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April 8, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:22
April 8, 2016, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Greetings, my friends, and welcome.
We are here, as promised, Rush Limbaugh, a whole crew.
Of course, the crew doesn't really matter much, because I'm what counts.
On Friday, let's go.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Lime Friday.
And actually, this is a day where the crew is crucial.
This is a big day.
It is our 26th annual Curathon.
Radiothon Curathon.
The objective to cure the blood cancers.
Leukemia, lymphoma, non-Hodgins lymphoma.
And we do it in conjunction with the Leukemia Lymphoma Society of America.
26 years that we've done this.
And this one, I'm really anxious about this.
I get more and more anxious every year as the curathon approaches and as the day arrives.
26 years.
And I think all but two of those years, and it may be all but one, but for 24, 25 years, we have always done better than the previous year, which just astounds me for all of the obvious reasons.
I mean, the amount of real appreciation that I have for every one of you.
I mean, I have that each and every day.
I count my lucky stars each and every day that of all the people in America I could attract as an audience, it's you.
You're just the best audience anybody in media could have.
And you come through each and every time you're asked.
And it is, it's a mind-boggling thing to realize.
This is also a challenging year.
This is our second year of doing the curathon without Kit Carson.
This was his deal.
I mean, we were all involved in it, and I, of course, am the face and the voice of it.
But it was Kit who early on developed relationships with all the people at leukemia lymphoma and stayed in touch with them and coordinated various things about this day, the logistics throughout the year.
And it just doesn't feel the same having him here and on the other end of the line here reporting statistics to me, relaying messages, suggesting things to say, criticizing other things I've said.
So there's a void there.
There's a void in our hearts over the fact that Kit isn't here, but we know he's here in spirit.
And we know that he is, we know that he is every bit as much a part of this as he ever has been because he, while there's a void in our hearts, he remains right there.
Now, let me give you a telephone number.
And I'm going to be repeating a number throughout the program.
It's 877-379-8888.
And that's the phone number to call to donate to the Leukemia Lymphoma Society of America and our curathon.
You can also donate at rushlimbaugh.com.
You can also donate at our Facebook page.
And you can donate at our Twitter page.
Online donations, rapidly taking over phone.
But if you want a phone call to donate, you can do that at 877-379-8888.
26 years of doing this.
And such a great cause and with such great people.
Everybody at the Leukemia Lymphoma Society that we deal with on this day has been personally affected by one or more of these blood cancers, either themselves or members of their family, close friends, even members of the organization.
And one thing we do here that makes it even more astounding to me is that we don't devote the whole show to it.
We continue to do the regular radio program.
We will talk about Bill Clinton and Sister Soldier 2.
This is actually profound, what is happening on the Democrat side with Bill Clinton in this.
Because I need to give you the history of this.
I need to tell you why this is even going.
This is directly traceable to the Clinton administration.
What is happening?
Now, the problems that Bill Clinton finds himself in are problems that were demanded he fixed by Congressional Black Caucus and other African-American community groups way, way back in the 90s.
This is why we had 100,000 new cops.
It's why we had the vaunted Clinton crime bill.
The very people who demanded that this kind of thing be done to clean out crack cocaine-ravaged neighborhoods.
The same people demanding that.
Now, the same people that have started Black Lives Matter and are dumping all over Bill Clinton for, and he's not alone in saying what he said about who Black Lives Matter is and how hypocritical they are.
We've got news on the Republican and Democrat campaign fronts, as always.
So it is really sobering.
It's not to think we do the regular radio program, combine the radio-thon as part of it.
Most people that engage in this would broom the regular radio programming format for the whole day, and they would just go wall to wall with the curathon.
You people are so fabulous, it's not necessary.
The way this all began, very briefly, when I began to do this national program in New York in 1988, it was a convoluted setup because we couldn't get the program on a New York affiliate for the first couple of years.
And then we did.
And that program that was on the New York affiliate happened to be a national program.
It wasn't tailored to New York locally.
And so back in the early days of this, the entire unit of ABC-owned and operated radio stations broomed an entire broadcast day, seven or eight radio stations, coast to coast, and they went from sunup to sundown, nothing but the cur-a-thon.
Every one of the radio stations broomed all normal programming.
And there was my three hours right in the middle of it in New York.
So the station manager, the WABC, and the executives from leukemia, lymphoma, came to me and said, hey, we know that we can't tell you not to do your show today.
Go, if we give you a phone number, would you mention it a couple of times?
I said, sure, I'd be happy to.
Absolutely.
So I did.
The first year, we mentioned the phone number two or three times, mentioned what was going on, raising money to cure the blood cancers.
And the short version of the story is that it didn't take long for everybody to realize that, well, I don't know how to say this.
You people were generating more money in our three-hour radio program, more donations, than that entire multiple station, wall-to-wall, 12-hour sunup to sundown day.
That's not to condemn that.
It's just to talk about how amazing all of you are.
And so now the entire Radiothon cur-a-thon takes place on one day on one program on over 600 stations now, of course, for three hours, but we don't even go wall to wall with it.
And even at that, all of you continue to set records each and every year, except for a couple of years.
I think 2008 was a down year because of the economic collapse.
And there was one other, but I don't remember which one it is.
As I say, I always get anxious.
You know, meet, surpass expectations every day, every month, every week, what have you.
And so we come to you once again, trying to reach into your heart and to your mind and to continue to ask you to assist this valiant effort to cure the blood cancers.
I've said it every year.
If everybody in this audience just contributed a dollar, we would automatically establish maybe an entire record for all charitable activities, just to illustrate how many people there are.
And if everybody just gave a dollar.
Now, of course, that doesn't happen.
But the numbers of people who donate, the amount of money per capita that comes in always goes up every year.
And we continue to sit here and look at the numbers in amazement.
We really do.
I don't know how I've run out of ways to say thank you.
I've run out of ways to tell you how much we appreciate it.
I trust by this time you're fully aware of it and are ready and are aware of the drill.
The mission of the Leukemia Lymphoma Society is to cure leukemia, to cure lymphoma, Hodgkin lymphoma, myeloma, and to improve the quality of life for patients and their families.
And that's a big deal.
That is happening.
Life expectancy is expanding.
Quality of life is expanding.
Assistance for families, patients is expanding.
Research continues to prove worthwhile with great, great advancements and results in drug therapy, treatment therapy, and diagnostic therapy.
The pass-through is phenomenal.
There's no huge overhead here.
This is not like some charities that take 40% of what's donated to pass around to live on.
The Leukemia Lymphoma Society passes on almost everything that comes through.
There's very, very little overhead because of the mission.
They receive no government funding either.
Leukemia Lymphoma Society, no government funding.
They rely on the generosity of individuals, the generosity of foundations, corporate contributions to advance their mission.
And then there's the patient services program designed to guide patients on the difficult cancer journey and offers free of charge a variety of programs including disease information, financial aid, family support groups, and referral to other local community resources.
That Information Resource Center, by the way, stands out among health organizations and call centers.
It began in 1987.
The Information Resource Center has helped more than 1 million callers.
It's staffed with master's-level health care professionals and expanded its hours from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
I know what happens.
Seems like every week, in just consuming news, you learn of somebody that everybody knows, a celebrity, a personality, somebody in a group that everybody thinks is invincible.
All of a sudden, you learn that somebody has died that you didn't even know was ill.
Or you learn that somebody has contracted one of the blood cancers, and you can't believe it.
You're astounded.
Maybe at age 65, the numbers of children affected by this disease are also astounding.
But then you don't even need that.
There's the personal diagnosis.
Many of you in this audience have faced that news.
Many of you have experienced symptoms.
You're not feeling well.
You have no idea what it is.
There are no outward symptoms.
You just know things aren't right.
You go for a checkup.
You can tell by the look on the doctor's face that this is not just an everyday average malady.
People are facing the terrible news of this diagnosis daily.
I'm sure many of you in this audience have.
It's especially difficult when you find out one of your children has been diagnosed.
It wrenches you apart.
It tears at your gut.
You wonder how you're going to get through.
You wonder how you're going to pay for it.
You wonder how in the world it happened.
You wonder why it happened.
You go through all these different phases.
And then reality hits and you have to deal with it.
That's when you learn a lot about yourself.
That's when you learn a lot about people you love.
And that's when you learn a lot about people you are yet to meet.
That's when you find out what the people at the Leukemia Lymphoma Society do each and every day.
They're there.
They're waiting.
They know that you or somebody like you, somebody in this audience, many people in this audience are going to get that diagnosis.
They deal with it constantly.
They have dealt with it personally.
The doctors involved know.
The support staff know.
It is a devastating bit of news to pass on to people.
But we're all adults and it is what it is and you have to face it.
Then when you learn how life expectancy has been improved and expanded, when they sit you down and they tell you that you or your wife, your spouse, your child Has a bit of a better future than you initially thought.
And you go through a period of rejoicing because it won't be as bad as you thought, primarily because people like you throughout the years have enabled the research and the counseling and the assistance to the families and all of the medical aspects of curing the disease.
And in the process of curing, it is limiting its scope, limiting its strength, attacking it.
There are all kinds of advances that have taken place in leukemia, in lymphoma research that have helped cancers not related to the blood.
And so every dime that comes in, every dollar that comes in, ends up being worth it, personally transferable to people who are going to face this diagnosis.
And just in the course of this program, just in the course of the busy day today, lots of people are going to find out that for nothing they did, absolutely no fault of their own, not for one reason, they have been diagnosed with the blood cancers.
And that's where you come in.
It's where we all come in.
And we're here today as we are one day a year to do what we can to make it as less tragic, less jarring, less depressing, and perhaps even hopeful for people who get that news.
The telephone number is 877-379-8888.
It's that number every year if you want to donate, if you can, anything whatsoever to leukemia, lymphoma.
Also at rushlimbaugh.com, our Facebook dress, Twitter account as well.
We have goodies.
We have premiums as we do every year based on how much you donate.
You got a little gun of a prize.
I'll go through the list of what those things are.
All of this, by the way, is at our website, rushlimbaugh.com.
Every aspect of what we're doing today, you can see, you can donate.
You can find out what the premiums are.
Take a brief time out now.
We'll come back and continue.
Again, 877-379-8888.
Today is a day that we advance on curing blood cancers and maybe save some lives.
We don't know, but that's the objective.
You may never know personally what your donation has done, but you can be confident.
You can rely on the fact that you are helping tremendously in ways you may never know.
Don't doubt me.
You wouldn't believe this.
So somebody said, wait a minute, you always donate and you didn't say you're going to donate.
Are you not donating?
Of course I'm donating.
Folks, I never ask people to do something that I wouldn't do.
I couldn't do that.
These guys that do these radiothons or TV telethons or whatever, and you always wonder, how much are you giving their Monty Old Buddy Opal?
Oh, I'm donating my time.
Well, that's not going to get it done.
Your time is not going to help anybody.
So I always, you know, my problem is, if I tell you right now how much Catherine and I are going to donate, I'm afraid some of you might say, well, then we don't need to give anything ourselves.
So I'm going to hold off for a little while in announcing my own personal contribution, which I do each and every year.
But folks, we have collectively raised, I forget the number now, some total, but it's, I think it was like $32, $33 million last year, three hours a day, once a year.
It's just astounding.
And when we come back to the break, I'm going to have just a brief explanation of the premiums, little prizes that you get this year for certain levels of donation.
But it is our annual cure-a-thon trying to cure the blood cancers, 877-379-8888.
If you want to use the phone, you can donate also at rushlimbaugh.com and Open Line Friday, also part of the day.
We'll be right back.
So I just checked the email, and there's a couple in there.
Say, hey, Rush, you shouldn't expect to raise more money this year.
There's no way you can raise more money to the Shiva Junior because look at how many people are not listening to you anymore.
Look at all the people that said they're not going to listen to you anymore because of the Trump and the Cruz thing.
And I said, you know, that's a good point.
There's a lot of people out there that were listening last year that claim they're gone.
They're not going to be here this year.
So I could rely on that if I wanted to as an excuse.
But see, I don't believe it.
Let me tell you something else we don't do.
You know, one of the things I learned about the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Television, everybody's so much more worldly than I am.
I actually believe for all those years that they did everything during that 24-hour telecast.
I thought the fundraising began when they went on the air.
I was stunned when I found out that they were raising money all year.
I literally was.
And I was in my adulthood when I figured this out.
That's how naive I was and how susceptible I am to media packaging and PR.
I had no idea that they're working year-round to raise money and that they've pretty much got everything they're going to get when they go on the air.
That the actual telethon, and this is not to focus on muscular dystrophy.
I just, things that I learn about things and how we don't do it that way here.
This is it.
We do not work here, not on this program, leukemia lymphoma does.
But we're not out there raising money all year long, and whatever we raise, add it to what we generate today and come with this massive total.
Whatever we get, we get in these three hours.
And that's it.
And that's why you all are so amazing.
You wouldn't believe the amount of money you come up with every year.
It's really sobering, folks, and it's humbling to me that you do.
And so everything is done differently here from the way conventional wisdom standard operating procedure for this kind of enterprise takes place.
There's nothing that goes on other than what happens in these three hours.
And like last year, by the way, here's a list, I promised you, the list of the premiums that we have for certain levels of donations.
$75 to $99, you get a t-shirt.
It's athletic gray t-shirt this year, big black EIB logo on it.
One size fits all.
If you donate between $100 and $384, you get a T-shirt and an EIB hat to go along with it.
It's the athletic gray shirt, black hat, gray and white EIB logo, one size fits all.
Now, the hat is decorated with the official EIB signature and 2016 logo in contrasting embroidery, and it's also one size fits all.
And if you donate $385 or more, then you are entitled to the polo shirt and the EIB hat.
It's a gray polo shirt this year, black EIB logo.
The hat is black with gray and white logo.
And the shirts come in all sizes.
And the EIB hat is a one-size-fits-all.
All of this is at rushlimbaugh.com.
I don't want to spend a lot of time mentioning the premiums, but they're there, and you can find out all about them in great detail.
And even see them at rushlimbaugh.com.
Now, let's get started with some of the news.
One of the big things on the Republican side is that Trump has canceled trips to Colorado, the state convention of Colorado, and a trip to California in order to stay in New York and campaign.
And you can imagine what the cruise camp and the media are doing with that.
And of course, the anti-Trumpers that you find throughout the Republican and conservative movement.
They're giddy.
They're happy.
They think it means that Trump knows he's bombing out in New York.
They think it means that Trump knows he may not even get to 50%.
If he doesn't get to 50%, and if he doesn't sweep the districts in New York, then he doesn't get the lion's share of the delegates, and he needs them all.
If he's to have any hope of getting a 1237 before the convention, he needs them all.
And I don't know whether they just learned this at the Trump campaign or whether they've known it, but it's too late for Democrats to register in New York to vote in the Republican primary.
Their deadline was March 25th.
And I don't know the Trump campaign knew that.
They might have.
I don't know how many campaign offices the Trump campaign had open, but it is being speculated that that kind of ground game political insider apparatus is something Trump doesn't do, hasn't done, just recently hired a guy.
Looks like they're acing out this Lewandowski guy.
Lewandowski made a power play, by the way.
Trump goes and hires Paul Manafort to actually manage the delegate massage and the delegate sales job at the convention.
And Lewandowski immediately ran a power play on the guy, ostensibly saying that you can't get to Manafort without going through me.
And Manafort went to Trump and said, look, I'm not working this way.
This is a summary.
And it looks like this new guy, Manafort, won the power struggle because he maintained his position.
And Lewandowski has been edged out, which also makes the anti-Trumpers, never Trumpers happy, because they hate this guy.
Lewandowski's the guy, of course, that accused of roughing up the infobabe, Michelle Fields.
So you can make of it what you want.
Then there's an APGFK poll out that shows Trump's negatives are at an all-time high of 70%.
But so are Hillary's.
I mean, not 70, but Hillary's are sky-high to boot.
So it's not a singularly comforting fact for people that Trumps are so high.
But it is curious he's canceling California and the Colorado Republican Convention.
There's some delegate massage that can go on there that they've decided to stay in New York.
Hey, if they know they've got to win big in order to try to get 1237, that is the immediate task in hand.
And so it could also be a decision to stick with their strengths.
But of course, the anti-Trumpsters are going to look at this and say, that means they're falling apart.
They didn't think they'd ever have to do this.
This is Trump's home state.
He shouldn't have to campaign here at all.
He should be able to go to Colorado and California.
He should be able to ignore New York's home state.
But he has to stay here.
Well, not necessarily.
We'll find out in due course.
Paul Ryan continues to say no way, no way, and is producing an ad now.
I told you yesterday, if you want to find out what's really going on, keep a sharp eye on the media.
Start seeing stories that, you know, personality profiles of Ryan, what a great guy Ryan is, stuff on the family, how hard he's worked.
You say, why am I the Speaker of the House?
We're not electing speakers in the House.
If you start seeing things like that, it could be an indication that they are making a move or planning on a move at a contested convention.
On the Democrat side, I thought it was only the Trump rallies that had protesters.
But it turns out Bill Clinton is drawing protesters.
He's out there stumping for Hillary.
You know, people starting to ask with some of the stuff Clinton is saying.
They really are.
I mean, salon.com is demanding that Hillary fire him.
They say, we know that she can't divorce him, but she should fire him.
Why can't she divorce him?
Why can't she?
I ask it rhetorically.
She's stuck with the guy, and the things he's doing are making people think that he doesn't want her to win.
That's how sabotaging in nature they are.
Now, the mainstream media are doing their best to ignore the protesters when they're protesting Democrats, but they're having a field day covering Bill's supposed backlash against those Black Lives Matter protesters in Philadelphia.
He's essentially saying to them what I told you, Ray Lewis has gotten in trouble for.
You know, Ray Lewis has produced a video on Facebook that so far has 2 million viewers, and it's grown since then.
And the point that he's making, Black Lives Matter, but you don't talk about black on black crime.
And there's a lot of black lives that are being lost here due to black crime, black on black.
Do those lives not matter?
And all hell's breaking loose on that.
Clinton was giving a speech to a crowd of Hillary supporters.
He was interrupted by Black Lives Matter protesters, and he responded to them by saying, you're defending the people who killed the lives you say matter.
Tell the truth.
I mean, it's a violation of every politically correct tenet about Black Lives Matter.
You know, Bernie Sanders did it too, and they walked up, stormed the stage at one of his appearance, and literally took his microphone.
So he changed his tune on it.
And now there's the hubbub over this is big and it's fascinating to watch.
And it's the kind of thing you usually don't see publicly when it goes on on Democrats.
But I want to tell you why this is all going on.
This is all going.
You have to go back to the 1990s to get to the root of this.
And I, ladies and gentlemen, was there.
We had a number of things from the Clinton administration back in the 90s.
We had midnight basketball.
We had the vaunted crime bill.
We had 100,000 new cops.
Now, people might remember that, but they don't remember why.
Well, I'll tell you why.
There was an endemic, a pandemic of crack cocaine sweeping through minority neighborhoods in this country, and it was ravaging them.
It was ravaging them even more ravaged than they already were.
And it was black community leaders, such as the guys in the Congressional Caucasians, congressional black Caucasians overwhelmers, demanding that Clinton do something about it.
We've got to stop this.
This crack cocaine epidemic is wiping out our neighborhoods.
And so Clinton responded.
100,000 new cops, crime bill, severe new sentencing guidelines for people caught selling and using the stuff.
And it's all come back to bite them.
Because that is Black Lives Matter is essentially an outgrowth of that movement back then.
Meaning, all of this police attention, you know, the Black Lives Matter and other civil rights groups are running around complaining about police brutality and the police being mean and police murdering innocent young blacks walking the street while waiting to go to college and this kind of thing.
Well, it turns out that all of this ramped up police activity, policing and strident activity to wipe out this scourge of crack cocaine and others was started by the Democrats.
That's why Clinton's getting mad at him.
That's the unspoken truth here.
The reason why Clinton's lashing, he resents being protested by these people because they're the ones that demanded he do what he did.
And he thought he was doing a good thing.
He thought he was responding to their demands.
So he went out and did it.
And now they're upset that the cops are behaving the way they're behaving.
They're upset that crime is being treated as a crime and people are dealing with it.
All the while they want to try to pass this off as having something to do with the Republican Party and racism, this whole universe is owned and operated practically exclusively by the Democrat Party.
There's more on this.
Now we'll take a brief time out here.
Again, the phone number for donations to our curathon today as we attempt once again to attack and cure the blood cancers for the Leukemia Lymphoma Society of America, 877-379-8888.
Here are the details.
It was the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act.
That's what Bill Clinton did.
This is the act that Clinton used to put 100,000 new cops on the street.
But that never happened, by the way.
We've reviewed this before.
The 100,000 cops program was a PR program.
There were some new cops.
And what happened was a local community, the federal government would pay the full salary for, say, five new cops for the first year.
Then the next year, you local community had to come up with 25% of the salary.
And after three or four years, you'd have to pay the entire salary, whatever new cops.
So it was a scam that Clinton ran for great PR.
But the reason this happened was that African-American community leaders were beseeching him to do something because this crack crocane and other drugs too, but it was primarily crack, were out of control.
You know, these minority neighborhoods were already being ravaged just with the cultural decay that was occurring in the country.
And you put this on top of it.
I mean, the dealers were giving it away, selling it for very little, getting people hooked.
And that's all it took.
And so 100,000 midnight basketball is all kinds of things that Clinton initiated here at the behest of the very people who are out there protesting him now.
And all of this, the renewed interest in crime in African-American neighborhoods, poor neighborhoods, minority neighborhoods, not just African-American, the renewed interest traces all the way back to the 1994 Violent Crime Act.
It was the largest crime bill in the history of the country, 356 pages.
$9.7 billion in funding for prisons.
The Democrats did this, folks.
There was $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs, and that's where midnight basketball was.
The Democrats demanded all this, and they did it.
And so Black Lives, and they're out there running like this is a Republican problem because the Republicans are the racists and the bigots, and it's not that at all.
And it's all coming home to roost.
And Clinton doesn't like it.
He doesn't like these people showing up and heckling him because he knows.
And that's why he's reacting the way he is.
Meanwhile, Hillary's biting her nails because she doesn't like any of this either, because they're trying to pass this off as a Republican-related problem.
It's fascinating to see.
And we're not going to let go of this because this is funny, but it's also very crucially important.
This Black Lives Matter movement is part of the left wing that is distorting cultural situations in this country and affixing blame to people that have no blame whatsoever with the decay.
Actually, out there denying that there's even any black on black crime, which means you can't admit that Chicago exists.
So we've got more on it, and we will stay up to speed.
And once again, folks, I don't know how to say I just got a report on the activity in our curathon for this hour.
I'm reluctant to pass on good news because I'm afraid that it might cause people, oh, wow, man, we don't have to do as much.
We're up over 200% from last year in the first hour.
Up over 200%.
It's all on you.
You all are just the absolute best audience in media.
And we have two more hours of this.
I'm so proud.
I'm really honored to host a program with.
And I know you.
I know who you are without seeing you.
I know who you are.
And I treasure the fact that you're there.
Leukemia, lymphoma, 877-379-8888.
We will be back after this.
26th annual Radiothon Curathon as we once again seek to cure leukemia and lymphoma.
877-379-8888.
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