RUSH: We are in the second day of voting for the Children’s Choice Book Awards. I just mentioned this a couple of times yesterday, and what it is, the Children’s Choice Book Awards started yesterday, goes through May, I think May the 12th. So we still have, what, four or five days left in this month, then all of April and into May. Last year they said they had a million votes. It’s readers, the kids who read the books vote on Favorite Author, Book of the Year, Favorite Illustrator, and we have linked to it at RushLimbaugh.com. All you have to do, if you’ve read the book and you want to vote is simply go to the link that you’ll find at RushLimbaugh.com; we take you right there.
Now, we changed the link because we think that we created a lot of delays for people in traffic yesterday, as we are wont to do. We shut down websites here when we give them out, and we had a link up to the direct voting page, rather than the home page of the Children’s Choice Book Awards. So in consultation with Koko, we have changed the link, and the link now just takes you to the home page of the Children’s Book Council. And it’s easy to find the voting page from there. Again, it goes through May the 12th. This is a program that hasn’t been around all that long, and it is designed to celebrate young readers by recognizing the books that matter most to them.
In 2013 over one million votes were cast by kids and teenagers. This year, young readers can vote for their favorite author, illustrator, Book of the Year from yesterday through Monday, May 12th. The website is CCBookAwards.com, if you think you can remember that. If you can’t, you can find it at RushLimbaugh.com right at the top of our home page, CCBookAwards.com. Every Child a Reader is a literacy organization dedicated to instilling a lifelong love of reading in children. It’s a very worthwhile cause. It’s one that we are invested in here by virtue of we got two children’s books out.
March 30th, the next publication of the New York Times best-seller list, and I, El Rushbo, will have two books in the top five, Rush Revere and the First Patriots, brand-new, just out on March the 11th, will open at number one, and Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims is coming back up the list. It came out last October. And people are now essentially making combo buys. I just want to take a moment here to once again thank all of you for your overwhelming support.
I just want to remind you that there is a purpose here, I call it a mission, and it is to simply treat with great pride the true stories of the founding of the United States of America. It’s something that every child in this country should be told the truth about, and it’s something every child in this country could be proud of. Every child in this country should and could be proud of the founding of this country and proud to be an American. And, sadly, the grade school curriculum has been taken over in many school systems by the multiculturalists, who do not like this country; who consider this country to be the problem in the world; who think this country has not behaved honorably. That we have cheated; that we have lied; that we have conquered; that we have stolen. And of course that couldn’t be further from the truth.
It is the exact opposite what this country has meant to the world. And it’s an effort also to inculcate the entire concept of American exceptionalism. But I want to remind everybody here — and I don’t say this defensively; I say it truthfully — there is no direct politics in this book. The terms “conservative” or “liberal” you won’t find. You won’t find “Republican” or “Democrat.” You’re just gonna get the truth about American history, but, in that, you’re gonna get the values and the beliefs, the traditions and institutions that define this country’s greatness.
In the depiction of William Bradford, who was the leader of Plymouth colony, the leader of the Pilgrims, it’s unmistakable what he did, what he learned. They tried socialism; it didn’t work. They tried capitalism, self-reliance, and they just produced more than they could handle themselves, shared it with the Native Americans, the Indians. True story of Thanksgiving. It’s important that kids learn these lessons, and what we found is that even some adults who bought the book for their kids have read the book and have learned things that they didn’t know, even though the books are written for ages 10 to 13. But, actually, as I am wont to say, they’re written for everybody. For grandparents to purchase and to read to their grandkids, parents to purchase and read to their kids.
The audio version is read by me, both books unabridged, great to put on in a car when you’re driving around. And the kids, the greatest thing that I’ve heard from all this is that these young readers love the book. You know why? We’ve got this interesting vehicle, a time-traveling talking horse that can go anywhere in American history, and, as such, we have no limits on what we can do. We have no limits on where we can go. And students can be taken. This Rush Revere, the prime character, is a substitute teacher at a middle school. Takes kids with him, takes his iPhone, videotapes or videos history. The real beauty of these stories is that the reader is taken to the event as it happens, when the Pilgrims land, when Plymouth colony was being established. They’re at the first Thanksgiving.
In the second book, they are at the Boston Tea Party. They are part of it. It’s not written in lecture form with facts and truths recited. It is stories upon stories where the reader is actually taken to and becomes part of the event. And these young readers are loving it. So we fortunately became nominated by the Children’s Choice Book Awards because the nominations are based on sales. So we’re in there, and the voting is ongoing, and you can vote CCBookAwards.com or find that link at RushLimbaugh.com.
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RUSH: Hey, folks, there is one more reason why these books — my two books — are successful, and this is important. I wrote these books just the same way I do this program, and that is with total respect for the reader. I do not write down to you. I assume that the kids reading these books are gonna have the ability or the curiosity necessary to understand.
There’s nothing insulting. There are no presumptions that the people reading this book are incompetent or stupid. These books are written with total respect for the reader. And, if I might say so, these books are written with high expectations for the people who read these books. In other words, there’s a lot here to get. There’s a lot to learn.
I have total confidence, full expectation that people/kids reading these books can learn it and will get it. It’s not above them, but it certainly is not targeted beneath them. There’s nothing… They’re not babied. Let’s put it that way. There’s not a “goo-goo, ga-ga” kind of baby talk. They’re nothing like that. There’s total respect for the potential reader as these books are written.