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Feb. 12, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:03
February 12, 2014, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 Podcast.
And greetings to you, all of you that are either in the midst of the frozen tundra or in its path.
It's going to be 86 degrees where we are today.
And I don't know why.
I wanted to tell you that.
But it's about 82 right now, on the way to 86.
The overnight load of night will be 72.
And we are barely an hour away by air of all of this ice.
Up in Atlanta.
Greetings, my friends.
Great to have you.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
The phone number, if you want to be on the program, 800-282882, the email address, L Rushbow at EIBNet.com.
You know, I just I just printed out, and now I can't find it.
This just the front page of the Drudge Report that uh catalogs all of this horror, all of the uh the the winter storm.
I mean, it's brutal.
What did I just do with that?
Just had it right here on the top.
I know this sounds terribly unprofessional.
It was right here.
I printed two or three things after it.
Maybe it's maybe.
Let me see if I put it uh no, and I can't turn around and read it because this stupid ditto cam.
People would see the back of my head, which I don't want anybody to see.
It's the only part of my head's got a hair on it.
Anyway, it's brutal out there, and uh ice storms, airplanes, airports, grounded, shut down.
Uh electricity bills are going to be skyrocketing, record cold, and we've got audio sound bites from scientists claiming it's all because of global warming.
Not climate change, but global warming.
Anyway, I will find that.
Those of you living in it are fully aware of it, and it is brutal.
There is no question.
And if you're up in the Eastern Seaboard, it's on the way to you.
Alabama, Georgia, and of course the drive-bys are totally captivated by it.
They just wall to wall, totally captivated by it.
In the midst of all of this, last night, the president of France, Francois Hollande, and the Obamas, and 350 of their closest friends dined on caviar and quail eggs, dry aged ribeye steak served with blue cheese, charred shallots, oyster mushrooms, and braised shard.
They dined in a gigantic tent, lavishly decorated to replicate a Monet painting of spring in Sunny France, outside the tent, 17 degrees.
For dessert, they enjoyed cake made with chocolate from Hawaii, Florida tangerines, cotton candy dusted with orange zest.
Michelle Obama wore a designer dress estimated to have cost 12,000 dollars, designed by Carolina Herrera.
Today, President Obama will give another speech about the horrors of income inequality.
Well, uh, that's a transition after all of that excess.
By the way, if 12,000 for a dress.
Well, they didn't, they 12,000 is a guesstimate from the social doyen of Washington, D.C., Sally Quinn.
I mean, no, they didn't announce 12,000.
They just Sally Quinn's out there guessing.
And uh being that she's the social doyen.
If she says it's 12 grand, it's what it's gonna be.
Uh, designed by Caroline Herrera.
I've got a picture of it here.
Uh, in fact, I want to show you this.
Let me let me uh let me let me turn the ditto cam off.
I'm gonna zoom in on this.
For those of you uh that are members of Rush 24-7, you'll be able to see this.
For those of you who are not, please bear with me because it's worth it for those who let me get a little closer here.
All right, here we go.
Turning the Ditto Cam on, there you have it.
There is Michelle Obama and the $12,000 gown by Carolina Herrera.
And the French President Oman is uh is in the middle, and there's Obama.
You'll notice that this dress is bigger than the president of France.
Here, let me make one more adjustment here and show you this again.
Take a look at that picture.
The little guy in the middle is the socialist dictator.
Well, not dictator, socialist president of France.
On the left, that's not Oprah.
That don't confuse that.
That's Michelle Obama.
I saw a picture of this from the rear.
That's why I thought it was Oprah.
I did.
You people looking at this, imagine that from the anyway.
You see, that dress is bigger than the president of France.
So Marie Antoinette dresses exactly right.
So anyway, that was uh that's how it looked last night as they headed into the tent for the exciting state dinner.
And in the meantime, President Obama today is going to give another speech about the horrors of income inequality.
That's just amazing.
Ladies and gentlemen, there's so much going on out there.
I the lawlessness of this regime is it's it knows no bounds.
There's nothing stopping this man from doing anything.
If he wants to raise marginal tax rates, he can just do it.
Nobody's gonna stop him.
Here is the latest.
As you know, the regime recently delayed the implementation of the employer mandate for three years until 2016.
This means that employers who have employees that are a hundred or less will be subject to the mandate.
The point of this is is that this limit of 100 is a golden opportunity for businesses to once again fire people to get under that number of 100 so that they are eligible for the delay of the mandate.
And so what the Obama regime has done.
Firms are now going, businesses are going to be required to certify to the IRS under penalty of perjury, that Obamacare was not a motivating factor in their staffing decisions.
I mean, this is absolutely lawless.
It is against the law.
They cannot, ladies and gentlemen, do this.
Specifically, they cannot run businesses this way.
That they cannot turn staffing decisions into crimes, and this is exactly what they're doing.
Businesses make decisions all the time on the basis of avoidance of costs here and cost there, labor costs, tax costs, they do it all the time.
And this is a tax.
Don't forget the Supreme Court claim that all of this is constitutional, because these mandates are just taxes.
They're not mandates to buy a product.
That would be unconstitutional.
Of course, that doesn't matter now anyway.
The Obama officials made clear in a press briefing that businesses would not be allowed to lay off workers to get into the preferred class of businesses with 50 to 99 employees.
Because those businesses are the ones exempt From Obamacare and the employer mandate for three years.
Between 50 and 99 employees, you are exempted.
So if you have 103 employees and you fire four of them, you now have to certify to the IRS under threat of perjury that you didn't do that to avoid Obamacare costs.
So I mean, apparently you you can duck the law, but then only if you promise not to say you're doing that.
You cannot say companies must now swear to the IRS that none of their layoffs are because of Obamacare.
This must be in writing.
It is made under threat of perjury charges.
If you if you so if i what they're trying to avoid here, obviously is laying people off, but more than that, they don't want businesses saying that they're laying people off or firing people because of Obamacare.
That's really what the rub is.
And it boils down, they can do what they want, but they better not say that they're firing people because of Obamacare.
Now, it's been running around going around here, this is a banana republic.
This is way beyond a banana republic now.
This is Stalinism.
This is sheer brazen lawlessness.
There is nothing stopping Obama if he wants to to raise somebody's tax rates or to eliminate somebody's tax rates.
I mean, there's nothing stopping him from doing virtually anything he wants to do.
Because nobody's stopping him now.
Nobody's making in fact the Republicans are doing everything they can to avoid any kind of disagreement.
The debt limit, then you heard about that.
Oh, yeah, well, uh, we got to focus on Obamacare.
We can't run the risk here of getting into a fight with Obama on the debt.
Shutting down the government again.
Can't have that.
So uh well, and besides the Tea Party won't let it party.
They're trying to blame all of this on the Tea Party, trying to blame all of this debt business on the Republican side on the Tea Party, and then claiming, well, you know, we can't we can't do anything about it anyway.
We don't have 218 votes.
We have 218 votes, you can't do anything.
There's no reason to stand for anything, we don't have the votes, and we don't want to shut down the government, we'll get blamed again.
And so we'll just do this, we'll just let the president expand the debt limit, we'll go along with it, we'll endorse it, and it will really focus on Obamacare for the rest of the year.
That's just uh it's hard to comprehend this.
And we're we're in uncharted territory.
Nobody knows what to do here.
Everybody's sitting around waiting for somebody else to do something.
No, seriously.
How many of you, I mean, this is not a criticism.
How many of you, upon learning that businesses now cannot blame Obamacare for firing people and getting under the 100 employee limit?
Can't do that.
You can't fire them for that reason, and you can't say that you did it for that reason if you fire them.
You have to promise the IRS that Obamacare had nothing to do with your staffing decisions.
And all of the other, just the mandate delay itself, the waiver here, all of the changes in Obamacare.
Let me ask you, how many of you have asked yourself who's gonna stop this?
How are we gonna stop?
And that's everybody is at Bahner.
Mitch McConnell, everybody in Washington is saying, how are we gonna stop this?
Nobody knows how to stop it.
Rand Paul is threatening to sue the president.
That's gonna come down to does he have standing or not?
Mike Lee, Senator from Utah.
I've got a piece in the stack today about the problems with suing the president, how difficult it is.
You must have standing in order to sue the president.
If you're a business, for example, you have to be able to prove without any doubt whatsoever that the harm you have Incurred is exclusively tied to Obama's policies.
And then even if the if you found a business or a group of them that wanted to sue, then you've got we don't have the money compared to these guys.
They've got the Justice Department, they've got Eric Holder, they've got the judges, they've got what difference does it make to sue?
Then you've got impeachment, nobody's talking about it.
There's no way that's gonna ever gonna happen, no matter what.
Not even going to talk about that.
So how does it stop?
We're in uncharted territory here.
All the commentators, I mean, what one of the one of the conventional bits of wisdom inside the Beltway commentariat today.
Well, you know, if people would have started speaking out against this when it first started happening, then maybe we could do something about it.
And here Yeah, but I before we get to that, there's something I want to submit about about commentators and so forth.
What is the role of a commentator?
Is the role of a commentator is to sit there and tell you what he thinks and then go home?
Or is a commentator attempting to marshal public opinion for what he believes for the purposes of creating action within the body politic?
What's the purpose?
I would submit to you that a whole lot of commentators just gonna tell you what they think, and that's it.
They go home.
That's end of the day, that's the job.
I'm gonna tell you what I think, but uh, whatever happens after that, you know, we're all in it for ourselves, every man, every woman for herself or himself.
Of course, the most fundamental way to stop Obama is to simply deny him the money for what he wants to do.
And that happens in the House of Representatives, House of Representatives, Ways and Means Committee specifically, but the House of Representatives is where every spending bill originates.
That's where they were talking about defunding the Iraq War, the Democrats were back in the day.
That's where that would have happened.
Power of the purse.
It all boils up whatever techniques there are available to stop this.
You then have to make the leap to is there the will to do it.
And that takes us into another problematic area, which we'll discuss as the program unfolds.
We've got to take a break now, sit tight, much more when we get back, don't go away.
On the cutting edge of societal evolution, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network, and a limbaugh institute for advanced conservative studies.
This is really big, folks.
This I we tend to gloss over these things after we mention them and move on to the next thing.
But this ruling from from the from the White House, employers required to certify to the IRS under penalty of perjury that the waiver was not a motivating factor in their hiring and firing decisions.
So in other words, to avoid Obamacare costs, you have to promise, you have to swear under oath that you're not trying to avoid Obamacare costs.
And everybody's trying to avoid Obamacare costs.
That's why they're being waived.
They're punitive.
My friend Andy McCarthy wrote about this, and he did it great.
Think about how lunatic this is.
There is nothing even faintly illegal about businesses making financial decisions based on tax consequences.
They do it every day.
Remember, notwithstanding Obama's misrepresentations to the contrary, Obamacare mandates our taxes.
The Justice Department argued that, and Chief Justice Roberts agreed.
The mandates requiring you to buy a product were called taxes by the Supreme Court in order to claim that all of this is above border and constitutional.
The federal government, the Commerce Clause, cannot mandate that citizens buy a product or service.
And so the regime said, well, we're not doing that.
We're just we're levying a tax.
And the Supreme Court agreed.
And so Obama carries this a series of taxes, really punitive taxes.
And businesses have been trying to figure out how to do their best in avoiding as many of them as possible, which is standard operating procedure.
Because the tax consequences of Obamacare are profound.
They can ruin a business.
They can put it out of business.
That's exactly why Obama is waiving them, folks.
Until after this year's elections and the 2016 elections.
Because Obamacare is destructive.
Obamacare is destroying everything in its path.
The enrollment this year, 2014 has slowed to a crawl.
Folks, it is unmitigated disaster.
And they're doubling down on all of it now.
No responsible person running a business of any size would fail to take all of these Obamacare taxes into account in making the decision how to staff the company.
And if you have an opportunity to avoid these punitive taxes for three more years by having fewer than a hundred employees, you're going to damn well do it.
It would be the responsible thing to do.
And because Obama knows that's going to happen, he's come along and now and told them they can't do it, just because he says so.
And furthermore, if they do it, they have to swear to the IRS that they're not doing it because of anything having to do with him.
Welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network.
Half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
This attempt to criminalize normal, everyday, standard responsible business decision making is outrageous.
And that is exactly what's going on.
Barack Obama and all of his supporters and the entire administration now attempting to criminalize standard, ordinary, everyday, intelligent business decision making.
Where what is really illegal and irrational is not what a company does to limit its costs.
That's smart.
A company must limit its cost.
Profitability is how you stay in business.
It's how you keep people employed, it's how you provide them health care.
What's illegal in spades is Obama's edict.
Now look what comes with this illegal edict from the one.
Criminal prosecution.
If Obama's Justice Department, i.e., Eric Holder decides that a business has falsely certified that its staffing decision was not motivated by Obamacare.
Criminal prosecution.
Now stop and think about something here, folks.
The waiver itself is illegal.
Barack Obama does not have the constitutional authority nor power to make this waiver.
He cannot willy-nilly change this law.
The text of the law is enshrined as law.
It has been signed into law by him.
After being duly passed by Congress, he cannot willy-nilly go in and say that paragraph is not going to apply for three years.
That paragraph's not going to apply for five years.
That whole section over there isn't going to apply until next summer.
He cannot do that, but that's what he's doing.
The waiver in the first place is illegal.
Extending the waiver to 2016, delaying the implementation of the mandate, whether you like it or not.
The law is the law.
He cannot change the law on a dime on his own whim, not legally.
So to start with, the waiver is illegal.
The extension of delaying the mandate is illegal.
It turns upside down the language of the Obamacare statute under which the employer mandate is required already to have been implemented by now.
There is nothing in the law that lets Obama waive the mandate.
There is certainly nothing in the law that allows him to attach further lawless circumstances to this lawless waiver.
We are so far over the line of legality here that many people have lost sight of the original line of legal and illegal.
We are so far past it.
The waiver is illegal.
Delaying the mandate is illegal.
And then furthermore, telling businesses that they must not staff their businesses on the basis of the waiver, under penalty of law, is itself illegal.
A business that seeks to use the waiver and fails to pay the mandated tax is in violation of federal law, regardless of its compliance with Obama's outlaw edict.
And yet there's Obama.
He's just happy as he can be at his state dinner, and he's out there proclaiming his illegal waiver with impunity.
He's just up there like a king.
I'm gonna delay this.
You know what?
I'm gonna do it for three years.
And you know why?
Because I don't want to hurt my port in November.
He's just announcing he's gonna delay this thing for three years, and then on top of that, attaches illegality to people who then govern their businesses as a result of the waiver.
I once attended uh lecture by Lady Margaret Thatcher, and the subject of her lecture was the rule of law, and sometime later, I found myself, fortunately, sitting right next to her at a dinner party, and she was still on the subject months later.
She was like that.
She would get focused in like a laser on one subject and just spend as much time as she wanted to discussing it, and of course, taking the table discussion with her.
And her discussion on the rule of law and the how crucial it is to the coherence of a free society.
Obviously, it was profound, and I've been thinking about it a lot lately, because that's what's gone by the wayside here.
The one thing, and there are many things, but the one thing that really sets us apart and has is the natural respect for the law that everybody has had.
The rule of law.
I mean, they're individual lawbreakers, don't misunderstand, but the responsible portion of our Population that makes the country work is respects the rule of law.
Institutionally, fundamentally understands, maybe even not specifically, but they understand the importance of respecting the rule of law and the limits.
And don't forget, something very crucial.
I want to go back and remind you of something I read in a book Daniel Hannon, the British member of Parliament wrote, one of great differences between us and the Europeans.
Europeans believe that everything is illegal until a government makes it legal.
We don't.
We grow up, we are born, our culture is everything is legal until we pass laws making something illegal.
It's a huge difference in the mindset.
When you when you start out thinking everything is illegal, and the only thing that makes something legal is from some president, king, state, what have you.
You're already a prisoner.
You already have given up every ounce of freedom that you are innately created with.
When you believe that, if you believe that nothing is legal until some third party, some leader, some king proclaims it legal, then you do not believe that freedom is the natural yearning of the human condition.
It's another thing that has set the United States apart.
Now, what is it that makes us proclaim something illegal?
It hasn't been dictatorial leaders, it hasn't been statists, it hasn't been tyranny, it has been combination of religion, common law, natural law, and cultural experience, which has given us our legal code.
Tried and true.
It's given us the definitions of our institutions, you know, what is marriage.
Sorry, it is a union of a man and a woman.
Just the definition.
That's anything that's not man and a woman cannot be marriage.
It may be something else, but it isn't marriage.
You can claim it is, you can say it is, but it isn't.
Rule of law is what has gone by the wayside.
And what is so profoundly disturbing here is that the one person who takes a specific oath to defend the Constitution, to protect the Constitution, to defend the laws of the United States, and to enforce the laws is the one bastardizing them.
The rule of law is disintegrating before our eyes.
And because it is happening at such an unprecedented scale, we are getting into big trouble real fast.
Things are going very bad, really fast.
It's getting worse faster than anybody thought, even after Obama won in 2012.
As such, nobody knows what to do.
Nobody knows how to deal with this.
And everybody's hands are tied by one giant elephant in the room that nobody's going to ever be able to do anything about, and that is the historical aspect of this presidency.
It's just untouchable.
But despite all that, this is happening.
The very fabric, the very rule of law, that is the glue that's held the country together, our culture, society together, is just being obliterated.
It's not actually disintegrating, it's under assault.
It's being attacked.
Brief timeout.
Once again, back with more after this, folks.
Don't go away.
And what this does is silence critics.
It is silencing business critics of Obamacare.
They now cannot criticize Obamacare.
If they do, they've got the IRS coming after them.
And it has already been established that the regime will use the IRS to crush its opponents.
Nobody stopped that either.
It is an infringement of the First Amendment.
The First Amendment's not alive.
The First Amendment can't stand up and say, stop, you're abridging me.
Of course it's an abridgment of the First Amendment.
So then what?
They are silencing their critics.
Businesses cannot say that they are firing people because of Obamacare.
Therefore, they can't be critical of Obamacare.
When businesses cannot tell the media how many people they had to lay off, or how many people they had to convert part-time because of Obamacare.
Then the low information crowd isn't gonna hear about it.
Nobody's gonna hear it.
They can't tell anybody under threat of penalty from the IRS.
And I stress again, everybody knows already that the IRS has been used by the regime to target its political opponents.
Now it's always been assumed that happened here and there, willy-nilly.
But now it's out in the open.
Everybody knows it.
And it is serving and will continue to serve to shut people up and to intimidate them.
Just can't tell anybody.
That probably is something equally important to Obama in addition to the political ramifications for the election 2014 and 2016.
And even if they do risk the IRS, if they do actually lay off people because of Obamacare, they'll never be able to admit it publicly.
So, in addition to everything else, this is just a way for Obama to silence business criticism before the elections.
And remember, nothing is simply self-contained.
The president has now made it clear that businesses will run afoul of him if they are criticized.
Or if they criticize him, others will think the same thing will happen to them even if they're not mentioned.
It's much easier to be afraid of this stuff and just shut up and not call attention to yourself than it is to fight it.
So, yeah, violation of the First Amendment, violation of any number of laws.
All of this is illegal.
That doesn't stop it.
A law making it illegal to rob banks doesn't stop that.
Laws against murder don't stop murder.
What does?
Well, arguably nothing stops murder other than another gun.
The law is a mechanism for punishment, obviously, for those who violate it.
A challenging thing for people.
Uncharted territory for a lot of people.
Particularly commentators who do not want to be involved in any kind of activism.
Oh no, right.
They just want to get the platitudes for being great thinkers and then go pour Johnny Walker.
Blue.
That's the latest fed.
I told you, my page at 1800 Flowers, there's lots of great stuff there.
Not just the special.
Okay, folks.
Hang in there.
Be tough.
Even key.
Everything's gonna be okay.
We'll take a brief time out.
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