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Feb. 20, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:38
February 20, 2015, Friday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Have my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network, and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Great to have you with us on Friday as we wrap up yet another busy broadcast week.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's open live Friday.
800-282-2882, and the e-mail address, lrushmo at eibnet.com.
No, no, I was not.
I had some e-mails during the break.
You knew you were pretty rude to that guy from upstate New York.
You know, I thought about any number of ways I could have dealt with the call.
What are you laughing at in there?
Do you think I was rude?
You know, this is the thing.
It is what it is.
I could have answered the guy.
I thought, I'll tell you what I thought about doing.
And I may do this randomly from now on.
Just pick a moment.
Pick a call when it works.
Okay, so this guy was calling.
His name is Jason, right?
Upstate New York.
And he gave us the details of how the hospital and the EMS system simply can't stay afloat.
They simply can't stay in business because of Medicaid, Medicare, the well, Obamacare, but it's all the reimbursements, the mess that Obamacare is.
And I could have answered it as if this were a liberal talk show.
And I may do that now.
And just surprisingly and randomly and off the cuff.
And had I answered him as a liberal, I would have said, what are you complaining of?
You know, this is a problem.
This is why we need Obamacare.
People like you want to get rich off the healthcare business.
Why should you make any money getting people well?
That's the problem with healthcare and Obama's addressing it.
There are too many people getting too rich and all they're doing is making people well.
Being well is the natural state.
Being sick, that's unnatural.
So if you have the ability to make the sick get well, why should you get rich doing that?
And that's all Obama's doing.
He's equalizing things.
He's making sure that you who simply do what you should be doing out of the goodness of your heart are not being overly compensated for.
Why should you make more than anybody else just because you make somebody sick get well?
You don't think that's an attitude they have?
I'm going to tell you, if you are in the medical field, if you're a doctor, if you're a nurse, if you're in any way involved, I'm going to tell you, I'm going to make a prediction to you right now.
It's not the first time I've predicted it before.
Eventually it's going to happen when they, because they can't.
They don't have the money for this, folks.
As Jason's call illustrates, there isn't the money.
The only way that Obamacare can even hope to stay functioning is by denying treatment to a certain number of people.
It's the only way.
We don't have the money to treat everybody.
If the government's going to take over that responsibility, if we're going to remove market forces from this entire endeavor of health and health care and health insurance, there's no way.
We already are $18 trillion in debt.
And the annual deficit, they say it's coming down.
Smoke and mirrors.
We don't have the money for this.
And what's going to happen at some point as the regime got everybody believing now this is going to be better than ever and it's going to be filled with lots of compassion and a lot of sick people getting better and a lot of uninsured getting insured.
I mean, they've promised a utopia with this.
And when that doesn't happen, and it isn't going to take long for people to realize, the next thing the regime is going to say, well, we all need to lower our expectations, and especially those that are in the healthcare business.
Because it's just not right that people who treat the sick should get a lot of money for that.
Look at Mother Teresa.
She did it for charity.
Mother Teresa, why, she should have been the richest person on earth.
And she did it from the goodness of her heart.
And more of you should too.
Why should there be exorbitant salaries paid to people who make people well?
Well, because it takes a lot of money to go to school to learn how to do it.
It's very specialized, and not everybody can treat the sick.
Yeah, but we're still talking about a compassionate endeavor.
They're going to resort to this at some point because there isn't the money for this.
Anyway, some other things in the news, folks, because there's a pretty good stack here.
And I've got grab audio soundbite number.
Let's see.
Yeah, four, five, and six.
Just to get some of these in here.
Last night on the CBS Evening News, they have a correspondent there named Vladimir Dutia, or D2A or Dutia, whatever.
He was reporting about how employers are using social media to screen potential recruits.
Now, I don't know if a recruit is a job applicant.
I assume that it is.
The point of this little soundbite here is that employers are now using social media research to find out about the people who are applying for jobs and to learn about them and make decisions on whether or not to hire people based on social media research.
That's what this report is about.
It was on the CBS Evening News last night.
Stanford Professor Michael Kaczynski uses a computer model to predict personality traits by analyzing what someone likes on Facebook.
The surprising thing is that when you combine you liking Lady Gaga, you liking some books, movies, and maybe comments made by your friends, then actually I can extract much more information from that.
Based on the 86,000 Facebook users who participated in the study, the model concluded people who liked Shakespeare and 2001 A Space Odyssey were more artistic.
People who liked Ford Motor or Rush Limbaugh were more conventional.
Liking boxing was a sign of being organized.
People who liked vampires were more spontaneous.
Do you get this?
Did I adequately set this up now that you've heard the bite?
Do you know what this guy, Stanford professor Michael Kaczynski is selling a service of his, obviously, to American companies?
And he's telling me that he has research that they can buy from him, his service, and that he can filter every job applicant they have through his formulaic analysis of what people say they like on Facebook and I guess Twitter.
And from that, he can then tell the employer more information about the prospective employee than the employee will admit or own up to.
So if you go apply for a job that this guy's hired by, this is an XYZ widget company, hires Stanford professor Michael Kaczynski to analyze a series of applicants.
He's going to find out what they like and don't like on Facebook, and he's going to run it through his own formula that he alone has set up.
And then he's going to tell the employer, well, yeah, okay, candidate A here is X, Y, and Z because this candidate likes Lady Gaga.
So it's another little warning here that all of this stuff that you put on Facebook or Twitter or whatever social media, all of this stuff about yourself that you just vomit, that you just announced to everybody, it's now going to be used either for or against you in ways you never even dreamed.
Even down to whether or not you get hired.
So the next time you're putting down likes, dislikes, thumbs up, thumbs down, whatever on Facebook, you better think about it.
You better think about what it means if you say you like, say, Jay-Z.
No, if you don't like Jay-Z, what that might tell a future employer if this guy is hired to analyze applicants that include you.
No, I didn't play the bite because I'm in it, because I'm in everything.
I mean, that's not why I did it.
Although I do find it fat, people who liked Ford Motor or Rush Limbaugh are more conventional.
That's good.
That's good, isn't it?
I mean, for now, I'm glad I'm not unconventional.
If you're from an art company, well, they can find unconventional.
That's the point.
There's the conventional, there's the unconventional, there's the risque, there's the risk taker, people that are organized, people that are spontaneous.
But the point is, it's what this guy says it means.
And you'll never know.
No, you'll never know why you're hired or not.
You will never know.
You'll never know.
For example, you might not get hired because you put down you like Lady Gaga.
And that might tell the employer X, Y, and Z about you that he doesn't want to deal with.
And you'll never know.
I warned everybody about this.
I warned everybody, this quest for fame, this desire for everybody to know everything about them.
Now, last night, I was at a cigar dinner.
Marvin Shankin, cigar aficionado, put together forth a little impromptu cigar dinner up at the Old Palm Golf Club.
And he brought in Carlito Carlos Fuente Jr., the Fuente, Fuente cigar family in the Dominican Republic.
He brought the cigars and he did a little presentation.
And it was, they had a special scotch, three different years of scotch were served, taste testing and in mix and match with the cigars.
And it was on for about, I go, 7 o'clock to 10 o'clock.
And while I'm there, I started getting texts about Rudy with Megan Kelly on Fox.
And then I got a text, a couple of emails from people who told me that I, let's see, also on the Kelly file, that my name was brought up and that I was compared, and they weren't sure the people that sent me the, because it went by real fast and they were not paying full attention when they were watching.
But they thought, they told me, they thought I had been mentioned as being similar to ISIS terrorists by a guest that Megan Kelly had on the program.
And lo and behold, right here it is.
Kelly file last night, Democrat analyst Mark Hanna was one guest.
And Mark Thiessen, the American Enterprise Institute, was the other guest.
During a discussion about the founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council attending Obama's violent extremism summit, this guy's name is Al-Mariyati al-Salamariyi, whatever his name is.
He's renowned as a rabble-rouser.
And everybody was saying, what the hell is this guy doing there?
It's akin to inviting Arafat to the thing.
What is this guy doing there?
So that's what the subject was about.
And Megan Kelly said, this guy, As-Salam al-Mariati, he seems to be rather radical.
What was he doing there?
And it just feeds into a narrative that people have about whether the president's taking the advice of the right people and whether he's focused on the right things at this summit.
Here is the former or the current Democrat analyst named Mark Hanna.
I think he is.
Look, there were groups from this summit, the Christian people mentioning the Bible.
I've spoken with my friends who are at this summit, and they mentioned that there were groups from Northern Ireland there represented.
There was the Anti-Defamation League, the sort of Jewish group that rightly calls out and criticizes anti-Semitism.
This was a diverse group, but it wasn't this kind of interfaith gathering.
We know that violent extremism is coming mostly from groups that are affiliated of the Muslim faith.
And so we absolutely need Muslim groups there.
We can take quotations out of context.
We can do that to Republicans and make them out to seem like, you know, Rush Limbaugh has said all the, you know.
Okay, so I ended up being compared to this radical, extreme terrorist who happened to be invited to the terrorist summit that the White House sponsored.
Well, we can take quotations out of context.
We can do that to the Republicans and make them seem like, you know, Rush Limbaugh because Rush Limbaugh is radical.
He's just out of control.
And Rush Limbaugh says incendiary things.
And we can make the mistake of making, assuming that all Republicans are like Rush Limbaugh.
And Mark Thiessen, God bless him, this does not happen much, but he was not going to let this stand.
You're comparing this guy to Rush Limbaugh?
A guy who says that Hamas and Hezbollah are the equivalent of the American founding fathers?
A guy who said after the Ford Hood shooting, after it was absolutely clear that Nidal Hassan was in communication with al-Qaeda, with their leaders in Yemen, said that it was just because he had psychological problems.
I mean, this guy just dismisses terrorism, justifies terrorism.
And you're comparing this guy to Rush Limbaugh?
So I wanted to thank Mark Thiessen because this doesn't happen.
This does not happen.
People are reacting this way.
Mostly they're afraid to stand up and in any way either defend me or try to explain.
It's just easier to let it go.
But Thiessen said, this is ridiculous.
You're comparing this guy who is an apologist for terrorism to Rush Limbaugh.
And of course, I'm just the easiest name these guys on the left can come up with because they think they have done such a profoundly great job of demonizing me that all they have to do, mention my name, and every leftist understands that we're talking about the devil.
And so if you want to portray some guy at the summit as a devil, yeah, just like Rush Limbaugh, but Thiessen, God bless him, was not having it.
Take a time out.
We'll be back and continue after this.
Don't go away.
Here's Francine in Houston.
Great to have you on Open Line Friday.
Hi.
Great to be with you, Rush.
I love your show.
I love everything about you.
Well, I appreciate that.
I really, especially today, I appreciate that.
Since you start talking about health care today, I thought I would call in and put in my two cents.
Fine and dandy.
Have at it.
I figured, you know, if Obama really wanted to fix the health care problem, we had 30 million people without health care.
No, we did.
That's what they was like 14 or 15.
That wasn't even true.
That wasn't even true.
Like 14 or 15 at most, because many of the people that didn't have it could have.
They just didn't want it because they were young.
Okay.
If he wanted to really fix it, simple solution.
We had the best health care in the world.
People come from all over to come to the United States for health care.
All we needed to do was keep everything as it was, but allow people to go across the state lines and purchase their insurance.
That would have solved.
That would have solved quite a bit about that.
That would have been a huge improvement.
Those people that didn't have insurance get a million dollars for each one of them, put it in a medical savings account.
Problem solved.
That's also true, and it was suggested.
It was suggested.
You could have fixed the health care system for that little money.
Now, Francine, let's not get too far away from reality.
Because the healthcare system was not perfect.
No.
In talking about insuring the uninsured, yeah, we could have done that for much, much less money than what we spent on the reform.
And letting people go cross straight lines to buy insurance would have really ramped up competition, and that would have brought prices down, no question about it.
But employers were pulling their hair out over the ravaging, increasing costs of the benefit of providing health insurance to so many employees.
There were problems with it.
And it was the problems with it that allowed people like Obama, the Democrat Party, to come up with false reasons rooted in compassion why they wanted to take it over and fix it.
Because it did have some things wrong with it.
Most of them were related to the fact that there were no market forces involved in determining prices in health care.
And that was because the government had been involved, essentially, in an intense way since the 1960s.
But it was much better than what it is now.
And it was the best health care system in the world.
You are exactly right.
And we could have reformed it better and for much less money than what we've done.
Rush Limbaugh at 2:34 in the afternoon Eastern Time.
Iran's foreign minister and lead negotiator in nuclear talks, it'd be nuclear for those of you in Riolinda, with the United States has been ordered by the Islamic Republic Supreme Leader, who happened to be the Ayatollah Khamenei, to stop shouting and yelling at Secretary of State Kerry during negotiating sessions.
You heard that right.
Iran's foreign minister and lead negotiator in nuclear talks with the U.S. has been ordered by the lead Ayatollah to stop shouting at John Kerry.
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif told his country's state-controlled media in a recent interview that the Ayatollah, Ali Khamenei, has instructed...
Well, no, I know a lot of people say Khomeini, but I remember Pierre Salinger back during when Pierre Salinger used to be the press secretary for JFK, and he left and went to ABC News.
It's always been a circular door.
It's news, government, revolving door.
Anyway, when the Ayatollah Khomeini came back from exile in France and took over Iran after booting out the Shah, everybody was calling him the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Even Mike Wallace went over there and called him Imam.
Mike Wallace would already interview the Ayatollah Khomeini and referred to him as Imam this and Imam that.
But Pierre Salinger always called him the Ayatollah hominy.
I said, as a student of words, that made me curious.
Everybody, Walter Cronkite, everybody was calling him the Ayatollah Khomeini.
And here's Pierre Salinger, who was based in Paris, by the way.
His first name was Pierre.
So ABC sent him to Paris.
It worked.
And he kept referring to, because that's where the Ayatollah Khomeini was in exile.
So you have Pierre Salinger reporting, he was Paris Bureau, closer to Iran, therefore would know, kept calling him the Ayatollah hominy.
And I never did find out why.
And I never did find out who was right.
The whole world called him Khomeini, but Pierre Salinger called him the Ayatollah Hominy.
So I'm just going to think the Ali Khamenei instead of Khomeini.
Anyway, the lead Ayatollah is telling the lead negotiator to be nice to John Kerry and stop yelling at him.
This is just, it's embarrassing.
Now, the Iranians who put the news story out, U.S. government has not denied this.
And it's, I guess this guy has a temper.
Javad Zarif reports about Zarif's temper first emerged in the Iranian press last November when the U.S. and Iran agreed to extend talks through June of this year.
Zarif is said to frequently shout at Western diplomats with such force that bodyguards have been forced to enter the negotiation room.
During one incident described by Iranian officials to the media, European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, a chief Western negotiator, admitted that Zarif had been shouting and she had gotten used to it.
It didn't bother her.
Abbas Arakchi, an Iranian diplomat who's also a member of the negotiating team, is reported to have said in an interview that during past negotiations in Geneva, Zarif shouted at Kerry and spoke to him in a manner unprecedented in the history of U.S. diplomacy.
Why do you think that is, by the way?
Why do you think in the history of diplomacy, nobody has ever yelled at Henry Kissinger?
Nobody ever yelled at Gene Kirkpatrick.
Not that we heard about it, not to the point that the lead Ayatollah of the country has to tell the guy to be nice.
I don't know.
This just does not inspire confidence.
Douglas Ernst, reporting in the Washington Times, the former director of the CIA, talking about James Woolsey, said yesterday that President Obama looks scared to call members of al-Qaeda, the Islamic State group, and other terrorists Islamic.
Don Lemon was talking to James Woolsey, CNN, and Lemon asked him if Obama was being too politically correct.
Woolsey said the president's sort of a world champion of political correctness, and I think that he's let it really run too far here.
It might be different if he was taking a stern position in the Middle East and other places that are causing huge problems.
Lemon then said, well, look, does it affect the strategy?
The president said that we have to address the root causes of radicalism, poverty, the lack of education, and so on.
And Woolsey said, look, you need to address the root causes as well as these circumstances as let people know, well as let people know that you can fight and you have to fight effectively.
And Obama's not doing that.
He looks scared.
He looks as if he's afraid of using the adjective Islamic to describe the terrorists.
I don't think he's scared.
I think this is another example.
I think Woolsey is being politically correct.
That's just me.
I don't know Woolsey.
I know him when I see him.
So I don't.
It's a wild guess, but I don't think that Obama is scared to call them Islamic or Islamist.
I think that there's something else going on.
Here's Michael, Zephyr Hills, Florida.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Sure, Mr. Snerdley said to make this short, all I can say to you is pentaflop dittos, my titular big brother.
I listened to you since I was in the Navy in Norfolk.
My question is about your views on net neutrality.
I think the regime is throwing all these things out right now and trying to sneak in, quote-unquote, the oxymoronic phrase of net neutrality.
I think, since you've asked, that there's nothing wrong with the internet that needs federal intervention.
I agree.
I don't think there's anything wrong that requires federal fixing.
And I don't think that net neutrality is net neutrality.
All they want to do is under Title II, they want to regulate the Internet the way they regulate the phone companies.
Absolutely.
They're trying to use a 1930s FCC law, and they did it with Ma Bell, and no technology ever came out until we broke up Ma Bell.
And both sides are wrong.
Now, the only thing I've seen that's of any value is an article in Forbes magazine last year, and he updated it just recently.
February 19th was the last day to put in your opinion.
I put in mine.
But everything is secret.
Everything is secret until the new rules come out.
All this is.
It's going to be it.
Here's the thing.
I don't want to make this simplistic.
I mean, I'm going to be accused of simplistic, but who is it that wants to fix this?
Who is it that wants to reform this?
Who is it that's running around saying it's broken?
Who is it that's running around saying it's broken so he can get his fingerprints on it?
Who's doing this?
Barack Hussein-O, the one.
That's all you need to know.
As far as I'm concerned, that's all anybody needs to know.
Leave it alone.
Obama does not intend to improve it.
Not in the way you and I would think improving the internet needs to be improved.
Obama wants to control it for a host of different reasons, not excluding money.
The control over the internet will result in less access for more people.
It will result in more expensive access for more people.
Let me, if you don't believe this, take you back to the 90s.
Each and every time there was a new bill that came out of Congress that was going to really fix the cable TV system because they were ripping people off.
They were overcharging everybody.
And Senator McCain, sitting on the Commerce Committee, would come out with legislation after legislation designed to lower cable rates and to spread it more around equally.
And what happened?
Everybody's rates went up.
The federal government has no business.
The internet is the essence of openness now.
Now, there are people who don't know any better who are all for Obama and net neutrality because A, they're young, impressionable little liberals, and they believe the title of it.
They believe net neutrality.
They believe the word neutrality.
What that means to them is it's going to be equal.
It's going to be the same for everybody.
What they also believe, the most hated internet provider in the world today, apparently, not me, I'm just telling you, based on what I read is Comcast, people hate them.
I even shared with you a story last year about some little blogger who was all upset at how much his minimum of 15 gigabytes a month of coverage on Comcast cost and how upset he was about it.
And I tried to explain to the guy that you're not one of the big customers.
People are paying Comcast a whole lot more money than you are, and they are going to expect higher speeds, faster speeds, and more access.
And this guy's response to that was, well, that's not fair.
Just because somebody has more money than I do doesn't mean they should get better speeds, better coverage.
But of course, it does.
If you want to spend the money on 200 gigabytes down fiber coming into your house to have those kinds of speeds, you should be able to do it.
Under net neutrality, you won't be able to.
Net neutrality, the people that are in favor of it believe that Obama is going to punish all of these internet service providers that are overcharging young millennials.
And they also believe, I'll tell you, if you love Netflix, I have to know that a lot of young millennial liberals love Netflix.
If you get net neutrality, you're going to lose this open access to Netflix that you've got that you think is going to expand.
There's a thing, I don't know quite how to use the terminology here, but some of these internet service providers have been accused of throttling speeds and coverage based on the prices people are paying.
And the more people pay, the less throttling and the more open and access the speed is.
Which, I mean, if you buy a Ferrari, you get a Ferrari.
If you buy a Prius, you get a Prius.
The Prius is not a Ferrari.
And net neutrality wants to turn the Ferrari into the Prius on the internet is basically what it does.
Under the guise of fairness and equality.
And more importantly, as far as these young millennials are concerned, they think Obama is really going to get even with all these cable providers that these young liberal millennials hate.
And that's not what's going to be the case.
The problem is, there's nothing wrong with it now.
It's as open and free as anything in this country is.
And that's the problem.
That's why they want their mitts on it.
It is as open and free.
How many things on the internet can you access for nothing?
It's incredible.
And if you look at an app that you buy for your smartphone or your iPad, I can't believe when I see people on these tech blogs I read complaining, don't buy this app.
It's way overpriced at $1.99.
$1.99 is overpriced because so many of them are free.
$1.99?
Overpriced?
It's a testament to the relativity of things and how people end up being shaped by not reality, but by perceptions.
The internet is as open and wide open as anything is, and that's why Obama wants his hands on it.
It's a threat.
The openness and the freedom that exists there.
They're also trying to sell net neutrality on the basis of content.
Yeah, well, we're not going to allow all these conservative sites to have free access to people.
We're going to make sure the liberal sites get just as much access and have just as much access to high-speed delivery and all that.
We're going to make—it's not going to happen.
That's what they're using and telling people that they'll make happen.
That's what the neutrality party is.
It's just, look, all you need to know is, I know.
Obama wants it.
You should oppose it.
It's that simple.
Do you like your internet provider?
If you do, you ought to be able to keep it.
You won't be under net neutrality.
Try music streaming.
You have no idea how that's going to get screwed up if they implement net neutrality.
Yep, streaming music to your device is going to become an absolute mess.
There's no need for it.
And it's not neutral, and it's not fair, and it isn't equal, and it's not going to punish anybody but the user.
Here is Bonnie in El Paso, Texas.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hello, Rush.
I have a breath of fresh air, I think.
It's an honor to speak with you.
I've been a listener since the 80s.
My husband and I are missionaries, and we love God and we love our country.
Thank you for always giving out the truth about the issues of our country.
I know when I listen what you have to say, I know it's backed up with a lot of background checking and true facts.
I wanted to talk to you today about the Rush Revere books.
We have 55 grandchildren.
27 of those are great-grandchildren.
I've gotten all three books for four of them, and my husband and I.
We give these books as birthday and Christmas gifts.
I think these books can be heirlooms from us with the fun and true facts of our American history that they can always keep and pass down to their children.
I sent you a picture last year of our daughter having reading time with her two children on the Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims, and they love it.
They're seven and ten.
My husband and I read them and love them.
I'll tell you, you know what?
We're going to get her, get her address, Mr. Snirdly, because we've got 55 grandkids.
This is incredible.
I'm out of time.
I wish I'd have known I'd have taken your call sooner, but I just, thank you so much.
You made my day.
I appreciate it.
Sadly, my friends, we're out of time here, but count on the fact that we're going to be back.
It never really ends here.
Just temporary halts in the operation.
Thanks so much.
Have a great weekend and back at it Monday.
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