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Dec. 11, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:50
December 11, 2014, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Hiya, folks, how are you?
Greetings.
Great to have you here.
It's Rush Limbaugh and three straight hours of broadcast excellence.
Hosted by me.
And you can count on the fact that whatever your expectations are, we will meet them.
And more than likely, we will exceed them.
Because that is the objective.
Each and every busy broadcast day, the telephone number if you want to be on the program.
800-282-2882 and the email address, El Rushbo at EIBNet.com.
Okay, there is panic inside the beltway.
There is panic over the Cromnibus bill, the omnibus spending bill, ladies and gentlemen.
It appears that the Republican leadership pretty much gave Obama and the Democrats everything they want.
Except for one thing.
They are making some tweaks, and I'm going to get into this in greater detail, just setting the table now.
They made some tweaks in the Crom Nibus bill to the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, and Elizabeth Warren is fit to be tied.
And she's livid.
Now she's in the Senate, and she's out there saying that the Republicans in the House want to shut down the government over their tweaks to the Dodd-Frank bill.
No, it's Elizabeth Warren that will shut down the government if she objects to this.
But see, this is how it works, and this is why I have we all have been over backwards to tell the Republicans, well, you stop worrying about what's going to be said about you, because even if if you gave the Democrats everything they want, and if you give Obama everything he wants, and in the last minute they pull a whammy on you and say, you know what, we don't like this thing, and then just to accuse you of shutting down the government when they are doing it.
Doesn't matter.
Elizabeth Warren could succeed in shutting down the government, and the Republicans are going to get blamed for it.
It is, it's written in the commandments of media.
And it doesn't matter what the truth is.
If there is a government shutdown, the Republicans are going to get blamed for it.
It's the same old thing.
Whatever happens, no matter on what anything, the Republicans are going to get blames.
The argument's always been just do the right thing.
You've got an electorate behind you in massive numbers.
The latest poll on Obamacare, there is a record high, as expressed in polling data, opposed to Obamacare.
58%.
It is an all-time high.
Now, there have been some outlier polls that have shown 60%, 62%, but this is a eh, what they call a drive-by mainstream poll.
58% opposed to Obamacare, and the same kind of numbers opposed to Amnesty.
And yet the Republicans still sit there and maintain.
Oh, we can't do the government shutdown.
We're going to blame for it and so forth.
It's just, again, when it comes to Amnesty, the Republicans want it.
They they they Chamber of Commerce wants it, wants it, and we know that.
But it's it's fascinating to watch Elizabeth Warren, and of course, in doing this, Elizabeth Warren is going out and launching a full-fledged attack on capitalism, which is really going to help her if she does decide to seek a Democrat presidential nomination.
And I mentioned a poll on Hillary Clinton yesterday that I'd never seen a poll like this.
That showed her in the 70 or 80% approval range.
And these polls always surprise me.
I I've never bought into this idea that Hillary is unbeatable, and I've never bought into the idea that Hillary is preordained to be president.
I've never bought into the idea that it's hers for the asking or taking.
I've never bought into the idea that it's senseless to oppose her because if she wants it and if she runs, she'll win.
And we have evidence on my side.
She did run in 2008 and she lost, despite our best efforts to help her here with Operation Chaos.
Anyway, it turns out we had some in-depth analysis of that poll, and it's totally flawed.
And, you know, the poll showing Hillary's 70, 80, whatever percent approval.
It doesn't jibe with real world experience.
She can't sell a book, folks.
Nobody bought that book.
And when she makes appearances to make speeches, half the room is empty.
Now I know a little bit about drawing a crowd.
I know a little bit about connecting with an audience, and I know that she doesn't have an audience connection.
I mean, even maybe with a with a few Democrats, but I'm turned in in terms of the kind of connection, a deep connection with an audience voters, whatever you want to call it.
She just doesn't have it.
I don't think she ever has had, to tell you the truth.
I think it's been one of the greatest myths that has been pulled over on a country, a society by the media, so far harmless, well, other than for those in Benghazi.
But I really think Hillary Clinton is mostly hype, but it doesn't mitigate the fact that she's there and she's been in positions of power.
But it does provide some confidence.
There's no reason to be afraid of her.
Anyway, get into details on that poll as the as the program unfolds.
And then we got this in A. B. Stoddard at the Hill.com, Democrats sick of Obamacare.
You have Kathleen Sibelius running around saying, well, you know, there is a problem with Obamacare.
It's the name.
It's a branding problem, she says.
But folks, the Democrats are running away from Obamacare in drones.
First up was Chuck Schumer wanting no part of it anymore.
And then, and then uh Tom Dungheap Harkin in Iowa saying he wanted no part of it anymore, and saying it shouldn't have been voted on.
It should have should have done it last or shouldn't have done it first.
They should have done other things first, like focus on jobs in the economy.
And A. B. Stoddard's piece here with a couple of pull quotes.
Four years ago, the Affordable Care Act was passed by only Democrats.
The law has contributed to giving Republicans their strongest hold on Congress in more than half a century, fifty years, for those of you in Rio Linda.
And another poll quote now, Democrats hope that a better website, more enrollees, some bipartisan fixes, and a second affirmative Supreme Court decision can save the law before Hillary Clinton or another Democrat nominee has to finesse a position on it two years from now.
If not, these four years are just the first in which what could be decades before the Democrat Party is cured of its health care ills.
Her whole point here is how Obamacare has destroyed the Democrat Party.
Now you may not see that written in such terms, because the media, of course, is not going to do that.
But it is one of these things happens to be true.
The Democrat Party is in total trouble.
They're being shellacked in elections, left and right.
The 2012 presidential race argues against that.
Obama was re-elected.
I understand that presidential turnout being what it is, but the last two midterms that we've had, I mean, can't deny the Democrats have gotten creamed.
The Democrat senators that voted for Obamacare are gone.
It has been devastating.
They are on the ropes.
They have done great damage to their party.
Obama has succeeded in doing great damage, which we forecast, by the way, while pointing out that Obama didn't care about whatever damage might occur to the Democrat Party.
But here's how A. B. Stoddard opens her piece, watching Jonathan Gruber testify before the House government reform and oversight committee on Tuesday was likely too much for most Democrats to take, as he characterized his remarks describing Congress as tricking Americans into approving a new tax as thoughtless, as well as mean, glib, uncalled for, and embarrassing.
It's the very definition of the door hitting them on the way out.
Four years after the Affordable Care Act was passed by only Democrats, the law has contributed to giving Republicans their strongest hold on Congress in more than 50 years.
Harry Truman to be precise.
And what's even more frightening than the law's unpopularity is the prospect of Obamacare being dismantled by a coming supreme court review.
The cumulative damage in a Democrat Party and what is suffered as well as the casualty rate has brought its leaders to unhappy inflection and reflection point.
Two years ago, Obama re-elected to the surprise and delighted Democrats who believed not only would his unique coalition provide them with cover, but a permanent ongoing majority.
And now look at what has happened.
I only bring this up because I'm trying to reinforce for everybody what a strong position the Republicans have and how for some reason they simply refuse to accept that, to understand it, to know it with confidence, and to act on it.
They simply don't know how to act as winners for some reason.
That's understandable if you've never been a winner in your mind, and all that one day you are.
It's hard to do a 180, but it's not that they're just recent winners.
They've been winning a lot of elections.
So it's it's curious.
And we will delve further into it as the program unfolds.
I'll tell you, folks, that the the hack at Sony Pictures is producing all kinds of juicy inside stuff about what executives at Sony actually think of their actors.
And what they think of Obama.
Oh.
There are two people involved.
One is Scott Rudin.
Scott Rudin is a producer.
He made the movie No Country for Old Men.
He made the movie Moneyball.
I think he wants to make jobs, the movie jobs.
I think he wanted to make movie jobs.
And Amy Pascal is one of the co-CEO types at Sony, and emails from these two people back and forth have leaked.
And in these emails, they just mock and make fun of Obama along racial lines in ways that nobody would ever suspect because these are the same people that are giving Obama money.
They're hosting breakfast fundraisers for Obama.
But here in the Washington Post, Hollywood has a race problem.
Just read Sony exec's emails about Obama.
First reported by BuzzFeed, the exchange between Sony executive Amy Pascal and producer Scott Rudin involves Obama's presumed taste in movies.
Rudin, a producer responsible for movies like No Country for Old Men and Moneyball, said what happened.
Amy Pascal said she has had to go to some breakfast that Jeffrey Katzenberg was putting on, a fundraising breakfast for Obama.
And she didn't want to go.
And so she sent an email to this buddy of hers, Scott Rudin.
What should she say to Obama if she met him?
And Rudin replied, ask him if he'd like to finance some movies.
Amy Pascal relied, I replied, I doubt it.
Maybe should I ask him if he liked Django?
Rudin responded, no, 12 years.
Pascal quickly continued down the path of guessing preferred movies that Obama would like based on whether or not they starred African American.
Hey, you think Obama would like the butler?
Hey, you think Obama would like think like a man?
And Rudin responded, right along.
I'll bet he likes Kevin Hart.
So the first black president must like movies about black people and butlers and movies that star black people because he's black.
Here you have high-level Hollywood executives making racist, yep, racist jokes about the president of the United States.
Nobody would ever think this would be going on, right?
Because these are good people.
These are sentitive people.
These are good liberals.
And they're the ones that eagle-eye racism and bigotry everywhere else.
But they are innocent and clean and pure as the wind-driven snow, and here they are making fun of and mocking Obama's imaginable taste in movies and lamenting to each other they'd rather not have to go to this Katzenberg breakfast fundraiser and so forth.
And there's a whole lot more.
Some of the things that these people are saying about Angelina Jolie, she's an ego freak.
All she does is make movies that lose money.
And if we did this latest movie she wants to make, it'd be the end of your career and mine.
Rudin and Pascal emailing back and forth.
And then there's an email there's all kinds of things.
It's it's it's it's uh it's it's your worst nightmare.
In this case, these people's worst nightmare come to life because all of their supposed private emails have now been leaked because of this hack, and the drive-by media is all over the story.
Truth Revolt, that's Ben Shapiro's piece, the Washington Post, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, they've all got stories on Hollywood liberals mocking Obama on race.
Imagine you, ladies and gentlemen, are at a football game.
Let's say that you are in Detroit on Thanksgiving Day, and you have your girlfriend or your wife with you, and you're sitting there, you're watching the game, and your girlfriend keeps using her phone.
She's texting.
And you say to yourself, no big deal.
It's a football game, and she is good enough to come with me, doesn't really like it, so she's doing what she can to stay involved while I enjoy the football game.
And at some point during the game, a guy sitting behind you hands you a note.
Handwritten note.
The guy behind you has been watching your wife or your girlfriend as she texts.
And the note tells you that your wife or girlfriend has been texting another man, telling him that she wishes she could spend the day with him instead of being it's a football game with the lug hit.
And then the guy who you don't know, who gives you this note, says, Happy Thanksgiving.
Have a great day.
But I think you should know, bro.
That actually happened.
He was just trying to watch the game, but instead he was dragged into a random couple's relationship drama.
Man named Lie has written about his experience confronting a stranger in a Detroit Lions game after he claims he saw the man's very pregnant girlfriend's romantic texting.
Another man throughout the game.
At the end of the game, Lie handed the man a note revealing the alleged adulterous text messages.
And later posted a picture of the note and the pair he claimed to be the couple on Facebook.
He went public with all of this.
The images have now gone viral and are sparking a heated debate online about whether it's appropriate to wade into a complete stranger's relationship.
Really?
That's a matter of debate.
It's up for grabs whether or not you should wade in to a complete stranger's relationship.
This guy took a picture of the note that he wrote, posted it.
He says, hey, bro, I don't know you and you don't know me.
But when you get home, check a girl's phone.
She'd been texting Jason, saying she wishes she was with him all day.
Take care, bro.
Wish you the best.
Signed unknown fans sitting two rows behind you at the Detroit Lions game.
Is this not?
You know, you you're worried about the NSA spying on your emails.
You're worried about you're worried about Apple or Google or whatever.
Hey.
How about the guy sitting behind you in public?
Have you heard about the college professor?
Oops.
Got to take a break.
Okay, we have a vote on a rule on the budget resolution in the House called a Chromnibus Omnibus.
And it's a little bit in the weeds to explain this.
Therefore, nobody better than me to do it.
What just happened is that the rule setting the stage for the vote later barely passed.
They had to vote on the rule, the procedure in order to set the stage for the vote on the final passage of the omnibus bill in the House of Representatives.
The vote was very close.
It was 214 to 212.
Not a single Democrat voted for this.
Now, you might say, so what?
214 Republicans did, so it passed.
Two hundred and twelve Democrats voted to shut down the government is what it means, in essence.
Not a single Democrat voted for the rule that would that would then bring the budget up for vote in the House.
In other words, 212 Democrats voted against the rule, voted against bringing the final vote, bringing up the final vote on the omnibus bill.
Now you could say, as I just did, that the Democrats essentially voted to shut down the government, but nowhere would this ever be portrayed as what actually happened.
I've got to take another break here.
But back before you know it, I'll explain all of this.
And welcome back, ladies and gentlemen.
Il Rushbow, your guiding light.
America's truth detector, doctor of democracy, America's real anchor man.
All combined as one harmless, lovable little fuzzball.
214 to 212 procedural vote passed in the House of Representatives, which now clears the way to pass the uh omnibus budget bill in the House.
The procedural vote is what is called a vote on the rule.
And the rule uh governs debate and what is permitted during debate and who's permitted to what it basically gives Boehner the right to set the uh the rules as he goes and set the stage to get votes as he needs them uh during the voting process.
And if if this were going to be stopped, it would have had to been stopped at this level at this at this point, the rule.
Voting, if the rule had gone down to defeat, then we'd be talking Turkey here.
But the rule passed.
Now here's the thing about the rule passing.
212 to 214, uh it it's fourteen to two twelve.
No Democrats voted for the rule.
No, in other words, not a single Democrat.
There were some Republicans that voted against it too.
But the point is not a single Democrat voted for the rule, which is what's necessary for the final vote and ultimate passage.
So you could say, and you would be accurate in doing so, that 212 Democrats essentially voted to shut down the government.
Now they didn't win.
They lost by two.
Now, if it had failed, and I know it's if, but I want I still want to make this point about things because the the reason this happened is because the Republicans are well, everybody's saying it now.
Everybody, they're just cowards.
They're afraid of the media, they are afraid of what's going to be said about them on some matters.
Other things like amnesty, they actually agree with it and support it, because most of their donors do, or big donors do.
But if the rule had failed, with not a single Democrat voting for it.
Do you think anybody would have accused the Democrats of shutting down the government or endangering the economy or hurting the nation's poor or whatever they accuse the Republicans of doing vis-a-vis via government shutdown?
Because that's what happened.
212 Democrats essentially had had the Democrats sided as one, we'd be looking at a government shutdown right now.
And it would have been made possible by the Democrat Party because every damn one of them in the House voted against the rule.
You could accurately say the Democrats in the House voted for a government shutdown.
What, you want motivation?
Who knows what motivation could have been to shut the government down because they know the Republicans are going to get blamed, shut the government down because they don't like the spending and don't like the bill itself.
Who knows?
But the point here is that while the Republicans are running around scared to death, uh uh afraid to represent their constituents, the Republicans are running around afraid to act on the election returns because they are afraid what the media is gonna say about them, and the biggest fear they've got is they're gonna be blamed for government shutdown.
And I'll tell you where it stems from.
And we've addressed this before.
It goes back to 1995.
Newt Gingrich was the Speaker of the House.
Bill Clinton was the president.
The Republicans had had some success in balancing the budget before this, and the Democrats were reeling.
Because for the first time in a long time, there was actually some spending discipline.
The House featured a whole bunch of genuinely conservative members of the freshman class.
And they arrived untainted.
They arrived as virgins in terms of the way Washington worked.
They were brand new.
Nobody in the media knew who they were.
They were not part of the old boy network.
They were not part of the social structure, and they came in and they actually began to vote the same way they promised they would during the campaign, which featured the contract for America.
They did all of this.
And they, for the first time, I'll never forget when John Kasich gabbled the budget committee to order and said, okay, the Democrats had exhausted all their debate and K6, it's time to do this, and they did it, and they balanced the budget.
And the Democrats were just paranoid.
The Democrats were fit to be tied.
Well, all of this led the Democrats to using new tricks to stop the Republicans.
And one of the things that happened in the 1995 budget showdown was the school lunch cuts, if you'll recall.
Now stick with me on this because it's all a lesson.
And it I just want you to understand why the Republicans react the way they do today.
And it's all because of what happened in 1995.
The school lunch cuts, Democrats began to pepper the media and the country with the idea that Republicans wanted to starve kids.
Now the school lunch program was not going to be cut.
No item in the budget ever is really cut.
There are sometimes reductions in the rate of growth.
But you know how that works with baseline budgeting.
And, you know, when an increase in budget spending is not as much as they'd hoped for, they called it a cut.
You could spend 5% more next year than this.
And if they expected 8%, they'd call it a 3% budget cut.
When in reality it was a 5% increase.
Well, that was what was happening with the school lunch program.
School lunch program was going to get more money spent, just not as much as the Democrats had thought and hoped.
So they immediately began tarring the feathers of Republicans as people that wanted to starve kids.
And the Republicans said, who's going to believe this?
And they basically didn't think it was any problem.
They didn't think that it was going to panic over.
Because who in the right mind is going to think that we want to starve kids?
We have kids.
This is absurd.
And then all of a sudden, letters began to arrive in offices in Washington, of members of the House.
They were written by kids, supposedly.
And the letters pretty much all said the same thing.
Dear Mr. Congressman, I can't study when I'm starving.
Dear Mr. Congressman, I can't learn when I'm hungry.
Dear Mr. Congressman, please don't deny me lunch.
I can't function if I don't have lunch.
Nobody ever stopped to it it was just simply idiotic.
And of course, if such a thing ever did really happen, what about parents and fixing lunch for their kids to take the school?
None of that was ever considered.
So the Republicans didn't really put a lot of stock in it and didn't fight back on it, which was a mistake.
Now they didn't have to fight back and defend themselves.
Oh, we don't want to starve kids.
What they should have said was, look at how ridiculous the Democrats have gotten now.
We have the Democrats so much on the ropes that they're now accusing us of wanting to starve children.
Is this the best they've got?
But rather than do that, they did nothing.
Figuring nobody would believe it.
Well, we all know better now, because the left has driven their base so insane they believe practically every insane allegation anybody on the left makes, from Hillary Clinton to Bill Clinton to Elizabeth Warren, you name it.
So the government got shut down.
Newt held fast on the Republican budget items, and the government got shut down.
What we learned later was that Bill Clinton had made a closed door behind the scenes deal with government union leaders.
And the deal was that whatever happened to them during the shutdown in terms of lost wages, Thanksgiving Turkey's, you name all of it would be made good once the shutdown ended.
And so union leaders didn't oppose what was going to happen.
They actually ended up supporting the Democrats in their opposition to this.
And it isolated the Republicans, and then the media got in gear.
And every night on CNN was a different person whose life had just been destroyed because of the government shutdown.
And it went on like this for a couple of months.
This happened October, but it went on like this for a couple of months, and finally the Republicans waved the white flag.
And it's that experience that guides them to this day.
They think that they had their heads handed to them on a silver platter back in 1995.
And that's why to this day, election results from last November, election results from 2010 don't matter.
And if they got somebody produces a poll that says the same thing can happen in 95 is going to happen today, then that guides them.
And by the way, a lot of people have asked me, Rush, you say that the Republican establishment's opposed to conservatives.
And yet they've got two years, two terms of Reagan, two landslide Republican victories.
And I said, great question, but that's not what the Republican establishment goes back to when they hear conservative.
They only focus on Barry Goldwater.
And so to the Republican establishment, a conservative nominee equals a gold water landslide loss.
It does not equal a Reagan two-term landslide win.
So the Republican establishment and their consultants, everybody in the political class, is guided by, motivated by events from 1964, 1995 in determining political strategy today.
So here we are on the day where the rule, the procedural vote on this budget that basically is a Democrat budget, with a couple of exceptions, that funds the government through the end of next September.
The rule was up for a vote, and not a single Democrat voted for it.
And that means that all Democrats in the House voted essentially to shut down the government.
Because voting against the rule meant voting against the final vote on the budget on the omnibus bill.
But the eyes had it, 214 to 212.
Not a single Democrat voted for the rule.
Not a single Democrat essentially voted for the budget.
They voted against the final vote taking place.
And the only way to analyze it is that the 212 Democrats voting in unison essentially were voting to shut down the government.
So my question is: had the procedural vote failed, had the rule, the vote on the rule failed, do you think that the House Democrats would have been accused of shutting down the government?
Do you think they would have been accused of endangering the economy or hurting the nation's poor or whatever other disaster happens with a government shutdown?
And what did they vote against?
The Republican budget funds Obamacare.
The Republican budget funds Obama's executive amnesty.
This budget funds, pays for everything the Democrats want.
And yet it's conservatives are the problem, right?
It's never the left that's the problem.
It's never the Republican established.
No, no, it's never Obama who's the problem.
In matters like this, it always seems to come back to the fact that conservative Republicans are the problem.
And yet 212 Democrats voted against the budget bill going forward, essentially voted for a government shutdown.
Knowing full well that had the government shutdown prevailed, had the rule gone down to defeat, the Republicans would have been blamed for it.
Even though not a single Republican voted for a government shutdown.
That's because they're scared to death that they're going to get blamed for it.
So the answer, okay, so what should the Republicans do?
It's become quaint.
It's almost mockable when you answer the right thing.
The right thing to do is to do the right thing and save the country and to hell with what the media says about you, to hell what the Democrats do.
It's it's nutcracker time.
In more ways than one.
This is when you do the right thing.
You save the country and you know full well you've got a majority of voters behind you.
That's what they elected you to do.
And at 212 votes, they're not all Democrats.
I just...
There's some Republicans that voted against the rule, too.
My my point to you is that every Democrat, every single Democrat voted against the rule.
Which means at the end of the day, that virtually every Democrat in the House voted for a government shutdown.
Because had their side prevailed, that's what would have happened.
If the rule had gone down to defeat, there could be no debate and no final vote on the on the bill.
There's a story from Reuters on this.
Democrats balk at U.S. spending bill raising shutdown risk.
And that's true.
However, as Elizabeth Warren is out there saying, it's the Republicans who want to shut down the government.
Even though the Republicans passed the bill, the Republicans are the ones that wrote the damn thing.
This is from uh let's see, what this is from yesterday, so that's good.
This sets the stage.
Now we know what happened, so let's look back at the way this was portrayed.
It uh Reuters Congressional Democrats objected Wednesday to controversial financial and political campaign provisions tucked into the one point one trillion dollar spending bill, keeping the risk of a government shutdown alive.
The complaints from Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats clouded the chances for passage of the funding bill as a midnight Thursday deadline drew near.
And in this story, there's not one syllable of outrage that the Democrats are running the risk of shutting down the government.
Not one syllable of outrage from the media.
And yet they're reporting right up front that had there been a shutdown, it would have been the Democrats, because the Democrats don't like a couple of provisions in Dodd Frank.
Now, basically the provisions that they they don't like have to do with with uh campaign finance, campaign provisions, and some relaxing of restrictions on Wall Street evil barons.
And the Democrats don't want to, so they've they they voted against this.
Every Democrat did.
And it raised the shutdown risk.
But of course, it's not written about in any way, shape, manner, or form that that would have been bad.
There's no outrage.
Pelosi said Democrats are deeply troubled by Republican measures that would kill planned restrictions on derivatives trading by large federally insured banks, and would expand tenfold the amounts that individuals can donate to national political parties.
Pelosi said these provisions are destructive to middle class families and to the practice of our democracy, and we gotta get them out of the bill.
Well, they're in the bill.
And every Democrat voted against it.
And here's Reuters acknowledging it could have resulted in a shutdown.
And you know what?
In this case, it would have been a good thing.
Yeah, yeah.
So government shutdowns, they're not bad.
No, if the Democrats do them, government shutdowns are brilliant political strategy.
When the Republicans do it, it's destructive.
It's the end of civilization, and it proved they're a bunch of mean spirited reprobates.
During a town hall meeting in Nashville, President Obama blamed conservative talk shows for Americans' anger over executive amnesty.
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