| Stack of Stuff Quick Hits Page |
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September 29, 2009 |
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Story #1: Again: Consumer Confidence Drops "Unexpectedly"
RUSH: Now, look at this headline here from the State-Controlled Associated Press: "Consumer Confidence Unexpectedly Falls in September." Unexpectedly falls. Let's see. Unemployment through the roof, no sign that the there will be any positive change there, foreclosures continue, the government continues to intimidate and threaten the private sector, and the AP reports consumer confidence unexpectedly falls in September. The surreal attitudes, the surreal notion of what's news in this country continues, but we are here to straighten it all out for you -- happily so.
Story #2: Gangs Riot in Chicago, Site of the 2016 Olympics
RUSH: There are gang riots in Chicago, home of the 2016 Olympics. Here, the New York Times headline: "Obama Will go to Copenhagen to Lobby the International Olympic Committee." Come on. He's going to go lobby the I.O.C. and then they're going to award it to someplace in Brazil? That ain't going to happen. Chicago already has it in the bag. He's not going to set himself up to be embarrassed. He's heading over there to take credit for it, please.
Story #3: The French (The French!) Think Obama is Weak
RUSH: Yesterday at about this same time in this program we shared with you the details of a story in the National Post in Canada (the only place I have found such details) about how irritated with Obama the French president, Sarkozy, was in the way he's dealing with the Iranian situation and their nuclear ramp-up. And it was clear that -- we read the quotes from Sarkozy and things that he had said (that, again, were not reported here in the State-Controlled Media in the United States) he  clear thinks Obama is an idiot. He thinks he's naive and he was laughing at him, but he's also very concerned. Now, there is an editorial today in the Paris daily Le Monde. Now, listen to this: "President Obama wants a unified front against Iran, and to that end he stood together with Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown in Pittsburgh on Friday morning to reveal the news about Tehran's secret facility to build bomb-grade fuel.
"But now we hear that the French and British leaders were quietly seething on stage, annoyed by America's handling of the announcement. Both countries wanted to confront Iran a day earlier at the United Nations. Mr. Obama was, after all, chairing a Security Council session devoted to nonproliferation. ... With the world's leaders gathered in New York, the timing and venue would be a dramatic way to rally international opinion. ... But the Administration told the French that it didn't want to 'spoil the image of success' for Mr. Obama's debut at the U.N. and his homily calling for a world without nuclear weapons, according to the Paris daily Le Monde."
This is in the Le Monde, the daily newspaper in Paris, and the Wall Street Journal repeats it. So Obama thought he had this glowing aura after his brilliant first-ever speech at the UN, and he didn't want to spoil it by having to announce that after he had made his speech the Iranians were making a fool of him. So he had to delay it a day 'til he got to Pittsburgh. In the process of that, they allowed Ahmadinejad to have the stage in New York where he was, where he reacted to what Obama was saying.
You know, I find this amazing. So much is going on in the world. And, remember, folks -- and our news consumers are not hearing about it in this country, obviously. Now, remember we were told Obama's going to bring the nations of the world together. There's going to be this unity; there's going to be this utopia. We're going to bring back respect for the United States, and they're laughing at us out there! Our allies... Folks, I have to tell you when the French come across as having bigger gonads than we do, it's funny. It's sad, but funny. Of all people, the French, whose national anthem is the song Surrender! The French! And I love Sarkozy. Don't misunderstand here. But can you believe Obama saying, "No, no, no! We're not going to respond. We're not going to do this deal on the new nuke plant in Iran because we've got this great aura here of my great speech here where we promised no nuclear weapons anymore. I'm not going to go out and embarrass myself there. We're going to wait a day. We'll do it in Pittsburgh." It's all about him, and it's all about his image.
Story #4: "Cap and Trade" Means "Cap and Tax," Senator Kerry
RUSH: Now cap and trade is in trouble. Boxer, Kerry, et cetera, will introduce a climate bill in the Senate, but they want to change the name. John Kerry said that it's not cap and trade, it's a pollution reduction bill. Kerry said, "I don't know what cap and trade means. I don't think the average American does." The average American does know, Senator Kerry, and that's why the average American is calling it cap and tax, and that is why you have to change it, because the American people do understand it.
Story #5: Northeast May Experience Coldest Winter in Decade
RUSH: A related story to what Kerry and Boxer are doing: "The U.S. Northeast may have the coldest winter in a decade because of a weak El Nino, a warming current in the Pacific Ocean, according to Matt Rogers, a forecaster at Commodity Weather Group. 'Weak El Ninos are notorious for cold and snowy weather on the Eastern seaboard,' Rogers said in a Bloomberg Television interview from Washington. 'About 70 percent to 75 percent of the time a weak El Nino will deliver the goods in terms of above-normal heating demand and cold weather. It’s pretty good odds.' Warming in the Pacific often means fewer Atlantic hurricanes --"and that's all been kind of comical. Clusters of thunderstorms throughout the Atlantic Ocean, the National Hurricane Center, "Ah, 50% chance this could develop. Thirty percent chance this could develop." They're dying for a hurricane, "Oh, please, could you give us a hurricane." The media has wanted a hurricane. Zip, zero, nada.
There's been nothing out there other than clusters of thunderstorms. But we get the tracks. We get the forecast path and so forth and everybody just gins themselves pick up. There haven't been any hurricanes to speak of, and I checked the hurricane center just now, and no tropical storms. They're all over the place in the Pacific and in Asia. So, in addition when El Nino is weak it means fewer Atlantic hurricanes, higher temperatures in the US northeast during January, February, and March. This is all according to the National Weather Service. El Nino occurs every two to five years, on average, and lasts about 12 months, according to the service." I've learned as a south Florida resident that it's a good and bad situation. A weak El Nino does produce fewer hurricanes, but a much cooler winter here, and I've been through a couple of these. It's somewhat disappointing but it's still not nearly as cold as it is anywhere else.
Now, I'll tell you who's looking at this. "Hedge-fund managers and other large speculators increased their net-long positions, or bets prices will rise, in New York heating oil futures in the week ended Sep. 22, according to U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data Sept. 25." So the people who put their money on this game are banking on a frigid, long, snowy, cold winter in the northeast where they still use heating oil from Hugo Chavez in some cases to heat their homes. "'It could be one of the coldest winters, or the coldest, winter of the decade,' Rogers said. U.S. inventories of distillate fuels, which include heating oil, are at their highest since January 1983, the U.S. Energy Department said Sept. 23. Stockpiles of 170.8 million barrels in the week ended Sept. 18 are 28 percent above the five-year average." So again, the people who put their money on these weather forecasts are betting that this is right.
So here comes Algore, here comes Kerry, here comes Boxer: "Cap and trade, nobody knows what it is. Climate change bill, global warming, we gotta change it to the pollution reduction bill." The worst thing possible -- best for us -- the worst thing for these people is that there's no warming, there's no sweat city out there. And where it is hot it's unusual for it to be hot, like in the great northwest. But there wasn't a summer to speak of in the northeast where the primary readership of the New York Times is. So they're having a tough case to make. And yet here we are again back to the old theme, why accept their premise? Why go along with the whole notion that there is climate change? "Well, the American people believe it, Rush, and we gotta get their votes and we gotta act like we believe it or tell 'em we care about it, too, and so forth." It's a disaster and we see where it leads us. It's a disaster accepting every premise they put forth.
Story #6: NYT Mourns the Collapse of Socialism in Europe
RUSH: Boy, it's a sad day at the New York Times. Have you seen this headline? "In Bad Times for Capitalism, Europe's Socialists Suffering Even in Downturn." The New York Times is terribly concerned about this. "A specter is haunting Europe -- the specter of Socialism's slow collapse." That's the lead in the New York Times. Now, they buried this in the Europe Section of the New York Times. So the regular readers of the New York Times on the Upper West Side of Manhattan have probably not seen it and therefore have not had heart failure. But this is quite an opening: "A specter is haunting Europe -- the specter of Socialism's slow collapse."
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Story #7: Hope & Change: Poor Hardest Hit in the Recession
RUSH: Get this headline from the Associated Press: "US Income Gap Widens as Poor Take a Hit in Recession." Yes, the poor are hardest hit. Now, I thought Obama was going to even all this out. He was going to shrink the income gap here. What has happened here?
Anyway, here's the article: "The recession has hit middle-income and poor families hardest, widening the economic gap between the richest and poorest Americans as rippling job layoffs ravaged household budgets. The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans -- those making more than $138,000 each year -- earned 11.4 times the roughly $12,000 made by those living near or below the poverty line in 2008, according to newly released census figures. That ratio was an increase from 11.2 in 2007 and the previous high of 11.22 in 2003. … Poverty jumped sharply to 13.2 percent, an 11-year high. 'No one should be surprised at the increased disparity,' said Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard University. 'Unemployment hurts normal workers who do not have the golden parachutes the folks at the top have.'" This guy is an idiot. This guy is at Harvard. He's an economist.
 Unemployment hurts when the people who make investments to start companies and hire workers can't keep up with government regulations and taxes to keep people employed. Small business people do not have golden parachutes, you doofus! Small business people are hurting, too. The minimum wage is hurting the poor. It has caused additional layoffs. We had the number yesterday, 52%, young people, highest unemployment rate ever since 1948 when records were taken. I thought Obama was gonna stop all this. I thought he was going to take from the rich and give to the poor so that we will all be equally mediocre. By that theory, shouldn't the poor be better off? I really am confused here. So lowering the boat of the rich -- you know, rising tide lifts all boats -- so lowering the tide so rich boats are sinking a little lower also lowers the dinghies that the poor are floating around in?
There's more in this article. "Analysts attributed the widening gap to the wave of layoffs in the economic downturn that have devastated household budgets. They said while the richest Americans may be seeing reductions in executive pay, those at the bottom of the income ladder are often unemployed and struggling to get by." Boy, they are really ratcheting up this class envy here. The richest may be seeing reductions in executive pay. Not every rich person is an executive, for crying out loud. There have been a bunch of executives that have been laid off and their pay is in the process of being capped now by the pay czar. This is all about the fact that he's destroying the private sector and small businesses, every business is down -- well, not every, but for the vast majority of business sectors, business is down. They have to lay off workers to stay in business. There's not an endless pot of gold in the bank that these small business people are hoarding, selfishly keeping it to themselves and not paying it to their, quote, unquote, workers. And that's another thing.
I've been mentioning this since I started this show. "Workers" is a communist word. "Workers" is a socialist word, it's a Karl Marx word. "Workers of the world unite." We don't have workers, we have citizens; we have employees; we have associates. When I worked at the Kansas City Royals the team was owned by Ewing Kauffman who also owned Marion labs. He never called one person a "worker" or an "employee". Everybody was an "associate", from the custodial staff on up. Workers. All this little leftist lingo trickling into our lexicon. "It's unclear," says the AP, "whether income inequality will continue to worsen in major cities, said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. Many Americans are staying put for now in traditional cities to look for jobs and because of frozen lines of credit." Wait, I thought Obama said that all this was over. I thought we'd hit the brink or were coming back from the brink or whatever.
Frey said, "During the years of the housing bubble, there was middle-class movement from unaffordable metros with high-income inequality. Now that the bubble burst, more of the population may be headed back to the high-inequality areas, stemming their middle-class losses." This is hopelessly uninformed and naive. This guy is just a demographer, at least, he's not teaching at Harvard. The guy teaching at Harvard, "unemployment hurts normal workers who do not have golden parachutes the folks at the top have." You mean to tell me -- let's go back to the second paragraph. The wealthiest 10% of Americans, those making more than $138,000 each year, you make $138 grand in this year, in this country, you're in the top 10% of wage earners. Those people have golden parachutes? Those are people at the top?
Story #8: Andy Williams: Obama Wants the Country to Fail
RUSH: This is in the UK Telegraph: Andy Williams, 81 years old, Andy Williams has done a reverse Rush Limbaugh. "Andy Williams, the veteran pop singer, has accused Barack Obama of 'following Marxist theory' and 'wanting the country to fail.'" Now, Andy Williams sang the song Born Free, which in the early days of this program was our animal rights update theme with all the animal sounds and machine gunfire and bombs going off. The people that own the rights to the lyrics of the song called us, "You can't use the song that way," they denied us permission. We snuck it in there on our 20th anniversary show, but Andy Williams, "Hey, it's fine with me. I love what you're doing with it." You know, he's got the Andy Williams Theater in Branson, Missouri, still very active. He's over there doing TV shows on the BBC. And he told the Radio Times that he thought Obama wanted to turn the US into a socialist country. "Obama's following Marxist theory. Don't like him at all," he said, "I think he wants to create a socialist country. The people he associates with are very Left-wing. One is registered as a Communist. Obama wants the country to fail." Andy Williams, a reverse Rush Limbaugh, but nevertheless, on the same team.
Story #9: Broder on the Constitution as Impediment to Obama
RUSH: David Broder -- I didn't get to this yesterday -- but David Broder in the Washington Post on Sunday had a column, he read a piece -- I'll have to find this. He read a piece that fascinated him, that two conservatives had written about the unprecedented way that Obama and his progressives have this giant, jaws-like agenda just trying to gobble up everything as fast as they can, and Broder agreed with these two conservative authors who came to the conclusion that the only thing standing in Obama's way is this pesky little thing called the Constitution, and that's true. Believe me, when I tell you that Obama looks at the Constitution as an obstacle and a problem, don't doubt me. You know the whole theory, the Bill of Rights is a negative set of rights. The Bill of Rights tells the government what it cannot do to us. Obama doesn't like that. He wants a Constitution that spells out what the government can do to us or for us, as he would say. Right now, it's the Constitution that's standing in his way to the extent that he's willing to respect it. But all these czars that he has are, if not unconstitutional, certainly extraconstitutional.
Story #10: Earthquake Triggers Tsunami Warning for Hawaii
RUSH: A massive 7.9 magnitude earthquake has hit off American Samoa. No word on any danger, but tsunami warnings are issued all over the place, including for Hawaii. Seven point nine, that's a massive earthquake.
Story #11: Book Names 237 Reasons Why Women Have Sex
RUSH: Okay, throw this in the mixture, throw this in the pot on the Miss America Pageant judge question, throw this in with the stories we had last week on why are women unhappy, young women. Why are they miserable and unhappy? Throw this in, with Maria Shriver doing the state of women in America on NBC, throughout October. It is a story from the UK Guardian by Tanya Gold, and the story here appears in the life and style section, relationships, of the paper, "Why Women Have Sex." It's a book, actually. Tanya Gold reviews the book. The book is written by Cindy Meston, who is a clinical psychologist and David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist. And according to this book -- and I think books like this contribute to reasons why women are unhappy, particularly those women who go out and buy this stuff. According to this book, "there are 237 reasons why women have sex, and most of them have little to do with romance or pleasure."
Now, you're an unsuspecting woman, you're looking for salvation, you're looking for happiness, you're looking for fulfillment, you're looking for explanations, life is a mess, the world doesn't make any sense, there is war, there is pestilence, we don't have health care for the kids, it's just a total mess out there. Then you go to the bookstore, you hear from this book about why women have sex, and most of the 237 reasons have little to do with romance or pleasure. Women are going to read this and go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah," and they're going to be further miserable and unhappy. What? Look, Snerdley, I haven't read the whole story, I have no clue.
"She rattles off a list and as she says it, I realise I knew it all along. 'People just assumed the answer was obvious,' Meston says. 'To feel good. Nobody has really talked about how women can use sex for all sorts of resources: promotion, money, drugs, bartering, for revenge, to get back at a partner who has cheated on them. To make themselves feel good. To make their partners feel bad.' Women, she says, 'can use sex at every stage of the relationship, from luring a man into the relationship, to try and keep a man so he is fulfilled and doesn't stray. Duty. Using sex to get rid of him or to make him jealous. We never ever expected it to be so diverse,' she says. 'From the altruistic to the borderline evil.' Evil? 'Wanting to give someone a sexually transmitted infection,' she explains. I turn to the book. I am slightly afraid of it. Who wants to have their romantic fantasies reduced to evolutional processes? The first question asked is: what thrills women? Or, as the book puts it: 'Why do the faces of Antonio Banderas and George Clooney excite so many women?'" That's as far as I'm going. I only printed one page of this.
Story #12: Cuban Minister: Neocons Block Lifting of Embargo
RUSH: The French News Agency has a story out today: "Neocons Block Lifting of the US Trade Embargo," according to the Cuban foreign minister. Now, who the hell are the neocons now? Where are these people? Neocons are blocking lifting the embargo? I think that would be Obama!
Story #13: PPP: Obama Down to 51% Approval in Minnesota
RUSH: Fifty-one percent is Obama's approval rating in Minnesota, down 11 points since April, Public Policy Polling.
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