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June 5, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:37
June 5, 2015, Friday, Hour #3
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Yeah, we're back and we've got a big remaining single busy broadcast hour to go.
It's Friday, so let's just keep rolling.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's Open Line Friday!
Open Line Friday at 800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, look at it this way.
What?
What do you care about?
What's on your mind?
What are you dying to tell somebody?
I mean, do you wish you were a man or a woman and you're the opposite?
Whatever it is, doesn't have to be about the news of the day.
That's what the purpose of Open Line Friday is.
Telephone number again, 800-282-2882 and the email address, LRushbow at EIBnet.com.
Let's see.
Looking at audio stone by tears, seeing anything here that floats my boat.
Maybe.
Maybe I get some of these things.
I want to focus on remaining items in the news, plus your phone calls.
Rick Perry had his presidential announcement yesterday.
And man, I have to tell you, what a difference.
The last time Rick Perry ran, which of course in 2012, I mean, he started out okay.
The debates happened.
We learned later that he was take pain medication for surgery and so forth and wasn't quite himself.
But my memory is of Rick Perry the last time around that there were a lot of people by the end of it laughing at him, making fun of him, generally disrespecting him, not giving him much of a chance, which I always found kind of curious.
Rick Perry has run Texas for a long time.
Texas is in one of the best shapes of any state in this country.
Texas is one of the few states where the Republicans do get a sizable percentage of the Hispanic vote.
I mean, you look at Texas and there's, from our standpoint, Texas would be a great model to replicate all over this country.
And yet here they are, people were making fun of or ridiculing Rick Perry for a number of reasons.
So I expected more of the same.
When Perry made his announcement, I thought the same cat calls, the same type of reaction, but it's the opposite.
It's stunning.
And the Wall Street Journal, Rick Perry's Lodestar State, Perry has proven what America can look like from C to Shining C. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry on Thursday joined the herd running for president.
While the Beltway crowd considers him a long shot, he deserves as much of a hearing as anybody else, given his impressive 14-year record as a reform conservative.
Now, the journal editorial page is, they sometimes go off the path on doctrinaire conservatism, particularly when it comes to things like amnesty and so forth.
But this is a it's a it's it's not an endorsement, but it is really flattering and positive.
And it's it's not at all what I expected, simply based on the kind of treatment Perry got last time out.
Mr. Perry must also overcome a dubious Austin grand jury indictment charging him with two felonies.
His heinous crime, he threatened to use the line item veto to strike funding for the Travis County DA's public integrity unit unless the DA, Rosemary Lemberg, who had been found drunk in her car, resigned.
Unlike many of Obama's actions, this was a constitutional exercise of executive power.
In any case, the indictment should not distract Mr. Perry's Texas record of political and economic success.
In 2001, he was lucky to inherit a relatively prosperous state.
He deserves credit for growing the political endowment that he got.
2003, the state capped damages for pain and suffering in medical malpractice lawsuits at a quarter of a million, which has helped cut providers' insurance premiums by nearly half.
Where else is that happening?
Where are insurance premiums being cut by half or by nothing else?
This has attracted more doctors to Texas to accommodate an increasing patient demand.
In 2005, Perry signed a workers' compensation reform that has helped slash bidness insurance premium rates by half.
Where else is this happening?
A 2011 loser-pays tort reform has reduced the cost of bidness by warding off frivolous lawsuits.
The Tax Foundation ranks Texas bidden's climate 10th best, and the state's growth spurt vindicates the Perry formula of low taxes and a light regulatory touch.
Between 2000 and 2010, Texas gained a net 781,000 domestic migrants, second only to Florida, while California lost 1.9 million, according to the Manhattan Institute.
Last year, Texas boasted the three fastest-growing counties with populations above 250,000.
That'd be Fort Bend, Montgomery, and Williamson.
Anyway, the story goes on, and it's laudatory.
And Perry himself was optimistic, and you don't see and hear much optimism anywhere in politics today.
I mean, we get optimism from Rubio.
We get optimism from Ted Cruz.
We get optimism from Scott Walker.
But really, party-wide and throughout the country, media-wise, there really isn't noted lack of optimism to which people are exposed every day.
I mean, you look at most of the pop culture media and most of the drive-by news media.
I mean, it's depressing.
It is dispiriting.
The stuff that we are told is mainstream in social media, Facebook, Twitter, you name it.
I mean, that's depressing.
I think, by the way, as I said earlier, by design, I think all the stuff that's highlighted on social media is all part of the effort to depress you and keep you dispirited and to make you think that you've lost the country, the country's lost, make you think it's beyond the point of being salvageable now.
I think they would love it if you were so depressed that you just said to heck with politics, particularly if you happen to be a Tea Party type.
They would love to be able to just dispirit you right out of politics.
So here comes Perry yesterday.
He said, my friends, we are a resilient country.
You think about who we are.
We have been through a civil war.
We have been through two world wars.
We have been through a Great Depression.
Hell, we even made it through Jimmy Carter.
We'll make it through the Obama years.
We will do this.
It's a good laugh line, but it was also upbeat and positive at the same time.
And so worth pointing out.
And exclusive from the UK Daily Mail, the Clinton charity took up to $10 million in donations from an African church that had called homosexuals devils.
Hillary Clinton's charity accepted a substantial donation from an anti-gay African church, which has likened homosexuals to the devil.
The 2016 presidential candidate took money for her sprawling health nonprofit from the Cameroon Baptist Convention, whose official policy is that being gay contradicts God's purpose for human sexuality.
It's a devout Christian organization.
They've in the past compared being gay to committing incest and human trafficking.
Its leaders have also railed against American attempts to promote gay rights in Cameroon.
Despite this, the Cameroon Baptist Convention Health Board gave between $1 and $10 million between 2010 and this year to the Clinton Health Access Initiative.
Have you ever heard of that?
The Clinton Health Access Initiative, what is this, another shell corporation, another pass-through?
The Clinton Health Initiative, it's a subset of the Clinton Foundation, got between $1 million and $10 million from an anti-gay African church which equates homosexuality with incest and bestiality.
Church calls it homosexuality a devilish type thing.
The church rails against how the U.S. is now tying aid money to the acceptance of homosexuality.
And yet here the Clintons are accepting money from this group.
Now, what are the other Clinton donors going to think of this when they hear about it?
Why is this group giving to the Clintons anyway?
What are the Clintons telling?
I mean, what in the world are the Clintons doing that would gain the approval of this Cameroon Baptist church?
Well, it's got to be something.
I mean, they're not giving this money, just be nice about it.
They're not giving this money just for the Clintons to come in and shake hands.
They're expecting something for it.
Did you hear about what happened to Julian Castro?
Or does somebody help me?
Does he pronounce his name Julian Castro?
He's the Castro Brothers, San Antonio Mayor.
Julian, me too.
I've always heard Julian, but I want to be correct here.
And I remember a great second baseman when I was growing up, St. Louis Cardinals, Julian Javier.
And it was spelled just like this, pronounced it Julian.
But I've heard Julian.
So we'll just go with that.
And I'll acknowledge that he might pronounce it Julian, and I'm not sure.
He's the former San Antonio mayor.
He's now the new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
And he wants to be vice president.
So he has begun to campaign for it in obvious ways, which apparently is a no-no.
It's not decorous.
It is violating procedure and decorum.
Julian Castro has upped his public profile as the presidential race heats up.
He's not jockeying for a position in the race itself.
Analysts say he's trying to position himself as a potential running mate for specifically Hillary.
And part of the effort that he's making entails rounding up Hispanic activists to pressure Hillary into moving him to the short list in case she wins the nomination.
This is all in the Politico.
And the Politico points out that Team Hillary is not happy here.
They don't like being manipulated.
They don't like this young whippersnapper starting to try to manipulate them behind the scenes, trying to coalesce Hispanic activists to put pressure on Mrs. Clinton to start thinking about Julian Castro as her VP.
Now, admittedly, it was a trial balloon.
And the Castros are feeling their oats because it's no doubt they think his Hispanic heritage that enabled him to get the HUD gig.
He was also the Mexican-American cabinet member, so forth.
So he's one of those, and that is said to be one of the reasons that Obama put him there.
But the Democrats are now reacting, it's way too early for this kind of thing, and they say it's unproductive to talk about a general election ticket when Mrs. Clinton still hasn't nailed down the nomination.
One Clinton ally with an eye on Democrat efforts to woo Hispanic voters said if I were Julian Castro or Julian Castro, I'd be worried.
Others who are in his corner need to dial down those effusive musings.
So now we've got this guy trying to position himself to be vice president for Hillary based on his racial identity.
And some are saying he does not have the resume for it yet.
He does not have the experience and he knows it.
So what he's doing is using his racial identity, i.e. Hispanic identity, and using Hispanic activists to try to force Hillary, and it's not pretty.
Apparently, the Clintons are not happy about this at all.
Have you heard just something to keep in mind because the Castro brothers, particularly Julian, has been hailed all the way back to the 2012 Democrat Convention as a rising star in the Democratic Party.
And the Clintons are famous for snuffing out rising stars.
Bob Torricelli, at one point, Andrew Cumo.
A lot of people are worried here what's going to happen to Julian Castro if the Clintons win the White House, because they're reportedly very ticked about it.
You don't try to manipulate Hillary behind the scenes.
You don't pull that.
You're not that big, young man.
You are not in our league, young man.
Here's the message being sent back to Julian Castro.
The EPA, I don't know how this happened.
The EPA has, what do you say, announced, confirmed, made it public that fracking, which everybody on the left hates, fracking is a horizontal way of drilling for oil, which the left hates.
Fracking is behind the oil boom in the United States.
The left hates it, and the FDA, which is owned fully by the left, the Obama regime, has come out and said that fracking does not damage groundwater.
And there are a lot of people on the left that are just livid about this.
And the FDA or the EPA rather is not talking about it much.
They did publish it, but nobody's touting this.
Investors Business Daily found it and did a little story about it, but they're not celebrating this because Obama doesn't like fracking.
The left doesn't like fracking.
And they don't like the news that fracking is harmless.
They want you to think fracking causes earthquakes and all other kinds of disasters.
And here we find that one of the lead allegations about it is that it destroys drinking water resources, groundwater, and so forth.
Turns out to be not true.
It has no impact whatsoever.
Brief timeout.
Your phone calls are next after this.
And back to the phones we go on Open Line Friday, Caldwell, Idaho.
This is David.
Great to have you here.
Welcome.
Yeah, thanks, Rush.
You are my hero.
I have been listening to you from the very beginning.
Wow.
I have two adult Rush babies and two Rush grandchildren.
Anyway, something you were saying the other day reminded me of a situation that happened to me back in 1969.
I was in fifth grade.
I had to do a book report.
And, of course, Dick Tracy was one of my favorite comics, too.
Anyway, in this book, it was Danny and something computers.
In that book, Danny did his homework on the computer.
And in my book report, I said, in your lifetime, you will see that you will be doing your work on computers and the kids will be doing their homework on the computers.
And there will be a Dick Tracy watch.
And they laughed at me, including the teacher.
And really, this is 1969, they laughed at you?
Yeah.
And you were in the 10th grade then?
What?
Yeah, I was in 5th grade.
And they laughed at you.
Yeah.
But I mean, Dick Tracy was alive.
Dick Tracy had been using a wrist radio for a long time, and it was nothing new then.
I mean, Dick Tracy wasn't.
Well, right.
Yeah, but that was comics.
Yeah.
But the idea had a chance to take hold.
But even in 69, they thought, no way, you're out of your mind.
Right, right.
Oh, when I was in the 10th, 1969, I was 18, and I'll tell you, there were some people who thought that by the year 2000, we would be the Jetsons.
Yeah.
And the 2001 Space Odyssey, we're going to be going to Jupiter, people thought.
That's kind of interesting.
So here you called it.
They laughed at you, and you've got the last word now.
Right.
Now, I just want to say, ha, told you so.
Wouldn't it be great if you knew they were listening?
Oh, I hope.
Especially Billy.
Do you have an Apple Watch?
No, I don't.
Have you ordered one?
I can't afford it.
Oh, I hate hearing that.
Well, they're impossible to get still.
I understand that in a couple of weeks, they expect supply to catch up with demand.
And by June 28th, actually, you'd be able to walk into an Apple store and get one.
That's the June 28th.
June 28th.
Except for one model.
They're still running behind.
June 28th.
By the way, even with all the so-called great economic news today, the job numbers, don't forget the way CNN's reporting them.
Yep, unemployment rate went up from 5.4 to 5.5% for the right reasons.
The unemployment rate went up for the right reasons.
In spite of all this, there remain 93 million Americans not working.
93 million.
The adult population in the country is 240 million total or 300 million, maybe 240 million adults, 220 million adults, and 93 million are not working.
Can you imagine?
Now, not all of those at one time have.
I mean, the labor force participation rate's never been 100%.
But back in the days when there really was a growing economy, and when you knew it just by being alive, just by going about your business, you knew that economic expansion was taking place.
I mean, you saw businesses opening.
You could just feel it.
You could just see.
And there's none of that today.
You don't feel any uptick in economic activity.
You don't get a sense of it at all.
You're just the opposite.
And it only stands to reason as much of the economy the government's taken over, you know, one-sixth of our economy has been taken over by Obamacare, it just stands to reason.
If just 20 million of those 93 million found work, what a difference it would make.
This unemployment number, 5.5%, is meaningless.
You realize, folks, George W. Bush, just a year or two years before leaving Orifice, he left Orifice 2009.
So this is 2007.
I mean, the media was doing everything they could to try to convince everybody we were in a recession, the Iraq War.
They were trying to engineer a defeat.
I mean, it was just every day was just a drumbeat of pessimism and negativity, and it just was relentless.
But even then, we had statistical full employment as defined by the Federal Reserve and the Department of Labor has always been 4.7%, 4.5%.
4.5% unemployment has been considered full employment.
Meaning, if you take the labor force participation rate and you have a traditional percentage of American adults who can work working, it's never 100%.
And then you calculate the unemployment rate by counting a number of people who've lost their jobs but are trying to find jobs.
When you have an unemployment rate, the U3 number is 4.7%, 4.5.
You've got statistic full employment based on the idea that it's never really going to be the case, that everybody who's capable of having a job is going to have one.
But we're nowhere near 4.7% unemployment as it was when George Bush was president in 2005 or 2006.
When he was at 4.7% unemployment, we had economic growth out the wazoo.
There were no negative numbers.
The labor force participation rate was much larger than it is today.
And for them to tell us the unemployment rate is 5.5%, just one point worse than statistical full employment, that should tell you how we have simply redefined for the worse how we calculate employment and unemployment because it's absurd.
The unemployment rate is more accurately reflected by what is called the U6 number, U-6, the letter U-6.
And that number is around 11, 12%.
That counts the number of people out of work who have given up trying to find a job.
And that's more like it.
And you go to the African-American community.
You know what the unemployment rate among African Americans?
It's in the 20s.
It's been hovering at 25%.
And they want to celebrate news to the 280-some-odd,000 jobs created.
We needed, from the moment Obama did his porculus, we needed 500,000 jobs a month just to stay even and a little more than 500,000 jobs a month in order to grow the economy.
And we haven't come close to 500,000 jobs in a month being created.
Not even close.
And so the new normal, everybody's being told just to accept this is the new normal.
This is what it is.
America's best days are behind us.
We've got to make do with the new reality.
And that too is dispiriting and depressing.
So it's good to hear Rick Perry come along and some others and start speaking optimistically and positively because it works and people need it.
Most people aren't self-starters.
People will respond to this kind of optimism and leadership.
High expectations.
People, if you expect a lot of them, they will start working to satisfy you.
If you have low expectations of people, it's what you're going to get.
Here's Lucia, who is on the phone from Lake Forest, Illinois, 13 years old.
I'm glad that you called, Lucia.
It's a pleasure to have you on the program today.
So nice to be here today.
Well, it's our pleasure, too.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, I've been waiting to call for so long.
I love your book so much.
They're the best books I've ever read.
And then when I heard that your Spanish version is coming out of your book, number one, June 9th, you said, yeah.
That's right.
I was so happy.
I was so happy because I'm half Hispanic from my father's side.
He's Venezuelan, and my mother's American.
And so I really like improving my Spanish a lot.
And then the Spanish version, I feel like it's really going to help me improve.
And I'm really happy that you did that.
Oh, wow.
This is so cool.
That is, well, that's great.
You sound genuinely excited about this.
You almost did a better commercial for it than I did.
I also wanted to thank you so much for, I was one of your first prize winners for Become a Star, for doing a scene of one of your books.
I was your first prize winner.
I want to thank you so much for picking me, and I love your books.
Me and my grandpa, we both love your grips.
My grandpa from my mother's side, we love your books so much, and we love American history.
And he's the one who introduced us to your books.
And after your books came out, he's also, he really likes looking at our ancestry too.
He's probably listening right now.
He never misses a single one of your talk shows.
We found out that we're a direct descendant to William Brewster nine generations back.
I was so happy.
I was like, it's no wonder we love American history because our relatives were part of it.
You are amazing.
You have an all here, Lucia.
You're well spoken.
You're obviously educated in the process of learning even more.
You're passionate.
I mean, you're amazing.
It's just a pleasure to sit here and listen to you.
And you found out that you are actually related to William Brewster.
Yeah, I thought that was insane.
Yeah, well, it is.
It is, but you've got a direct line now to that, which you've been reading about.
Yeah, I was like, oh, my gosh.
Now, what did you win?
We've awarded prizes.
People have sent in videos and other things to the Rush Revere website.
What contest did you win?
I won the Become a Star, where I do a scene from any of your books, a 30-second scene.
Yeah, which one did you do?
I did the one with your second book when Rush Revere was talking to King Henry and Elizabeth with her dress and everything.
Oh, yeah.
My favorite part of that book.
King George, you mean, but nevertheless, yeah, that was one of my favorite parts to put, because you know why?
Because that conversation between Rush Revere and King George obviously never happened.
Yeah.
But it did in the books, and the purpose of that conversation was to take something like that in American history and make it relatable to people your age reading it today so that they might have a – I didn't want these books to ever even get anywhere close to having a political agenda behind them or any kind of politics at all.
All the books are is the truth, as we can best find it about American history.
And King George did not want the colonists to be separate from England, and he wanted to tax them, and he wanted them under his thumb, and he wanted to be them.
He wanted them living under the tyranny of his reign.
He resented everything about the fact that they had departed and formed their own new world, sent his soldiers over here to keep everybody in line.
So Rush Revere goes in for a conversation asking, why do you want these people to live this way?
Why do you want to control these people?
It was an effort to teach tyranny, Lucia, to 10 to 13-year-olds in the age group.
It was an effort to teach young people about the pitfalls of losing liberty and losing freedom and how precious it is and how important and how worth fighting for it it is.
And since there isn't, Rush Revere never really traveled to meet King George, but so it was a, I had free reign to make this, it had to be historically accurate.
King George's words had to be very, very close to things he believed in his day anyway.
So it was really fun.
And I remember when you focused on that, it made my day, because that was, to me, I mean, it's hard to pick a most important part of any of these books, but that one was really very important to me for the potential lesson that it taught.
So the fact that you got it and that you got it with passion and love it, like you just, you just, you're just making my day here.
You really are.
Yeah, I just love your books so much.
And I read them, and then we're learning about American history in school.
I remember my teacher telling us, we were learning about how the Americans were separating from Britain.
He's like, the Americans were the rebellious teenagers who didn't want to listen to their mothers or their parents and thought that they could do whatever they want.
And the parents were always right for them, except for they didn't believe that.
And I'm like, excuse me, teacher, I don't think that's really correct.
And he's like, what?
And I'm like, I don't really think that's correct.
I was reading Rush Revere's book, Russ Lindbaugh's books, and I'm like, I mean, you should read this.
And he's like, Lucia, let me teach here.
I could keep on interrupting him.
Like, I don't think you got this.
Excuse me, teacher.
I don't think that's really correct.
Would I have loved to have been in your class at that time?
What would the teacher say?
He's like, he's just like, look, yeah.
And then whenever I interrupt him now, he always just looks at me.
He's like, Lucia, I got to teach here.
Because I always take forever explaining.
Like, I use your books.
And he's like, Lucia, I got to teach here.
He says, I have to teach here.
Well, so you didn't get any trouble for that, I hope.
No, I didn't.
Well, that's good.
That's good.
So what grade are you going to be in when school starts?
I'm going to be in eighth grade when school starts.
Eighth grade.
So that makes you 14?
Yeah.
14, right?
Well, and you sound like somebody you like school, you do well in it, right?
Oh, yeah, I really love school.
All my teachers are great.
Well, you've got it made.
If you like school and your teachers are great, you've got the Rush Revere books.
What else could there be?
Yeah, but I don't think I'm like, well.
Well, now, did we, you were a prize winner there.
Do we send you the audio versions of the books, the CDs?
Do you have those?
I only have two of them.
I'm missing the third one.
I'm planning on getting that soon.
And I got all your books.
Well, I'll tell you what.
We've got that.
We can send you that out.
I want you to hang on here.
Mr. Snerdley, I'm going to run because of time constraints here, but if you can hang on, Mr. Snerdley will politely get your address so we can get you some stuff out first part of next week.
You already are a prize winner, so we're not going to send you stuff, and we know what we sent you, so we're not going to be redundant.
But which book do you not have the CDs, the audio version for?
The third one.
The last one.
Okay.
We'll fix that.
And we'll throw some other stuff in there.
We're always acquiring cool stuff.
So we'll throw some stuff in there for you, Lucia.
And God bless you.
Thank you so much.
I'm really glad that you made through today and held on.
I hope to talk to you again sometime, okay?
Yeah.
That's Lucia from Lake Forest, Illinois, and we will be back.
Hi, welcome back.
Great to have you.
El Rushbo, wrapping it up here before being out next week.
Usual late August, September golf trip and moved up to next week, folks.
A series of great guest hosts coming in next week.
Here's Matt, St. Paul, Minnesota.
Great to have you, sir.
Hello.
Hello, Rush.
How are you?
Very well.
Well, it's going to be hard to follow up, Lucia, but I wanted to ask you, I mean, she was phenomenal.
I wanted to ask you your thoughts on the Hall of Fame, the NFL Hall of Fame process, and how, you know, folks get into it.
And I have a vested interest.
And the number one fan is my father, who is John Arnett.
Your dad's John Arnett.
Jack John, yes, sir.
Wow.
He's probably listening right now out of Lake Oswego, Oregon.
I'll tell you this, the NFL Hall of Fame process is a good friend of mine.
I used to play touch football with Rick Goslin, who is now an NFL expert in the Hall of Fame and other things.
He's one of the voters.
And he's even got, I think Rick just started a talk radio network about the Hall of Fame.
It is such a process that they can do hours a week talking about how it happens.
And he's explained it to me.
It's no mystery.
But if you don't understand it, for players that don't make it in their first year of eligibility, that's where it gets tough and confusing because every year is a new process.
And it's quite possible that they will know the voters of the Hall of Fame just because the way they know how things work.
They can tell you that somebody's going to take them four years to make it based on the voting and based on the new class every year of the competition and how it's shaping up, how many people at each position, eligibility.
I couldn't by any stretch do it justice in the limited amount of time I have here.
But if you find anywhere, just Google Rick Goslin, G-O-S-S-E-L-I-N.
And he's written about it extensively.
They don't keep it secret.
I mean, the deliberations are secret when they happen the day before the Super Bowl, but the process is not.
And he'd be able, I'm sure you can find, or Peter King at the Monday morning quarterback, MMQB.
It's fascinating.
And it has problems that they acknowledge, too.
Tim, I wish I'd have gotten your call before I have to go because I'm really out of time.
I wish I wasn't.
Okay, what Lucia won from the Rush Revere website was an Apple desktop computer with production software, $100 gift card, and a personalized winner certificate.
So we're going to send her the CDs, the audio version, third book.
Try to find her video for you, too.
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