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RUSH: I don’t know if you’ve noticed it to this detail. It’s why I’m here. Gasoline prices have gone up again for the 35th straight day. I kid you not, ladies and gentlemen. Thirty-fifth straight day. Now, if there were a Republican in the White House, every network would kick off their evening news broadcast with this day-by-day count. Instead, what do we get? This is great news for America. It will bring families together by keeping them at home. It’s great news for the planet, there’s less driving. It’s great news for Obama’s bullet train idea. Oh, yeah, rising gas prices, great, great news, except when they can find a way to rope Republican leaders into it.

Hi ya, folks. Great to have you here, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. Telephone number is 800-282-2882. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

Ladies and gentlemen, the gas price when Obama took office was $1.83 a gallon. It isn’t news. It’s almost never mentioned by our news media. It’s now over 108%, the gasoline price is up since Obama was immaculated. I mentioned this yesterday. The EPA, a bureaucracy, has denied Shell Oil a permit to drill off the Alaska coast. And you know why? Because the emissions might hurt a tiny village which is more than 70 miles away. I kid you not. That’s the reason given. And along the same line it’s been reported that seven more oil platforms have left the Gulf of Mexico because they couldn’t get permits to drill. Most of them have gone down to Brazil. They have gone to Brazil where we are subsidizing Petrobras offshore drilling. So Shell Oil told by the EPA, you can’t drill off Alaska ’cause of pollution. We got a moratorium on drilling in the Gulf. Seven oil platforms have shut down and moved to Brazil where we are funding that nation’s oil exploration. What are we doing here? Well, once again we’re talking about raising taxes on the oil companies and ending their subsidies on big oil companies.

Boy, some days this job is a job. Most days it’s not. But some days this program, folks, is a job. John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, has indicated in an interview with ABC that he is open to the idea of reducing the so-called oil subsidies, and he used a phrase that has been popularized by the left. “It’s about time the oil companies paid their fair share.” He’s open to them paying “theirfair

share” and open to the idea of reducing their subsidies, when we need them the most. And I understand the Republicans don’t want to get caught in a trap. They think it’s a trap, of having to defend Big Oil, but this is how the left sets the agenda. This is the left setting the premise and putting us on defense. We’re always reacting to it. Now, my reaction is, if I were a political leader and a Republican, and the Democrats are hell-bent on ending Big Oil subsidies and raising taxes on Big Oil in circumstances like we are in now with rising gasoline prices — this may be the difference working in radio versus working in politics — but I would defend Big Oil, especially now. We need supply. We need to stop helping neighboring countries build up their supply, drill and add to their supply. We’re harming ourselves.

We are purposely increasing our dependence on other nations’ oil. We have policies which are elevating the price of oil and gasoline. This is all on Obama. Why not say that? I have. As you people well know I don’t look at the world through rose-colored glasses, but I’m gonna tell you I know who the left’s enemies are. I know who’s on their enemy list and my instincts are to defend the people that they are targeting because I know who the left is, I know what their objectives are, I know what their agenda is, and I know what their policies’ outcomes will be. And if you sit around and let the left start targeting everybody but you eventually they’re going to get to you, and there won’t be anybody left to defend you. This is not to say that Big Oil is blameless, and it’s not to say that Big Oil is above criticism. It’s not to say that they are beyond reproach or any of that, but nobody else is, either. Nobody is clean and pure as the wind-driven snow in all of this.

I remember early on — Snerdley, help me out here — George W. Bush early 2000s, was it during the presidential campaign of 2000 or after he was elected when he said that he would not balance the budget on the backs of the poor, as he was defining compassionate conservatism. I think it was during the campaign. I flipped out. I said, “Why are we using the language of the left here? Balance the budget on the backs of the poor?” You know, we got a sound bite in the roster here, Robert B. Reichhhh is all excited, practically orgasmic because he thinks the mood has shifted on raising taxes. That’s the last thing that needs to happen here on anybody, and, by the way, Boehner is hanging tough on that. He’s telling the president what for on that, but I guess the public pressure on elected officials to stay as far away from Big Oil as they can is something I can’t even imagine and I can imagine a lot of things. You know me, folks. When it comes to empathy, there is nobody that out-empathizes me, there is nobody that out-instincts me. But I don’t know. “Really, Mr. Limbaugh, you would try to defend Big Oil in these circumstances?” Yeah, in terms of educating people, in terms of leading.

We’re watching the country being destroyed. We’re watching our economy go to hell in a handbasket. Even while there’s a handbasket shortage we’re still going to hell in handbaskets. It’s all by design. There’s an agenda out there. Look at the Supreme Court. We got our work cut out for us, folks. The Supreme Court refused to fast track the Virginia lawsuit on health care. Now, this plays right into Obama’s hands. This is standard operating procedure for the court. I mean it’s very rare they fast track appeals. But delay in terms of Obamacare equals implementation. And Obama has gamed this in another way. All the pain in his law or the vast majority of the pain is put off until after the 2012 presidential election. The real arduous, painful aspects of Obamacare do not get implemented, most of them until 2013, 2014, when he will no longer stand for reelection, if there is reelection. Who knows what the political system is gonna end up being by then. Look at all the waivers that have to be granted now to avoid pain. If these waivers had not been granted Obama would be dead in the water.

Over a thousand waivers have been granted to companies exempting them from the law’s requirements on health care. It would have put them out of business, which is the ultimate idea, to destroy the private sector health care industry, insurance, all that, and shift it all to the government after 2012 when there’s no longer chance to throw Obama out politically as a result of it. So all of these waivers have been granted, for one reason: to hide the genuine pain this bill is gonna cause, to delay it. When these waivers end after the 2012 election, that’s when we’re gonna see the Medicare Advantage start to unravel. This is very popular with seniors. They like it. But Obamacare punishes the plans that do not sufficiently cut costs the way Health and Human Services is gonna require. That’s gonna drive up the costs of the plans, which is then passed on to the seniors. Health and Human Services issued another waiver for that part of the law, for now. They’ve waived almost every genuinely hard, painful aspect of this until after 2012.

Now, we’ve got hundreds of billions of dollars on the line. The health care of every individual in this country is at stake, and, you know, you woulda thought the nine justices on the court woulda dealt with this. The common wisdom is that the court never does this sort of thing and never fast track things. This is the normal way. Court does whatever it wants is the bottom line. This court’s not overworked. I mean hell, we’re coming up to their three-month vacation pretty soon here, travel the world giving speeches and all that. The idea that dockets are chock full, that judges are overworked, that government bureaucracies are overworked, that’s just an excuse for the fact that they’re inefficient, not overworked. So you delay the implementation of this thing, it’s gonna make it harder and harder to repeal it once the infrastructure is dug itself in.

Then you have this ongoing problem with oil. And what is this, every three years we have the same argument, the price goes up, it goes back down, every three years we have the same argument, Big Oil, big enemy, big villain and so forth. This is a nation made up of people, many of them hardworking people, and these rising prices are having a deleterious effect on virtually every effect of a whole lot of people’s lives. And we’re sitting back and we’re just watching the domestic oil industry be shut down, retarded, slowed down while we’re not dealing with OPEC in a strong way, little cartel action they’ve got going, there’s no free market really there. We’ve got Shell being told to go pound sand off the coast of Alaska ’cause some little town 70 miles away might get pollution. Meanwhile, we apparently don’t care what kind of pollution happens in Brazil, as long as the Brazilian oil companies do well. Seven new platforms shut down in the Gulf of Mexico moving down to Brazil where we are funding, investing in their oil exploration. And our focus here somehow is, “Big Oil, yeah, they’re gonna pay. We’re gonna make ’em pay.”

Let me give you some numbers here. I was watching Fox this morning and I heard this explained. Shell Oil spent five years and nearly four billion dollars on their plans to explore for oil off the coast of Alaska. The leases alone cost them $2.2 billion. That $4 billion has been lost because they have been turned down. Two-point-two billion for the leases, the balance spent on going through the permit process. That’s how much it costs to get permission. So Shell Oil lost because they spent $4 billion, and the whole project was shut down by a bureaucracy, the EPA. Now, to an oil company, $4 billion, a lot of people think, “Well, good, they deserve to lose four billion dollars the way they’re gouging us.” That’s the wrong way to look at it. They’re just gonna find a more favorable place to go get oil, that will not employ Americans, that will not produce our own domestic supply which will help us become a little bit more independent on foreign producers.

By the way, one of the reasons there are subsidies for Big Oil is to promote — just like you subsidize anything, you want activity to take place, you subsidize it. So you want ’em to explore. You want to help ’em cover the costs of what might be big losses. Now we’re causing the big losses. Now this regime is causing the big loss and they’re celebrating. They’ll probably have a party at the White House, (imitating Obama) “Hey, you see that, Shell Oil, they lost four bill, ha-ha, and we got it, they had to spend that money with us.” Obama’s probably throwing a party. So now we talk about how, yeah, Big Oil should pay their fair share. No sense of perspective. Meanwhile, while all this is going on, our brilliant leader, Mr. Obama, has ordered the Department of Justice to try to figure out who is driving up gas prices. With any luck, we would witness the FBI frog marching Obama out of the White House at the end of this investigation along with the head of the EPA and Zimbabwe Ben Bernanke.

You want to find out who’s raising prices, just go to the Federal Reserve. It’s called Quantitative Easing 2. It’s called stimulus. It’s called spending all this money. It’s called inflation. That’s who’s responsible for prices going up, not Big Oil, not the American private sector, not capitalism. This is all being caused by an activist government mistakenly believing that all of this spending will revive the private sector. It’s nonsense.

Folks, this is so predictable. I wish I would have voiced this prediction. New Republic: “The Trouble With Independents. What if These Voters are Just a Clueless Horde?” New Republic, liberal journal of opinion, now that they’ve lost the independents, well, you know what, they’re probably just a bunch of schlubs and always have been.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Bob in Queens in New York.Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Good afternoon, Rush. First I’d like to say, in service of the country — people serving their country — you do that every day, especially when the country’s in trouble. So thank you.

RUSH: Well, you’re welcome, sir. I appreciate it. I really do.

CALLER: I wanted to talk about Katrina. I remember watching it at night, Shepard Smith in the street, “We missed a bullet, nothing wrong with New Orleans, everybody is fine,” but they were worried about the oil rigs. How many were destroyed or damaged, and what that would do to oil prices being that 25% of our oil comes out of the Gulf? All right, and how it was gonna hurt people and the economy, how bad it would be. Here’s a guy who shut down the whole Gulf on one oil well burning. You know? And Alaska and other things. And that isn’t hurting the economy. Based on their own words, this is deliberate sabotage. That is the only way to look at it

RUSH: That is an excellent point. You are exactly right. Even before Hurricane Katrina hit, we got graphics of where all the oil rigs were, the platforms. “Oh, my gosh, what if they go down? Well, what’s that gonna do to the price of oil? Oh, no! Oh, no! What’s it gonna do to the supply of oil? Oh, no!” There was some, “Oh, my God, what about the pollution? Are we worried about oil spilling?” But mostly they were concerned: “What’s gonna happen to the price?” Yeah. But now, now after one oil spoil that didn’t cause nearly the damage that was predicted — and Obama shutting down with a moratorium drilling — nobody’s making the connection. Nobody’s worried about what that’s done to the price of oil. That’s an excellent point out there, Bob. Have you ever thought about running for president?

END TRANSCRIPT

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