And here we are right back at it, ladies and gentlemen, Rushlin Boe meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
This the one and only Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Our telephone number, if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882 in the email address, lrushbo at eibnet.com.
Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Washington, actually on television on NBC, actually ask the French ambassador to the United States, whose name is Gerard Arot, why is it permissible to be as provocative as these anti-Muslim cartoons were?
This is a debate that we're having in the U.S., journalistically.
Can you think of any other, anything that Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Washington, has ever been worried about offending anybody?
And here she is asking the French ambassador to the United States, essentially, why do you let him do it?
Can you, what would happen if I were to come on this program and let's say talk to somebody in the Obama administration?
Why do you let MSNBC do what they do?
Or pick any, why do you let Fox News do what they do?
Why do you let Bill O'Reilly do what he does to you every night?
Can you imagine what the reaction would be?
And here's Andrea Mitchell asking the French ambassador, why do you permit that magazine to do all these cartoons?
Why is it permissible?
She's a journalist.
You would think that she would be on the side of the magazine regardless.
Freedom of speech, freedom of the press.
You go with the flow, you roll with the punches, but no, you see, what this teaches us is that journalists, particularly in the modern era, journalists are not journalists.
They're liberals.
They associate with big government.
They are perfectly fine with big government using its power to silence people that present a problem or people that they disagree with.
This is just, this is too much.
Here's Andrea Mitchell getting away for all these years with this idea.
She's a journalist.
No restrictions go anywhere.
Get to the bottom of it.
Get to the truth.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And what she is, just like everybody else in this business these days, a statist.
I would be embarrassed.
If I were Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Washington, I would be embarrassed.
You know, get Marie Harf on.
Hey, Marie, why do you guys let Fox News make fun of Obama the way they do?
Or, better yet, get Marie Harfon of them.
Hey, Marie, why do you let me get away with making fun of Obama so much?
Why don't you shut me down?
And she would say, well, if you'd go along with it, we would.
This is just, it's such a teachable moment.
Anyway, folks, great to have you back here.
El Rushbo executing assigned host duties flawlessly.
Zero mistakes.
Since I promoted, I've got a couple things I need to do here that I have been holding over since last week, and I'm going to finally get to them because I've promised and I've committed to it.
This is the UK Daily Mail.
It's on New Year's Day.
Parents who deny their children independence are creating a generation incapable of dealing with failure.
This from a leading neuroscientist.
The trend over the past 20 years, wrapping children in cotton wool is leaving them struggling to cope with setbacks in their teenage years and adult life.
And it's a female neuroscientist here.
Professor Sarah Jane Blakemore, an expert in cognitive neuroscience. at the University College of London, said that it was important for children to embrace a degree of risk and learn from mistakes.
But she warned youngsters nowadays are not allowed to be independent as they were when she was growing up in the 70s and 80s.
Professor Blakemore, an expert in a teenage brain.
Well, how do you become one of those?
Man, wouldn't parents love to be figuring that out?
An expert in the teenage brain.
Wow.
Anyway, that's what she is.
This is, again, Sarah Jane Blakemore, expert in the teenage brain, said risk-taking is an important development behavior for teenagers as they begin to negotiate independence.
Adolescents after puberty need to become independent of their parents and their families, and they need to go out and affiliate with their peer group, and they need to explore their environment and take risks.
My view, she said, is that children almost need to practice risk-taking to know exactly how to deal with situations when they fail and when things go wrong.
And I think she's got a point because we have evolved to a point where we're afraid of our children failing because they may not be able to handle it psychologically.
We're afraid of them not being able to handle it, so we don't want them to fail.
And we have relatively amount of economic prosperity that we think we can shield them from failure.
And why should they fail if it's not necessary, Mr. Limbaugh?
Why should children suffer if it's not necessary?
If we can protect and shield our children from suffering and pain and embarrassment, why shouldn't we do that?
And it's a prevailing opinion today.
And in many circles, it's called good parenting.
Kid you not.
When they suddenly do have independence as an adolescent, how are they expected to exert their independence if they've never had any practice at it?
My view, said Professor Blakemore, is that risk-taking and failing and things going wrong are really important skills for a child and an adolescent to learn.
If you don't allow an adolescent to fail or take risks, then what kind of adult will they be?
Democrats is what's going to happen.
They're going to become dependent.
Democrats is what's going to happen.
Well, damn right, what else are they going to become?
What else?
If they're afraid to take risks, if they always want a security blanket to backstop, they're going to become Democrats.
Plain and simple.
What kind of adult will they be when they go out and live on their own and have to deal with their own lives?
They won't.
They'll turn it over to the Democrat Party.
Or they'll turn it over to government or something.
Professor Blakemore is the daughter of Sir Colin Blakemore, himself a renowned neuroscientist.
She stressed that it was still, oops, sorry, I didn't print the next page.
But what more do we need?
She's exactly right about this.
Do you disagree with this?
Or are you just laughing?
I teased people by not printing this thing.
Well, I didn't.
I print one page.
If a story, if the essence of a story isn't on one page, it's not worth me doing.
I've got enough paper around here without stories having to be three or four pages long.
Screw that.
Everything I do is one page.
And if it goes longer than that, then it's a waste of time.
Has anybody doubted that I've gotten the essence of this story?
I got to the essence exactly right.
Related story, the rise of men who don't work and what they do instead.
New York Times on December 11th.
That's how old this story is.
My brother's birthday.
I wonder if it had anything to do with that.
Just kidding.
At every age, the chances of not working have changed in the last 15 years.
Teenagers are far more likely not to work.
Older people are retiring later and working more.
In the ages in between, the periods of life when most people work, the changes have been smaller, but they are still substantial.
You see, my friends, in the late 1960s, almost all men, are you ready for this?
In the late 60s, that's my teenage years, to put it in perspective here.
In the late 1960s, almost all men between 25 and 54 got up and went to work.
Only five out of every 100 did not have a job in any given week.
5%.
By the year 2000, this figure had more than doubled to 11 years out of every 100 men.
And this year, it is 16 out of every 100 men do not have a job in any given work.
Now, there's some people excluded from the stats here.
People in the military, prison, and institutions are excluded from these figures.
Because if you're an institution, you're not going to get up and go to work unless you're a guard.
And they're already counted.
Of course, the economy was stronger in 2000 than it is today.
Well, why is that?
Just gloss over that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Of course.
This is New York Times.
Of course, the economy was stronger in 2000 is today.
Why is that?
Well, they're going to say Clinton.
There's a lower official unemployment rate.
But for prime age men, the rise in official unemployment explains only about one-third of the increase in not working.
The remaining two-thirds of men, 25-54, not working, is made up of those who are not working and not even looking for work.
But I'm going to point out again, they are all eating.
And they're all watching TV.
And no, I'm not opposed to people.
That's not why I say this.
In the old days, in order to eat, you had to work.
Today, you don't.
If you don't have to work to eat, I'm sorry, there's a lot of motivation for working gone.
That's my only point here.
I'm not opposed to people not eating.
I get emails.
Every time I mention, it's when people stop eating, no.
Idiots for crying out loud.
If you are able to eat and not work, then what's the motivation going to be to go to work?
And if you're able to make a cell phone call without going to work, if you're able to watch the NFL playoffs, the NBA, TMZ, whatever you do without working, why go to work?
The remaining two-thirds made up of those who are not working, not looking for work.
Every month, the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Stats, asks these men who are not in the labor force to describe the situation.
Are they disabled?
Are they ill?
Are they inscrutable?
Are they taking care of the house or the family?
Are they in retirement or something else?
And here are the trends within some of the larger of those categories.
About 13% of the increase in prime age non-workers is people in school.
We're talking adults, we're talking men now between 25 and 54.
And 13% say, whoa, whoa, I'm in school, man.
25 and 54, right?
Okay.
Yeah, man, I'm working on my master's, my PhD, you know?
Yeah, man, right.
Get on up in there.
Taking care of home or family.
Men who identify as homemakers remain relatively rare, but they are about twice as common as they were in 2000.
About 20% of the new non-workers say they are disabled, a category whose numbers have risen particularly for workers above age 50.
You know why?
You know what comprises disability these days?
Insomnia.
Alcoholism.
Any number of things make you disabled.
Boredom.
You can get on disability for practically nothing these days because the Democrats are handing out welfare cards to anybody who'll take them.
The Americans with Disability Act is one of the greatest ruses that's ever come down the pike.
Retirement.
Among prime age workers, 25, 54, early retirement has increased slightly since 2000.
Far more drastic changes have occurred among workers 55 and older who have been doing the opposite.
They've been putting off retirement.
The decline of traditional pension plans and rising education levels, which are associated with less physically demanding jobs, may both help explain why the elderly are working longer.
That doesn't even get close to telling us why the elderly are pension plans.
They're working longer because they don't have any money to retire on.
It's taken every bit of their savings and their wives going to work, spouses going to work in order to pay all these new taxes that have arisen in this timeframe the New York Times is addressing.
They never mention taxes as a factor in any of this.
And they never mention the plundering economy as a factor in any of this.
And there's another area that they don't even get into at all.
Men 25-54, why they don't work and what they do instead.
They don't have to in order to have their basic needs met.
You really don't have to.
In some cases, getting a job actually reduces the amount of welfare you get.
You become what's called overqualified.
Another companion story.
Okay, what did we just hear?
We just heard the rise of men who don't work and what they do instead.
And the next story, Wall Street Journal, more moms staying home reversing decades-long decline.
This is not looking good.
This is not, the rise of men who don't work and what they do and more moms staying home, not working, reversing a decades-long decline.
And these trends have been, this one in particular, the feminists, they had their hooks in these women.
They really did.
And then biology took over.
Biology and psychology.
That biological time bomb started clicking.
Motherhood.
And finally, impregnation happened.
The baby was born.
And that's when feminism began to fall by the wayside because more and more women, you know what?
I love my baby.
I want to stay home and raise my baby.
And the sisterhood blew up and have a gasket.
The feminazis don't.
They didn't foresee this.
They foresaw women having babies and daycare or what have you.
But then these women, and this trend has been happening for a long time.
A few years ago, they were widely reported that this generation was not just into feminism.
And then suddenly the war on women was jimmed up along with evil men raping women all the time.
And women became afraid to go out of the house.
You couple that with having a baby, and there was really no reason to leave.
Feminism brought it on itself unwittingly, unknowingly, back after this.
Well, the Wall Street Journal story is way back in April.
See, I saved this stuff and I put it all together, folks.
I saved these stuff.
I have an archival system like you can't believe.
So all three of these stories, the number of men not working and what they do, the fearfulness stories, and now more moms staying home reversing decades-long decline.
This Wall Street Journal, April of last year, 2014, after decades of decline, the share of mothers who stay home with their children has steadily risen over the last several years.
It's Pew Research Data numbers.
And Pew attributed the rise of stay-at-home mothers to a mix of demographic, economic, and societal factors.
The vast majority of married stay-at-home mothers, 85%, say they're doing so by choice in order to care for their families.
That's a slap in the face of feminism, if I ever heard one.
Now, the feminists will deny that, but that's 85%.
Women aren't supposed to do this.
Sisters are not supposed to do this, even after having the baby.
That more and more of them are.
And that's just nature, folks.
That's just biology, whatever you want to call it.
Here's June in Austin, Texas, as we head back to the phones.
Great to have you.
Hi.
It's certainly an honor to speak to you, and I thank you for, you know, how you love our country and our military.
And I would like to ask you what you think about the situation with General Petraeus and the apparent blackmail of him about testifying about Benghazi.
Well, when it comes to Petraeus, and I haven't dug deeply into this, I probably don't know any more about it than you do.
I just know that the Justice Department holder and these guys are thinking prosecuted because he's had this affair with Paula Broadwell and is reputed to have leaked classified info and data to her.
To be honest with you, June, I mean, I think a lot of this, I don't know how much, I think a lot of this is related to Petraeus' potential as a Republican presidential candidate down the road.
And I think they're trying to take him out.
And if it's not that, then there's something that's happened between him and Obama that we don't know about that is causing this kind of thing.
Because this is really unprecedented.
Petraeus is one of the most celebrated, successful military people of our time.
And for the regime to take him out like this or to try to, I mean, clearly there's an effort here to besmirch and impugn his reputation, destroy it.
And I think with this bunch, you just, you cannot, you just, you cannot remove from the realm of possibility good old simple party politics.
You're familiar with the great actor Liam Neeson.
Schindler's list.
Number of things, the taken movies.
Taken one, taken two, taken three.
Star Wars?
Liam Neeson was in Star Wars?
He was?
Which one?
that would be episode one.
It could have...
The Phantom Menace?
Well, you could have fooled me.
I think I even saw it.
Well, anyway, it doesn't matter to that.
Liam Neeson has joined the chorus of people who say that the attacks in Paris show the need for more gun control in America.
Standing in front of a poster of himself holding a handgun in the movie Taken 3, the latest installment in a movie series relying on guns to make the movie more exciting.
Liam Neeson spoke to the attacks on Charle Ebdu by offering condolences and then said, there are too many bleeping guns out there, especially in America.
The attack happened in France where the cops are unarmed, where the magazine people are unarmed.
The cops are unarmed.
The cops are on them.
The carps show up on bicycles.
And here's Liam Neeson.
Yeah, there are too many guns out there, especially in America.
He said the level of private gun ownership in the U.S. is a bleeping disgrace.
According to GulfNews.com, Neeson stuck with the American rant saying, I think the population is like, what, 320 million?
There's over 300 million guns privately owned in America.
It's a bleeping disgrace.
Every week now, we're picking up a newspaper and seeing yet another few kids have been killed in schools where their authorities are unarmed.
You know, I'm convinced.
I don't think Liam Neeson, I don't even, I don't think he knows what he's saying.
This is, it's like I told you the story last week when I was invited to this fashionable Upper Eastside dinner party, the fashionable apartment on Fifth Avenue, and the host, a well-known former Republican cabinet officer, who you'd probably know his name in the Nixon days, you know, starts coming up to me and says, what are you going to do about the guns?
It was like the guy at the Hamptons who asked me, what are you going to do about the Christians?
He said, what are you going to do about the guns?
I said, what do you mean what am I going to do about the guns?
There's too many guns.
We've got to get our hands on guns.
I said, it was right on his window at Central Park, right across Fifth Avenue.
And I looked at him and said, okay, look, if you can convince me that your gun control is going to take guns out of the hands of the people lurking in the shadows over there in Central Park, then I'm all for it, but you can't guarantee that.
And he didn't have anything to say.
And I'm convinced this gun control business is just, it's the way you gain and maintain admittance into a particular group of elites that you want to be a member of.
They don't even know what they're talking about.
And you hit them with irrefutable logic on this, and all they do is stare at you like you are brain did when they don't have a retort to it.
And I said, look at, you're taking, you're talking about taking guns out of the hands of the law-abiding, the ones who are not using them to commit crimes.
By definition.
I said, you can disarm all those people.
Do you think you're going to eliminate a single school shooting doing that?
Do you think you're going to eliminate violence?
Do you think you're going to eliminate all these things that you abhor if you take guns away from people who are not using them for that purpose?
Well, there's just too many guns.
That's always the retort.
Well, there's just too many guns.
And I'll tell you something else, folks.
Something else I'm convinced.
I think it's a class thing.
Just like to these people, abortion is a class thing.
Hayseeds, hicks, people drive pickups, military types.
They're the ones that love those guns.
Yeah, daddy.
They're the ones that, and the elites would never be seen in their company.
They'd be the first to call for them if they were ever in danger.
But just like this guy in his fashionable Upper Eastside apartment, he didn't even know what he was talking about.
But he was, that was his price of Republican.
That was his price for admission into New York society.
I'm telling you, is to have that attitude on guns.
Did who?
Liam Neeson singing at the terrorists.
No, no.
No, no.
Do you think he did?
Here's Liam Neeson commenting on a terror attack, not a crime, a terror attack in Paris and then immediately complaining about too many guns in America.
Of course he didn't talk about other than to say he felt so bad about it.
And because he felt so bad about it, that's why he observed there's just too many guns everywhere.
We've just got to get rid of the guns, but just too many guns.
I'm telling you, this argument hasn't changed.
You know, I've been doing this long enough now, and I'm blessed with a really half-decent memory.
And all of this stuff, the cycle is starting to repeat.
And what it tells me is people are reciting rather than opining.
They're reciting what they should say, what they think they should believe.
And everybody's got a reason for believing this.
It's admittance into society.
It's admittance into certain club of elites.
It's a way to gain favor with certain other people.
If you say it in the media, it's hip versus unhip, cool versus uncool.
Who knows?
But I don't think there's a single bit of intellectual thought behind it.
They think there is.
Folks, this is exactly when I say liberalism is the most gutless choice you could.
Liberalism is the easiest thing.
Look at all you have to do to be a good liberal.
Or even what Liam Neeson said.
You have to decry the incident in Paris, and then you say, there's just too many guns.
What a grave guy.
Oh, my God.
What a caring, what a really compassionate guy.
See how easy that is?
In the meantime, Liam Neeson hasn't done one thing to solve gun crime.
He hasn't done one thing to keep guns out of the hands of bad guys.
All he's done is made a heartfelt statement, and it's been greeted with approval and applause, and he has automatically granted the compassion and the understanding and so forth.
That's how easy it is.
The tough stuff in the world is refuting the easy stuff and telling people the truth about complex, difficult things.
That's what's hard, and such as gun control.
Liberal positions on gun control, the easiest damn thing anybody could do or say.
But actually tackling the problem, that's another thing.
And to that, you have to be interested in solving crime.
And I never hear gun control people talk about solving crime.
The people that think we got too many guns are the ones thinking the cops are the problem in Ferguson and in New York City.
The people that think we got too many guns.
Meanwhile, the people that we got a problem with crime are not blaming the cops for it.
And look who's catching the excrement sandwich in all this.
The people taking the hard route to actually solving our problems.
Homelessness is another example.
You walk down the street, and there's bubbles, and he's pushing his shopping cart, and he's selling used stuff or whatever, and you look, oh, what a haul that poor man, my God, in the richest country in the world.
I go, oh, Jesus Chafi.
That's so sad.
That's all it.
The conservatives, yeah.
We need to find a way to get that guy out of that shopping cart, find a way to give him a sense of purpose and maybe get a job.
And they come at you like you are heartless and cold and cruel because you've destroyed their effort to be good people.
Because see, all you have to do when you spot the homeless is just point it out and act like it's so bad.
It's so sad.
Oh my God.
How can we, what kind of country would allow that?
What a great guy you are.
Oh my God, the compassion you have.
We need you in our political movement.
The minute you move in and properly identify the reasons for it as a means of getting to the solution, that's when you become a cold, mean-spirited, extremist conservative.
So if you want to be a good liberal, when anything comes up, just ask what's the easiest thing I could do here to get credit for something and do it.
And you'll immediately become a liberal.
And realize that you don't have to do anything to solve a problem.
In fact, you even have it better than that.
You can make efforts to solve problems and make the problems worth and still be credited as a great guy.
LBJ, war on poverty, great society, it's worse.
But man, does he get credit for caring?
And you know, the fastest way to really be a good liberal is to demand other people pay higher taxes as a way of solving a problem.
Tax guns, tax income, tax this, tax that, to get rid of this pain and suffering and misery.
Blame the rich for it.
Easy.
You're a good liberal.
In good standing.
That's how easy it is.
They never solve excrement, folks.
Never solve anything.
And they're the ones that have all the compassion.
They're the ones that get all the credit for all the compassion.
If I were to say here to Liam Neeson, hey, Liam, you know, by the way, I love Ray Donovan.
Oh, wait, that's not you.
That's Lee Schreiber.
Sorry to confuse you.
You're in taken, right?
I love those taken.
I love the way you fire those guns.
I love the way you kill those bad guys.
You know what, Liam?
I've learned a lesson from you watching those taken movies.
Yeah, you're not killing people.
Your gun is.
And these Islamo terrorists, yeah, the guns.
The guns are not killing people.
The Islamo terrorists are.
And you say that to them, and you have totally confused them.
Because you see, to them, the gun almost has its own brain.
The gun self-actuating, the gun self-acting.
If you really want to confuse them, say, hey, just, you guys don't need gun control.
You need bullet control.
That'll send them into a Tizzy.
Now you're obfuscating.
Now you're just trying to confuse the.
What do you mean, bullet control?
Well, what good's a gun without bullets?
What you guys need is ammo control.
No, no, no.
Gun control.
We need to get rid of guns.
That just shows they're just.
We're dealing with robots here, folks, who have a desire for a certain degree of standing in certain communities.
And it's all liberalism.
The most gutless, easy decision you can make or choice you can make in a controversial situation.
Take the simple route.
You're a good liberal.
Back after this.
Todd in Thornton, Colorado.
Great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Rush, it's an honor, Major 24-7 Dittos.
Been a subscriber for a long time.
Not only are you great, sir, but you're also affordable.
I'm also affordable.
Oh, yes.
Obviously.
And I'm cheap.
You are affordable, sir.
Okay.
That's great.
Very cheap.
Steve, speaking of affordability and all, too, you look at the gas tax now.
And one thing, Rush, that you've always taught us is that when taxes are low, more money, demand goes up, and more money actually works its way back into Washington, correct?
Yes, up to a point.
I mean, there's a point of diminishing returns, but yes, that's real world true, yes.
Absolutely.
And the thing is, is here in Colorado, gas is at $1.72.
My wife and I, we fill up our cars for, it's about $25, $30.
Last year it was $25, $30.
Yeah, let me guess what's happened.
The gas tax collection in Colorado is down because the price of gas is down.
And so they're coming along saying, you need to raise the gas tax because they're not getting the revenue from it that they used to.
Exactly.
And our friends, John Soon, Bob Corker, and everything like that, they want to, as far as raise it anywhere from $0.6 to $12.
And the whole thing is, is I was watching Ted Baxter last night.
And, you know, we've collected $38 billion as far as in taxes.
And they spend $53.
So the whole thing about it is, is, again, Washington cannot stay within its means.
Washington will not do with less, no matter what.
They urge you to go out and drive these little peashooter cars.
They urge you to save gasoline and energy to save the planet.
And when you do it, or when the prices naturally fall, they have a shortfall.
You've done exactly what they've asked you to do, and they're going to punish you.
They're going to raise your taxes to get what they were losing because they can't do with a penny less.