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Feb. 6, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:46
February 6, 2014, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of The Rush 24-7 Podcast.
Hi, folks.
Really great to be back with you today after two shocking, surprising, unpredicted days away.
I can't really call them days off because they weren't days off.
They were days away.
So this is Thursday.
So what I missed Tuesday and Wednesday.
I missed Disney.
By the way.
If what I saw is right, I'm I'm really surprised.
The Super Bowl is the most watched television program of all time.
Did I see that correctly?
If I it if that just amazed him, it was so bad.
But I'm not going to dwell on it.
I really thought they'd be carrying Rupert Murdoch out of there on a stretcher at halftime because of the uh quality of the game and the and and the audience fleeing, but it apparently didn't happen.
Anyway, there's a societal, interesting societal explanation for that, I think, that uh I may have time to get to.
Folks, I've got so much to get to, and I'm not going to be able to get to it all today.
Just get that uh out there up front.
I'm gonna try, and I'm and I may surprise myself, but I may not get to it all today.
A lot has happened in these past two days.
And even though you may know pretty much what has happened, you still don't know what to think of it.
Because you haven't heard my take on any of it, and you haven't heard me put it in perspective, which of course I'm gonna do.
But I have to tell you, on on uh Monday afternoon, I'm all day Monday, I'm telling Snertley, lower to Thermoston.
I'm just I'm burning up in here.
Did not feel feverish, I just felt hot.
And I got home on Monday afternoon and uh started getting the chills, and uh, but that was it.
It didn't feel bad or anything of the sort.
And Catherine came in and said, Well, we'll just take your temperature.
It was a hundred and three and a half, and I said, I I can't, that thermometer can't be right.
103 and a half, and I would be unconscious in bed.
And so we took it with three different or two different thermometers, three or four different times, and it it stayed at 103 and a half for the the rest of the night into the next day.
It was the weirdest 103-degree fever I've ever had because it didn't have anything else with it.
Uh, but it was I did have the chills and so forth, and it it it obviously had me incapacitated, but it would, but not like normally uh just over the weekend during in fact during the Super Bowl game, I had a uh uh a flash from a friend who was just getting over high fever.
So when's the last time you had a high fever?
Interestingly enough, I said years.
I mean maybe decades.
And then lo and behold, 36 hours later, there I am with one.
So it's back to normal now.
Everything's hunky-dory, and it I just tell you it's I was going stir crazy yesterday.
Um because I didn't want to come in here befect anybody, and I didn't want to push it, and then maybe end up missing a couple of more days.
I'm still not a hundred percent.
I mean, I still feel like I'm burning up, but I don't have any fever.
It's really weird.
When I had fever, I didn't feel like I was burning up.
When I don't have fever, I feel like I'm burning up.
I had to chills.
It was really, really uh strange.
Anyway, we're ready to go.
The telephone number, if you want to be on the program at 800-282-2882, the email address, L Rushpo at EIB net.com.
So Tuesday night's episode of Justified featured me.
Well, I can't say it featured me.
But I was in it.
And what a great episode it was.
Uh and this episode was so good that I had to go back to last season and watch a couple of episodes from the prior season to bring myself back up to speed on some of the characters being referenced and some of the things that Raylan Givens had supposedly done that I had forgotten.
So I watched the Tuesday night episode, didn't get to it till Wednesday because I wasn't able to focus.
And then I went back and watched a couple of previous uh episodes to put what a just what a fabulous show.
The way it worked was Nick Circe.
What a Nick Cersei, I wish everybody could meet Nick Cersei.
He's uh he's He's an actor, he's an accomplished actor, movies, television show, and he's just you'd love to go hang around, watch a ball game, have a beer, uh, chew the fat.
He's just a great guy.
Oh, he's totally fearless.
I mean, he's he's is a fearless one of you can count him on one hand, fearless Hollywood conservatives.
Doesn't hide it, doesn't use it as an excuse.
He just it it doesn't, and I don't think he trumpets it, but he doesn't hide it.
And but he's well, it's not not true to say doesn't trumpet it.
He's very proud of it.
He's uh great.
He plays Sheriff Art Mullen, and Art Mullen is on a stakeout at a diner, looking at some bad guys, and the radio is on Art Mullen's U.S. Marshall Carr.
National Low-income Housing Coalition issued a report, and they found that low-income households can only afford 495.
National.
Now, the plight of homeless families is not from page two.
Okay, that'll give you the flavor for now.
While this is going on, a bad guy is uh thinking about entering the diner, and uh Sheriff Art is uh is staking the uh thing out, and as he's listening, this is a morning update, a previously aired morning update.
Um art is he's kind of frowning because he's on a stakeout, he's nodding a couple times.
I mean, it was an honor.
I just have to tell you it was it's one of my favorite shows.
And I just I I want to tell him how much I appreciate being uh included in the thing.
Okay, the CBO report.
Uh folks, I to do this properly, we almost have to go back to January 16th of 2009.
This would be two weeks before President Obama was inaugurated.
January 16, 2009 was when I said over and over again.
Well, it was what happened.
The Wall Street Journal had asked for 200 words from a bunch of conservative media people.
Advice for President Obama, or ways in which we'd work for President, you know, one of those kind of things.
I forget what the exact question was.
And I wrote back and I said, I don't need 200 words.
I just need four.
I hope he fails.
Now the reason I said that is because I meant it.
I hope he failed, because if Obama would fail, the country would survive.
The country is founded.
Now, it was immediately seized upon and predictably misreported, taken out of context, and it was reported to all the low information voters that I was hoping I was so partisan, I was so pro-conservative, so GOP that if my side didn't win, that I wanted the country to go in the tank.
And that's what was reported.
And it was that was just one of the most unpatriotic things anybody could say.
Nobody wants the president to fail.
Nobody wants America to fail.
But see, the two didn't go together in my mind.
Obama failing meant the country being spared.
So I went on Hannity's show uh uh one night to explain it in great detail.
And it was it was a waste of time, uh, even though appearing on the Hannity show was fun, because everybody knew what I meant.
They just took the occasion to distort it and misrepresent it.
But everybody that was criticizing knew exactly what I meant.
It was just typical behavior of the left and the and the left-wing media.
They all knew exactly what I meant, but they were feigning ignorance and acting as though they don't.
And as the controversy continued to attach itself to it, I continue to explain it, which to me it's it still stand by it.
More and more people, by the way, according to polling data, CNN not happy.
They're very troubled at CNN over this.
More and more people are now adopting that attitude.
Obama has failed.
Um it's it's not looking good in a whole lot of areas, and they're very concerned about it in the drive-by media.
And that led Me to go into great detail, even though I had spent the entire campaign detailing for people making predictions.
And when it came to Obamacare, and it wasn't just me, there were a whole lot of us on the right who were predicting exactly what has happened.
And let me fast forward to 2009, when we got the first CBO estimate of Obamacare.
Now remember, the CBO is valuable.
It's the coin of the realm in Washington because it is nonpartisan.
So they say.
And I will accept the premise that they try to be.
It's a tough one, I'm sure to pull off because of the pressures that are being applied and the tricks that are being employed by the party in power writing legislation to trick them.
But nevertheless, let's just accept that they are nonpartisan.
The CBO only deals with 10 years in the future.
That's by policy.
So when the Democrats and Obama originally proposed Obamacare and then spelled out, they they provided the ingredients, if you will, for the CBO to analyze.
They they included a trick, and that is see the magic number was a trillion dollars.
They had to bring Obamacare in.
The CBO had to say that Obamacare was going to lower the deficit, it was going to create jobs, it was going to lower premiums, and it was going to do this all for the cost of the Iraq war.
We get out of Iraq, that's 999 billion that we won't have to spend on that that we are spending, we'll just transfer it to Obamacare Ergo.
No, added money to the deficit.
And this was how they sold it.
Now, how did they get that figure, the total cost, under a trillion dollars?
Now I'm sorry, those of you who listen to this program every day, this is redundant for you, but it's important to revisit this.
The way they did it was to structure the 10 years, the first and the only 10 years the CBO could score, starting in 2009.
In case you want why why is the CBO report now different than it was four or five years ago?
Because it's a new 10-year period now.
Now we've got implementation.
Now the lie to the original CBO report, not the lie, yeah, the lie to the data given the CBO by Obama and the regime has now been brought to light.
The trick they played was the tax increases and the fee increases and all of the new sources of revenue for Obamacare would start immediately in year one.
So they were able to count and tabulate 10 years of so-called revenue generation after Obamacare was passed.
However, they delayed implementation of the key elements until this year, so that there were only six years of spending and ten years of tax collection in the original CBO projection report.
And so if you have four free years to raise money without any spending that's associated with Obamacare, that's how they kept how they lied.
I mean, that's how they pulled it off.
That's how they kept the figure under the magic number of a trillion dollars.
And they had four years to lie to you about keeping your doctor if you like him and keeping your insurance if you like him and uh your premiums going.
They had four years to lie to you, two elections to lie to you, two elections of a free run, and all of the benefits in the wonderful aspects of Obamacare.
Now, while this is going on, I and a few others, it at the beginning it wasn't many because there was fear, there was abject fear of opposing Obama, especially in the first year because of the historical nature of his presidency, i.e., the first black president.
The Republicans were afraid to death of criticizing Obama, and many of them still are.
Conservative media reluctant to go there.
In fact, that's during the period we had David Brooks talking about how the crease in Obama's slacks told him that he was qualified to be a great president.
This is when all of that rigmarole was going on.
Now I knew, and a lot of other people knew, and we're telling you what the trick was.
And we were telling everything, this is this is the thing about this that if I really let this get to me, it could it could really tick me off.
I don't let it get to me because I'm satisfied at the end of the day, every day that I've that I've done my best, but every dire prediction, everything they were lying about,
you were told in advance, and every prediction we've made about what was going to happen to health care and the economy and jobs has been coming true since the first day of implementation, and the CBO just happened to come along this week and codify it in a so-called non-partisan way.
It is an utter disaster.
It was never going to be anything but an utter disaster.
If you wanted to look at it in terms of mathematics, it never added up.
If you wanted to look at it in terms of psychology and people's behavior, it was never going to add up.
If you wanted to look at it in terms of good intentions, well, it might have really wanted all this stuff to work, but it didn't have a chance the way it was designed.
Don't forget, at the time Obamacare was implemented, 85% of the insurable public had insurance.
15% didn't.
And one of the lies was that the only thing Obamacare was really going to do is cover the uninsured, which was 30 million, we were told.
That equals 15%.
So we have up we we have we have totally wrecked the world's best health care system that was insuring 85% of the country in order to ensure the remaining 15.
Now where are we?
Now the LA Times story, this this story is just devastating.
From from top to bottom, beginning to end, side to side.
And it's it's got a quote from a woman whose life has been destroyed because of Obamacare.
But she is quoted as saying, I can't believe Obama intended this to happen, and see that's the rub.
It's very hard to convince people that Obama intended this to happen, but how else is it explained?
It's either intentional, or this is the biggest most incompetent president and regime we've ever had.
You take your pick.
But I don't think gross negligence and incompetence covers this.
I don't think it gets anywhere near explaining this.
I must take a brief time out, my friends.
Sit tight.
We continue to forge our way through the muck right after this.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, let me explain again for you why I am revisiting the history of this.
Because it need not have happened.
We do not have to be where we are.
Had the Republican Party had some gonads, had the Republican Party reacted to the president as the president and not an historical figure that was immune from criticism.
We would not, we do not have to be here.
This is not about me Doing a see, I told you so.
This is not about me spending some time here reminding you that I was right, that would be childish.
This needn't have happened.
And what this is horrible for our country, what is happening.
It is horrible for the people of this country who do not have a lot of resources, and where health care is the most important thing in their lives.
This is this is an absolute tragedy that's happened here.
And it was it did not have to happen.
The truth was known.
Had there been sufficient pushback and opposition.
Now, I will admit that in the first two years, the Republicans didn't have the votes in the House or the Senate to stop Obama doing anything.
Despite that, look at how hard it was and all of the chicanery and tricks they had to play to get it passed.
If there had been sufficient pushback and therefore education of the public at large about what was coming their way, we could have avoided.
And I can't tell you, it breaks my heart, folks, to see this literal tragedy happen to this country.
It would be easy for me to say, hey, you know what?
I don't care.
I called it, and everybody's gonna know I was right.
That's not at all a factor to me.
That's not why I'm reliving the history.
And reminding some of you and telling teaching whatever the rest of you who may not have been around here when we were talking about it.
Now we've gotten to the point where the CBO says, just as we said five years ago, that Obamacare is going to cost this country two and a half million jobs minimum.
Obamacare alone was going to reduce the deficit, it's going to lower premium, it's going to cost two and a half million jobs.
And the regime says that's good.
So I checked the email at the bottom of the hour break, and I got an interesting note.
Rush, it has happened.
This isn't like you.
You never bellyache about what's happened, because it is.
I'm not bellyaching.
We need to learn from it because you know what's coming next?
In the midst of all this is amnesty.
That's why this needs to be put in the proper context and focus and learned from.
Amnesty is what's coming next.
And in addition to that, there were fireworks this morning up on Capitol Hill over the hearings on the IRS.
You know, Obama goes on, oh, Baxter's interview on the Super Bowl game, and Subo Sundays.
He's being undermined by his own words every day.
These people still have three years, folks, to continue to wreak havoc or their incompetence, whichever wish you wish to attach to it.
And it's got to be stopped.
It's got to be opposed.
It it's we need to just stand up and say no more.
And that's what the 2014 midterm elections are all about.
But this is particularly devastating because it was well known.
It just people were afraid to be critical of the president.
And it was every bit of this not only was predictable, but it was predicted.
And now the Congressional Budget Office essentially says that because Obamacare's means tested subsidies phase out as cash income rises, people will choose to stay poorer to keep earning benefits.
And that has already been happening, and we've reported it.
I remember a couple of instances out of San Francisco.
Well healed Obama supporters in San Francisco making well into six figures.
A 55-year-old man and wife learned that they weren't going to qualify for subsidies.
And so they made the strategic decision to reduce their income so that everybody else, you, me, their neighbors, pays their health care.
I. that some of the giddier liberals are out there now extolling Obamacare for liberating workers from the adult responsibility of earning a living.
But what's Obama loved to say lately?
Every time he makes a personal appearance, what does he talk about that this country features?
If you work hard, you take responsibility, you get a hit.
He's been beaten at drum to the point of redundancy.
You work hard, you take responsibility, you get a hit.
What a load of crap.
The fact of the matter is Obama's policies are forcing people out of work in such high numbers that the New York Times is editorializing how liberating that is.
It is liberating workers from the adult responsibility of earning a living.
You know, the the media that covers Obama, I refer to them as the first responders because they are the ones that are entrusted with dealing with these Obama emergencies.
And this CBO report is one.
And the CBO report, two and a half million people will leave the workforce by 2017 is good news.
News media now claiming the CBO meant that Obamacare will just give those two and a half million workers the liberating choice to stop working.
Obamacare, you see, is a success because it is liberating people from the responsibility of working.
It is offering the choice to stop working and maintain their health care.
Nancy Pelosi in a press conference say yesterday the CBO projected that by 2021, the Affordable Care Act will enable more than two million workers to escape job lock.
The situation where workers remain tied to employers for access to health insurance benefits, but no other reason.
Job lock.
Obamacare allows Americans to escape their policies and doctors.
Obama allows Americans to escape the Constitution.
Obama, I mean, it it is this is perverted.
The lengths to which now Dana Milbank had a call in the Washington Post earlier in the week.
And his way it ended was Obamacare has been undermined by the very entity they had used to validate it.
And that would be the CBO, with the original scoring based on false data, which is all the CBO had to go on.
The regime gave them false data, ten years of tax increase collection, only six years of spending, able to keep the magic number under a trillion dollars, which is a psychological number for the public to go along with it.
Couple that with the lies about keeping your doctor and keeping your policy and your premium coming down $2,500, and it was a panacea.
It was utopia.
It was it was just going to be great.
Now the lie has been fully exposed, and the only way the left can cover it is to say, well, these two and a half million people are only working for health insurance.
They really don't like their jobs.
If they had their choice, they wouldn't be working, and now they don't have to.
And that is somehow a benefit.
That's just another two and a half million people are going to be eating and are going to be driving and are going to be watching and are going to be texting and making cell calls while not working.
Because somebody else is going to be paying for it.
They're going to have their health care.
Ostensibly, somebody else is going to be paying for it.
We're going to pay another two and a half million people not to work.
And the New York Times, the Democrat Party, the regime are coming along and now saying, oh, yeah, yeah, this is a great one of the great benefits of Obamacare.
Now you tell me how does this equate to a growing economy?
How does this equate to a growing economy with burgeoning job opportunities, a growing private sector, an expanding pie where people truly working hard are able to access their share of it based on their input and their hard drive and ambition,
whatever additional they earn is going to be taxed from them to pay these other people who are choosing to get out of job luck, choosing not to work, and still have health benefits.
So, my friends, the thing is everything.
And if I wanted to, I could spend another hour reminding you of the year by year history and the predictions that were made on this program and the intentions Obama really harbored, if we can go but relive it all again.
But those of you who have been here every day, you know, you heard it said, you heard the predictions, and we know and we knew what was going to happen because we know liberals.
We know liberalism.
We know what their intentions are.
So it was not hard to predict at all, and it was not hard to say, I hope he fails.
I wanted the country to survive.
I wanted the country to remain what it was.
So everything we said was going to happen is happening.
The best the left can claim is that people losing their jobs is great for America and great for them, and an added benefit of Obamacare.
And now, of all things, we're going to move on to amnesty?
BELL RINGS Gotta take a break while you chew over that.
Don't go away.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have your guiding light, Rush Limba, doing what I was born to do.
Here is the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Doug Elmendorf, and is this the current guy?
Yeah, and he's being questioned by Paul Ryan.
Says, so it's not that employers are laying people off.
It's that people in the workforce are not supplying labor to the equivalent of two and a half million jobs in 2024, as a result that lower workforce participation rate lowers economic growth.
Who are these workers?
What kind of worker from an income scale side are being affected by this?
By providing heavily subsidized health insurance to people with very low income and then withdrawing those subsidies as income rises, the act creates a disincentive for people to work relative to what would have been the case in the absence of that act.
Now, these subsidies, of course, make those lower income people better off.
This is an implicit tax, not the sort of tax we normally think about, where if the government raises our taxes, we are worse off and face a disincentive to work more.
By providing a subsidy because people are better off, but they do have less of an incentive to work.
Anybody think that wasn't intended?
Of course it was intended.
Something people need to remember when analyzing any of these outcomes of Obama policies.
But better than that, something you need to keep in mind, whenever you hear an Obama policy announced, and you you've got to have the courage to admit this to yourself.
Unjust, improperly founded, and the people who really make it work have gotten the shaft from day one.
And it is his mission To reverse all of that.
It's payback time.
Therefore, the least achieved among us are not the least achieved because they work haphazardly, don't prepare, are not educated, unqualified.
No, no, no, it's none of those things.
They are victims.
Any failure is an indictment of the country.
Wherever it happens, if any individual fails, something's wrong with America, not the individual.
In Obama's world, in the left's view of things, and that failure, engineered by the country, occurred because powerful people set the wheels in motion to generate that failure and that failure and that failure and that individual, that group, that group.
The failures, the unachieved, the unaccomplished slackers, whatever.
They have no role in their current circumstances.
They are nothing but victims.
And they fail not because of anything they've done, they fail because the country has seen to it.
So when you hear Elmendorf talk about the disincentive to work and yet end up with health care, reduce your income, somebody has to pay for that.
Who is going to pay for it?
The suckers who continue to work.
And the suckers who continue to work are who?
Winners of life's lottery.
They're not the achieved.
They're not the accomplished.
They're the privileged.
The advantaged.
Success, same token as failure.
Failure is not the fault of anything but a flawed system that devised America.
Success is the same.
Because the people who succeeded were given unfair advantages.
Or they were targeted for success, or they had connection, or whatever, however, it manifests itself.
But in liberalism, nothing is genuine.
Everything is the result of flaws in the structure of our culture and society and country.
Have you ever wondered why the mainstream media gets practically everything wrong?
Not just a little off here and there, but I mean it's major.
The things they get wrong, the errors they make, including, but not limited to, the editing of 911 tapes to create a totally different impression from what really happened.
Have you chalked that up to bias?
You chalked it up to incompetence, have you chalked it up to whatever you've come up with as an explanation?
But what have you ever, why is it that they're all because they all report the same thing?
How is it that they are all wrong?
dramatically so.
And I would submit to you that they are wrong because their starting point is flawed.
And Starting point they're educated to in journalism school, the starting point that they are all taught.
And it flows from this belief that this is an inherently unfair country.
And so any minority, any failure, any disadvantaged, less advantaged, is actually the hero.
Because of victims' status.
And they are going to be protected, never ever blamed.
They're going to be hoisted as true heroes because they are the victims of a rigged game going all the way back to the 1700s.
Come on, Rush, you can't believe they really believe it.
This is my point.
I do hope that you will believe this.
I will go into greater detail.
In fact, on this in the program today.
I think it's worth it.
But there are other news items I want to catch up on too, as well as the fireworks at the congressional hearings on the IRS.
Nothing to see here scandal.
The president told us about on uh on Super Bowl Sunday.
Jerry Seinfeld is being treated as though he's a Republican.
He's got this new web show called Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.
And he doesn't have any comedians of color.
And so the PC crowds accusing him of not having any diversity in his show.
And he's telling him to go to hell.
He's being treated like a Republican back after this.
Now I'm not even going to pressure myself, try to get it all in here.
I can't do it in one show, folks.
I just can't.
Stuff I've been collecting the two days I've been out, and stuff that's been happening.
So I appreciate your patience.
As always tomorrow, we're going to get your phone calls in a little bit of an announcement to make tomorrow, too.
So lots of things to look forward to.
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