The other day in the mail, well, I guess it was the mail doesn't matter.
In the arriving stuff, there was this envelope from an inventor out in Irvine, California, and it was for something called a perfect draw.
P-E-R-F-E-C draw.
Perfect, no T in there, perfect draw.
Look at that guy in Fox.
Looks like Ted Kennedy as J.R. Ewing with a black cowboy hat.
Look at that guy.
Is that not looking like Ted Kennedy?
And J.R. Ewing?
I don't know who it is.
It doesn't matter who it is.
It's irrelevant.
I'm sorry to get distracted.
Anyway, so open this thing up.
For you cigar smokers, what is the number one problem you have?
For me, you never know whether a cigar is going to be any good or not until you clip it and you draw on it.
And I don't know about you, but 30%, maybe more of the cigars have to be thrown away because the draw is so tight, you get a hernia trying to smoke it.
And in the past, wizards of smart have said, rush, get a meat thermometer and just jam that meat thermometer down there into the cigar and it'll drill a hole in there.
It never works because the hole just fills in.
What this thing is, this thing's got, I don't know how to describe it.
It's like a miniature bunch of propellers on it.
And you screw it in there.
And when you take it out, it actually brings some of the tobacco out.
And I have so far saved 10 cigars I would have had to throw away.
You can even use the darn thing, like a cigar I'm smoking now.
I'm halfway through it and all of a sudden it plugged up.
It just happens because the humidity and the heat, things expand and the draw just got tight.
I would have had to throw it away.
And so I got an hour left, so go get a small one, light that one up.
No, I can finish it.
I'll just take that perfect draw thing in there, screw it in there, and then slowly draw it out, bring some more tobacco out, save the cigar for the rest of the show.
Now, for us cigar smokers, that is a big deal.
And that's why I am mentioning, I'd never heard of this thing.
I think they're advertising in Cigar Aficionado, and I haven't seen the latest issue.
So whoever sent me this thing, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
It's $39.95.
I just told Snerdley I ordered him one.
Snerdley loves the Padrones.
The Padrone people are so great.
They send me cigars and they're just the best.
And Snerdly loves them.
You know, I'll open, let's sit this big box and I'll open the box and I'll see there's three or four missing from the last time I looked at it and I say, aha, Snerdley snuck in here when I wasn't looking.
But I don't care because I like sharing the things.
Who is this?
Sid Miller, Texas Agriculture Commissioner.
I guarantee you, this guy, that is exactly what you take J.R. Ewing and add Ted Kennedy and his weight to his face and that's who that guy is.
It's uncanny.
Anyway, folks, greetings and welcome back.
It's great to have you here on the Rush Limbaugh program of the Excellence in Broadcasting where Donald Trump was just interviewed.
Oh, that reminds me.
Folks, I admit here, I'm somewhat surprised, maybe a little frustrated when I keep hearing people accusing Trump of going off the issues because he doesn't that much.
If your only access to Trump is the media, they can make it look like that's all he's doing is complaining about people that attack him.
And it's late in the game, and I'm sorry, I should have suggested this earlier.
But some of you ought to really take the time to watch one of these Trump rallies from start to finish.
There are YouTube channels.
You can do it on Facebook.
And every, well, not every rally, but seems like every rally, Drudge has a link.
Trump in Ohio, Trump in Pennsylvania, and it links to the YouTube channel that carries Trump.
And I would suggest that you watch one front to back.
Now, Trump does stream a consciousness.
He will remind himself of something halfway through a sentence and start talking about it.
But he stays on point.
I saw one of these Trump rallies last week.
And I even said here on this program that if the media were to cover these things, he'd be leading by 10 points because he is on issue.
And he is on point and on message.
And what he's saying has got his crowds going crazy and going nuts.
And when he deviates and starts responding to some of the challengers or some of the critics, be it the women have come forward or whoever, it's funny the way he does it.
It's enjoyable.
It's not somebody that makes you nervous, like he's lost his place.
And come on, Trump, get back on point.
You don't have that reaction to it.
Now, if all you do is see snippets of Trump as presented to you by the media, then you're going to get the impression that he's off-message a lot.
But he's actually not at these rallies.
Now, we had a call earlier from a woman, Alicia Fromp.
She was in New Jersey.
And her point was that there's an automatic ground game at every Trump rally just waiting to be employed, is waiting to be energized and motivated.
And I was kind of surprised.
She was saying a lot of people don't know what to do.
They don't know how to tell people to go get an absentee ballot or where to go to early vote or register.
And that kind of struck me.
There's some things I just assumed had been going on.
Maybe they haven't been.
But you've got, at every Trump rally, you're going to have a minimum of 5,000 to 7,000 people.
Whatever the venue is, it's going to be filled.
If it's an airplane hangar, if it is an arena in a city, and now some of these rallies are 10,000 with 5,000 outside wanting to get in.
I just assumed that there were people registering Republican voters at these events.
But with that call that we had from Alicia in New Jersey, I'm beginning to question maybe.
So who's responsible, Mr. Snerdley, whose responsibility would it be?
You got a Trump rally, say, in Tampa.
You've got, say, 12,000 people.
You would think that there would be somebody there registering those people that are not registered, registered, who would be state RNC, the state party, the Florida.
Anyway, try to catch one of these things on the internet.
The networks were televising them in total during the primaries, but they're not doing that now.
Of course, they can't do that now.
They wouldn't, they'd be caught dead doing it now.
But you can see them at various links on the web.
Now, Trump is in Washington today to participate in a grand opening of his new hotel there.
And the conventional wisdom is, see, see, what an idiot.
Doesn't this guy know that we're less than two weeks out?
He doesn't have time to be doing it.
See, he's just selfish.
He's just greedy.
The only thing Trump's doing cares about himself.
I honestly, folks, I understand that reaction, but it's so dead wrong.
I honestly, I can't recall somebody who seems as indefatigable as Donald Trump.
The guy is doing four rallies a day.
The guy is traveling all over this country.
The guy is meeting with individual groups, large and small, then going out and do a rally.
And then he has lunch and dinner on the day of debates with people and then goes and does the debate and leaves for the rally in the next city the next morning.
I don't, especially when you compare to Hillary Clinton, how in the world can you say that Trump is not working hard enough at this?
I mean, takes the time from his campaign to celebrate the grand opening of his hotel.
He turns that into a campaign appearance of sorts, too.
What's wrong with that?
Again, this is what it looks like when somebody from the outside is challenging.
In fact, Dana Bash, CNN, asked Trump about this.
She interviewed him at the grand opening of Trump International Hotel.
And she said to him, so to people who say you're taking time out of swing states to go do this at your hotel, what do you say?
And Trump said, I say the following.
You've been covering me for the last long time.
I did yesterday eight stops, three major speeches.
And I've been doing this for weeks straight.
For you to ask me that question is actually very insulting because Hillary Clinton does one stop, then goes home and sleeps.
I think it's a very rude question, to be honest with you.
And then they reply, they report that Trump was very defensive.
Very, very defensive.
As something else, by the way, I've been meaning to mention this all day and it slipped my mind, but this just jogged my memory.
This Megan Kelly Newt Gingrich dust stuff.
I mentioned today at the opening of the program, CNN spent 20 minutes on what happened on the Megan Kelly show on Fox last night.
CNN spent 20 minutes, essentially, they gave their competitor 20 minutes of airtime.
I've never heard of that.
Now, I know that the lines of demarcation are different than they used to be back in the old days, but I'm a dinosaur when it comes to that stuff.
The competition to me doesn't exist, and you don't talk about them one way or the other.
You don't build them up, you know, but you just don't mention them.
That's the way I learned.
That's the way I was taught, and that's what my instincts are.
CNN, 20 minutes.
And you know why they did?
Because in their opinion, Megan Kelly made Newt look silly and therefore made Trump look silly.
So CNN said, we don't care if we're ending up promoting our competitor.
The bottom line is we want to smack Trump, and Trump got smacked last night, and we're happy to show it.
And then another thought hit me.
It's not a new thought.
It's something that really bugs me and irritates me.
And that is that people in the media consider themselves above criticism.
Here's Dan Abash telling Trump and everybody else, man, oh, Donald Trump, he was really defensive when I asked him why he showed up at his hotel.
You want to talk about defensive?
Criticize somebody in the media.
You want to talk about childish immaturity and defensiveness?
These people, you're not entitled to criticize them.
Why, they're journalists.
They're just the messengers.
You must be having anger issues if you criticize me.
You can't criticize me.
Who do you think you are?
They think they're above all of that.
It's one of the many things about that profession that's always irritated me as they carve out these special places for themselves.
And they are experts in dishing it out.
But boy, you turn it around on them and they can't take it.
And furthermore, they don't think they should have to take it.
And they're going to punish you for daring to criticize them.
Yet they can sit there and try to destroy you day in and day out.
Trump gets defensive when asked why he took time off from the campaign to open his hotel.
It just goes to show that you cannot, you cannot count on the media seeing things your way.
Even if they do, they won't report it.
Rather than see Trump working hard and combining all kinds of, you know, I tell you, my takeaway is, and all of this, frankly, I don't know how many of you have stopped to think of this.
How many Republicans do you know who would have caved into all this pressure and criticism by now?
Just said the hell with this.
I don't need this.
And they would have changed their campaign and do whatever necessary to stop the criticism.
Trump has not.
He has not given up.
He has not at one moment acted like he believes any of these polls.
And in the process, he's not permitted his supporters to give up.
He's kept his supporters engaged and enthused.
Some of them may be nervous because of the polls.
But Trump is not acting like he's bothered by it.
He's continuing to do all these appearances.
He's scheduling more of them.
He squeezes in the grand opening of his hotel because it allows him to say it came in under budget and on time and early.
And this is the kind of efficiency our country needs and our government needs.
I guess there's a difference in being a natural pessimist and a natural optimist.
Okay, you got to hear this.
We've played these bites previous occasions, but I want to let you hear them again.
Obamacare is on the table, and what it was designed to be is now being questioned.
I mean, there's some people like Kevin Williamson, I think is the name, at National Review Online, wrote a piece last night essentially poo-pooing the theory that Obamacare was designed to fail as it is failing, that it was designed to, so as to speed the process towards single-payer.
He thinks that's an incorrect conspiracy theory.
And the alternative, the thing he believes is that they really designed this because this is what they think works.
That they're this dumb, that they are this inexperienced, this incompetent, this unqualified.
They actually thought this would work.
Either way, I mean, they deserve to be criticized.
I do think that it is designed to fail to get us to single payer only because Obama has said so.
And we have a bunch of those times on tape, which you will hear when we get back after this.
All right, audio soundbite number 25.
This is a montage of then Senator Barack Obama.
This is from the month of November in 2007.
He's talking to a couple of different audiences here because it's a montage of comments that he has made about his plans for health care reform.
This is again, now this is nine years ago, folks.
It is my belief that not just politically, but also economically, it's better for us to start getting a system in place, a universal health care system, signed into law by the end of my first term as president, and build off that system to further to make it more rational.
By the way, Canada did not start off immediately for the single-payer system.
They had a similar transition step.
It's a transitional system building on the existing systems that we have.
Let's say that I proposed a plan that moved to a single-payer system.
Let's say Medicare Plus.
Essentially, everybody can buy into Medicare, for example.
Transitioning a system is a very difficult and costly and lengthy enterprise.
It's not like you can turn on a switch and you go from one system to another.
So here you have multiple interviews and appearances in 2007 explaining how his proposal would be an interim step.
Can't do it all at once.
Can't go because politically people wouldn't accept it.
That you can't go from where we were to single payer overnight.
He was warning his supporters, be patient with me.
It's going to take time.
Keep in mind, he is not knowledgeable on health care or health insurance at all.
He's a wonk.
He's never been in the health care industry or the insurance industry in his life.
He doesn't know a thing about it.
And yet he presumes to know better than anybody how to reform it, how to make it work.
But everything to him about it is political.
Here is another montage of Obama this March 2007 to a different group of people.
I don't think we're going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately.
There's going to be potentially some transition process.
I can envision a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out.
There's no denying that part of the solution in the healthcare arena as we transition and deal with the legacy systems that we've inherited will probably require some additional money.
I don't think we're going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately.
There's going to be potentially some transition process.
I can envision a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out.
I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care plan.
A single payer health care plan.
Universal health care plan.
That's what I'd like to see.
That last is from 2003 when he's just diddling around in the state of Illinois.
2003.
A single payer.
I'm a proponent.
Single payer universal health care plan.
He's telling audiences of supporters and other academics how he's going to get there.
And we're right in the middle of his plan.
We're in fact ahead of it.
He thought it would not be happening until the end of his second term.
And we're actually right on schedule.
Here he is from 2004.
What I'm looking at is a very specific proposal that would provide health care coverage for all children who need it all across the United States, would allow 55 to 64 year olds to buy into the Medicare system.
And I think that if we could start with children and those persons 55 to 64 that are most vulnerable, then we can start filling in those holes and ultimately, I think, move in the direction of a universal health care plan.
Everything that he's on record saying indicates single-payer, universal health care provided by government.
It is part of the plan, and it requires Obamacare to fail.
You want to hear something that is just Well, it's mind-boggling, but it is just perfect as an illustration of how convoluted things are.
This is Chris Saliza, our old buddy, Chris Salizza at the Washington Post.
And Chris Salizza is our old buddy.
He's a nice guy.
I occasionally have email exchanges back and forth with him where he will ask me for the conservative interpretation of something when he's not sure of it himself.
And I don't think he's ever taken me out of context or misquoted me like most of them have.
He's got a piece today, and the headline is just incredible in what it admits.
In an alternate universe, this Obamacare news is absolutely devastating for Hillary Clinton.
And it is, folks, what is happening to Obamacare in any other campaign, you combine what's happening to Obamacare with the state of the economy, and the party in power would be history.
The polls would show it.
It wouldn't even be close.
And the party in power would be scared to death how many House and Senate seats it was going to lose.
It's that bad.
The economy itself, 94 million Americans plus not working.
Unemployment rate, not 5%, not 5.2.
It's more like 16 to 20%.
And if you go into certain demographics, it's even higher than that.
The jobs created are part-time mostly.
Millennial college education circumstances, student loans are astronomical.
The prospect of paying them back before you can start to acquire your own personal wealth is so far down the road in the future you can't see it.
There isn't any legitimate reason for optimism unless you're a hedge funder or somebody with connections on Wall Street where the Federal Reserve has been printing and pumping money for you.
But it's bad.
And Obamacare, what was promised and as important as health care and insurance, the Democrat Party has made health insurance.
You remember how they've sold it?
Remember all these people they would parade in front of us and tell us that they're one paycheck away, or no, sorry, they're one disease away from bankruptcy.
They're one trip to the emergency room away from bankruptcy.
Remember all that?
And they have convinced people.
Harris Wofford, who ran for the Senate in Pennsylvania back in 1990, some odd, he was the guy who started this whole health care entitlement notion.
Well, it actually started in the 60s when they wanted all that Medicare stuff.
But he, in the modern era, popularized it by saying, if the Constitution guarantees everybody a lawyer, whether they can afford one or not, then it, by God, ought to insure, provide them health insurance as well.
And the Democrats glommed onto that, made it a quasi-constitutional, moral, constitutional right.
And they created in the minds of people this entitlement.
And then the way they managed the healthcare system anyway caused prices to skyrocket way out of proportion with people's ability to pay.
So that the only hope anybody had for catastrophic injury was health insurance.
You know how it all fell out.
I mean, healthcare is something that you can't afford.
Catastrophic, you can't even contemplate affording it.
And this has all been done by the people who claim they're the experts in fixing it and structuring it.
I mean, it's devastating.
This, what they have done to the American healthcare system should disqualify the Democrat Party for a generation.
And it would have in any other year if it weren't for the fact that the president of this party happens to be African-American and therefore immune to any critical analysis.
And if other events had not coalesced at a moment in time where the drive-by media feds said to themselves that whatever is necessary to defeat Republicans, we will do.
Even if it means selling out the American people and ensuring that their economy sucks and that their health care system sucks, we will do whatever it takes.
And so that's where we are.
And Saliza knows it.
This guy, he knows it.
The news broke Monday.
The costs of insurance premiums for those in the nationally run Obamacare Exchange would soar 25% on average in 2017, even as the number of plans to choose from would sink drastically.
This would be big news at any point in this election.
The signature achievement of the outgoing Democrat president appears to be fulfilling many of the doom and gloom predictions Republicans made when the law passed.
Costs are rising for many.
Major insurers like Aetna are dropping out.
And the law, which has never been terribly popular, isn't faring any better in most credible polling these days.
For Clinton, this is where it gets interesting.
Look at me.
Listen to this.
For Clinton, who has latched herself to President Obama throughout both the primary and the general election, this should be a very bad development.
Very bad.
If you wanted to make the case that Clinton represents an extension of the bad part of the Obama presidency, this is a gift of epic proportions.
Epic.
Here's the problem.
Donald Trump is the Republican presidential nominee.
Wait a minute.
How does that change any of the facts about Obamacare?
What does it matter who the nominee is?
Why does Trump, being the nominee, change everything Saliza just wrote?
It doesn't change one fact.
For that matter, how does Trump being the nominee change any of the facts revealed in the WikiLeaks emails, which the drive-bys are also refusing to cover?
Solissa then continues.
He has spent the last few weeks dealing with allegations of sexual harassment from 11 women and a hot mic tape in which he made a series of lewd comments about women.
That's not to mention his attacks on fellow Republicans as insufficiently loyal to him, his insistence that the entire press is rigged, and description of Clinton in the final debate as such a nasty woman.
So Trump doing all that cancels out the facts of the absolute disaster that is Obamacare.
What does any of that, Trump's lewd comments about women, the hot mic tape, Republicans insufficiently, what does that have to do with Obamacare and the facts of its disastrous implementation?
What does that have to do with it?
What does any of this have to do with the reality that Obamacare premiums are going through the roof?
Is Salissa saying that Trump defending himself from scurrilous sex allegations is keeping the media from covering this?
Whose fault is that?
Or is he saying, well, I don't care how bad this Obamacare stuff is.
The fact that Trump is the nominee means we got to put up with how bad Obamacare is because Trump's actually horrible.
Is that what he's saying?
Trump, through those and any number of other self-inflicted wounds, has made the election a referendum on him.
Is that what's happened?
I think it's the fact that the drive-by media and the Hillary campaign have made this election referendum on Trump.
And that was the plan for the get-go.
The plan for the get-go was to say Trump is unfit.
Trump is unsuited.
Trump is unqualified.
Hillary's never wanted to talk about the issues.
Hillary's never asked to explain any of this.
Hillary gets away with saying that she wants to improve and expand healthcare.
Grab sunbite number 24 yesterday, Hollywood, Florida.
She was on the radio.
Notice I'm not telling you what station because I don't know if it's mine, so I'm not, that's just me.
But she was on the radio in South Florida.
It might be my station, in which case I'm missing a chance to plug them, but I'm not going to take the chance because I don't know.
Sorry.
That's just anyway, this is what she said.
She was being asked about Obamacare and the mess that it is.
Here's her answer.
We're going to make changes to fix problems like that.
The president and I have talked about it.
And look, this is a major step forward.
20 million people.
And actually, I'm sure you know this.
Predominantly working people, African-American, Latino people now have access to insurance, but the costs have gone up too much.
So we're going to really tackle that.
Oh, yeah.
She is admitting, yeah, we don't know what we're doing, and we've really screwed it up.
And the people of color in this country, they're the ones that really need insurance, but they can't afford it.
I talked to Obama about it, and we're going to fix it.
Right.
We're going to hand over the keys to the people who don't know how to design the car.
We're going to hand over the keys to people that have demonstrated they don't know what they're doing.
Oh, yeah, I talked to Obama about it.
We're going to make sure that African Americans and Latinos, poor people of color, who, by the way, are still poor after voting for us for 50 years, we're going to make sure they can't afford it next year either, because that's going to be the result.
Here's Bob in Scottsdale, Arizona.
I'm glad you waved it, sir.
Hi.
Hello, Rush.
What a blessing to talk to you.
Thank you, sir.
Appreciate that.
I have been listening for a long time and just wanted to call in because you made a comment about the interaction between Megan Kelly and Newt.
And I've been listening to Fox for a while and watching the Kelly file because I really thought that she did a good job with journalism and stuff, but I've noticed a progressive movement in her tone and stuff.
And last night really was it for me.
I'm done listening to her because in interaction with Newt, specifically, when they were talking about stuff and Newt responded, she made a comment that just sparked me and picked me off.
She said, I am a protector of women in her comment.
And I thought, no, wait a minute.
I thought her job was to do the news, not to be an editorialist and protecting women.
I honest to God, I haven't seen the whole thing.
So I didn't see that.
She said she was there to protect women from predators like Trump.
From predators.
Yeah.
She said, I'm a protector of women.
I'm a protector of women, and he's the one that's the predator.
Oh, and that must be when Newt said, well, then would you say Bill Clinton's sexual predator at the same sentence?
She wouldn't do it?
That's right.
See, that's when I, if I were Newt, that's when I would have said, so you want to defend women by promoting the woman who enabled her husband in his sexual predator behavior.
That's what I would have said.
But it's easy to say that after the fact.
I'm not criticizing Newt.
I'm just.
No, no.
The issue that just drove a wedge for me for Kelly, Megan Kelly, was that here she purports to be a news anchor giving us the news, and now she is communicating.
I've noticed the people she's had on the discussions she's had.
I appreciate it.
I don't mean to be rude.
I'm out of time, and I do have some things to say, but sadly, I don't have time right now.
And that's it for today, folks.
Fastest three hours in media.
And we've got more in 21 hours.
Whatever happens between now and then, be up and running and revved and ready to go.