RUSH: Do you remember, ladies and gentlemen, all during the last three or four years of the Bush administration, the Patriot Act and the warrantless wiretaps and so forth, the left was crying and moaning and wailing about the loss of civil liberties, freedom, privacy? Bush was spying on them. Bush was listening into their phone calls. From CNETNews.com: The federal government is pushing for the tracking of cell phones. ‘Two years ago, when the FBI was stymied by a band of armed robbers known as the ‘Scarecrow Bandits’ that had robbed more than 20 Texas banks, it came up with a novel method of locating the thieves. FBI agents obtained logs from mobile phone companies corresponding to what their cellular towers had recorded at the time of a dozen different bank robberies in the Dallas area. The voluminous records showed that two phones had made calls around the time of all 12 heists, and that those phones belonged to’ two men they were able to identify.
‘A jury eventually convicted the duo of multiple bank robbery and weapons charges. … [T]he Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ in their — or at least their cell phones’ — whereabouts. US Department of Justice lawyers say that ‘a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records’ that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.’ Quite understandably here, the ACLU is alarmed. They’re very much concerned as are ‘other civil liberties groups, which have opposed the Justice Department’s request and plan to tell the US Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia that Americans’ privacy deserves more protection and judicial oversight than what the administration has proposed.’
Every day — every day! — we learn of something new. I just had a bunch of people come in say to hello, and they said, ‘You know, you’ve been doing this 20 years. You probably do it just like clockwork now. You’ve got a formula down.’ I said, ‘No, no, no, no. It is harder than ever to do this because when I first started this program I could prep it with three to five newspapers. Now with the Internet out there, news is being made every minute. I have to keep up with it, have to be able to multitask,’ and then I said, ‘Besides, every 20 minutes Obama launches another assault on this country.’ Three of them laughed and one of them frowned, and I said to myself, ‘Home run.’ But it’s true: ‘Feds Push for Tracking Cellphones.’ All of you leftists were so worried about George Bush spying on you, trying to get cameras in your bedroom, and listening to your phone calls?
Now your guy, Barack Obama, wants to be able to monitor and track you via your cell phone — and, if necessary, be able to get records of where you’ve been. Same thing with your library books. This, ladies and gentlemen, is why I don’t use a cell phone. You know, I have a cell phone but never make a call on it. Sometimes I text with it. But I never use it. I hate the phone anyway as you well know. But they can still track it even if it’s off. Even if your phone’s off, it’s still sending out a signal. You have to take the battery out of it in order to not be tracked — and of course if you have an iPhone you can’t take the battery out of it. You can’t get in there. Not yet. Check it out, Snerdley. I know I am right about this. Don’t doubt me. You have to take the battery out to avoid being tracked. The cell tower still knows where your phone is. I’m sure Apple knows this. (laughing) Yes, I’m sure Apple’s not the only one you can’t take… Well, I don’t think they’re the only one.
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RUSH: Now, Iran. They’re out there proclaiming that they are now ‘a nuclear state.’ The Nutty Near-Professor, Barack Obama, said the United States cannot ‘tolerate’ a nuclear Iran. Do you remember this? He also said that we can’t ‘isolate’ them because that will accelerate their efforts to get nuclear weapons, but he just imposed sanctions on the affiliates of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Now, then again, Professor Obama said that he would create between 3-1/2 and 4 million jobs (with 90% coming in the private sector) if his slush fund was passed. He said he would close Club Gitmo in a year — and has given a terrorist Miranda rights after saying this two months after his inauguration Obama reiterated: ‘Do these folks deserve Miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter down the block?’ Of course not!
And then he proceeds to give one of these ‘folks, ‘the Fruit of Kaboom Bomber, Miranda rights — and he continues to call them ‘folks.’ These terrorists — the ‘folks.’ Yeah, has anybody told Bill O’Reilly about this yet? Because Bill O’Reilly owns the term ‘folks.’ Bill O’Reilly is looking out for ‘the folks’ and here’s Obama now appropriating the term for his own self and referring to terrorists as ‘the folks.’ This is going to confuse O’Reilly’s audience: Who are the folks? Also Obama said his number one focus this year was jobs and then calls for a summit on his health care plan. He said he was post-partisan. He said bankers were crooks. Then he said bankers were ‘savvy.’ You do not believe the CYA that is going on at the Huffington Post over this, this business of saying, ‘Hey, I love these guys at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase! They’re savvy business guys. I’m all for people getting wealthy in this country. I got no problem at all with these bonuses.’ They were livid, fit to be tied yesterday. But now the CYA has begun to suggest that this is not out of the ordinary for what Obama has said. So now Senator Nutty Professor Obama on Iran. In a debate lecture during the campaign, he said that we ‘will not tolerate a nuclear Iran,’ and he said ‘our efforts of isolation have actually accelerated their efforts to get nuclear weapons.’ He was criticizing Bush, which is strange because Obama just imposed sanctions on affiliates of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Sanctions don’t isolate? Much less work? (laughing) As we are learning. (sigh) So every day…
Here’s the fourth Obama story inside of ten minutes. This is from Bloomberg, and I want you people who make less than $250,000 a year to listen to this. ‘President Barack Obama said he is ‘agnostic’ about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.’ Agnostic? What in the world does he mean by ‘agnostic’? I’m wondering if… This is what happens when this guy doesn’t have a teleprompter. When they turn him loose for the Bloomberg interview, he gums it all up and creates a panic inside the White House and over at the Huffing and Puffington Post, and now he says he is ‘agnostic’ about raising taxes? Does he mean ‘antagonistic’? Agnostic? Now, ‘Obama, in a Feb. 9 Oval Office interview, said that a presidential commission on the budget needs to consider all options for reducing the deficit, including tax increases and cuts in spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. ‘The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table,’ the president said in the interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. ‘So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.” Agnostic? Of course the tax increases are going to happen, folks. We’ve been telling you this since before he was inaugurated. There will not be any cuts in entitlement spending. The Democrats will not allow it. There will not be any cuts in Social Security or any of that. It will be loudly talked about, a whole lot wailing, a lot of gnashing of teeth but it will never be seriously considered. So, anyway, you’re on the hook now. Those of you under $250,000 a year, a tax increase is now coming your way. It always was. If you believed it wasn’t, you have just been snookered once again.
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RUSH: I went to my trusty dictionary on my cell phone, ladies and gentlemen, to look up the word ‘agnostic’ and I had a suspicion here that I was right. ‘Agnostic,’ basically Obama’s voting ‘present’ when he says that he is ‘agnostic’ about raising taxes on the middle class. It means that he is unwilling to commit to an opinion about something. So he is an agnostic. He has no opinion on the matter. This is the same as voting ‘present’ on a middle class tax increase, meaning he’s gonna leave it up to his commission and other advisors and the Democrats in Congress.
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RUSH: Here’s Obama himself. Here’s this quote from February 24th last year. February 24th, 2009, this is to his first joint appearance before Congress.
OBAMA: Let me be absolutely clear, because I knooow you’ll end up hearing some of the same claims that rolling back these tax breaks means a massive tax increase on the American people. If your family earns less than $250,000 a year — a quarter million dollars a year — you will not see your taxes increased a single dime.
CONGRESS: (applause)
OBAMA: I repeat: Not one single dime.
RUSH: One year ago!
OBAMA: In fact…
CONGRESS: (applause)
OBAMA: Not a dime!
RUSH: All right, all right, all right, all right. February 24th, 2009, President Obama, joint session of Congress, ‘Let me be absolutely clear… If your family earns less than … a quarter million dollars a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime.’ Yesterday he said he’s ‘agnostic’ about it, which means he has no opinion anymore about it, which means he’s open to it, which means everybody that voted for this guy on that basis has now just been screwed and lied to. Although we tried to tell all of you people in this category that you were going to pay the lion’s share of any tax increase because there are more of you than any other category. There are more people in the middle class — it’s still true, even though Obama is doing his best to wipe ’em out. There are still more people in the middle class than there are rich, more people in the middle class than there are poor. So say hello to your Obama tax increase that you were assured one year ago would not happen. David ‘Rodham’ Gergen says that Obama is in crisis.
GERGEN: We are seeing the president descend, almost slow-motion, into a crisis. He’s been pounded over the last 24 hours, uh, from left and right. The labor leaders jumped on him today for inaction on the labor agenda. We learned today that in his meeting yesterday with congressional leaders and talking about a jobs bill it was Nancy Pelosi who said, ‘Mr. President, I don’t think this is going to work.’ Paul Krugman from the New York Times called President Obama ‘clueless,’ and of course there are new polls out, the latest ABC/Washington Post which show this arc downward. If you look at the averages of the polls in recent days his disapproval rating had almost passed his approval rating for the first time. So, uh, these are dangerous times for this president.
RUSH: Wolf Blitzer still has not reported, by the way, the falling approval ratings of the president. We’ve been keeping a sharp eye. ‘Obama in crisis.’ If David Gergen thinks it, everybody in Washington does. Guaranteed.
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RUSH: A friend reminds me in an e-mail flash about Obama and ‘agnostic.’ He’s saying he’s ‘agnostic’ because he pretended to be against taxing health benefits during the campaign. He went after McCain because McCain was in favor of it, as part of an overhaul that would have reduced costs (according to McCain), and so here comes Obama railing against that. Now, here’s the thing: Obama knows if he comes out now and says he is for a middle class tax increase or taxing health care benefits, he’s gonna get creamed for flip-flopping. So now he’s gotta say he’s got an open mind. He’s voting ‘present.’ He has an open mind. If the Democrats suggest it, he’s gotta take a look at it. So he’s not for it; he’s not against it. He’s going to wait and see what happens. But remember: All along, folks — all along — he was going to raise taxes. It’s part and parcel of the redistribution of wealth that he assured Joe the Plumber he was going to do.
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RUSH: To the phones, Karen in Las Vegas. It’s great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello. I had to laugh because ‘agnostic’ — you keep talking about agnostic — is Greek. It’s a Greek word. It means ‘to not know.’ But if you translate agnostic into Latin, it’s ‘ignoramus.’ So he’s saying (doing Obama impression), ‘I’m an ignoramus on taxes.’
RUSH: (laughing)
CALLER: (laughing) Thought I’d share that with you. No kidding! Look it up. I mean, I laughed my butt off when I heard him talking about being ‘agnostic’ on taxes. Oh, he’s an ignoramus all right.
RUSH: Hey, I’ll tell you what. Let me tell you something. This guy is so arrogant, he’s afraid. He doesn’t want to be accused of flip-flopping. That’s why he’s not coming out for these tax increases.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: He thinks if he says, ‘I’m agnostic’ — or ‘I’m an ignoramus on it,’ or ‘I can go either way; it depends on what I’m advised to do’ — he can escape the flip-flopper aspect. But I’ve read a lot of things in the show prep the last couple days, and there are more and more people — Joe Klein at TIME Magazine, any number of liberal commentators — who have now started insulting the American people as too stupid to understand what’s going on. Some are saying there’s too much democracy now with the tea parties (actually they call them the ‘tea baggers’). There’s too much democracy. Now, there wasn’t too much democracy when Obama was running his campaign, but there’s too much democracy now. You know, back in the mid-nineties when this program was about all there was (other talk shows were just getting started; Fox News was on the horizon), TIME Magazine asked: ‘Is There Too Much Democracy?’ That’s what the left always does, and they’re always insulting you.
You’re too dense to understand how brilliant a president you have. You’re too dense to involve yourself in supporting your government. It is hilarious to read, and I guarantee you that Obama and his people are among the elites who think that you are stupid. Why wouldn’t they? They fooled enough people to get elected! They’re sitting back there behind closed doors. They know exactly who they are. They know exactly what their plans are. They know they went out and lied through their teeth and created this false image during the campaign. Why wouldn’t they think voters are stupid? There’s no question they do. So now they’re relying on your stupidity to forget that Obama ever said, ‘If you make less than 250 you’ll not see one dime of tax increase.’ He’s already flip-flopped by saying he’s an ignoramus about it, that he’s ‘agnostic.’ He’s already flip-flopped, and this isn’t going to help matters.
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RUSH: Here’s Bob in Newport Beach, California. Welcome to the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. It’s a pleasure to speak with you, finally.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER (garbled cell): Hey, regarding this comment by Obama some time ago where he thinks that families making less than $250,000 are not — they’re not going to suffer not one [dime] of tax increase, that statement, there’s a lot of people that take refuge in that statement, however that statement is very muddy and I have to really believe that that’s an intentional muddiness. Because the word ‘make’ or ‘makes’ or ‘making’ doesn’t exist in tax code as a legal definition. So if you think about your 1040, the first page is income. The top portion is gross income, then there’s adjustments to the income, then you have something called the (garbled). I think that’s on line 22. The second page is a carryover of AGI, and then they apply itemized deductions to that to reduce your AGI to come to something that’s called ‘taxable income.’ Well, there’s no limitations to how they can apply any new taxes. So people making 250,000 or less, taxes could be formed, they could assess it against gross, they could assess it against AGI, they could assess it against taxable. There’s no limitations. So I’m highly suspicious about, even, Obama’s statement. (cell static)
RUSH: Well, you know what? Your assessment here is a little bit more complicated than what we have to do to synchronize my voice with the video output on the HD Dittocam.
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: What it boils down to is: He’s going to raise taxes on everybody.
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: And when he runs around and says, ‘If you make $250,000 a year,’ people are thinking gross there.
CALLER: Yeah. People are thinking gross, but they could be… No, people are thinking taxable income. The mistake is that he could assess it — without wording, he could assess it — to AGI.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: There’s a huge difference between AGI and taxable.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Sometimes as much as 50%.
RUSH: But the bottom line is, the bottom line is he’s now ‘agnostic’ about it. The bottom line is he’s now, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ After promising this wouldn’t happen, he’s now saying, ‘Weeeeell, I don’t know. I’m going agnostic. I don’t know. I’m open to ideas. I don’t really have an opinion on this. I gotta wait and see what my advisors say.’ He’s doing everything he can to avoid a flip-flop on this when, in fact, everybody’s going to figure out that this is already a flip-flop. He made too big a deal about this. In fact, at his first joint speech before Congress in February of last year he made a huge deal out of it and he received a lot of sustained applause from Democrats in the chamber about all of this.
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RUSH: Ted in Bristol, Pennsylvania. I’m glad that you called, sir, and welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. First-time caller. Do you think Obama finally realized that he should soften his rhetoric on the big bonuses to anybody because that’s where he intends to get his tax money from in the next couple years? If he clamps down on —
RUSH: No. No.
CALLER: But he put a minimum on the bonuses —
RUSH: No.
CALLER: — so he could get more taxes.
RUSH: If he’s softening his rhetoric on those guys it’s because they threatened to donate all their money to Republicans, not Democrats.
CALLER: (chuckling)
RUSH: Look, I’ve got four stories here in the stack of how the White House is in a CYA lickety-split, trying to cover their bases on that. ‘Oh, Obama didn’t mean that. Obama’s got a consistent record of saying what he said,’ from the Huffington Post and a number of other people, because Obama really stepped in it. I mean, you had Paul Krugman yesterday saying, ‘We are doomed,’ telling Obama this is foolish. Because Obama’s supporters want Wall Street people in jail. Obama’s supporters want ’em frog-marched out of their offices. Obama supporters hate anything corporate. They hate anything profit. They hate bonuses, and Obama has said to them enough times that bonuses are ‘obscene.’ He had the ‘pay czar.’ He was gonna make sure that these bonuses weren’t paid, then all of a sudden these two guys — Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs — they’re golden. They’re golden! Obama went out and talked about, ‘I love the free market, and I’m not against people getting rich and acquiring wealth. That’s the way it works,’ and his left-wing charges have gone bat manure.
They just can’t believe it. Now, one of the reasons… MIT professor went bat manure yesterday because, he said, ‘Doesn’t Obama realize that these are not free market banks? These are banks that were bailed out and saved by the government. They are wards the state. These are banks too big to fail,’ which makes these guys even madder, because he doesn’t think these guys — who would have been out on their tushes if left alone — should be paid big, big bonuses off of government money! Oh, the left is livid about this and they’re trying to cover Obama’s rear end. This is why they don’t let him go out there without a teleprompter. But I don’t even know that he meant to say what he said. But if he did mean it, it was because he’s scared that he believes these guys when they say that they’re trying to start contributing to Republicans now and no longer to Democrats. At this point, analyzing why Obama does things is to get distracted. I don’t care why. I don’t care what his motivations are. It just has to be stopped. Whatever Obama is doing has got to be stopped.
Right now.
Dead. In. Its. Tracks.