RUSH: Listen to this headline. It is a headline from CBS News and their website: ‘AIG Bonuses Renew Call for Congress to Read Bills.’ Is that not hilarious? Greetings. (laughing) Greetings, my friends, and welcome. It’s the Rush Limbaugh program. Here we are, the fastest three hours in media, broadcast excellence straight ahead as always. It is a thrill and an honor, delight to be with you. The phone number, if you want to be on the program when we eventually get to the phones is 800-282-2882, and the e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
I mean, he got excited. He got really, really, really revved up about that. Charities are upset about this. A lot of other people are upset about it. But if you understand why — okay, if there are fewer citizens — i.e., the private sector making charitable donations, guess who gets to make it up? If it’s made up, that’s the government. The government will be more in control of even that. That’s the umbrella under which all of this news about the financial sector or any other business or industry that the government is bailing out, i.e., taking over, you have to understand that this is all about the government creating chaos. Dick Morris was on Cavuto’s show yesterday and he said after he listened to Geithner’s plan on the toxic assets, he said he’s convinced that Obama wants the plan to fail. Now, this is taking it to a new level. I of course said I want Obama’s policies to fail. Bobby Jindal out there backed that up. Now, by the way, CNN is running a story, the Democrat National Committee claims that I am Bobby Jindal’s speechwriter. The only problem with that is I don’t write speeches. I don’t even write my own. The only way that you can get a transcript of my speech is to find out what I said after it when there are transcripts published, because I do not write speeches. And now they’re using me in a special election in New York.
They’re taking the attack Rush plan, Rahm and these guys, for a little test-drive in a special election up in New York, New York state. We’ll have details of that as the program unfolds. The CBS story: ”AIG Bonuses Renew Call for Congress to Read Bills’ — ‘The United States Congress is dangerous,’ radio host Rush Limbaugh said last week. ‘They put the bonus law in the stimulus bill that nobody read! The stimulus bill contained the details of these bonuses.” They even include in this CBS story a link to a video clip of Republicans unsuccessfully trying to have the bill read out loud. I kid you not. It’s a blog, but it’s on the CBS website nevertheless. Tim Geithner today was up on Capitol Hill again. Financial Times has the details: ‘Geithner Lays Out New Financial Rules.’ Let’s go to the audio sound bites to give you a flavor of this. Once again this is the House Financial Services Committee. Barney Frank, the Banking Queen’s committee, and here is Barney setting out the plan.
FRANK: The goal of public policy is to come up with rules that set a fair playing field that constrain abuses; that protect legitimate and responsible entities from irresponsible competition. The job of Franklin Roosevelt and his colleagues during the thirties was to set rules that allowed us to get the benefit of the finance capitalism of the stock market but curtailed some of the abuses. Our job is to craft rules as did Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt that allow the society to get the benefit of these wonderful, value-added financial innovations while curtailing some of the abuses.
RUSH: Meaning the government’s gonna now be the referee; the government is gonna control as much of this as they can. Here is Geithner now asking for massive new powers to change the financial system, not modest changes, he wants an overhaul.
GEITHNER: US came into this crisis without adequate tools to manage it effectively. And as I discussed before this committee on Tuesday, US law left regulators without good options for managing the failure of systemically important, large, complex financial institutions. To address this will require comprehensive reform, not modest repairs at the margin, but new rules of the game. And the new rules must be simpler and more effectively enforced.
RUSH: These will include rules on what you can make, what you can earn, what your bonuses are going to be. The thing, folks, you have to ask yourselves, now, seriously, ask yourself at any time you interface with government, any time you interface with a government bureaucracy at the state level, at your local town or city level, whatever it is, the DMV, or whether you’re going out to try to get a permit to build something, an addition on to your house, whether you’re fighting the town ordinance on whether you can have your lights on in the back because of turtles, I mean whatever it happens to be, ask yourself how smoothly does it go, and how often do you succeed in battling government? I mean just the other day, yesterday, the post office says, ‘We’re outta money.’ The postal service director, ‘We’re out of money.’ Who’s been running the post office? There is no intelligent reason to give these bureaucrats any more control over our capitalist institutions than they already have.
The Congress has regulated the financial services industry and the bank industry to the point that they have practically destroyed it. As recently as post-Enron we had all kinds of new regulations, and we had new regulations on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and when the regulators tried to enforce them, guess who shut ’em down? Your very own Congress, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd did their best to shut ’em down. We found out today that Rahm Emanuel, during a short little stint at Fannie Mae, earned $386,000. Should he be forced to give it back? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are losing money. There is no logical reason whatsoever to turn any more of this, or any of this, over to these incompetent bureaucrats. Geithner is simply incompetent. This toxic asset plan, I think Dick Morris is right. I think it’s designed to fail. It makes no sense! The toxic asset plan makes no sense. It is designed to fail.
There’s a story I have in the stack today, I read this and I just started laughing. This is from NewScientist.com. This is how the story begins: ‘It is on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power. A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event — a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun. It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.’
Now, I’d like to know if any of these people buy into global warming, any of these people that issue this report. ‘Cause the people that buy into global warming say sun has nothing to do with anything to do with whether it’s warm or cold here on the earth. ‘The projections of just how catastrophic make chilling reading.’ Oh, I’ll bet. Oh, I’ll bet they do. ”We’re moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster,’ says Daniel Baker, a space weather expert.’ Are you kidding me? We have a space weather expert on earth? We don’t even have weather experts on earth and now we’ve got a guy who’s an expert on weather in space? He’s based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report. ‘It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress.’ And the reason, ladies and gentlemen, that it’s difficult to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard earned progress is the Democrat Party already does it. We don’t need the sun to wipe out large amounts of our hard-earned progress.
Barack Obama and the Democrat Party are in the process of doing that. We don’t even wait ’til 2012 for this mythical storm on the sun to take us back to the Third World. The Democrat Party is in full-speed-ahead mode on this. So here we have more doom and gloom, it’s everywhere you look, it’s crisis, it’s disaster. Why, I’ve got a New York Times story today with tent cities actually under bridges in Fresno, California. I know they’ve been there, but you didn’t see it reported during the Bush administration. Now, California is about bankrupt, 10.1% unemployment out there. This is a state problem, run by the left. California is a microcosm of what we face because Obama is emulating the same kind of policies that have run California into the ground. Now the latest doom and gloom is the sun is going to set us back to the Stone Age, the global warmists are going to convert to this disaster as soon as their little bare feet can get them there. I mean, if this doesn’t scare us all into giving up meat and getting rid of lightbulbs, toilet paper, driving, cell phones and instead adopting mass transit — you wait ’til you hear the solution for this.
The solution for this sun storm that’s going to wipe us out will be every solution they’re offering for global warming. This story says that the resulting disaster will be worse than Hurricane Katrina. This sun storm will be worse than Hurricane Katrina. Obviously somebody on the sun is very mad. Folks, it never ends. Every day there is something that’s going to kill you. Every day there’s something that’s gonna ruin us, and every day that that is reported, guess what the solution is? The government has to take over. The government has to be in charge. Now, the government is going to fully take over the financial services industry. They’re going to nationalize it, because they want to control it. I defy you to find, other than the US military, anything the government does that you would hire them to do if you had a job that needed be done. Think about it. And yet, and yet so many people seem to think that is the magical solution.
All right, a quick time-out. There are big problems overseas, by the way, speaking of the Third World. Another Obama brother is in trouble in Kenya. This is Malik Obama, not to be confused with George Obango Onyango. George Obango Onyango Obama is the guy that lives in the hut. Malik Obama has been taken to hospital with chest pains and stomach pains. They fear cholera. Also today, Obama’s aunt, Aunt Zeituni faces deportation hearings. I know it’s hard to believe. The president of the United States signed a $500,000 book advance five days before being inaugurated to escape ethics rules and to also earn a lot of money before his own tax increases go into effect. Now, I wonder if President Obama will redistribute any of that $500,000 to the guy living in the hut, the brother who has cholera, and will he lift a finger to help Aunt Zeituni, who is about to be sent back to the Third World, whether the sun erupts or not.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: A minor correction. I said that Aunt Zeituni, Obama’s aunt, was facing deportation to the Third World today. It’s April 1st. She’s back in her Boston tenement awaiting a deportation hearing on April 1st. The president said he’s going to let the law play out. He’s not going to lift his hand here. How is this going to look? It is heartless, he’s got $500,000, he could buy her an apartment, he could buy her a green card, he’s the president. If he does that then he steps on US law. So? They’re ignoring US law in a whole bunch of regulations of the banking industry and a number of other things, they’re ignoring the Constitution. They’re stepping on it. And some people say it would be embarrassing around the world for the aunt of the president of the United States to be deported. It would just be embarrassing, we just don’t need this.