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March 26, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
32:36
March 26, 2015, Thursday, Hour #3
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It's the fastest three hours in media, ladies and gentlemen, the Rush Limbaugh program.
This is the most listened-to radio talk show in the country and the most talked about radio talk show in the country.
And the most frequently discussed radio host in America telephone number.
If you want to be on the program 800-282-2882, the email address, lrushbo at EIBnet.com.
The guy was talking about that I watched on the Brinkley show back in Sacramento, 1984, when it was this week with David Brinkley.
His name is Michael Oppenheimer.
He is a professor of geosciences and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson Screw of International Affairs.
And he's also at Princeton, and he's part of the UN's global warming apparatus.
That's who the guy is.
He's still around, and he still is crazy.
He's like Paul Ehrlich.
He's been wrong about virtually everything and is still a guru.
Paul Ehrlich, he goes back to the 70s.
He's still a liberal icon.
Ehrlich is the guy, wrote the book called The Population Bomb, who said by the year 2000, there are going to be too many people on earth to all be fed to have enough water and enough food and cleanliness and hygiene.
It was just not going to be possible for the Earth to support the number of billions of people, whatever he said.
And it was apocalyptic, and he had disciples.
I remember one of the executives at the station I worked for in Pittsburgh, which was at the time owned and operated by ABC, KQV, 1410.
AM 1410, guy came down waving this book around.
Got to read this.
Got to read this.
And I said, what is it?
Population bombs.
He says, we're all dead.
Except he believed it.
It was this panic, apocalyptic stuff.
And people are drawn to that.
There's a psychology to that, too.
But anyway, it's all been disproven now.
And he's still, I think, a professor emeritus at Stanford and still has all the respect that he's ever had.
Hasn't been right about anything.
He made a bet with Julian, ah, what's the, I'm a bit of middle block, Julian Simon, a scientist who disagreed with him about everything.
And Simon made him a bet.
They selected some minerals, natural resource material.
And Simon bet that by the year 2000, they would be in more abundant supply than ever and cost less.
And Ehrlich said, oh, I'll take that.
Hell, we're not going to have any of that stuff by 2000.
And Simon won the bet, hands down, every aspect of it.
So these guys are all over the place, and they're still experts.
And they have been documented to be wrong on all of their predictions, which is what they're in the business of making is predictions.
And I don't even think science has room for predictions.
Not when the predictions become science.
I mean, science cannot be a consensus because science isn't up for a vote, and science can't be predictions.
I mean, you can make predictions based on what you think the science is telling us, but you can't say that the prediction is scientific.
It's something else.
Anyway, just a couple of more soundbites here related to Ted Cruz.
Now, this is interesting, too.
Two soundbites here from Jeffrey Toobin, who is the legal analyst at CNN.
And he was on Fresh Air program on NPR yesterday, the host Terry Gross, and said to Toobin for your New Yorker profile of Ted Cruz, you interviewed him several times.
Tell us more about your conversations with Ted Cruz and what you learned about him through these conversations.
He's just a very smart guy.
He is a very polished speaker.
I think people who watched his announcement speech on Monday, you know, here was a guy who spoke for 30 minutes, theater in the round style, without referring to a note, speaking in clear paragraphs without any teleprompter.
I mean, this is someone who is an extremely good political communicator.
Now, obviously, you have to be receptive to his message, which is extremely conservative.
Wait a minute, why the qualifier?
Now, we got to give Toobin credit, though, here, because what Toobin's doing is nuking this idea that Cruz is dumb.
And remember, this is Thursday, it was Tuesday, that I pointed out to you that this is what the drive-bys and the Democrats do.
They take this guy who is the top of his class in Harvard, and Alan Dershowitz may be the smartest student that he's ever had there.
Great debater, championship debater, has won several elections, and they come along and they call him dumb.
And they come along and they call him stupid.
And their willing accomplices everywhere else in the media pick up on it, and it becomes he's the next Sarah Palin.
He's dumb, he's stupid, he's an idiot, and that's all because he's a conservative.
And so even Toobin here, in praising Cruz's intelligence and intellects, says, now, obviously, Evie's a great speaker and all of that, but you have to be receptive to his message, which is extremely conservative.
No, you don't.
We all agree that Mario Cumo was a great speaker.
I didn't agree with a thing that he said, but I understood why it was accepted as gospel by his acolytes.
I could watch Mario Cuomo.
I did not have to be receptive to his message to understand it or to appreciate his skill.
Well, what is this?
You have to be receptive to it.
No, you don't.
Toobin's not receptive to it, and yet Toobin still recognized Cruz's innate intelligence and talent in a performance sense.
Anyway, here's one more soundbite from Toobin about this.
There was no other question asked.
He just continued on his opinion here.
One of the things that I find, frankly, offensive when I hear discussions of Ted Cruz, they say, oh, he's just Sarah Palin.
You know, he could not be farther from Sarah Palin.
This is someone who has a completely thought-out political philosophy, and you can agree with it or disagree with it, but it holds together.
And he is someone it's very easy to have an intelligent conversation with.
Oh, that's not going to stand Toobin in too much good stead with his buddies because this is in direct contradiction to the narrative.
The narrative is that Cruz is an idiot, and he's an idiot because he's a conservative.
It doesn't count that he went to Harvard.
You know, Bush went to Harvard.
Bush has got a Harvard MBA.
Obama doesn't have that.
Wait a minute, Bush's MBA may be somebody.
He's got an MBA and a Harvard degree or Yale or somewhere.
And still, Bush was this biggest cowboy idiot.
And they got away with that on Bush because of the way he speaks.
Same consequence.
Obama is said to be the smartest president ever.
Brilliant.
Got that great crease in his slacks.
Makes him presidential.
Thank you, David Brooks.
And yet, Obama thinks we have 57 states.
He's one gaff after the next with Obama that everybody just looks past.
Oh, he's smart.
He's so smart.
Now, grab audio soundbite 17.
Since we're talking about intelligence and talent and not being fooled by it, let's subject ourselves to what, well, you decide.
This was this morning, today, on Capitol Hill, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on diplomacy and national security.
Senate Appropriations Subcommittee.
This is where the money gets spent.
This is where the money gets allocated.
It's an important committee.
Subcommittee, actually, on diplomacy and national security.
The chairman is Lindsey Gramnisty, and he is speaking with their noted expert witness, the actor and director Ben Affleck, about security in Congo and Central Africa.
And Senator Graham said, Mr. Affleck, you have been, I think, very involved in the security environment.
Well, I think he did.
He had a security team around his trailer on the movie set.
Now, all of these developmental programs, Mr. Affleck, the private sector, I mean, you've got to have enough security so that people from outside the region come in and help.
What is your evaluation, Mr. Affleck, of training the security forces as an American role?
What's your opinion of our responsibility to train security forces in Congo and Central Africa?
In other words, Mr. Affleck, what benefit do we have, not just on the hard side, the soft side, but actually training?
What is...
Wait a minute now.
What?
What benefit?
This is the question.
What benefit do we have, not just on the hard side, soft side?
What's the hard side, soft side?
What is he talking about here?
Hard side, soft side, asking Ben Affleck about the hard side, soft side?
Okay, well, in other words, Mr. Affleck, in your experience in Congo, Central Africa, what benefit do we have, not just on the hard side, soft side, but actually training indigenous forces?
And how important is that to you in terms of your potential success?
This is an area that we're working in, but really this is a top-down area.
It requires leverage from the United States and local regional actors to say, you know, include sort of trying to end corruption, trying to get soldiers paid.
And those are difficult things.
But one of the hardest things about that is to train soldiers properly.
And we're uniquely suited to do that.
Well, okay.
Well, there we did you understand that.
We're talking about intelligence and brilliance and competence.
The question itself could be said to be convoluted.
But Mr. Affleck here is being asked his opinion as an actor and a director, well, I think implied as a diplomat, security expert, all that, for his evaluation of the training and security forces as an American role.
In other words, Congo Central, do we have a role in this?
Is it our responsibility to train security forces?
In other words, what benefit do we have, not just in the hard side, the soft side?
But what benefit do we have in actually training indigenous forces?
And how important is that to you in terms of your potential success?
I'm assuming this means, Mr. Affleck, what is, you're going to go film a movie there sometime and you need to be safe while you're there.
So what do you think we need to do?
And Affleck here, because that's the question.
Okay, that is the question.
Now we'll play his answer again.
Mr. Affleck is an actor.
You're going to go to Congo.
You're going to go to Central America.
You're going to film a movie at some point.
What do we need to do to make your experience there safe?
You're an expert.
What can we do?
This is an area that we're working in, but really this is a top-down area.
It requires leverage from the United States and local regional actors to say, you know, include sort of trying to end corruption, trying to get soldiers paid.
And those are difficult things.
But one of the hardest things about that is to train soldiers properly.
And we're uniquely suited to do that.
And he took another stab at it.
We have areas in the north where we're doing work with coffee collectives that are under threat from the AFDL, which is an al-Shabaab associated militia out of Uganda.
When you have a state that in parts is failing, it's more vulnerable to that kind of extremism.
I hear folks like you say, let's spend money this way before we spend money on bombs.
But this kind of training is something that we can do.
It's relatively inexpensive, and we're the greatest in the world, without exception, at knowing how to build and train militaries.
All right.
Well, speaks for itself.
There you have it.
Ben Affleck testifying before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Diplomacy and National Security on training the indigenous forces of Congo and Central America.
Time for us to regroup.
I am, I don't know, we're surrounded here by such brilliance with all these sound bites from Ted Cruz and Ben Affleck.
I need to ratchet it back and chill out here just to get back to normal.
You know, this Toobin comment, something about it, you've got to be open to his brand of conservatism in order to appreciate and be able to sit through one of his speeches.
What in the world is extremely conservative about Cruz, what he's saying?
Every one of Ted Cruz's positions matches every position of the American public, a majority of the American public.
A majority of the American public believe the same things Ted Cruz believes.
And yet he's characterized as some extremist.
It's like I. I'm called controversial.
To who?
I'm not controversial to you.
You agree with me.
I'm not controversial if people listen to the program.
How is it I'm always controversial, right-wing, extremist structures, controversial to who?
Anyway, back to the phones we go.
This is Sandy somewhere in Parts Unknown in Maine.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
I work for the federal government, so I wanted to clarify something about our health benefit plans, because the Congress is eligible for the same plan.
As federal employees, we can choose from a variety of health plans that cost less than others or more than others.
And our contribution to those plans is about 30%, and the government's is about two-thirds.
Right.
That's exactly what I've pointed out.
Yes, and so Ted Cruz could choose Obamacare or he could choose the federal employees' health benefits plan.
But I think it's he said he didn't want to take subsidies from the government.
And I think he was probably referring to the 75% that the government kicks in on a federal employee's health plan.
And it's also brilliant that he would go with Obamacare because it shows that he's willing to take what the rest of the country is forced to do.
And I think the news media will fix it.
So whatever he does, whether it's health plans or Obamacare or whatever choices he makes, they fix it so whatever he does, it's wrong.
So if he takes Obamacare, that's wrong.
If he doesn't take Obamacare, see, he didn't take Obamacare.
So they'll fix it however they want.
Well, when this all happened yesterday, one of the first places that I was aware he went to talk about was CNN.
And on CNN, they tried to make him out to be a hypocrite because on the one hand, they say, well, here you are.
You're constantly criticizing it.
You're saying you would repeal it.
You're saying it's doing all this damage.
And yet, here you are signing up for it.
Aren't you a little hypocritical?
No, it's the law.
And he knows it's the law.
And he's going to follow the law until he can change the law if he can.
But if he follows the law, that's what everyone has to do, including him.
And he's a very calm person, so he's not going to get rattled and he's not going to get resentful.
And that's one of the things I think I like about him.
Well, that is true.
He is unflappable.
And that's very good.
It is.
So you work at the Office of Personnel Management.
I do.
Yeah.
Well, your agency is providing the subsidies for federal employees as per on order from President Obama.
And I went back to my website and I found the source story for this back in 2013.
And it basically was what I said.
A bunch of members of Congress really, and congressional aides, really started complaining about the cost when they found out that Obamacare was going to apply to them.
And they've made Harry Reid was leading the charge.
It all got started by Chuck Grassley.
Grassley inserted this provision that everybody that wrote and voted for this law was going to have to be subjected to it.
And they didn't fight him on it.
They thought it would just be forgotten.
And they were held to it and they started complaining.
And Obama decided to run the subsidies through your department rather than through the normal exchange setup that had been set up for them.
I think they've always been eligible for the federal employees' health benefits because they are, you know, Congress is our federal employees.
Well, they weren't going to be if they went the Obamacare route.
That's what it was all about.
They were going to have to pay full vote.
That's what Grassley's amendment required, and they were just raising holy heck about it.
Anyway, you got it right at the beginning of your call, as I normally you would.
What do you mean?
What are they going to do now if they can't trust the pilots?
What's who going to do?
Oh, the Eurowweenies or the Europeans and us?
What are we all going to do if we can't trust the pilots?
You mean, if you can't trust the pilots to not crash the plane, what are we going to do?
Well, I don't know what are you going to do.
What are you going to do?
If you don't trust, it's my question the other day.
If you think your pilot is going to fly your plane into a mountain, you wouldn't get on the plane.
Right?
Okay, you don't know.
That's why you have to trust that the airlines and the government and everybody involved is doing proper background checks and finding out exactly who these people are and what extremist philosophies they attach themselves to.
And you need to do your best.
This is why governments will tell you they need to be able to surveil.
This is why governments will tell you they need metadata.
They need to be able to sweep up every bit of data about people they can to find bad actors like this.
This is why they'll say we need to re-up the Patriot Act.
We need to make sure we can continue to surveil everybody involved.
This is how we find out.
And the point is, they are doing that.
They are surveilling.
I don't know about the Europeans.
I know they are.
Everybody is.
The NSA is surveilling.
You know, metadata on your phone.
People say, it's just, there's no data about who you're or what you're saying to anybody.
Metadata is just the number you called, where you were when you made the call, and how long the call lasted.
That is surveillance.
Eavesdropping is another matter.
Eavesdropping would be being able to determine the content of these calls.
But you can learn a lot from surveillance.
Do you know what I saw the other day?
There's one of my tech blogs.
Have you ever wondered why so many apps that you buy on your app store for your phone or your iPad?
And this includes Android.
Do you know why so many apps are free?
You would not believe how often your personal data that that app collects is sold to advertisers and others who want it.
In one instance, an average user of something like 23 apps that were used, in the example, their location data and other things about them, search data on their browsers, was sent out to 5,000 different entities.
And that's how the developers of free apps make money.
They don't make it selling the app to you.
They sell whatever data on you your phone collects.
And you can turn your location services off.
You can do all that.
But certain data, if you serve the web, metadata on a web search, the website you're searching.
So if you search porn sites, they'll know.
If you search for people, they will know who you're interested in.
And who knows what they can tell from that kind of information?
They don't have to hear you talking to somebody in order to find out what you're up to.
Now, this is the point that Edward Snowden was making when he released how the NSA does this.
Okay, so your question is a valid question.
So how do we trust the pilots?
Well, agencies, government agencies and companies that employ them will use this as an example or as an excuse for their surveillance.
Yeah, you've got a good question.
How do we know that Pilot X isn't going to wake up one day and ram the plane into the side of a mountain?
Well, if we're collecting all kinds of metadata on this guy, we'll be able to know.
The point then becomes they've got so much data on so many millions of people.
How in the world can they use any of that as a preventative?
Let's say they had been surveilling this flight crew just as part of a sweep of everybody.
And let's say there is something to know about this pilot.
Why didn't they know it?
I'm not going to make anything.
But let's say this guy does have sympathies to some extremist group.
Why don't they know it if all this surveillance is already going on?
But the point is, your question is exactly the question that authorities will tell you is why they need to keep up this massive data collection to be able to identify the bad actors in our society and to be able to shut them down before they engage in any activity like this, to be able to identify them in advance.
And that's in Apple and Google and Evernote and Facebook and Twitter and a whole bunch have just sent a letter that they're all signatories to to the NSA and to Obama begging and Congress begging them to not re-up the Patriot Act
These companies saying our customers do not want all of this data collected on them and we think you ought to not re-up the Patriot Act 9-11 was a long time ago.
You don't need to keep behaving as though 9-11 happened last week.
So there's a lot happening in this area.
But when I saw the story about all of the app developers that make available the data information of their customers, I mean, that's a lot.
I think a lot of people assume that they're being spied on all the time anyway.
A lot of people are paranoid and think they're being spied on all the time.
It'd be wise to assume so if you're worried that you'll be discovered and found out and then whatever is found out about you publicized.
You know, people are worried about A, the potential criminality or the embarrassment of that.
But the ability that people have now of collecting data on people, it's a direct result of all of this connectivity.
It's just a natural byproduct of it.
And I don't know how you put this genie back in the bottle other than not use any of the tech.
You know, write in longhand or use a typewriter.
Don't use a computer.
Never log on to the internet.
Don't ever make a cell phone call.
I mean, that's really what you would have to do now in order to be as invisible as you could be.
And even at that, look now at the desire some car companies say, well, governments actually are demanding or asking for car companies, put little black boxes in the cars, everybody's cars.
You know what kind of information that black box is going to broadcast?
They're going to know it's your car.
They're going to know everywhere that car goes.
They're going to know how fast that car was driven.
Any number of things.
And that's metadata too.
From that, they can put together or put a good profile of the owner.
They know where the owner goes.
Let's say the owners go into the Kit Kat club 17 times a week.
It doesn't take much to find out what is the Kit Kat Club.
And when they find out what goes on in there, and you're going there 17 times a week, they can pretty much figure out without ever being there what you're doing there.
So the metadata can be converted with good probability to an indication of your own activity without actually being eavesdropped.
Surveillance and eavesdropping are two different things.
You got to think of the metadata as surveillance.
Like if you went out, you hired a private, thirdly, let's say that you had, oh, I don't know, a personal chef that you thought was stealing from you.
So you want to go hire a private detective to find out.
You can have the private detective surveillance or eavesdrop.
Now, if you want to eavesdrop, you're going to find out how you're going to have to bug your employees' phones, plant microphones in the employee's house and maybe in yours in rooms the employee operates.
If you just want to surveil, that means the private eye just follows them around and reports to you where they go.
And you take your pick, what kind of service you want from the private eye.
Surveillance, the point is, metadata is surveillance, and you can learn a lot from that.
The government says, it's just metadata.
Don't worry.
It's just the phone numbers and the dates and the lengths of the conversation.
Nothing about what you're talking about.
Yeah, but if you're calling the Kit Kat Club or whatever, there's a lot you can learn from metadata.
So I, well, the privacy, privacy is not, I don't think, is a relevant thing anymore.
I mean, it's not, no, that's not the right word.
I don't think privacy is something that is genuinely achievable unless you become a hermit and live alone and don't interact with people.
That's not the question, really.
Before I answer that, your question about how do we trust the pilots, I guarantee you the answer I gave you is what we're going to hear at some point.
These government authorities and the airlines, the businesses that hire pilots, are going to say, great question.
That's a perfectly legitimate question for any of our customers to ask.
We want you to be able to get on every airline flight of ours with full confidence that our pilots are not going to fly that plane into the ground on purpose.
The only way we can do that is to be able to collect as much information on all of our employees as possible.
And you're going to say, yeah, that makes sense because you're talking about your life.
You have scales here.
You're going to get on an airplane.
You want to be assured the pilot isn't going to fly you to your death.
The company says, we can pretty much guarantee it because we have every bit of data and information on our pilots that you could possibly have.
We have what they've told us.
And we can relatively, we can safely, we can assure you.
And if they've done that, if they can assure you because of surveillance, are you going to say, you know what?
I'm not flying your airline.
You're surveilling your own employees.
Well, screw you.
Are you going to get on the airplane thinking it's safe?
Because they, you'll probably get on the airplane.
You'll not worry about the surveillance because it wasn't of you.
It was of the employee, the pilot.
But this whole enough privacy, yeah, I understand.
I understand where you go should be your business and nobody else's.
But it already is somebody else's business if you live with anybody.
Look, I'm up against, I've got to take a break here.
I'm up against it on time.
And I just had a brilliant point that I was going to make about this, and it slipped my mind just in a flash.
So hopefully it'll come back to me.
It's about privacy and all that.
Maybe it'll come to me in this break.
If not, then it will later.
Now, I want to make a point here about this pilot, the co-pilot, as it were, the German wings airline crash.
Even if the co-pilot is not, was not a jihadist, even if he was not an Islamist extremist, he wouldn't have been able to keep the pilot out of the cockpit if not for the extra security due to terrorism.
So you could say, whether this guy was a jihadist or not, that terrorism played a role in the crash.
Because it's terrorism that makes it impossible to get into that cockpit once you lock that door.
It's to keep the bad actors out of there.
In this case, the door was locked by the bad actor to keep the good guy out, all because of our efforts to fight terrorism.
So he, look, it's a fine point, but it's still worthwhile.
The guy does not have to have been a jihadist for there to have been a terrorist component to this.
And that component is the reason why that door was locked and impenetrably so.
Just in this case, it kept the good guy out and the bad guy in.
And look, Ben Affleck was speaking before the Senate because he's got an organization called Eastern Congo Initiative.
He's trying to transform the coffee industry in Congo, and that's why he's brought up there as an expert on training soldiers and so forth to protect his coffee beans.
Anyway, see you tomorrow, folks.
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