RUSH: Last Saturday, House Democrats had the unmitigated gall to show up on a Saturday night when nobody was paying attention — after the unemployment number at 10.2% — and commit a Saturday night massacre on this country.
It’s nothing other than a Saturday night massacre. After securing the vote to destroy the best health care delivery system in the world and replace it with a massive, big-government trillion-plus-dollar job-killing monstrosity — and I gotta tell you something here, folks. That Stupak amendment? I don’t want to ever hear anybody tell me again that Nancy Pelosi’s stupid. She pulled a giant trick on pro-life Republicans and Democrats. Single-issue politics came roaring to the top here, and when she put in the Stupak amendment that convinced pro-lifers, ‘Hey, hey! Abortion is not going to be funded. We gotta vote for it,’ it was silly. I guess now we should all get behind this bill because of this? Well, that’s what they’re telling us. I mean, for crying out loud! One of my concerns, ladies and gentlemen, always was: You put abortion in it and forces will rally. Then you pretend to take it out, and those people suddenly think they have to be for a bill. This abortion stuff, I just scratch my head. Okay, so we’ve been fooled. The House has been fooled into thinking that abortions are not going to be federally funded under health care. But, for crying out loud, when you look at the rest of the bill, it’s about nothing but death. It’s about the death of the living.
This is the most profoundly anti-life-at-all-ages piece of legislation that has ever passed the US House of Representatives. I mean, it’s anti-life depending on your age, depending on the severity of your illness, depending on your party affiliation probably, depending on a whole lot of things. It is anti-freedom, and without that you’re not going to have a pro-life movement at all. And of course abortion funding is going to get back in there. It boggles the mind. It boggles the mind. It was a bad move. This bill is going to harm everybody. It is going to endanger the very ill and the elderly — and nothing is going to stop Pelosi from going back in there after they get this law and changing that language in a year or two or three. Kill the bill because it’s bad for human beings. It’s bad for fetuses. It’s bad for human beings. You kill the bill! But now I guess we’re supposed to get behind the bill because it’s got this Stupak pro-life thing in it?
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RUSH: You know I was just thinking here at the top of the hour. Remember the interview I did with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday? I said, ‘Every day I get up here and I feel like I’m in the trenches in a war. No bullets are flying, but it’s intense. It never stops. Every day you get up and you find out the Democrats are doing something to assault liberty.’ I was watching this House vote Saturday night, and those Democrats started cheering like they had just saved the world from something. It was the biggest cheer since Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky had been convinced by Clinton to change her vote on his big tax increase. I’m watching and I’m saying to myself, ‘In a sane world, these Democrats — a number of them, a large number of them — have just voted themselves out of office.’ In a sane world. I actually think, folks, it’s going to happen. I actually think that a lot of them are going to be defeated in 2010. There’s a rage about this that’s happening all over the place.
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RUSH: Now, I said before the break at the bottom of the hour that Lindsey Grahamnesty and others, particularly Grahamnesty, cannot be counted on at all. The health care bill that passed the House is ‘dead on arrival’ in the Senate. It doesn’t have a chance. It’s already being called dead on arrival, doesn’t have a chance, and they’re playing up the story that Dingy Harry is having trouble. He may not even be able to get to his vote before the end of the year. Joe Lieberman was on Fox News Sunday yesterday, Chris Wallace said, ‘The House passed the bill. What do you think of the bill they passed? And do you still intend…? If there is a public option and if there’s this tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, would you support a Republican filibuster on final passage?’
LIEBERMAN: There are millions of Americans who don’t have health insurance, but I’m afraid that our colleagues in the House added a lot on to that, that subtract from the genuine purposes of health care reform — and one was to create a public-option plan. The public option plan is unnecessary. It has been put forward, I’m convinced, by people who really want the government to take over all of health insurance. They’ve got a right to do that. I think that would be wrong. But worse than that, we have a problem even greater than the health insurance problems, and that is a debt: $12 trillion today projected to be $21 trillion in ten years.
WALLACE: So at this point I take it you’re a ‘no’ vote in the Senate?
LIEBERMAN: If the public option plan is in there, as a matter of conscience I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote.
RUSH: Okay, now, that sounds pretty firm to me. It sounds pretty firm to me, but they can always pass… Well, the public option was a big deal in the House. If they take it out in the Senate as a trick to put it in later, it’s going to anger some of these nut jobs in the House once they get this thing to conference. So he sounds pretty adamant there. These are Democrats. At the end of the day, whether they’re Blue Dogs or whatever they are… Well, he’s an ‘independent’ but he’s a Democrat. They’re Democrats at the end of the day. And I don’t doubt that he means exactly what he said yesterday on Fox News Sunday, as of now. He’s exactly right in everything he says in this bite. In fact, I was watching television on this. Fox was running graphics. Even with this bill — which is going to add up to being $3 trillion before it’s all said and done, even at that — by 2019 there are still 18 million uninsured! There are 51 million uninsured by 2016 or some such thing. Which I always thought was the ostensible purpose of this is to insure the poor uninsured in this country. It doesn’t even do that, because it’s not really about that. And when Lieberman says, ‘There is no reason to create a public option, it’s unnecessary,’ now, he’s in Connecticut. That’s the insurance agency, but I tell you something else.
The public option is the only reason that any Democrat’s doing this. It’s the only reason. I know, I know, this stupid trigger. Let me tell you, our old buddy Olympia Snowe back in action here. ‘Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, who voted for a version of the Senate bill in committee, has given the Democrats a possible way out. She’s proposing to allow a government plan, if after a few years premiums keep escalating and local health insurance markets remain in the grip of a few big companies. This is the ‘trigger’ option.’ Well, a few big companies? Premiums keep escalating? That’s like saying, ‘Are we going to need air to breathe? If we don’t need any air to breathe next week then I guess we won’t have to trigger it but if we need air, we’ll have to trigger this option.’
So she’s predictably backing out on this. What I was going to say is look at all these groups. Big Pharma gets involved here because they think they’re buying protection. Big Insurance got involved. Big Insurance got involved. The insurance lobby got involved because they first thought that this bill was going to require everybody to go out and buy health insurance, so they saw a whole bunch of new customers. All of these companies that ran to get involved with this didn’t give a rat’s rear end about the country. They cared about themselves and they cared about positioning themselves better than their competitors. They basically just succumbed to the notion the government’s going to run our business. ‘We’re going to have jobs here but Obama’s going to tell us how to run our business and what to do, but we’ll have less pain if we go along with it.’ You look around and you don’t see the people that you would usually expect to stand up for the country standing back up.
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RUSH: ‘What the Pelosi Health-Care Bill Really Says,’ Betsy McCaughey in the Wall Street Journal. A health bill that Pelosi is bringing to a vote — and this is November 7th, so this is before the vote. It passed at 11 o’clock Saturday night on the weekend of a terrorist attack on our country.
Section 202. ‘What the government will require you to do.’ Now, no editorial comments are necessary. This just the language in the bill. ‘Sec. 202 (p. 91-92) of the bill requires you to enroll in a ‘qualified plan.’ If you get your insurance at work, your employer will have a ‘grace period’ to switch you to a ‘qualified plan,’ meaning a plan designed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. If you buy your own insurance, there’s no grace period. You’ll have to enroll in a qualified plan as soon as any term in your contract changes, such as the co-pay, deductible or benefit.’ This is why Obama’s lying through his teeth when he says, ‘If you like your coverage you’ll be able to keep it.’ You won’t.
‘Sec. 224 (p. 118) provides that 18 months after the bill becomes law, the Secretary of Health and Human Services will decide what a ‘qualified plan’ covers and how much you’ll be legally required to pay for it. That’s like a banker telling you to sign the loan agreement now, then filling in the interest rate and repayment terms 18 months later. On Nov. 2, the Congressional Budget Office estimated what the plans will likely cost. An individual earning $44,000 before taxes who purchases his own insurance will have to pay a $5,300 premium and an estimated $2,000 in out-of-pocket expenses, for a total of $7,300 a year, which is 17% of his pre-tax income. A family earning $102,100 a year before taxes will have to pay a $15,000 premium plus an estimated $5,300 out-of-pocket, for a $20,300 total, or 20% of its pre-tax income. Individuals and families earning less than these amounts will be eligible for subsidies paid directly to their insurer.’
Oh, and the ‘Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain ‘acceptable health insurance coverage’ and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years. In response to the JCT letter, Camp said: ‘This is the ultimate example of the Democrats’ command-and-control style of governing — buy what we tell you or go to jail. It is outrageous and it should be stopped immediately.” You go to jail if you don’t buy the proper amount of insurance.
We’ll link to Betsy McCaughey’s piece at RushLimbaugh.com. It’s from the Wall Street Journal. But the death panels are back in this thing, too. They were never out of it. That’s the dirty little secret about all this.
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RUSH: Here’s a blog post at the New York Times today: ‘Lawmakers Detail Obama’s Pitch — In an odd coincidence, the House debate on Saturday to overhaul health care took place on the third anniversary of the 2006 election that gave Democrats majority control after 12 years of Republican dominance. It fell to President Obama and to Congressional leaders to persuade those Democrats still sweating the final vote that it would not prove the party’s undoing in next November’s midterm elections.’ So they had Obama come up there and said: Go ahead! You think you’re going to lose the election? You ain’t gonna lose the election next year because of this. ‘Mr. Obama, during his private pep talk to Democrats, recognized’ the election of this Owens fellow, New York-23, ‘and then posed a question to the other lawmakers.’
The source for this, by the way, is a Democrat member of Congress. Obama is up there trying to talk these recalcitrant Democrats into voting for the bill and he’s trying to assure them that it will not mean their defeat next November. ‘According to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who supports the health care bill, the president asked, ‘Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit’ Democratic voters ‘and it will encourage the extremists.” So they’re ‘bitter…clingers,’ as stated in a San Francisco fundraiser during the campaign and now tea parties are ‘teabag people,’ the teabaggers, which, of course, is a pejorative term applied to certain rituals in the homosexual community. And, let’s see, anti-government people aren’t going to support them. ”All it will do is confuse and dispirit’ Democrat voters…’it will encourage the extremists.’? Teabags, extremists, bitter clingers. So if you oppose President Obama, you are an extremist. No matter where else you fall in line, you are an extremist.
RUSH: Ed in Columbus, Ohio, welcome, sir, to the Rush Limbaugh program. It’s nice to have you here.
CALLER: Thank you. Mega small business owner dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Yeah. I know how people can understand what’s going on here with our government, and that is… Even though I’m a conservative all my life, I think I want the Democrats to win the House and Senate again in 2010 so that if the economy is still in the tank in 2012, the people will understand, rise up, and vote ’em all out of office in 2012!
RUSH: Well, I don’t think we have time for that. I have been hosting this program… I don’t know how long you’ve been listening to it, Ed, but I’ve been hosting this program for over 21 years. And numerous times in various election cycles there have been people who have offered the theory, ‘You know what, Rush? We need to lose. Let the Democrats in. Let them implement all this! Let the American people see what a disaster they are and people will rise up in opposition,’ and I reject that happening each and every time the theory is proffered, especially now. If we cede 2010, you can kiss the country good-bye as you know it. You can kiss it good-bye. There won’t be an uprising. And even if there is an uprising and even if Obama is defeated in 2012, it’s… Look, I remember during the Reagan years, one of the big things conservatives said they were going to do is dismantle the Department of Education. Has that happened? The people said, ‘Well, we’ll get up there and we’ll reverse all this.’ That doesn’t happen much, folks. Entitlements, new bills don’t just get canceled. They don’t just get reversed or rescinded. You’ve got to stop them before they happen. And if we cede the 2010 election? Disastrous! No way.