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May 30, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:00
May 30, 2014, Friday, Hour #2
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Buck Sexton is in on my and and and what about who's Tuesday?
Oh, Tuesday's me.
Okay, I must make a point, I must make a point of listening.
Uh, and I'm not gonna do the whole week now.
It's I'm too I'm so excited about listening to Mark Slide when he comes in on Tuesday now.
Uh, but uh, Buck Sexton will be here for Monday, and uh, Rush will be back fully fit and recuperated after a few days.
1-800-282-2882, you know what it means.
It's the end of the week.
Live from Ice Station EIB, it's open live Friday.
Yes, from Monday to Thursday, a highly trained broadcast specialist maintains the same iron grip on this show as General Sissy does in Egypt with his 93.3% of the vote.
But on Friday, today, there is no broadcast specialist in sight, so anything goes, whatever you want to talk about, whatever you want to talk about, it's all yours.
1-800-282-2882.
And we will attend to matters small and large.
The big theme for me is my kid's Obama award from President Obama that he got for graduating from eighth grade yesterday.
And this letter that the president sent to my kid, he may have sent a similar letter to your kid too.
I don't know quite how personally motivated this was, but he said, When I see smart, bright young people like you, I realize that America's best days lie ahead of us.
And my point is that America's best days are behind unless something changes.
The economy contracted by 1%.
We're not in a recession.
It's six years since Lehman Brothers went under.
There's no great crisis of global capitalism.
And yet, mysteriously, the economy is shrinking.
And this is despite all the people who've departed the workforce and aren't looking for work, the tens of millions extra people on food stamps, all the millions who now claim permanent disability and all the rest of it.
Despite that, the economy is continuing to contract.
So, this is nothing to do with Lehman Brothers or anything like that.
This is the new normal.
Where does it go?
What happens to change that?
And it's funny, small stories somehow point up the contrast I often feel.
And HR drew my attention to this earlier today.
South Korea introduces female-only parking spaces.
They're larger with pink outlines and a mini skirt logo.
They're wider and they're longer than regular parking spots.
And they're outlined in pink, and they're marked with cute little pink mini skirted low.
Now, if you think about this, it's of course let's say two people are driving the same size Hyundai or whatever, however you pronounce it, or Kia.
Kia's the more popular model, I believe.
Now, they're in the same size Kia, and yet the space for the guy is half the size of the space for the woman's Kia.
So, this is like patronizing and sexist and all the rest of it.
Here in the United States, in Houston, Texas, not only do they not have female-only parking spaces, they've just abolished female-only bathrooms.
Houston's bathrooms, showers, and dressing facilities will now be open to all, regardless of gender, gender identity, gender expression, or other predilection of gender behavior, whatever that means, predilection of gender behavior.
By an 11 to 6 vote of the Houston City Council, Mayor Anise Parker achieved this as the crowning jewel of her tenure as mayor.
She said this is, quote, the most personally meaningful thing I will ever do as mayor.
And that is to open up every single bathroom in Houston to anybody, regardless of gender, gender identity, gender expression, or other predilection of gender behavior, as the law puts it.
So in South Korea, you've got gender-specific.
I don't know what somebody with predilection of gender behavior does if they identify, in South Korea, if they identify as a woman for the purposes of using a parking space.
By the way, if you find it hard to get a parking space in Seoul, then you might want to try claiming to identify as a woman for the purposes of parking.
But it's interesting to me now that since and I don't want to get into the whole Rush did Transgender Thursday on the show yesterday, and I don't want to tread on his turf in that respect, but it is interesting to me how swiftly things move since gay marriage and striking down the laws restricting marriage to a man and a woman and all the rest of it.
It's like nothing matters now unless it's got a gay element to it.
And like departments you would have thought had absolutely nothing to do with sexuality are all developing these sexual identity and sexual orientation programs.
The United States Department of Agriculture, would you have thought there was like a big gay scene in USDA?
I wouldn't have thought so, but they have now introduced a new federal program to celebrate gay identity and tell LGBT stories in rural areas.
Because the gay scene, I mean, I live in northern New Hampshire and the gay scene is lousy.
I mean, it's like, have you ever tried finding a decent gay club in Deadmoose Junction at 10 o'clock on a Thursday night?
It's Deadsville.
But now USDA has started a federal grant program to award grants to celebrate gay life in rural America.
So this time next year, you'll be watching the Future Farmers of America LGBTQ parade and thinking, wow, that is, I mean, this is such an improvement.
Last year it was lousy.
This is incredible.
There's been such a so that's like USDA, the United States Department of Agriculture has got a, has managed to introduce a gay program.
All the government agencies now are figuring out that that's where the big bucks are, that you don't really count.
You're not really part of the new world unless you've got a gay program in your part of the world too.
So for example, the National Park Service is now going to start promoting historic LGBT places.
So it's like all it's fine if you go to Yellowstone and you see just a lot of bears frolicking, but it's not, there's not enough celebration of LGBT identity in Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon or whatever.
So they're now going to the National Park Service is now going to start promoting historic LGBT places.
American foreign policy.
John Kerry has got nothing to say about Russia.
He's got nothing to say about the Ukraine.
He's got nothing to, he makes no meaningful contribution to Syria or to what's going on in North Africa or to the Iranian nuclear program or to the Chinese march of power in the Pacific.
But he has announced that he is sending credentialed gay experts to discuss homosexuality with the Ugandan leader, Yawary Museveni.
He had a town hall meeting a couple of weeks ago, and he said that he'd persuaded Mr. Museveni to meet with some American experts on gayness in order that they could engage him in a dialogue on the subject.
And good luck with that.
Mr. Museveni, by the way, is regarded as extremely homophobic, even by American African standards.
A couple of years ago, he proposed the arrest of all homosexuals, although he subsequently moderated his position and said, why can't we just go back to the good old days when these few individuals were either ignored or speared by their parents?
So I don't know what kind of time the fully credentialed American gay experts are going to be having when they land in Kampala.
But that's like John Kerry.
The United States can't send anybody in to get our guys in Benghazi.
They can't send anybody to get the Bring Back Our Girls Girls in Nigeria.
They can't send anybody in to help the fellas in Ukraine keep Putin from annexing what bits of the country wants.
They can't send any fellas in over Syria.
They can't even do anything in Afghanistan, but they can send a battalion of gay experts in to, as John Kerry puts it, engage Mr. Museveni on gay issues.
And it comes back to what I was saying in the first hour, that this is simply not a serious, this is not how a serious nation conducts itself.
The National Potato Council, the National Potato Council, is disputing Michelle Obama's attempts.
Michelle Obama got the potato banned.
She didn't just spell potato with an E, she gave potato the big E and got it kicked out of the food stamp program and for women, infants and children.
And she says that putting the potato back in her program, her program that she apparently passed into law, if you remember that Carol Costello thing on CNN that Rush quoted the other day, when CNN announced that Michelle Obama had signed into law her food program.
The First Lady says that putting the potato back into this program would, quote, override science.
So the National Potato Council is now arguing and disputing the First Lady's claims.
And this is all it is now.
It's transgendered bathrooms.
It's the National Potato Council.
Meanwhile, the economy is contracting.
Meanwhile, we are entering the post-American world.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are taking the Pacific Ocean.
And for the first time in human history, a superpower is dying over disputes about bathroom access for persons of predilections of gender behavior and over the National Potato Council's claim that the potato should not be banned by a potato phobic First Lady from the Women, Infants and Children's Food Programme.
At some point, a nation has to get serious.
Because if you're going to go out of business as a superpower, there should be a better reason to do it than the potato or the transgendered bathroom.
Mark Stein for Rush, more straight ahead.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
You know, this National Potato Council that's currently taking on the outrageously potato phobic Michelle Obama.
They're not going to get anywhere and the National Potato Council until they rename themselves the National LGBT Potato Council.
Nobody's going to pay any attention to them.
Let's go to Donna in Frederick, Maryland.
Donna, you are live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Hello, Mark.
It's my pleasure.
I would like to comment on the VA, that hot-button topic that I hope remains that way through the election cycle.
What I like to say is when it's discovered that the people who receive bonuses knowingly falsified those records, I believe those individuals should be required by law to reimburse that money.
Well, that's an excellent idea.
You know, I'm astonished at the fact that we get all excited because General Shinseki is being fired.
He's just basically like the transient cherry on the cake of the permanent bureaucracy.
And these guys can't be fired.
The most you can do is, I mean, if they can be fired, yes, if they like kill somebody.
But basically, anything short of that, all you can do is move them sideways.
And I'd go further than you, Donna, is that there should not be these routine bonuses paid out to members of the federal bureaucracy.
Basically, these are not bureaucracies for performance.
They're basically routine bonuses that are handed out and that people in the private sector would actually have to achieve something in order to get.
But I hear what you're saying, but I think the idea of an actual unionized so-called public servant writing a check and giving back these bonuses, I would love to see that.
But, you know, that will be a very cold day in hell before that happens from these guys, Donna.
Mark, what they should do is just deduct it from their salaries.
And, you know, what's sad is, you know, just like Benghazi and, you know, Fast and Furious, all these other things, we're still waiting for resolution on these issues.
And yet it's the same old drag it on and on it goes and we never get closure on any of this.
But I don't think this one's going to go away.
I hope this one stays right at the top.
Well, the reason this is different, and the time element that you mentioned is absolutely central to their strategy on this.
That pajama boy being interviewed by Brett Bear gave it away and he said, dude, this is like two years ago.
That's basically it.
It's like the Clinton argument.
Oh, this is old news.
We need to move on.
And they feel the administration strategy is that when things like this come along, all they have to do is drag it out until the media are in a position to say, well, Congress held hearings today and interviewed the assistant deputy, under assistant secretary, deputy, under assistant deputy secretary of veterans affairs, but nothing really new emerged.
Because like killing people is just like old news now and we need something else.
And they're very clever at doing that.
And you notice just in the last couple of days, for example, that they begun this week.
It was interesting.
For a while, this was the scandal for the media.
They weren't interested in Benghazi, weren't interested in the IRS, but they were interested in this one.
And then just in the last couple of days, it's all gone away a bit.
And they're already moving on to the, oh, it's old news kind of thing.
They can't do it quite as easily because there's real dead Americans all over the fruited plane because of this business.
But you notice that they're already trying to drain the urgency out.
And that's how they report the General Shinseki thing.
Problem solved.
Shinseki's gone, Donna, because that's how they do it.
What's so alarming is it's really called what I've heard to it being referred to as the slow roll.
And it's all deliberate.
And I think on this particular issue, it crosses, it's a quote-unquote bipartisan issue.
And I think that's why we've got to hold our feet to the fire on this one, just like the others.
Yeah, you're right about that.
And we shouldn't forget, we shouldn't forget, Donna, that what is most scandalous here is that real people die.
And they die because in the bureaucratic system, they're not treated like human beings.
They're just treated as statistics in a great churning mill of bureaucracy.
That story I reported last hour on 1,400 people from the interim report.
There were 1,400 people on the waiting list.
But there were another 1,700 people who were told they were on the waiting list, who think they've gotten into the system, and in fact, have not yet been put on the waiting list.
They're just on the waiting list for the waiting list.
And they don't know that.
They've got cancer.
They've got lumps in their legs.
They're feeling slightly worse this morning than they felt this time last week.
And they think it's okay because they think they're already in the system.
And they haven't yet even been entered into the system.
And a bureaucracy prioritizes the interests of the bureaucracy over anything else.
That's the purpose of the bureaucracy.
And we are insane to do this to people who have gone out and fought for their country.
These are the very last people who should be thrown into the hell of the only so far fully socialized medical system in the United States.
This is not something.
This is not something we should be doing to anybody.
But above all, it is not something we should be doing to American veterans.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
We've got lots more still to come.
Yes, Rush is having a few well-earned days off.
Buck Sexton is going to be here on Monday.
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We have been talking about the VA scandal on Open Line Friday, 1-800-282-2882.
The interesting thing about this is that it's not a simple big government issue.
It's not about denying funding.
The agency's budget has more than doubled in the last decade, up from $28 billion to $57 billion since 2003.
But the patient load is only up about one-third over that period.
So the VA has more money than ever and has more money per patient than ever.
And the reason why American veterans are dying is not because there isn't the money to treat them.
They're dying because the money is being used for performance bonuses.
And performance, for SAR, the idea of performance bonus in a government job is problematic to me because a government is a monopoly.
So how do you decide whether someone's performed?
You know, you don't say, hey, you've done a terrific job.
You've performed way better than the government across the street performs.
There's only one government.
You have a monopoly of provision in this case.
So the idea of performance bonuses is itself dubious.
But performance bonuses are routine.
One in five employees at the Phoenix VA received bonuses.
At the seven most troubled VA facilities, almost $9 million were paid out in bonuses.
And in order to get these bonuses, you basically had to kill Americans.
So these people are getting performance bonuses when the performance is how many Americans you kill by keeping them off the waiting list.
This should be a teachable moment in the perverse incentives of big government monopolies.
Because it actually, everything that people, everything that Sarah Palin was mocked for saying at the time the Obamacare thing started when she put the word, the phrase death panels in public conscious and people mocked her.
Oh, this simpleton from Wasilla, Alaska doesn't understand the sophisticated concepts that come into, she can't understand it.
So she comes up with some crude phrase like death panels that all those rubes who listen to Rush just suck up and start going on about.
No, it's not.
It's like in a private healthcare system, if you wander into the hospital with a broken leg, it is in their interest to treat your broken leg because the sooner they treat your broken leg, the sooner they'll get paid.
That is a routine economic incentive in a private healthcare system.
Everyone who has ever been treated in a Canadian hospital or in a British NHS hospital or other government systems knows that the only way you can control costs in a government system is by restricting supply.
So it's to the advantage if you wander in with a broken leg to a Canadian hospital or a Scottish hospital for them to say, okay, we can't treat you today.
We're going to make you wait with your broken leg three months or six months or seven months or whatever.
And if you do it to the degree that the VA does it, you wind up with a system where the only way you can get your performance bonus is to start killing American veterans.
And that's the obscenity of it.
Just to go back to what Donna was saying, we have people here who have seen things that most of us will never have to see.
They have been in hellish situations on the other side of the world that no one would willingly go to.
No one really wants to be in Fallujah.
No one really wants to be in, no one in their right mind really wants to be in Kandahar.
No one really wants to be in the jungles of Vietnam.
No one wants to be in the places these guys have been and seen the things they see.
And yet the system is not.
And so the purpose of the VA is to say, well, you've served your country.
Well done.
Great to have you back with us.
Thank you for your service.
And as a reward for you serving your country, we're going to give you a special health care program all your own.
So you don't have to go to Dead Moose Junction General Hospital and be there with all the RIFRAF.
We are creating, because of your exceptional service to the country, a special health care program just for you.
And instead, what happens?
It's not run for the benefit for the guy of the guy who was in the hellhole of the Sunni triangle in Iraq.
It's not for the guy who was hunting through the Hindu Kush in the fall of 2001, trying to get Osama bin Laden and the guys who perpetrated 9-11.
It's not for the guy who was out there in Vietnam.
No, it's run for the benefit of a pen pusher for the one in five VA employees who gets a so-called performance bonus.
And the performance bonuses are, in fact, actually rewards for killing American veterans.
Let's go to David in Tucson, Arizona.
David, you are live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Well, thank you very much.
Yeah, being from Arizona, you know, we got Phoenix is about an hour from here.
I well know that.
I was in Tucson a couple of years ago to give a speech for the Goldwater Institute.
I'm always amazed how furious, I guess.
No, no, I wasn't.
I did go south of Tucson, though.
I like that sign on the highway, which is immensely reassuring, where it says you proceed beyond this point at your own risk.
In other words, you might as well be in Benghazi or the Sunni Triangle because the sovereignty of the United States doesn't really run south of this point.
And it's very disturbing to actually see that on the border.
Speaking of which, Hillary today in her top secret meeting, I guess, with Obama is probably trying to get her Benghazi stories straight.
What do you think?
Oh, yeah, that's right.
We're told Benghazi doesn't matter.
And yet they had this big summit on it.
This year racist, a feminist, or no, today it's a potatoist.
All right.
No, that sounds like Greg Gutfeld.
Sorry.
But I was just wondering if Chelsea Clinton had been ambassador in Benghazi instead of Ambassador Stevens.
I wonder, what do you think Hillary, how would she have reacted?
Well, you want to hope she'd want to get her out of there.
But, you know, on the other hand, there's a heartlessness to the way Hillary and Obama reacted to this Benghazi thing.
The minute he was dead, they claimed this guy, Chris Stevens, was their best friend, Christopher Stevens, Mr. Stevens, Ambassador Stevens.
But when they were lying over his casket at Andrews Air Force Base, it was all Chris this, Chris that, Chris, Chris, Chris, Chris, Chris.
You'd think they'd been best friends since third grade.
In the end, they were willing not only to sacrifice him, but then willing to dishonor him in death, too, with the lies they told.
And what is impressive in a kind of cold way is the heartlessness of these guys when it doesn't serve their political narrative.
They decided Chris Stevens was a guy who took their view on the Arab Spring.
He agreed with them.
He took the Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama deluded view of the Arab Spring.
But unlike them, he was out there on the front line and he actually died for that delusion.
He actually died for that delusion.
And they dishonored him in death because telling the truth about what happened to him in that Godforsaken town in North Africa was inconvenient to their political narrative.
And it's spectacular, David.
In a way, it's impressive to see the heartlessness with which they're prepared to write off four American lives because it's inconvenient to their political narrative.
And I don't think that's the ugliness of politics.
I don't think most of us would be able to do that and live with ourselves.
Most of us wouldn't be able to do what Hillary Clinton did, stand up and tell those lies over those four flag-draped coffins at Andrews Air Force Base.
Most of us couldn't do that.
And we lack the heartlessness to prosper at the top levels of the Democratic Party.
And, you know, there are people all over the world who must look at this behavior.
Imagine if you're Ayatollah Khatami in Tehran.
Imagine if you're the Chinese Politburo.
Imagine if you're Vladimir Putin sitting in the Kremlin and you think, my God, look at Hillary Clinton and Obama standing there doing this to Chris Stevens over his coffin.
What about if they were to start applying this heartlessness and ruthlessness to America's enemies instead of America's own?
But oddly enough, they never do that.
Mark, sign in for Rush.
More straight ahead.
I always love that.
Love that great Canadian music.
Love to have Canadian music on Open Line Friday.
Backman Turner Overdrive.
Let's go to Mary in St. Louis.
Mary, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Hi.
Good afternoon, Mark.
Thank you for taking my call.
I appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
Listening to so many things today you're talking about different things.
I find it difficult to accept the things that are going on sometimes, but I would like to suggest maybe a part solution to some of the things that are happening and that when we have presidential elections, instead of those who are running for president to go out on a campaign and talk, because they talk such a good game sometimes,
but yet after the fact we find out what their record really is, what I'd like to see is that those who are running, they let us know who's running and in some form or fashion, but not campaigning.
We want to know what they've been doing all along.
How long have they been in politics?
How long have they been serving?
What are their stances on, say, gun control and military and health care and things like that and the economy?
What have they been doing in the past?
I want to know that because they can always tell us what they want to do, but that's not always what we found in what Obama has done.
Yeah.
That's actually from what he's done in the past.
Yeah, that's a good way.
The easiest record to run on is the one that hasn't happened yet, which is what Obama did.
He ran on hope and change, and Rush mocked the idea of hope and change.
Hope is pitiful.
Hope isn't even a plan.
Hope is you're just like lying there on the floor, and some hurricanes torn the roof off your house, and you're just lying there as the weather is pouring in, and you're on the floor and battered and bruised, hoping, hoping something will turn up.
And Hillary can't even, Hillary can't even run on that.
Hillary is running on so-called four decades of public service.
And in fact, there is no, you know, Sarah Palin was told, we were told, was not yet ready to be vice president because she wasn't ready to be president.
Because all she'd done was been a governor and a mayor and run a commercial fishing operation.
Well, Hillary Clinton had never run anything until she ran the State Department, and she ran that abysmally.
And there's a, what's her name?
Representative Allison Schwartz of Pennsylvania is in the newspaper today complaining that she wasn't the Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania governor because Pennsylvanians aren't ready to have a woman as governor.
You all know this, she says.
You couldn't even imagine a woman with my experience and my accomplishments could actually be the governor of Pennsylvania.
Well, to Representative Schwartz, I would say, why not take it up with your party?
Four of the five governors in this country at the moment are Republican women.
Your party is the one whose idea of an accomplished woman is the spouse of a philandering husband who got a Senate seat, who was given as a Senate seat as a reward for staying quiet during the year of impeachment and all that, and is essentially in the Ava Perron role.
She's now supposed to become president just like Gava Perron did after Juan Perron in Argentina.
You know, it's America's Don't Cry for Me, Heart Springs, Arkansas moment.
Is there nobody else in the Democrat Party?
Sarah Palin.
Sarah Palin wasn't qualified to be president because she'd only been a governor and a mayor and run a business.
But Hillary Clinton is qualified to be president because she did nothing until she became Secretary of State.
And then on Secretary of State, she had Benghazi, she had the disaster of the Arab Spring, she had the Iranian nuclear, and all the rest of it.
At some point, we have to understand what accomplishment is.
And accomplishment is not the Obama model where you have a million dollars of elite education and you become a community organizer and you mouth vapid platitudes about everything.
And whenever you actually have to get specific, you're talking about 57 states or you don't speak Austrian or you can't tell the difference between the Elas Malvinas and the Moldive Islands.
President Obama simply did nothing in his life to ever indicate he was sufficiently engaged to be president.
And that's why whenever he's doing anything other than golfing or schmoozing with celebrities, he looks bored out of hell by the thing.
He has no coherent geostrategic world vision.
And Mary is absolutely right.
And the idea that we just elect someone running on platitudes again, which is why they're ginning up all this war on women stuff, would be absolutely ridiculous for the United States to do.
Mark's sign for us.
More to come.
Donald Sterling has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and that is why doctors declared he is mentally unfit to have a voice in the sale of the LA Clippers.
Yes, this has just been revealed by TMZ moments ago.
Donald Sterling has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
He is mentally unfit to have a say in the sale of the clippers.
Whether he is also mentally unfit to have signed that letter saying that his wife Shelly has sole say in the sale of the clippers, I don't know.
It's a kind of wacky situation to be whether, and whether also the diagnosis that he is mentally unfit means that he should no longer have his private telephone conversations with his presumably now ex-mistress leaked to the world and used as the basis to deprive him of his property is another matter.
that Donald Stirling has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
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