RUSH: Peter in Rochester, New York. Great to have you on the program, how are you, sir?
CALLER: Rush, I wanted to give your millions and millions of listeners a heads up as to what we’re up against. I’m a doctor in Upstate New York here, and I was seeing a patient in a room and the patient said to me: “Can you hand me my Obama phone?” So I said, “What?”
RUSH: I think I know where you’re going here. I think I’ve heard this, go ahead.
CALLER: Well, I had not heard of that. And so I asked, “What’s that?” And he said, “This is a free cell phone for poor people and we get minutes and everything.” So that was all the conversation I had with him. But it occurred to me that if these Obama phones are going out all over the country —
RUSH: They are.
CALLER: — then would it be hard to believe that there’s going to be text messages and phone calls and all kinds of things?
RUSH: No. In fact, let me give you a shocking statistic. I read this just this week. Obama has 27 million Facebook friends, followers. Romney has 1.8 million. The Twitter numbers are not as large. But the supremacy by the Obama campaign on those social sites is overwhelming. And with these Obama phones, of course they can send texts out. Absolutely they can. They probably do. But the same thing happens if you follow Obama on Twitter or Facebook. It’s not to say that everybody following Obama is a lap dog, eager beaver, can’t get enough of Obama, but that’s how many people have signed up and there’s always varying degrees of interest. Everybody following me on Facebook is rabid, for example, but they’re not that way for Obama. We first heard about these Obama phones, I was shocked, just like you are when you discovered it, last year sometime, and I had no idea. And you’re right, these people get minutes. It’s all paid for. The phone is paid for. The usage is paid for. By us.
CALLER: Around election time I’m wondering what kind of messages are going to be going out, “Meet at such and such a place. Come here get a carton of cigarettes and we’ll take you to the polls,” blah, blah, blah.
RUSH: I think your imagination is the only boundary limit.
CALLER: (laughing) Oh, God.
RUSH: I do. However they could use this. And that’s a good catch. Did you talk to this guy about it at all? Did you just let it drop?
CALLER: No, I let it drop.
RUSH: He asked you to hand him his Obama phone?
CALLER: Yeah, I was talking to him, and in the context of his medical care he was going to need to make a phone call to family. So he asked me to hand him the Obama phone.
RUSH: Let me just tell you. Here are the details of this. There’s a website, ObamaPhone.net. I’m going to read to you: “The Obama Phone Program. What exactly is the free Obama phone? The free Obama phone is a program that is meant to help the financially unstable who cannot afford access to a cell phone. Communication should not be limited to people in relation to what they are able to afford.” They actually call it the Obama phone. And here are some frequently asked questions from the Obama phone website:
“How do I Get an Obama Phone?
“What is the Obama Phone?
“Who Qualifies for an Obama Phone?
“Who Pays for the Obama Phone?
“Is the Obama Phone Real?”
Now, in the “who pays for the Obama phone,” in the Obama phone questions: “Lifeline is a government sponsored program, but who is paying for it. Some people claim that the government is using taxpayer’s money to run this program, however, the claim is false. Universal Service Fund (USF) which is administered by Federal Communication Commission along the Universal Service Administration Company (USAC), pays for the Lifeline phone assistance program.”
So you and I are paying for Obama phones via the charges that are tacked on to our phone bill for the Universal Service Fund. The Al Gore tax, do you remember that tax? It’s still on your phone bill. To wire farms for land line phones. We are still paying that tax. And then there’s Internet taxes, Internet access for the poor and number of other things. The outfit that administers that is the Universal Service Fund.
If you can decipher your phone bill you pay every month a tax that goes into the Universal Service Fund and that’s what’s buying Obama phones and providing service for the people who use them. And, of course, it’s known who has them. It’s known what their numbers are. And they can be mass texted, individually, I would assume. But, look, before you panic, folks, this is not new. This has been out there for years, and Obama is in dire straits. When you hear about this, and you think, “How do we fight this? Oh my gosh.”
These are the people that voted for him anyway in large measure.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Folks, this cell phone problem. Government-provided cell phones is not a new program. I don’t know how long it’s been around, but it’s not a new program. Calling them “Obama phones” is new. That’s what’s new about this. And, of course, that’s being done purposely to make the people think that these free phones are coming from Obama’s stash, that they’re personal gifts from Obama. And, in fact, the Obama phone site looks like Obama’s campaign site. It has the logo and all that stuff.