of this for two years now.
It was poorly conceived.
We were lied to about what was in it.
There's been plenty of time.
How many of you say that the time is up on the president's health care plan?
Megan, take a look at this.
That no matter what you say during the say the unit address, if it doesn't resonate with the American people, you can be as passionate as you want, and it's still not going to work.
And this health care plan is going to pull the president down over the coming months.
And it's pulling him down now.
And it's just made to order.
You've got midterm elections coming up, and this is not the time for the Republicans to propose their alternative government run.
But they're just not going to do it.
For the stated uh reason.
But Kathy McMorris Rogers, I think was uh really good in what she did.
I liked it uh very much.
I just I look at these things as a response as an impossible thing to really you mean you're not gonna outshine the president no matter what.
You're not gonna you're not gonna have the audience.
Half of them are gonna tune out.
You're gonna lose them just by the fact that they're not there.
I gotta take a quick time out, my friends.
You sit tight.
We will be back with much more after this.
Back to the phones.
This is Jim in Philadelphia.
Welcome, sir.
Great to have you on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Rush Megadiddos.
Thank you.
First time caller.
I've been listening Since January the twentieth, nineteen ninety-three.
That is fabulous.
I and then the date happens to ring a bell.
It I um was listening to a local radio call-in show, and they were preempted by the Clinton inauguration, and I didn't want to listen to that.
So I spun the dial and I landed on a station that had a dulcet voice that was saying things that I agreed with and hadn't heard on the radio before.
And you have been here ever since.
Yes.
Appreciate that.
Really do.
Well, I wanted to call today because uh I think you have um once again proven your profound audition uh when you were talking earlier in the program about um independents who might have been former Republicans.
Mm-hmm.
And I said to my wife, he's describing me.
I got a call.
So I'm glad I got through.
So am I. I uh this I was based on is that um this last week or the week before, a caller asked me discussing independence.
Well, who are they?
And I gave the definition that I gave five years ago.
Basically a bunch of liberals that won't admit it, uh people that think they're smarter than everybody else, because they uh open-minded blah, blah, blah.
And then I'm watching last night and I'm watching the track, that little graph, uh, people responding yay or nay, as Obama's speaking, and the independent and Republican lines are identical.
They're almost on top of each other.
And so I uh if you're just joining us, I actually apologized to independence today for getting it wrong, because I think now what's happened that the vast majority of the independents are Republicans who have left the party.
Yeah, one way or another.
And that's what you're that that's who you are.
Yes, uh, I turned 18 in the summer of nineteen eighty and was proud to register as a Republican and cast my first vote for president for Ronald Reagan because he was saying things that I agreed with.
Um but as uh time went on and I watched uh different Republican candidates come up for president.
By the time we got to um 2008 and McCain, I just thought, wow, this is not the Republican Party I signed up for.
Right.
And um it took paraphrase my political hero, I didn't leave the Republican Party, the Republican Party left me.
Right.
Right.
And I think that you you're not alone.
I actually think now there's still some independents who fit the bill as I describe them, but yeah, I I was struck by that last night.
The independent and Republican response as tracked by it was it was Bing.com as Microsoft uh software that was being used last night, if it's the same Bing, I think it is.
It was identical.
It was identical.
It has to be, therefore, that there are a lot of former Republicans who are now calling themselves independents because they don't want to be known as Republicans for whatever reason.
Do you think that the Republican Party and the Republican elite will respond to that fact?
I said to myself while the speech was going on, they better be noticing this.
And th the problem, the potential problem is that they will see that and think, well, okay, we got the independence locked up, good, we don't have to do anything.
We got the independence now, they're with us.
And they'll just take it for granted and go on their merry way.
And what they'll assume is that no matter what you call yourself, you're still gonna vote for them.
If they that that's the potential mistake they could, because I think they could drive you away further, right?
Well, it's kind of tough because where am I going to go?
Uh I'm a big thing.
Well, you can sit home like four million did in two thousand twelve.
Well, I I held my nose and voted for McCain in two thousand and eight, and I held my nose and voted for Romney again.
Um, but I'm tired of holding my nose when I go into the uh voting booth.
Yeah, I I hear you.
Do you have access to Netflix?
Um I don't.
Netflix.
I could.
Netflix has a uh uh documentary, an hour and a half documentary called Mitt.
And there was a camera crew that's been following Romney around since 2008.
And they put together 90 minute documentary of both of his presidential campaigns.
And it's kind of remarkable because it's it's the Romney that nobody ever saw.
The real Mitt Romney.
It's uh it's a great example of how candidates, for whatever reason, be it the consultants or just their own instincts, hide themselves when the middle of a campaign.
They think they've got to present themselves a certain way, so I mean image consultants and their folks are what not to say and what not to do.
But this is Romney unplugged, as it were.
The cameras are around them so much he just forgot they were there.
It's a lot of family stuff.
It's really really good.
It's really fascinating.
And it's a it's a it's a slightly different Romney than the I don't think you'd be holding your nose as much voting for Romney if you had seen this prior to voting for him.
Well, I wasn't so much concerned about Romney himself.
It was just the way sort of the Republican establishment was driving the candidate, um, especially with McCain.
Um I just didn't see him as a conservative at all.
And it seemed like he was the guy the establishment wanted, and the media was going along with him.
And Pennsylvania has a very late primary, um, it's in April, and so it was really a foregone conclusion by April that uh McCain was going to be the candidate.
And I just got so frustrated with that.
And even with the way the Republicans handle uh attempts to work with the Democrats, um, it just seems like they say they want to work with the Democrats, but they end up being like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football and he yanks it away every time.
Nothing Democrats just pull it over on them.
Irritates me more when I hear a Republican, and you and you still do.
You hear it constantly.
Voters want us to work together.
Government to work together.
And I'm a guy who can cross the aisle and I can get things done in a bipartisan way, and that is the biggest tune out in the world for conservative Republicans.
Stan in uh Northern Mexico.
Wow.
We have an international call here on the EIB network.
Hi, Stan, how are you?
Hey Rush, Megaditos from Mexico, where the American dream is alive and well, south of the border.
How are you?
I'm great, thank you.
I've been a fan since the eighties when I saw you at your Russian excellence tours in uh Nollins.
And I have one question, and only you can answer this one.
I heard this morning that Edward Snowden was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Yeah.
Was it Hillary or Obama who nominated him?
I'm not sure.
That is an interesting question.
Um if if he's been nominated by the committee, then it's serious.
You know, I was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Uh really.
Yeah, the the year that uh Al Gore got it.
I was uh I was nominated.
Um Mark Levin, the landmark legal foundation, nominated me.
So I don't know who nominated Snowden.
I think it was a European.
Um, but I'm sure Hillary had something to do with it.
Let me tell you something.
If they gave the thing to Obama on the cum, don't think they're not gonna give it to Snowden or that he's I'm thinking.
Is it upside down world now?
It's totally upside down.
It was a what the Nobel Peace Prize has been a joke for I don't know how long.
I mean, Al Gore getting a Nobel Peace Prize for propagating a hoax.
It's a hoax that they all believe in, but it's a hoax.
Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize and he hasn't done anything.
He literally got the peace prize on the cum because they thought Obama was going to bring peace to the whole world.
They thought Obama was gonna bring universal love and devotion to everybody.
Obama, by virtue of his presence, was going to end terrorism and all that.
These people are a laughing stock.
They're an absolute joke.
They are an embarrassment.
And there are people in the Nobel committee, I guarantee you, that would no doubt look at Snowden as a legitimate nominee because he's done things to hurt America.
Remember, America is the is the focus evil.
Even with Obama, see, nothing's changed in that regard.
Obama was supposed to change all that.
We were supposed to be loved and adored and respected all over again.
And the same clowns still hate us.
And they're going to hate us no matter who the president is.
They're going to hate us because we are the lone superpower.
And I I give emails.
I get emails about things I don't even tell you.
Folks, my email is really populated with people wanting me to explain how it is, and I haven't mentioned this because I know some of you get irritated when I talk about Apple.
You don't like Apple, you think they're a bunch of commie libs, and uh you know stick to the issues, crowd.
When I talk about Apple, it's like when I used to talk about golf, people got mad.
But I'm going to talk about this.
I have a lot of email.
Want to know, Rush, something doesn't make sense to me.
Apple just announced a record quarter.
They sold a record number of iPhones.
They sold a record number of iPads.
They had a record profit.
They made more in profit in one quarter than Intel makes in a year, for example.
Their profit was $13 billion, 13.01, second quarter in a row.
They um they they sold 51 million iPhones.
However, somewhere in the media in the past six weeks, not making this up, there was an analyst, meaning somebody that works at a brokerage firm on a Stasmikoyan.
It doesn't matter.
It's a nobody.
Who sent a note to investors that he expected, he doesn't work at Apple, he doesn't know anybody, he doesn't know anything.
And he said, We expect Apple to sell 55 million iPhones.
So Apple announced on Monday, and they'd sold 51 million.
That's 4 million than they sold in the same quarter a year ago.
Apple has lost nearly $35 or $40 on the stock price since.
The media, the tech media is reporting on what a major disappointment this was.
And I've got people ask, Rush, how can this what is going on?
Why is Apple hated?
They have a record, they're outperforming everybody.
And all this negative news and driving investors out of the stock and so forth.
It's real simple, folks.
There's a number are a number of different ways I can explain this.
One way to understand it is, as far as the financial media is concerned, and to a certain extent the tech media, Apple is to the media what the Republican Party is to the news media.
They're simply despised.
Now in Apple's case, there are specific reasons for it.
One of the reasons Apple is despised is because they're the biggest.
But there's another reason.
They don't leak.
Now, you might think this is silly.
But Apple doesn't have one person in that entire corporation that calls anybody in the media and tells them anything in advance.
They do not leak.
There is nobody at Apple that has a closet working relationship, as most organizations, political parties, individuals do with the media.
The normal way that you buy good media coverage is to leak, become a source, buddy buddy.
Apple does not do that.
And that means it's payback time.
It is that childish.
There's also the fact that they're just the biggest.
They are a tech superpower.
And so they're automatically a target.
But it is personal with some of these people.
A nameless, faceless analyst somewhere at a stock brokerage firm you may never have heard of, can simply say, based on absolutely nothing, that he expects Apple to sell 55 million phones, and that becomes the media expectation.
That becomes the standard against which Apple's going to be measured.
Now, Apple, like every other company, issues guidance.
They try to tell the market what they expect in the next quarter, what's going to be.
And they were right in the middle of their guidance.
They didn't mislead anybody.
They didn't undersell it.
They didn't oversell it.
They came in right where they led the media and the investment community.
There were no surprises.
But because some one person, and then it ballooned in everybody, but one person said they're going to sell 55, and they sold 51 million, and that's it.
And that becomes they can't innovate anymore since Steve Jobs died.
No new products since the iPad.
They've lost their mojo.
And it's just it's it's an amazing thing.
Now on the other side of this, you got Carl Icon, who on uh bought 500 million dollars of Apple.
The day the report came out.
So if you follow the money, you find out they're doing fine.
It's the best run, one of the best run companies in the world.
It's one of the most solid companies in the world.
It's almost as dependable as the U.S. government financially, meaning government can't default.
Apple is solid.
It's just it's an amazing thing to watch.
And if you're invested in them, it's very frustrating because you you watch you know a bunch of people who have no idea what they're talking about talk the stock down.
And there are other companies treated like Apple is treated.
But on the other hand, you've got Yahoo, well, not Yahoo.
Let's say Amazon.
Loved and adored and constantly praised.
And they never turn a profit by design.
And their stock prices talked up and so forth.
So it in this sense.
Apple doesn't leak.
They don't have these close buddy buddy tight relationships.
They believe in secrecy.
They don't they don't want their competitors knowing in advance what they're doing.
They've really been pretty good at controlling what comes out of the company officially in advance of anything.
But at least early on.
And that kind of relationship with the media and with analysts can create a okay.
You're not going to play ball with us.
You're not going to cooperate with us.
You're not going to be our friend.
Well, look, okay, well, here's what we'll do to you.
And that's what's that's part of what's going on.
And it's it's the same thing.
It happens to the United States around the word despised simply because we're the best.
We're despised because we're the biggest.
We're despised because we're the richest.
What's different about all that now is that it used to be that we were despised by foreign entities.
Now the people running the country feel very close to the same way about the country as the foreign entities do.
That's what makes it problematic and dangerous now.
If you will, if you'll remind me tomorrow, I'll answer that.
So then why don't they make a bigger screen phone?
Why don't they make a bigger screen phone like Samsung?
I'll answer that.
I uh it I'd be happy to answer that.
Anyway, uh it's it's it's just fascinating.
Let's say the average profit on an iPhone sale is I'm gonna just pick a number that's close, $300.
And so they they sold uh let's say four four million fewer phones, and somebody that's not even in the business thought they were gonna sell.
Okay, that that that's 1.2 billion dollars of income they didn't make.
The stock is down 40 billion dollars because of this.
It's irrational.
Except the market is rational.
That's the thing.
There are reasons for this.
They may not may not make sense, but that's markets for you.
We could spend an hour on this if I thought you were interested.
Thank you so much for being with us today, folks.
And there's always tomorrow.
There is always tomorrow here at the EIB network and in America.
And yeah, I'll tell you how we can survive the next three years tomorrow.
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