RUSH: There was somebody out there, ladies and gentlemen, by the name of Peter Schiff, and I don’t even know who Peter Schiff is, but Peter Schiff said that as the markets drop we are not seeing the problem, we’re seeing the solution. When the markets drop we know we got a problem. The markets dropping are the beginning of the solution. And of course President Obama and Congress are trying to prevent the solution and make the problem even worse. This is not just Open Line Friday today, folks, this is Last Chance Friday, and admittedly, our last chance is very small. The next generation of our economy is in the hands of primarily two people here, maybe three, but primarily two since Susan Collins is already committed. Arlen Specter and Olympia Snowe hold in their hands the future of the United States economy, 435 representatives, 100 senators will vote on the biggest spending spree in history without reading it. It’s over a thousand pages. It was not made available ’til 11 o’clock last night. Do you know that lobbyists got a copy of the bill before anybody on Capitol Hill got a copy of it, including congressional staff? Lobbyists got the bill prior to any congressional staff or members of the House and Senate last night.
In order for a member of Congress to read the whole bill, before the vote today, they would have had to start at 11 o’clock last night and read over two-and-a-half pages a minute until the vote was taken. Nobody has read it. There was a promise from the Obama administration, the new era of responsibility and transparency, that all such legislation would be posted on the Internet for five days so that the public could read what is being voted on. Ain’t going to happen. In addition, they have reformatted the bill. They’ve made it a PDF file when they posted it. Now, for those of you that don’t use computers, basically what that means is that it cannot be keyword searched. A PDF file is essentially a picture of a page, and so you can read every page but you cannot keyword search it. It’s not a text file as legislation normally is, as posted on these public websites. They don’t want anybody knowing what’s in this. They want it happening as fast as possible so nobody can know what’s in it. The so-called watchdog media, I’ll tell you, it is embarrassing. I’ve got some audio sound bites from the Drive-Bys coming up today. One of them is Anderson Cooper last night on CNN.
I don’t know if these people know just how much they are embarrassing themselves. They not only have abandoned their professional responsibility here, it’s almost to the point they have abandoned their citizenship. They have no idea what’s in this, and yet they are promoting it. Now, in the old days, you know, there are things happening in this country today, things being accepted in this country today that ten years ago would not have been. We have the Drive-By Media now having become activists. They’re not journalists, they’re not curious, they are simple activists. They are promoting, they are pushing this piece of legislation without any idea what’s in it. There’s not a one of them who can raise his hand and say, ‘Yes, I’ve read it. I know what’s in it and here’s why I think it’s good.’ There’s not one of them. The only way they can stand up and say they support this, ‘Hey, it’s Obama, change. He won the election; he gets what he wants; he’s our guy.’ Isn’t it interesting that one of the reasons mainstream journalism exists, ostensibly, is to probe people in positions of power in government. If there were a handbook — and there is — that would be one of the primary things.
In the old days, folks, if you worked in a tiny little worthless newspaper in some little burg, and you wanted to work at a bigger paper, what you had to do was find some powerful person in the town where you worked and do a profile destroying them, finding out how they got their power, who they cheated, who they screwed in the process, even if you had to make it up, as long as you took out somebody in power, you got noticed by the bigger papers, and then they brought you in. Today, mainstream journalists are out trying to destroy average Americans who are not in power politically, who are trying to get the truth out about this legislation and this president. And so the mainstream media is now just part of the Obama army, and it is embarrassing to watch, because, as these people engage in this behavior, it is quite obvious that they are among the most uninformed of citizens in the country. They are among the most uneducated, and yet they claim to be members of the elite, better and smarter than everyone else. Only they are capable of probing people in power. But don’t you dare probe them, don’t you dare try to find out what kind of life failings they’ve had either in their youth or in their college days or as adults, don’t try to find out about their divorces, don’t try to find out about their DUIs, they aren’t the story, they have always said.
Well, they have become the story. They have inserted themselves right smack-dab in the story. Their motives are just as subject to investigation as are any elected officials. They have joined forces, they have become activists. It is embarrassing to watch this play out. It is as though they are unconcerned about the effect on their own lives, of this legislation. They are unconcerned about the effect on their own families, of this legislation. They are unconcerned about the effect on the country, of this legislation. None of that matters. They don’t even care to know what’s in it. They’re not the slightest bit curious. It is breathtaking to behold the dissent to which people who claim and think that they’re the smartest people in the room have joined the dunce class. It’s also quite dangerous when they join forces with powerful people to try to destroy harmless, innocent individual citizens such as Joe the Plumber, so forth. Oh, they still will poke at people in power if they are Republicans, i.e., Sarah Palin, but they will not deign to investigate one suspicious thing.
This guy, Obama, it’s funny on one hand, but, you know, it’s serious at the same time. He goes on television a couple days ago and says, (paraphrasing) ‘Yeah, I’m going out to Peoria, I’m going to see Caterpillar’s CEO, he’s on my economic team, he told me stimulus bill passes, and he’s gonna start hiring people.’ So they asked the Caterpillar CEO yesterday, ‘No, it’s going to be a while before we start hiring people. I’ve looked at this, there’s not a whole lot in this for heavy construction.’ Now, if there’s not a whole lot for heavy construction it means you don’t need road graders and the things that the Caterpillar makes, which means there’s not a whole lot of road building, bridge building and everything else in there. By the way, the net cost of this thing, when you add it all up over ten years and the interest and the debt, $3.7 trillion from this 800 and whatever it is billion, that’s the calculation from our friends at the Heritage Foundation, AskHeritage.org. Thank God for these people. I’ve got in my stack here four or five different stories — and we’ll link to all of them at RushLimbaugh.com — detailing things in this bill that you will not find reported anywhere else. Their scholars have been on the case, just go to the website, it’s AskHeritage.org. That’s what I did. In fact, I’ve got even more about Heritage later on. They’ve got a little film, a movie, 33 Minutes it’s called, that’s all it would take if somebody launched nuclear weapons against us.
The reason why this is interesting is that the administration and some national security officials are saying our economy possess a greater threat than terrorism. Some people, by the way, are beginning to wonder if what happened last September with that massive run on the banks wasn’t terrorism of a sort. I’m getting way ahead of myself as far as the content of the program today is concerned. The Heritage Foundation, here’s just one story, ‘Why the Rush?’ and it talks to all kinds of people, and nobody knows what’s in it, and one guy says, ‘If you can tell me what’s in it and if you can tell me what’s going to happen because of this, then you are trying to con me, because there’s nobody that knows.’ The more that comes out about this bill, the less it makes sense, even The Politico, which is one of these places totally in the tank for Obama, reports today the projected local job creation numbers that the White House is using to lobby for the bill simply don’t add up. The Wall Street Journal reports federal agencies simply don’t have the contracting manpower to manage what is a truly unprecedented explosion of government spending.
And get this, you probably heard about this. Harry Reid got his train from Disneyland to Las Vegas. It’s a train that travels 311 miles an hour and makes the trip in two hours. That’s an $8 billion earmark. The environmental impact studies alone will take more than five years to complete. Before they even break ground on the construction of this super train, what is the five years of environmental impact studies gonna cost? It’s an abomination. It is an outright abomination and if there were a watchdog media that were concerned, either as professionals or as citizens, this thing would be in huge trouble. But it’s not. Does anybody in his or her right mind think that the biggest spending spree in history has to be voted on before anybody reads it today or that the economy will collapse? It’s the same modus operandi: We don’t have time, Obama wants this, we have to vote for it. It’s Last Chance Friday. If you think the only thing that can save our economy is that Congress vote today before anyone has time to read it, then you probably are one of the 50% of non-taxpayers that are not going to have to pay for this.
Do you know this thing also gets rid of welfare reform? This thing totally gets rid of welfare reform. This bill will reward state governments for the more people they enroll on non-work required welfare plans. Everything we told you about health care is in the final bill. It sets up the bureaucracy for national health care. I’ve been asked this by everybody when I run into them, $2 billion is there for ACORN, for neighborhood stabilization. It’s down from the four, but still the Democrats are using you taxpayers to fund one of their organizations that engages in illegal voter fraud, or voter registration vote fraud, in essence, and other things. Now, interesting, when we get to the Senate for the vote today, Senator Kennedy is too ill to make it. He will not be able to get to Washington. They need 60 votes on this. Harry Reid says he’s going to try to find a parliamentary rule to ensure that neither Specter, Collins, or Snowe is the 60th vote. He is going to protect them. He is going to find a way that they get to vote prior to where they would in the roll call so that their votes are tabulated before the magic 60th vote takes place. That’s why I say this is Last Chance Friday. It’s the last chance for Olympia Snowe and Arlen Specter to understand what they hold in their hands. What they hold in their hands is the next generation of our economy in the tank. It’s in the hands of two Republicans. The Republicans in the House cannot stop this.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Once again from the Heritage Foundation: ‘True Cost of Stimulus: $3.27 Trillion — All of the major news outlets are reporting that the stimulus bill voted out of conference committee last night has a meager $789 billion price tag. This number is pure fantasy. No one believes that the increased funding for programs the left loves like Head Start, Medicaid, COBRA, and the Earned Income Tax Credit is in anyway temporary. No Congress under control of the left will ever cut funding for these programs. So what is the true cost of the stimulus if these spending increases are made permanent? Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) asked the Congressional Budget Office to estimate the impact of permanently extending the 20 most popular provisions of the stimulus bill. What did the CBO find?’
Well, there’s a chart and a table here that Heritage publishes. ‘[T]he true 10 year cost of the stimulus bill $2.527 trillion in spending with another $744 billion cost in debt servicing. Total bill for the Generational Theft Act: $3.27 trillion.’ Senator McCain is calling it ‘generational theft,’ which is exactly what it is. Now, those of you who are new to the program or because of all this, those of you who are new to the whole concept of paying attention to legislative politics my instinct tells me that some of you are saying, ‘What’s the big deal about spending?’ All of your life have maybe heard peripherally that we’re running budget deficits and that we have a national debt this high and you’ve never seen the sky fall because of it. Well, you are now. That’s the bottom line here.
The #1 culprit in what’s happening now is debt. At every level you will find irresponsible, unmanageable debt from the subprime crisis, to the ‘toxic assets’ that were created to try to give to the subprime mortgages, which had none from the get-go, to the government owing more than it can ever pay back, to individual consumer debt. It’s just out the window, and it’s now in the process of all coming due — and the best thing to do is to let it play out. We are going to pretend that we can manage our way out of this with Big Government, Big Brother helping us, experience as little pain as possible when in fact what they are on the verge of doing is going to cause pain that you can’t believe. This is going to be so inflationary. By the way, Heritage touches on this, too, today.
You can see all of this at AskHeritage.org. They touch on the inescapable inflationary aspects of this down the road. It’s impossible for inflation not to increase, and probably dramatically because of all this. But aside from all that, the reason that all of this spending matters is that we have lived in a capitalist country all of our lives, and there have been battles throughout our nation’s history between people who believe in liberal socialism and capitalism because capitalism is said to provide unequal, unfair outcomes. Capitalism features winners and features losers. Liberalism pretends to level the playing field and say, ‘There will not be any losers if, one, we have Central Planning and people who have ‘compassion’ at the top running it.’
Well, what’s going to happen here, in order for liberalism, socialism to prevail, they have to find an enemy, they have to find demons, and they have. The demons now are the achievers in this country. As I have always said, ‘The left never seeks to make lives more equal by elevating those at the bottom so that they, too, might become more prosperous. Liberalism, socialism targets people at the top as achievers and punishes them, tries to take away from them so that everybody is equally miserable.’ All of this spending is going to mean far less money in the private sector where your jobs are. If employers have far less money to expand and hire and invest via borrowing, then you can kiss massive reemployment good-bye for a while.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So we find ourselves, ladies and gentlemen, here on Last Chance Friday in a new ‘era of responsibility’ as articulated by President Obama, the man who does not want you listening to this program. President Obama says his administration is going to be the most transparent in our nation’s history. Now, according to the Cybercast News Service and a lot of other people now, not one senator will have read the final Porkulus spending bill before they vote on it. I want to share with you a couple quotes from President Obama before the Porkulus bill was voted on in the House and the Senate. One of President Obama’s statements was, ‘All of you are committed to building a more responsible, more accountable government, and part of what that means is making sure that we’re spending precious tax dollars wisely and cutting costs wherever possible. During this period of economic emergency, families are tightening their belts. So should Washington.’
Folks, it doesn’t matter what he says. It’s how he says it. Because this is the direct opposite of what has happened. Now, if I sit here and say, ‘President Obama is lying,’ nobody wants to hear that. They’re going to hate me. They’re going to think I’m nitpicking. They’re going to think I’m a sore loser — which goes to illustrate the state in which we find ourselves, because this is an out-and-out lie. What has happened is the opposite of responsible. There is no accountability. There is no precious, wise spending of tax dollars here. It’s irresponsible as hell. There are no costs being cut whatsoever — and Washington is doing the opposite of tightening its belt. This is the largest spending increase in one piece of legislation in the history of this country, and there’s no evidence in this country for 80 years that anything like this has ever worked before.
And then Obama said this: ‘Those of us who manage the public’s knowledge…’ Remember that? ‘Those of us who manage the public’s knowledge will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can they restore the vital trust between the people and their government.’ None of this except ‘manage the public’s knowledge,’ is true. That’s exactly what they do. I really never thought of government doing that until Obama came, and that’s exactly what they’re doing, government as an entity that manages the public’s knowledge, and he’s got his willing accomplices in the Drive-By Media doing just that. They are managing the public’s knowledge, and they are targeting anybody who wants to get the truth out about what this administration’s doing.
I don’t like harping on this stuff. Since I’m the target of it, it sounds like sour grapes, but Bill Clinton was the latest to join the chorus on the Fairness Doctrine yesterday. Isn’t it interesting? Maurice Hinchey, member of Congress from New York, pushed it today. Tom Harkin did the day before, and Debbie Stabenow the day before that. We’ve had five or six days in a row — and it’s made them look like it’s just happening coincidentally. Clinton was being interviewed on Hispanic radio, and he was asked about the Fairness Doctrine. (doing Clinton impression) ‘Hell, yeah, you know, that Limbaugh guy is pretty entertaining, but I’ll tell you we need balance out there. I mean, the big money has always gone to right wing radio. We gotta change that.’ Mr. President, big money goes to American Idol. Big money goes to the Super Bowl. Big money goes to successful media presentations. We don’t raise funds here.
Look, I’m really uncomfortable talking about this ’cause I don’t like sounding like a victim, but make no mistake: they are targeting and they’re going to make every effort at coming after voices of dissent — and leading the charge to silence voices of dissent will be the Drive-By Media. They’re excited about it, too. It’s the First Amendment. The First Amendment is under assault, and the very people who have constitutional mention for whom the First Amendment was largely written — members of the press — are going to eagerly sign up to silence the voices of dissent, to ‘manage the public’s knowledge.’ This is frightening, frightening stuff. In addition to all the lies about accountable government, responsible government, spending precious tax dollars wisely, cutting costs wherever possible. None of this, none of this that Obama said, is happening. None of it.
He goes out and says the Caterpillar guy is going to start hiring people after the stimulus passes. The Caterpillar guy says, ‘Nah, nah, nah, nah. Not going to do that. It’s going to be a while.’ The media is harping on the Caterpillar guy saying he backstabbed Obama. The Caterpillar guy never said anything publicly about this. Obama is the one who did. My guess it was Obama trying to shape and ‘manage’ what the Caterpillar CEO was going to say by announcing it to the world before the meeting with this Caterpillar CEO. To his credit, when asked about it by ABC, he said, ‘No, I don’t think we’re going to,’ and then do you know that Anthony Zinni thought that he was promised the ambassadorial posting in Iraq and then he later found out that he wasn’t, but he thought that he was?
There was somebody else who came out of a meeting with Obama and was convinced he was nominated to something and going to be appointed to something, and he ended up not. This is three separate instances where people come out of a meeting with Obama thinking they’ve just been named to something or said that they’re going to be, and none of it’s right. Now, I guarantee you, if this were a Republican president, and all these things were happening, we would be close to mounting impeachment hearings, just over the cabinet nominations and the withdrawals and the tax cheats and all of that. But now we have all these people who think they’re told one thing by Obama in private, and turns out they heard him wrong. Not one bit of curiosity to explain this. There are just instant attacks on the people who say something opposite from Obama. Now, here’s a few audio sound bites to illustrate what’s going on here. This is classic. This is embarrassing, too. This is David Shuster, PMSNBC, and illustrates the ignorance. It illustrates the shill. It illustrates the depths of unprofessionalism and catastrophe to which the Main Street media has shrunk.
SHUSTER: Rush Limbaugh says it’s a trillion dollar failure filled with, quote, ‘Porkulus.’ Critics have slammed the stimulus bill, worrying that hundreds of billions of dollars of spending will be wasted on pork. There’s an argument over whether that’s true, but let’s take the argument. Could wasteful spending be just what we neeeeed?
RUSH: Okay, here’s a member of the press who dutifully reports what ‘critics’ are saying. That’s in the handbook. And then, what’s new to the handbook is: ‘Destroy the critics.’ When I get started at this show, the ‘critics,’ they were the heroes. The critics — all the minorities, the critics of the majority — they were the heroes. They were excused! If they wanted to go throw condoms in the middle of a mass at St. Patrick’s, we were told that we had to understand why. We had to understand their grievance. It was the only way they could be heard. The critics of the Pope had to have their voice, too. Now the critics are the ones that have to be silenced, the critics have to be destroyed, and the media is doing Obama’s work for him in this regard.
This question! ‘Could wasteful spending be what we need?’ This question asked by David Shuster evidences a total ignorance of history of this country, a total ignorance of finance and of economics. And yet, somebody at NBC has judged him qualified to host programs on this network. He doesn’t know anything. He only knows how to parrot the latest liberal plan, President Obama plan, what have you — and he’s learned very quickly how to take out (or try to take out) the critics. Because you see now it’s the critics who stand in the way. Let’s go to the House of Representatives this morning. Representative David Scott (D-GA) and David Dreier (R-CA) arguing about the written version of the Porkulus bill.
SCOTT: Our economy has leaks and holes in it all throughout. That’s why you’ve got a thousand pages there, because it’s big. Our economy is big. This last November the people of the United States made a decision, and that decision was to put Barack Obama as president, because they wanted a new direction. He has pleaded, he has cajoled, he’s gone all across this country asking for help. I say, Mrs. Speaker, let us give him the help.
RUSH: Here is David Dreier.
DREIER: We do have a thousand pages here. This was put online after midnight. We all voted in favor of 48 hours. You voted in favor of 48 hours to allow the American people and our colleagues to see this. We all understand the urgency of this matter. Has my colleague read this? Many of us have been trying to go through it since after midnight in the Rules Committee.
TAUSCHER: (bangs gavel)
SCOTT: I was up until three o’clock this morning reading it —
TAUSCHER: The gentleman will suspend!
DREIER: Would the gentleman as an expert address — (crosstalk)
SCOTT: — just as you have done, Mr. Dreier —
TAUSCHER: The gentleman will suspend!
SCOTT: — and we were here debating it yest — just last week.
DREIER: In two-and-a-half hours you went through a thousand pages?
TAUSCHER: (bangs gavel) The gentleman will suspend!
RUSH: That was Ellen Tauscher running the place at the time shutting down the argument there between David Dreier, the Republican; and David Scott, the Democrat from Maryland. On Fox News Channel’s Happening Now yesterday, Jane Skinner was talking to Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland. She says, ‘Can you guarantee there’s nothing been added back into this bill that will be taken out that will be upsetting or a surprise to anybody?’
VAN HOLLEN: I, uh — eh — uh — Oh, boy. I — I — I — Around here I — I cannot guarantee that. What I can say is that most of these provisions have been very publicly (pause) vetted. But, y-y-y-you know, I — I — I — I — I’d be hard-pressed to say that there’s nothing in here that would be a surprise.
RUSH: (laughs) The suspension of reality continues. Publicly vetted? None of this has been publicly vetted. What people in this country know about the contents of this bill has come from that media that the Obama Democrats want to shut down.