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March 19, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:40
March 19, 2014, Wednesday, Hour #2
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Well folks, I went out there and I looked and I cannot find it reported anywhere how much fuel the Malaysian airliner was carrying.
I mean even in articles about the amount of fuel from two days ago, we're told it's not clear exactly how much fuel the plane was carrying.
Yes, it is.
It has to be paid for.
It has to be ordered.
The airline, whoever runs operations at the airline, orders the fuel.
The truck comes and fuels it up.
They know how much fuel was on this thing.
But you know something else that's happening in this coverage?
This poor country Malaysia is being dumped on like it is backward sticks Fred Flintstoneville.
Everybody is dumping on Malaysia.
Backwards airline, backwards country, backwards tracking systems, backward training systems.
It's amazing to watch this.
Anyway, the thing flies at normal operations, 639 miles an hour, cruising at 35,000 feet, carries 31,000 pounds of fuel.
Do you know why they measure fuel on an airplane in pounds and not gallons?
Because it burns so fast that gallons don't tell you anything.
In pounds, they have to factor weight for how long a runway they need to take off and land safely.
Takeoff weight, landing weight, any number of things.
So it's all weight related.
But I don't know why they can't find out how much fuel the thing took off with.
I mean, the pilot cannot come and add 3,000 or 4,000 pounds of fuel with nobody knowing it.
I mean, whatever was on the original manifest.
And it just seems to me, I'm sorry for being, you know, so unconspiracy-oriented here, but it just seems to me that if you know how much fuel, you can calculate various ranges the plane could fly at various altitudes.
You can factor in how fast it was, you could do any number of things, but you could get an outer limit.
You could come up with a maximum range the thing could fly.
Somebody has to have done that.
Somebody, the search team, somebody has to know what they're doing in that regard.
The fact that it hasn't been reported may not mean anything.
You know, I was just thinking, by the way, welcome back, folks.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network at 800-282-2882.
This Michelle Obama canning, well, she can, but I mean, she created working conditions that were unsatisfactory for this gay pastry chef.
I mean, the guy wanted to use cream, butter, sugar, milk, and eggs.
He's a pastry chef.
And Michelle said, no.
You know what Michelle's substitute for sugar is?
Applesauce.
I'm sorry, substitute for oil.
Cooking oil, substitute cooking oil, substitute applesauce.
Well, yeah, but come on, let's.
It's like all this other newfangled stuff, like the big craze now is the gluten-free diet.
There's a normal way.
I mean, if you want a decent cake or cookie, you're going to have it baked with normal ingredients.
Normal is the key here.
But not Muchell Obama.
Oh, no.
We're going to get rid of all that to the pastry chef at the White House.
I'm out of here.
And he said, somebody has to stand up for milk, sugar, cream, and eggs.
You imagine a White House chef resigning in order to defend those ingredients.
Now, the guy is married and he's gay.
And here's the conundrum.
What is Michelle Obama going to do if a same-sex couple asked the White House to make him a wedding cake with sugar and eggs and cream?
What?
I mean, here you've got a same-sex couple baking the cakes.
And Michelle Obama is saying, sorry, pal, you're not baking the cake because I don't like what you put in it.
Compare that to what happened in Arizona.
Same-sex couple walks in, wants a wedding cake.
The baker says, I don't believe in the way you're living your life.
I'm not going to do it.
And so the whole world comes down on the baker.
But Michelle can just send a gay married baker packing.
Michelle can just dispatch with a gay married chef, pastry chef in the White House because she doesn't like his ingredients.
New York Times.
What is this?
A tiny little paragraph.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 lines.
National Briefing Midwest.
This has got to be page, it is.
It's page A14 of the New York Times today.
Here's the headline.
Wisconsin Assembly passes governor's tax cut plan.
The Wisconsin Assembly has passed Governor Scott Walker's $504 million tax cut plan.
The chamber approved the bill on Tuesday by a vote of 61 to 35.
It wasn't even close.
The Senate passed it earlier this month.
Assembly approval sends the bill on to Mr. Walker for his signature.
The governor wants to use a portion of Wisconsin's $977 million surplus to pay for cuts in property and income taxes.
The solution to this country's problems gets 10 lines in the New York Times.
I'm amazed they even ran the story.
But it gets 10 lines.
I think this is one of the biggest and most undercommented on, and including in conservative media stories this year.
This is simply huge, what Governor Walker has done.
No matter how you look at this, A, let's look at Wisconsin, one of the bluest of blue states, one of the bluest of the blue universities, one of the headquarters states for malcontent state unions, one of the headquarters states for malcontent Democrat Party union activism.
They did everything they could, not just to destroy Walker's political career.
They tried to destroy his reputation and his political life.
They attempted to recall him a couple of times.
The Democrats in the Senate walked out.
He persevered.
He overcame.
He dominated and he won.
And in the bluest of blue states, unemployment is around 3.5%.
The schools have been reformed, and so the unions do not control every aspect of it now.
There is a surplus of nearly a billion dollars in this economy.
And there's no oil fracking going on there like there is next door in the Dakotas.
There is a near $1 billion surplus, and he's returning half of that to the residents of the state in the form of a property tax cut and income tax cut.
And it rates 10 lines in the New York Times.
Elsewhere across the country, we have economic decay, frustration, unemployment, no job prospects, certainly no career prospects.
We've got the answer in practical and real political terms and real-life experience.
We've got the, and particularly for the Republican Party, the blueprint for how to win elections and the blueprint for how to govern after you win elections, the blueprint for economic revival, the blueprint for employment revival, the blueprint for budgetary solvency.
It's amazing.
It is a huge story.
We interviewed, I interviewed Governor Walker for the Limbaugh Letter two issues ago, maybe the current issue, upcoming interview, by the way, Bill Donahue of the Catholic League.
And that is also a fascinating.
You've got to read that.
You've got to read the upcoming issue of the Limbaugh Letter with Bill Donahue of the Catholic League.
But this interview with Scott Walker in the preceding issue is just, it's indescribably good.
I just asked a couple questions to get out of the way.
It's just particularly, the Democrats are living in mortal fear that this is going to be discovered.
The Democrats are living in mortal fear that this is going to be uncovered, discovered, massively, widely reported.
They're living in mortal fear that the Republicans are going to get their butts in gear and learn from this and start and try to replicate it.
So far, there's no sign of that.
This is Paul Ryan's state as well.
And there are presidential rumblings for him.
There are also presidential rumblings for Walker.
I have no feeling on that.
But man, I was surprised to see this story in the New York Times.
Just 10 lines as printed, and every important detail is there.
Walker introduced a bill in January that would send $406 million to technical college to reduce their property tax hit and cut income taxes by nearly $100 million by reducing the lowest bracket to 4% from 4.4%.
So the poor are getting a tax cut.
Everybody is, actually, because property taxes are being cut.
The end result would be a $131 reduction in a median homes tax bill this December and $46 in annual income tax savings for the average worker.
I just look at this and I wonder why conservative media is not plumbing onto this and why the Republican Party isn't.
But it's worth paying a lot of attention to.
And by the way, Walker, when you listen to him talk, when you listen to him campaign, he doesn't sound like any of these other Republican governors who wants to cross the aisle and work together and bipartisanship.
They didn't offer him any of that.
The Democrats offered no cooperation whatsoever.
All they offered was personal destruction.
They threatened, they intimidated, they threatened harm against his family.
These union people did, and he persevered.
And one of the reasons that so few people know about it is that he, his personality, he's not out beating his chest over all of this and trying to get people to look at him and say, look at me, look at me, look at me.
He's just going about his business.
I just want to take the occasion to congratulate him and thank him again, by the way.
Now, on the other side of this, what's the alternative?
The alternative is what we've got going right now.
The alternative is the Russians rebuilding the Soviet Union, Vladimir Putin, while Obama fills in his brackets for March Madness.
Michelle Obama canning the pastry chef because she doesn't like milk, sugar, bread, eggs, butter, whatever.
In Venezuela, there is turmoil.
They don't have any flour.
They don't have any milk in Venezuela.
They don't have any diapers.
Alvaro Villarueda starts his morning the same way every day, putting in a call to his friend, who has a friend who works at a Caracas supermarket.
Today, he's looking for sugar.
He's asking his friend if he knows if any shipments of sugar have arrived.
And as he talks on the phone, his wife is in the kitchen.
Sugar shortages in Venezuela.
And you know where their client state is?
Cuba.
What is their number one export in Cuba?
Sugar.
It's not rum, and it's not tobacco.
It's sugar.
Venezuela and Cuba are inseparable.
They're ideological soulmates.
And Cuba's number one export is sugar, and Venezuela still doesn't have any.
This family, there are 10 mouths to feed every day in this family, five of them children.
The two youngest are still in diapers.
The things that are the scarcest for us are actually what we need the most, says the mother: flour, cooking oil, butter, milk, diapers.
She said, I spent last week hunting for diapers everywhere.
Situation is really tough for basic goods.
This is an NPR story.
National public radio, and they're gobsmacked.
They don't understand it.
It's a socialist paradise.
Venezuela is a socialist paradise.
Remember, Hugo Chavez, he was the answer.
He cared about the little guy.
Hugo Chavez was doing everything for the little guy and for the little people who have been screwed over by all those evil corporatists and the evil shop owners.
And I will guarantee you that the government of Venezuela is telling its own low-information citizens, which is most of them, by the way, oh, you can't find sugar.
It's because your evil grocery store owner won't let you buy it.
They're hoarding it.
That's the way they do it.
In socialist communist countries, they blame the people that customers interact with directly.
A lot of surprising news coming from our media guardians all of a sudden here.
Maybe they're getting these stories out of the way.
Well, they know people aren't paying attention because of the missing Malaysian airliner.
But they're going to blame the shop owners.
They're going to blame the businesses.
Hugo Chavez was nationalizing everything he gets his hands on.
Oil companies, oil wells.
He was nationalizing airlines.
The state was going to take it over because the private sector was screwing people.
The private sector was leading to shortages.
Now they don't have sugar, milk, eggs, diaper, nothing in Venezuela.
That's the alternative, Scott Walker.
Oh, and crime is out the roof, too.
There is no recorded history of socialism ever working.
Now, I know you in this audience know, but remember, there are new arrivals every day.
We've talked to one today and how he found us and what he thought before he got here.
And sometimes you've got to go back to the basics.
Obama would never do.
Obama, right?
He'd never do what he did.
Obama would never do to healthcare what he's done to it, right?
Obama would never make health care unaffordable.
Obama would never allow cancer patients to not be treated.
Obama would never accept all of that and more is happening under Obama.
The health care system has never been this bad in this country.
Safe to say?
The health care system has never been this bad.
Short of the Great Depression, it's arguable the economy has never been this bad, particularly after five years, and there's no hope.
There are no indications that it's going to improve because there's no effort actually being expended to make it improve.
This is just the new normal, folks.
This is what you are supposed to get used to.
And NASA, NASA says that this has to happen in order to save our society.
What we're doing here is we're equalized.
We're getting rid of inequality.
Everybody's equal now.
Nobody has that much more than anybody else.
That's what we're aiming for.
And that's how we will save our society.
That's NASA.
That's Obama.
This mess is how we save America.
That's who you voted for.
And we'll be back.
No, of course not.
It was not inequality and lack of natural resources that doomed the Roman Empire.
It's crazy.
I got to do that in just a minute.
I need to get another phone call in here.
We go to Pittsburgh.
This rich, great to have you, sir.
Hello.
Hello, Rush.
Thanks so much for taking my call.
It's a great question.
It's a pleasure to speak with you.
I have a theory about Flight 370 that I'm not sure has been articulated yet.
Wow.
Okay.
We've heard so much about the pilot and his activities and how what he did was highly suspect and everything else.
Let's assume for a second that he was not involved in this, you know, from the start.
And let's assume that, let's say, the engineer that was on board and the two unknown Iranians and so on somehow fabricated some sort of object that looked like a bomb during the flight and hijacked the plane.
And in the process, this pilot, realizing that this plane could possibly be used as a missile down the road or used for some other nefarious purpose, jettisoned the fuel in the process.
Now, from my friends who are pilots and work for the Air Force and so on, have told me that fuel that's jettisoned from that high up typically dissipates.
Oh, yeah, it would evaporate so fast.
Well, that's an interesting theory.
We should tell Jennifer Murwitz at WSFX-TV News at 10 in Wilmington, North Carolina, about this theory.
Because it'll, that's the great news anchor there that is keeping up on this.
Our last caller's theory, we didn't have a lot of time.
I didn't want to seem rude to him.
The caller from Pittsburgh, his theory, pilot was not involved.
Some kind of a shoe bomb on board that the two Iranians involved in a possible hijacking.
And the pilot, recognizing that the hijackers could turn his airplane into a missile or something, just decided to dump the fuel.
And because fuel dissipates, it evaporates.
Kerosene is jet fuel, jet A, and you throw it out there in the air and it'll dissipate pretty rapidly.
And after that, its range obviously greatly reduced, and then it plunges.
And he said he's not aware of anybody having offered that theory.
That sounds plausibly reasonable.
It's not so much conspiratorial because there have been hijacked airplanes.
There have been pilots that have been heroes.
But it is different because this pilot is in the process of being just destroyed from a lunatic wacko political ideologue.
The latest on this, by the way, one of the islands in the Maldives has a 13,000-foot runway.
And he happened to be on the course right for it.
And the latest development is that citizens on one of these islands in the Maldives claimed they saw it flying so low that they could read the markings and see the doors on the airplane.
And they said they'd never seen a jet fly that low, which would buttress the theory that the thing was flying low to escape radar detection.
Anyway, folks, I'm just telling you, even after it is learned what happened, CNN is going to be on this story for the rest of the year.
They'll break away for election coverage every 10 minutes or so.
But that'll be it.
Now, this NASA business, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration thinks that society, our society will collapse for the same reasons that the Roman Empire collapsed, and that is too much inequality and too few natural resources.
Now, just so you know, most historians think the Roman Empire collapsed because of bloated government, way too much government spending on the leaders.
Lots of palaces, the Colosseum, lots of games, and giving Roman citizenship to too many people.
You can find this if you read the great histories, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.
You will find Will and Ariel Durant.
You will find the theory often that Rome sought to expand so rapidly that they granted Roman citizenship to way too many people who had nothing in common with Rome, which diluted the concept of being a Roman citizen.
In other words, mass immigration.
I'm not making it up.
Roman history is replete with variations of that theory.
Now, the Romans conquered anything they could, but in the process, they granted citizenship to be able to expand the Roman Empire.
And they ended up diluting what being a Roman citizen was.
And there are also the theories that it just collapsed morality, collapsed morally on themselves.
There are a lot of people that try to draw that comparison between what's happening here and in ancient Rome.
But this business of inequality and too few natural resources.
Hell, they were conquering the world.
They did not have too few natural resources.
They went and took whatever they needed.
They built the aqueducts.
They found a way.
This is a crazy theory.
Now, let's stick with some of this geopolitical discussion of Venezuela because there are two things that relate to this.
And Russia, we got to bring Russia into this, given Vladimir Putin's obvious desire and movements already being made to reestablish and rebuild the Soviet Union.
Venezuela, at the moment, is in this kind of bad shape.
The annualized inflation rate is reaching 57%.
The problem is that Cuba is dependent on Venezuela.
It's oil.
Venezuela's oil is what fuels the Cuban economy and allows them to grow and raise the sugar and other things that they export.
Venezuela's oil provides 60% of Cuba's demands.
In exchange for this, Cuba sends about 30,000 doctors to Venezuela, according to an analysis by Pavel Vidal, a former official at Cuba's central bank, who's now an economics professor in Colombia, Cali Colombia.
For the last decade, Venezuela's oil has helped fuel Cuba's economy, providing 60% of the communist-ruled islands' demands.
And then Cuba sends the doctors.
The commercial relationship with the leftist Venezuela accounts for 40% of Cuba's trade or 18% of Cuba's GDP.
If Venezuela were to cut Cuba loose, if Venezuela said, we can't even take care of ourselves here, we can't afford to give you oil or sell it cheaply or whatever.
If they cut Cuba loose, either completely or partially, it could cause Cuba's economy to contract all the way up 7.5%.
Cuba's economy has nothing to write home about.
Cuba depends on Venezuela's political situation.
And right now, Venezuela's political situation is tenuous.
In addition to all of that, Canada's largest airline announced Monday that they have suspended flights to and from Caracas, Venezuela, because of violent protests in the country.
Due to ongoing civil unrest in Venezuela, Air Canada can no longer ensure the safety of its operation and has suspended flights to Caracas until further notice.
Despite being one of the world's top 10 oil-producing countries, more than 25% of Venezuelans live below the poverty line.
This is socialism on steroids.
This was a workers' paradise.
This was the model.
Venezuela, Sean Penn and all these Hollywood actors loved Hugo Chavez.
They just thought Venezuela was where equality reigned and where fairness and all of these wonderful liberal things were on display.
And instead, it's just abject, absolute misery.
There isn't any freedom.
There is fear in the lives of practically every citizen daily.
Now there's no sugar.
Now there's no milk.
Now there's not even diapers.
The Venezuelan government, 57% inflation rate, blaming the shop owners.
Cuba, so dependent on this, these are the U.S. embargo.
Every other country in the world is free to do business with Cuba.
Now, why does all this matter?
And a number of you probably, come on, Rush, who cares about Venezuela, Cuba, for crying out loud?
Our own country is going to hell in a handbasket.
It is.
It is, in a way, we're nowhere near the shape Venezuela's in or Cuba, but we've got leaders that exemplify the same kind of thinking.
If you listen to Fidel Castro talk about the United States of America, it's no difference from that and the way Democrats talk about this country when there's a Republican president.
You listen to Mahmoud Ahwaninizad talk about America, the 2004 presidential campaign.
Sounds just like John Kerry talking about America.
You listen to Hugo Chavez talking about Bush and the United States, no different than the way the Democrats today talk about it.
United States is the evil superpower.
United States is the problem in the world.
United States military.
United States has stolen every other nation's resources.
United States unjust, immoral, not a proper superpower, all that.
Same type of Saul Ilinsky thinking.
Now, over here, while all that's going on, Barack Obama is filling out on ESPN his March madness brackets while all this is going on.
And over here in Crimea and Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is openly laughing at the president.
Vladimir Putin only had to look at Obama's resume to know that he was no contest.
All he had to see was community organizer, community agitator, and that's all Putin needed to know to know he could take him.
So Putin wants to what?
Wants to rebuild the Soviet Union.
What do you have?
A nice hemisphere.
No Soviet Union anymore.
But one of their former client states, Cuba in bad shape.
Soviet Union used to give Cuba $5 billion a year.
Was it $5 billion?
It was huge.
And when that money was taken away, it was when the cigars went to hell and the sugar started becoming less.
They didn't have their own money.
They just took $5 billion or whatever it was away from them, and they didn't have the financial resources to keep up.
They couldn't make up the loss.
Now, you got Venezuela ripe, ripe for somebody.
And you've got a president filling out his March madness brackets while this is going on.
Now, what if Putin sits there and, you know, it was really cool when we ran Cuba?
It was really.
And in fact, already, haven't there been stories of Cuban ships pulling into port in Havana in the last year or two?
And aren't there similar stories of Russia supporting the Sandinistas?
Daniel Ortega's back in Nicaragua.
So what if Putin decides there's nobody that's going to stop me?
Nobody's got the guns.
What if he wants to put it back and include Cuba and maybe even Venezuela?
It all matters, folks.
Well, well, who?
Putin would have to get the CHICOMs out of his way in Latin America and the Iranians, but there's an alliance there ready to be made.
Because who is everybody's enemy there?
Us.
The common enemy, the CHICOM common enemy is us.
The Iranian common enemy is us.
Cuba's common enemy, us.
Venezuela's common enemy, us.
Nicaragua's common enemy, us.
And here comes Putin.
The Iranians need material to build a bomb.
Who's got it?
Putin.
Serious stuff is the point.
It is really serious stuff.
And I'm sorry, I am not confident we have anybody in foreign policy leadership that even considers any of this a problem.
That's it.
There's no hiding how weak Obama is.
There's no hiding how uninterested he is in all this.
There's no hiding the fact that Obama believes the days of the United States being a superpower were unjustified anyway.
There's no hiding any of that.
Now, the Democrat theory is all we got to show the bad guys that we don't mean them any harm and they'll leave us alone.
All we have to do is show them we're not the cowboy Bush.
We need to show them we're not Reagan with the finger poisoned on the nuke and we don't want to hurt them.
All we got to do is show them that we're finally nice, reasonable people and they'll stay where they are and they'll leave us alone.
And what they ought to do is examine how they behave toward the Republicans.
When the Republicans are nice to them, what do they do?
They move in for their kill.
Exactly what our enemies would do if they thought there would be no opposition.
Are they going to stay contained in their own borders, hunky dory?
It's not the nature of bad guys.
Got to take a break back after this.
Rushlin boy, half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
And we go to Southeast Oklahoma.
This is Wenham.
Great to have you.
Hello.
Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
And it's Northeast Oklahoma.
Northeast Oklahoma.
Out in a forest.
And I said Southeast Oklahoma.
Well, that's because I was wrong.
Anyway, what's up?
Well, I had, as I was telling your Mr. Surtley there, I believe it was an epiphany during a commercial, 32nd spot, for Blue Cross Blue Shield.
That did what?
Well, at the conclusion of the commercial, they said that after touting their product, they said, and remember, you have until March 31st to purchase this product.
I don't know how uninformed I have been or just plain stupid.
I was not aware that we have taken over the private industry.
You mean Obamacare?
You're talking about Obamacare.
So I take it you voted for Obama?
Twice.
Twice.
Okay.
And so you thought that Obamacare was going to be a positive change in the health care system?
Yes.
I didn't have many good experiences with the private sector.
Right.
But had you heard people warn you that no, no, no, Obamacare is not that great and so forth and you just didn't believe them.
And then you saw the Blue Cross.
That's exactly right.
And then you saw the Blue Cross commercial.
It's the March 31st deadline.
I said, wait, what the hell is that?
So what we have here, as far as I can tell, and listening to your earlier comments on Venezuela, we've nationalized health care.
That's exactly right.
We're in the process of doing it.
Exactly.
You got it.
Exactly.
Now, this, folks, this is what is scaring the Democrats to death.
There's no ad that's going to change Wenham's mind.
He's living it.
It's no longer theory.
He doesn't have to believe critics.
He's encountered it.
This is what has these Democrats running away from Obama left and right.
These are Obama voters who are discovering exactly what happened, and it's not what they voted for, and not what Obama told them was going to happen.
They are living it.
And sounds like Winham's kind of locked in now to what he thinks about it because it's happened to him.
He didn't think the healthcare system was so bad it needed to be taken over, and he didn't think that's what was going to happen.
Now he's living it being taken over.
So I'm getting some emails.
So what are we supposed to do about it, Rush?
What are we supposed to do about Venezuela and Cuba?
Sit there and you criticize Obama for filling out the brackets.
What would you be doing, Rush?
I'll be glad to answer that.
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