RUSH: And greetings to you, music lovers, thrill-seekers, conversationalists all across the fruited plain. Rush Limbaugh and the EIB Network, and the Limbaugh Institute For Advanced Conservative Studies. Great to be with you, folks. We are coming to you today from Los Angeles. We’re here all week long, came out over the weekend. It’s just a nice little change of pace, a couple super secret meetings and so forth and some people to see that we haven’t seen in a while. We’ll be out here in our secret basement confines for the balance of the busy broadcast week.

Now, we don’t use this studio all the time, but it doesn’t matter. The first time in the studio since the last time nothing’s ever the same. Nothing is ever right. The first hour of this program is going to be you setting levels and trying to make it sound to me as normal as possible. In addition, I have decided that we’re not going to use the Dittocam today. It’s working out here. It’s perfectly fine, except where it is. If I were to turn it on, all you would see would be practically the left rear of my head, and some of you may want to look at that. I mean, I understand that it doesn’t matter.

You’re never going to see my face. You’re never going to see a facial expression. You’re never going to see a thing. You’re going to see the computer monitor behind me. (interruption) Okay, turn it on, I tell you. But you got a dull gray wall back there. It looks like I’m in a dungeon, but if you want to turn it on, go ahead. It’s the best I can do with it. Do I have to turn it on? Have I got a switch in here? Go ahead and turn it on. I’m going to show you. There it is. Okay. Do you see it, Snerdley? I mean, that’s it. You see my cochlear implant. You see the cochlear implant cable. There’s the cigar ashtray. The golden EIB microphone. The washed-out computer monitor, which is actually good, can’t see what’s on it. Yeah, all I need is a cat in my lap and I can be Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Anyway, folks, here we are, and I love the change of pace. I love the change of scenery, and I love being in Southern California. You know, I spent a lot of time up in Sacramento. I used to live there, a lot of friends here, but the taxes out here. And, you know, my friends say, “You ought to just screw that. I mean, you’re letting taxes…” and this is the point. They actually say this to me: “You’re letting taxes get in the way of the enjoyment of life.” And I said, “I’m not doing it. The taxing authorities are.” I mean, it’s substantial. It would be absolutely stupid and senseless, and it really is a shame, too, because we both love it out here, outside of the traffic, but that’s no big deal.

But, no, I keep saying to them, “Well, do you guys realize how much money you’re giving away by staying out here?” But they love it. They’ve been out here all their lives and it’s where they live. It’s where they’ve always lived. So it’s good enough just to be able to come out here now and then and see everybody and have the change of pace. And there aren’t any technical glitches here. There are just some things that sound different to me, which is a distraction, at which point every ounce of professionalism I have must come to the fore, must surface. No, no, no, I’m not complaining about anything. No, no, I’m simply letting the audience in on the circumstances in case something sounds weird or if I sound distracted during a phone call. It may be because I can’t hear it or it’s too loud. Just setting the stage here for possibilities.

Now, folks, Snerdley just asked me if I’m going to let the government open. Folks, there’s so much happening with this government. Did you see the panic over the food stamp cards? Well, you can sit there, you can laugh at that, you go ahead and laugh at it, but you also want to do away with the program, don’t you? I mean, at some point except for the truly needy. We now have half the country on those things, and you see what happens when it’s not available for one day. People simply don’t know how to fend for themselves for the one day. You and me during the ’95 budget shutdown — oh, and speaking of that, who is it in the audio sound bites? We’ve got some guy in the audio sound bites. Tom Davis, you know that moderate RINO Republican from Virginia. Grab sound bit number 4.

Tom Davis of Virginia, he was on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal yesterday and he said the difference between this shutdown and the last time in 1995 is because the crap-to-content ratio is higher because of me. I was it back in 1995. There wasn’t any Fox, there wasn’t any conservative media, but now I have spawned all this other conservative media and there’s more opposition to Washington than there ever has been.

DAVIS: You didn’t have Fox News. You didn’t have MSNBC. You didn’t have the blogs. Rush Limbaugh was just starting talk radio. The information flowing out now, I say the crap-to-content ratio just very, very high of what people are hearing in terms of basic facts and their understanding that make it very difficult for leaders to lead because the facts are in dispute with the media. They don’t control the media message.

RUSH: There you have it. They don’t control the media message the way they used to and therefore the facts are in dispute. Now, the way to translate that is, is that now what comes out of Washington is routinely challenged and if it’s found to be not true, they’re called on it. And this is what they don’t like. Davis has just bumbled and stumbled here into a revelation. Back in 1995 it was only me, and it was bad enough then with me. Now look how bad it is. Now there’s all these people challenging the so-called facts that come out of Washington. We’ve got nothing to do with shutting down the town! Zilch, zero, nada. We don’t have anything to do with it. We don’t have any power to shut the government.

Snerdley just asked me if I’m going to allow the government to open this week. I don’t have that power, either, although it’s fun to pretend. What I was going to say about the 1995 budget shutdown, Snerdley, you go back. You listen to the starving kids complaint back then. We laughed at that, just like we’re laughing at a day and a half of food stamps being shut down. Back in 1995 I said, “Okay, if I’m a parent.” I mean, there was no truth to this whatsoever. There were no school lunch cuts. School lunch was not going to be ended. The school lunch program actually was going to have increased spending and yet, parents literally across the country were panicking. They were, as though feeding their own kids was something outside the realm of possibility. Feeding their own kids was incomprehensible.

Feeding their own kids lunch? Why, how do we do that? And maybe worse than feeding our own kids lunch, who do they think we are? Now you have a day, day and a half, whatever it is or was of the food stamp program being shut down and you have utter chaos. You have shelves and so forth emptied at Wal-Mart. Now, in the context of trying to reduce the size and the scope and the reach of government, that’s kind of a chilling reality, and something like that has to make the left smile. They just have to rub their hands together in glee and say, “Oh, man, look at this.” They love this kind of panic because they think that illustration alone provides evidence that nobody will ever, ever seriously reduce the size of government or limit its reach or scope because there will be an abject panic.

Now, given that, let’s move forward now to Obamacare. One of the active strategeries of the GOP, as you know, is, “Let it implement and let it collapse,” which it will. They say, “It will collapse on its own, cannot work, and Democrats will get the blame for it,” if the Republicans just open the government, of course. “They should get the blame for it and that’s all we need to do: Just sit back and let it happen.”

Now, one day the food stamp cards don’t work. One day. Imagine what’s going to happen not when people can’t get signed up at the exchange. Imagine what will happen if one day they are not able to go to the doctor and get treated because the computer system is shut down and the doctor can’t treat and the doctor can’t prescribe. The doctor can’t even see you. Can you imagine the abject panic that’s going to happen when that day comes?

If it can happen in food stamps, and if it can happen in Social Security, it can certainly happen in Obamacare. Something can go wrong one day. I mean, it’s the government, after all, and it’s the computer system that they’re running, which means it isn’t the best. The day is going to come, maybe many of these days, where all of a sudden one day whatever it is that you present at the doctor — your Obamacare card, whatever the hell people get — won’t work. What is it anyway?

You know, I haven’t even thought of it. You have your Obamacare coverage or whatever and you get it from the exchange, you go to the doctor, and what do you have to show them? Your name in a database? You’re in a database. What if the database is down and they can’t prove that you are you, and you can’t get treated and you have a hangnail? And if you don’t get it fixed, you’re gonna die. You’re gonna panic.

Can you imagine when that day happens?

This kind of stuff makes me sick in a human sense, to see this kind of abject panic when the food stamp card doesn’t work for one day. The abject panic is actually a little depressing to me to see just how dependent. It’s almost just like pets become dependent on their masters. I remember my little cat, Punkin. I had to take her to the vet in her last days and for one of these particular visits, she couldn’t eat because there was going to be surgery.

It had been months since the last time that had happened, and I couldn’t offer Punkin any food. You should have seen her. She looked at me with big eyes. She looked at me as if to say, “Well, where’s my food?” You could just see it in her face. She didn’t understand. No matter what I said or how I acted, she couldn’t find it. She didn’t really, couldn’t really comprehend. Now, naturally she’s a pet. She’s never provided for herself. So, I mean, it’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s the same thing here.

So while we can get our yuks and laugh about this, it’s still, folks, really upsetting. If you care about human beings and if you want them to be the best they can be — if you want them to maximize the one life they have and to see this happen — it’s depressing. And then what makes it even more depressing is that there are people in Washington smiling about it, people in Washington rubbing their hands together in glee and looking at it as a sign of success, how dependent they have made people in the United States of America.

That’s just an illustration of the massive task ahead in reducing the size and the role of government. Now, as to the shutdown, there’s abject panic out there. I was watching a little television yesterday afternoon and I saw this person. I said, “Who is this?” I thought I was looking at a cadaver, and it turns out it’s the IFM babe Christine Lagarde, the Frenchwoman, and she was talking about how this week could bring about the very end of the world economy. Why?

Because the US debt limit and the possibility of default.

That’s right. It’s our problem. Once again we’re down to a massive, massive crisis. The IFM babe says that if we don’t raise the debt ceiling, the rest of the world’s economy could plunge into an unrecoverable abyss. She’s no different than these people whose food stamp cards didn’t work. She’s one of the sponsors of that kind of thinking: “Government is everything. If government’s not operating, government doesn’t have this, then people are going to end up being damaged and harmed.”

There’s an LA Times piece takes a shot at me today. I guess they knew I was coming. I put it on the top here. Yeah, here it is. It’s by some guy named David Horsey. “Shutdown Has Proved One Thing: Government is Vital to Us All.” It has not proven that. What? “Shutdown Has Proved One Thing: Government is Vital to Us All”? The truth of the matter is, there isn’t a government shutdown. Now we’re being told that the governmental shut down for real on Thursday, all of this leading up to the debt limit has been sort of half-baked, not real.

But when the debt ceiling is reached, that’s when the government will really shut down — and you know what the left is trying now? You know what this has become? You know what? It’s metamorphosed. The left now wants to blow out the sequester! Susan Collins… Folks, you have to love this in and of itself. Susan Collins, Ms. Moderate liberal Republican from Maine, proposed a solution to the shutdown, to the debt crisis, to everything, and it was rejected by Dingy Harry and a couple of others.

She was called a right-wing extremist kook, and she is among the most liberal moderate Republicans in the Senate — and she was astounded! She was floored. She couldn’t believe it. Patty Murray, who ranks fourth in the Democrat leadership in the Senate, went to floor of the Senate and ripped Susan Collins apart! Ripped her to shreds! Collins couldn’t understand it! It was because the Republicans are not going to bend on the sequester. The one thing that will unify the Republicans, it turns out, is the sequester.

The Democrats are now making an end run at the last moment demanding that in any deal that reopens the government, the sequester be done away with. Those were ostensibly real spending cuts. They actually were nothing more than reductions in the rate of growth, but they were real. They were real, and they did not cause massive damage. It did not cause a massive panic. The left was hoping that the sequester would cause the pain that Obama is now trying to cause with the shutdown, but it didn’t on its own.

Now they’re trying to get the sequester taken out of this, and the Republicans are holding firm on it. Because of that, the whole town is panicked now that we might actually not raise the debt limit. The guy in the LA Times, Horsey, said, “Sure, political entertainers like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have built very lucrative careers by bashing government day in and day out. But, in their pampered lives, they have never had to see crops wither in a drought or farmland swamped by a flood or a herd of cattle perish in a snowstorm.”

I guess he forgets where I’m from. I guess he forgets my family was farmers. My grandfathers were farmers. I know all about droughts and floods. By the way, did you know there was a massive snowstorm earlier this month in South Dakota? It didn’t get talked about. I mean, it was one of the worst snowfalls ever. It had things incapacitated. You didn’t hear about it because of global warming. It just didn’t fit. I’ve got the news story, but it didn’t get covered.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: He has rejected everything the Republicans have offered. They’ve played hardball. They’ve played softball. They’ve even tried giving him everything he wants, which has happened before, and he turns it down, because it’s Obama who doesn’t want an agreement. Not as long as he’s got the media in his back pocket and everything they think bad happening can be blamed on the Republicans.

It’s like Yasser Arafat. They gave him everything he wanted. At the last minute, he turned it down because he didn’t want the issue to go away — and Obama doesn’t want the issue to go away, which is, “The Republicans are the problem.” That’s the issue. That’s the ideal. He wants to keep it alive. So he rejected a clean bill because now he wants to force an amendment that kills the sequester, and that’s something that doesn’t need Ted Cruz or Mike Lee. That ostensibly is going to keep the Republicans unified no matter what.