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RUSH: At a press conference, Leader Pelosi was asked by The Weekly Standard: ‘The Catholic Church in Washington, D.C., is a self-insured institution. Should the Catholic Church in Washington, D.C., be required to pay for these morning-after pills and birth control if they find that morally objectionable?'” And Nancy Pelosi, who claims to be a devout Catholic, said, “Yes, I think that all institutions who cover, who give, health insurance should cover the full range of health insurance issues for women.”


So Pelosi is suggesting the Catholic Church (unlike what everybody thought) damn well should provide abortion, damn well should provide contraception, damn well should provide abortion pills or contraception pills or birth control pills. Damn right they should! Why shouldn’t they? They have insurance companies. Why should they be given an out and not have to cover health issues for women? At the same news conference, Pelosi said 98% of Catholic women use birth control. Are even 98% of Catholic women within childbearing age? Really, keep an eye on Pelosi. They will tell you, the Democrats will tell you exactly who they are. That’s why I’m able to predict back in December 20th what they’re gonna be doing today.

Speaking of which, grab audio sound bite 22. This is just now, moments ago on PMSNBC. John Podesta, the former Clinton chief of staff, was on. He now runs Think Progress, Think the American Way, some uber-leftist think tank. And he was asked, “Do you think there’s a risk here of Democrats in the White House getting overconfident, what with all this great economic news out there? Do you think so?”

PODESTA: I doubt it. You see his job approval going up, but you also see the enthusiasm gap being closed. In the latest New York Times poll, for example, Democrats now are as enthusiastic about this campaign as Republicans. That’s quite a reversal from last year when Republicans were quite fired up and Democrats were kind of down.

RUSH: So Podesta: The enthusiasm gap is gone! All is well for the Democrats! Yep, yep. We’re now on equal footing and it’s, “Katie, bar the doors.”

Here is Al Hunt with a little bit different view. Al Hunt last night was on Charlie Rose on PBS, and the question was, “If you look back at Bill Clinton the early ’96 or Ronald Reagan early ’84 what you saw was those guys crossing the 50% threshold in approval, continuing to creep up a little bit more. If that continues to happen, the president will be in very good shape for reelection.” That’s Charlie Rose to Al Hunt. Here’s what Al Hunt said.

HUNT: I would add that I think a lot of people who I talk to about the economy, uh, who — who are Democrats, have great fears that this has been — if not a Prague Spring, it’s not something that’s likely to continue for the next seven or eight months. And if it doesn’t — and direction really matters. If it stalls, uh, I think you’ll see that number go down a bit. The Obama campaign is a bit more arrogant than they have a right to be right now. We have a long way to go in this race.

RUSH: So Al Hunt apparently does not believe that the White House is in charge of the numbers. Al Hunt doesn’t believe that the White House can control the unemployment number and presidential approval poll numbers and so forth. And what Al Hunt is telling us here (laughing) is if the media ever decides to report the truth, Obama’s gonna be in trouble.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We’ll go to Iron Mountain, Michigan. Hi, Monica. You’re up first. It’s great to have you with us. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. This morning on Morning Joe, Howard Dean said the following, and I quote: “Most Americans don’t think sexuality is the business of the church, any church. They just don’t believe it is. They believe it’s their own business, not the business of the church. They don’t think it’s the business of the government, either.” And everybody kind of nodded, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, if you think about that statement for two seconds, it defies logic. Tell me, which group is trying to make sexuality the business of the government? It’s ridiculous.

RUSH: Well, you mean the government is trying to —

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: — make sexuality its business?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Exactly.


CALLER: Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, —

RUSH: But wait a second. Hold it, hold it. Just a second. I don’t want to let this first thing you said just go by. You said that Howard Dean said that people don’t think churches should be discussing sexuality, correct? Did he say that?

CALLER: He said Americans don’t think sexuality is the business of the church —

RUSH: Okay.

CALLER: — any church.

RUSH: Stop. Stop right there. Would you be shocked, would you be shocked if I were to tell you I think he’s on to something?

CALLER: I’m not shocked because… I’m not shocked.

RUSH: You realize, organized religion, particularly Christianity, has been in the crosshairs of the American left and the media, Catholicism, Protestantism, for as long as I’ve been alive. When it comes to the Catholic Church, the media, the American left have actually been lobbying for the church to relax its views on everything it believes regarding personal morality, including sex.

CALLER: Hm-hm (affirmative).

RUSH: Now, given where our culture is today, I wonder how many people that go to church don’t really want to hear their church preach to ’em about their sex lives.

CALLER: They don’t. They don’t. They don’t.

RUSH: How many parishioners do you think believe the church needs to modernize, needs to understand the mores of today and learn to save our souls based on the way things are today? The church is too old-fashioned. My preacher doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he doesn’t know my life.

CALLER: Rush, I am a Catholic, okay. I’m faithful to the Magisterium. I’m hearing now the last two weeks this 98, 99% of Catholic women have rejected Humanae Vitae —

RUSH: Do you realize what a crock that is? Do you realize, 98% of Catholic women use birth control — that is absurd for Pelosi to say. Do you realize how absurd that is?

CALLER: Well, it’s not even true because we have women who have infertility and of course past childbearing age. But take it on face value, 98%, 99% of Catholic women don’t reject Humanae Vitae; they ignored it, they don’t even know what it is. They never read it. Ninety-nine percent of Catholics have never read Humanae Vitae. They don’t even know what they’re supposedly rejecting. You know what, if the Catholic Church had wanted to ban contraception from the government, they would have been trying to do it for 2,000 years. For all I care, Obama wants to wants to solicit private monies to fully stock every Planned Parenthood in the country. He can have kiosks on the street distributing birth control, I don’t care. I think it’s harmful for men and women, but I don’t care. We don’t live in a theocracy. But if I’m a business owner, and not just a faith based, any business owner, don’t you dare force me to subsidize the morning after pill for my employees.

RUSH: Well, I know. I think we’re speaking across each other here. What I’m trying to get at is that there has been a relaxation in morality among the parishioners. You say they haven’t read whatever they haven’t read. I have news for you, I’m not Catholic, but from what I hear, the Catholic Church isn’t even preaching about it. The piece I read the other day from Paul Rahe, the professor at Hillsdale who weighed in on this whole controversy, he left the church, went back to it 13 years ago. He went to Mass weekly for 13 years, he’s had three, what, sermons or what have you, went to Mass three times where he heard the teachings of the church in this area. That what he’s hearing from the priests is left-wing political dogma. He’s not hearing church teachings. That was my point. I just think inmates are running the asylum at a lot of places. Anyway, I’m glad you called. I appreciate it.

Up next is Lee in Leesburg, Virginia. Welcome. Great to have you here.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Good to be with you. Rush, I heard you over the past several days opining on, what is Obama really up to, or what are the Democrats really up to with this contraception deal? I feel that there’s some political angles that they’re playing. But one thing I don’t think you really distilled down, which I’m accustomed to hearing you do ’cause you have the last word on everything, but what this is, to me, is the kind of opening salvo of how the health care bill is going to be used as a political bludgeon going from this point forward. Any time in an election or when a particular vote is needed, all Obama has to do is bring out, “Okay, well, we need to have mandatory free breast cancer screenings for everybody. If the insurance company won’t do it, look, and the Republicans are going to fight against it,” they just create a new battle. And God knows where this can go. It could go anywhere. Just let your imagination run. They could make up any argument they have going forward and just continue to make these false choices, these straw men arguments about why this should be done and why this should be a mandate.

RUSH: All right, now, what is it that I failed to do?

CALLER: Well, you were getting into the idea, or talking about the idea that, okay, why were they doing this? I’m just trying to paraphrase you best I can, but you were explaining that, well, why are they doing this? You kept raising the question, “Why?”

RUSH: Wait a minute. What is “this”?

CALLER: Why contraception, why contraception right now? What does this have to do with anything? And that was the question you’ve been raising and as I remember you’re —

RUSH: Okay, so what am I not saying about it that I need to be saying, what am I not getting?

CALLER: That this is how the health care bill is gonna be used against whoever the Democrats’ political opponents are going forward. This is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this done in this country where a mandate has been handed down for a political reason over contraception, which means nothing to anybody, but they just dredge this thing up and say, “Okay, we’re gonna use this as a political weapon in this election here.” And I think that’s what I saw this as. This is kind of like the opening round. This is how this is gonna be used going forward —

RUSH: Well, the reason I’m confused is that I’ve spent three years giving examples of how Obamacare will be used to control every aspect of your life, from what you eat to what you drive to where you say what you say, to how you say it. It is total control over everybody’s life. This contraception business that they swerved into is a political ploy right now to defeat the Republicans, pure and simple.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: All right, it’s largely a hearing thing. I’m still not clear what the previous caller was trying to get at. So let me say again what I said about this contraception business as it relates to how it came out of nowhere. I thought that we had gotten into this pretty detailed and made it pretty clear. The whole point of bringing up contraception and trying to make it look like the Republicans want to ban birth control is simply something to excite the Democrat base, which has been depressed as it can be because their president has done a rotten job. The economy is in the tank. They have to fudge and screw around with numbers. They’re trying to tell us the economy’s rebounding, but nobody senses it, nobody feels it. Small businesses are still not hiring, wages are not going up, gasoline prices increase. They’ve got to distract people from this. They had, as Podesta talked about, an enthusiasm gap.

Republicans are far more eager and excited to vote than Democrats. And that still is the case. Podesta’s out there saying that they’ve changed it now. The point of this whole contraception business, he wanted to stir up the base, the women’s vote. You take a look, I mentioned it yesterday, I asked you to go find Obama’s approval numbers, the female vote, the women’s vote, it’s down, way down. All you have to do to get their attention is to dredge it back up that the Republicans want to get rid of their birth control pills and deny them abortion, and that will bring ’em back, and that’s what they’re trying to do. It’s a total move of feint and distraction.


It got started on January 7th with Stephanopoulos asking Mitt Romney if he supported banning contraception. It came out of the blue in a presidential debate. He had no idea what he was talking about. And he said to Stephanopoulos, “George, nobody wants to ban contraception. I don’t know what you’re talking about here, it’s silly.” But the question was out there. The concept of banning contraception was out there at either the federal or the state level. Now, Romney was supposed to step in it. The design was they hoped Romney would say, “Well, if the states want to,” they could then allude to the Republican front-runner suggesting that contraception be banned.

Then they went out and they found an interview with Santorum where they can take him out of context and say that this is what he intends to do when he has not and did not say that. So this is all about taking everybody’s attention away from Obama’s dreadful performance, the debt. This budget that he’s submitted, it’s irresponsible. I have a piece here by woman names Liz Peek in something called The Fiscal Times. “Obama does not deserve to be reelected. By refusing to address the greatest challenge this nation faces – our financial security – Mr. Obama has failed the American people. Despite warnings from the IMF, the credit ratings agencies, China — our principal foreign creditor — and the American people, the president continues to offer up budgets and programs that ignore the dire trajectory of Medicare and Social Security spending, putting the future of this nation at risk.”

Well, this is exactly right. But they can’t allow the election to turn on this. Ms. Peek says, “LetÂ’s get specific. This week Mr. Obama set forth a budget calling for yet another trillion-dollar deficit, the fourth in four years. Through certain spending cuts, some gimmickry (counting not spending on two wars as deficit reduction) and $1.5 trillion in tax hikes, the budget gap is projected to shrink to $575 billion in 2018, comfortably beyond the range of the countryÂ’s political telescope. Each of the proposalÂ’s major provisions scratches a partison itch: raising taxes on the wealthy, imposing new fees on banks, eliminating tax cuts on oil companies, spending $476 billion on transportation projects (mollifying construction crews teed off at the Keystone veto), allotting $30 billion for (guaranteed voting blocks) police, teachers and fire department workers, and so on.”

She goes on to say, “The budget is as cynical an affair as last yearÂ’s offering, which was defeated 97-0 in the Senate – an act of rare bipartisan cooperation. Before we celebrate that moment of sanity, however, we recollect that the Senate has not passed a budget in more than 1,000 days, though they are required by law to do so. The White House blames this dereliction of duty on intransigent Republicans (a charge most recently leveled by Budget Director Lew over the weekend) but in reality all that is needed is a simple Senate majority to pass a budget, which the Democrats have.

“All this skirmishing is but B-rated play-acting. Informed citizens should be furious that the real issues clouding our future are not even addressed by our president. The crisis in our country is two-fold: a rising number of people receive ever-increasing assistance from the government. At the same time, fewer Americans are paying taxes. The inevitable outcome is a widening gap between revenues and outlays: the deficit. The recession has accelerated the problem. Here are the facts:

“Last year, the first of the 78 million Baby Boomers reached retirement age. Between now and 2050, the number of people over 65 will more than double — from 40 to 89 million. This huge population will receive increasing funds from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and if nothing is done, it will be crippling. Social Security outlays, according to the annual Trustees report, will advance from 4.2 percent of GDP in 2007 to 6.2 percent in 2035.

“Medicare, too, is a menace. … While our mandated spending on health and retirement benefits will continue to sprout like weeds (fertilized by Obamacare), the portion of the country paying for this tab will shrink. … These trends threaten not only our economy but our country. Even now, the president is proposing cuts in our military. … President Obama argues that he is delivering what the country needs – more stimulative spending in the near term while laying the groundwork for long-term deficit reduction. He knows better. Our entitlements programs demand structural overhaul; he is afraid to light that fuse.”

He’s not afraid to light the fuse. He doesn’t intend to light the fuse. He has no intention of fixing this. He has no intention of dealing with this. This is a purposeful reordering or transformation of this country as it was founded. Now, put simply, the president cannot allow an election on that premise. That is why we’re getting all of these phony numbers on unemployment, all of these numbers, the president’s approval numbers are way up. There is nothing going on in real life that warrants those two numbers. There is nothing happening that would warrant his approval numbers skyrocketing. There is nothing happening that would warrant this whole plummet in unemployment. There are no new jobs being created. People are continuing to leave the workforce.

The numbers of people who used to be in the workforce when he took office versus now is down by two to three million, if not more. The only reason there’s an 8.2 or 8.3% unemployment number is because they have just erased the number of jobs available to be secured. It’s called the labor force participation rate. The price of gasoline was $1.67 a gallon when he took office. The unemployment rate was 7.2%. We’ve hit four dollars a gallon in some parts of the country, on our way to five. Unemployment is at 8.2 or 8.3%, but everybody knows that that’s a phony number, except the people that want to believe it’s a real number.

All the Democrats have is pages from their playbook that have worked in the past. They cannot run on this record. They don’t want to run on this record. Now, I know Obama’s out there touting the economy’s coming back, and he’s gonna continue to do that, but what they’re really doing is ginning up this old social-issues business because they know what it’ll do first and foremost is divide the Republican Party. They know, the White House knows that their biggest threat is conservatism. Their biggest threat is if the conservatives took over the Republican Party. Their biggest threat is people voting the way they live. They can’t allow that.

So this contraception business, yeah, it has roots to Obamacare, and, yeah, it’s an example. I mean, for crying out loud, where does Obama get the right to tell any company what it must sell or give away, period, be it contraception or hot dogs? He doesn’t have that rightly, but he’s doing it. With Obamacare, if it is declared constitutional, virtually anything that they say impacts health care and its costs, they will have the right to control, including every aspect of human behavior. You haven’t seen anything. You can’t even imagine how oppressive this is going to be, because you are an American, and you can’t possibly relate. You can’t possibly understand. We know the horror stories in totalitarian regimes. We’ve never lived under them, other than those who have emigrated to this country from those places.

But people who have been born here have no clue what’s coming. They have no way of comprehending it or understanding it. They have no way of even conceiving that there are people in this country who would want to impose that kind of will, that kind of loss of freedom. That’s why Obama’s getting away with it. People just can’t believe that we’ve elected somebody who has that as his ultimate agenda, and they can’t believe that he is surrounded by an entire political party that has the same objectives. Yet the evidence is all around us, everywhere we look. And this thing last week with mandating that churches, schools, give the away abortion pills and contraceptives?

They’re telling us!

This thing in North Carolina with the agent telling the four-year-old girl, “What your mommy brought you isn’t any good. You can’t eat that. You have to eat what we give you. You should trust us.”

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