RUSH: This, this is just juicy. Get this headline and story today in the Washington Post: ‘How the Fed Failed to Tell Obama About The Bonuses.’ Make no mistake, these are Obama bonuses, ladies and gentlemen, but here’s the Washington Post now running cover, how the Federal Reserve officials knew for months about bonuses at AIG but failed to tell the Obama administration. How in the hell did they get in the bill then? Greetings, my friends, and welcome, great to have you here. Rush Limbaugh, the fastest, the most entertaining week in media. Here we are at 800-282-2882, the e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
This is just amazing. This whole bonus business just continues. It does not abate. Here we have the House of Representatives voting today on a 90% tax claw-back on the people who got the bonuses. Barney Frank, the Democrats and Andrew Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, insists that the names of the recipients of the bonus be made public. It’s McCarthyesque. It is McCarthyesque what is happening here, and all the while there’s Obama out there, and when he gets in trouble, what does he do? He goes to the people. He has the ability that Reagan had. He has the ability to go straight to the people with his town hall meetings, appearance on Leno tonight, and did you see the crowd last night? It looked like most of it was 24, 25 years old and under, and they’re fawning, ‘We love you, Barry! We love you, Barry,’ and he has the ability to go straight to ’em and go over the heads of the Drive-By Media, which he really doesn’t need to do ’cause the Drive-By Media is still very much in slavish mode. We have audio sound bites of Obama’s town hall meeting in Costa Mesa, California, last night.
If we’re going to tax 90% of the bonuses, why don’t we just tax 90% of all bailout money and just get it back? Why don’t we tax AIG 90% in general? Why don’t we tax Goldman Sachs 90% in general? We’re going after individuals, and folks, it cannot be said enough, these AIG bonuses were issued by Obama, essentially. If this is a scandal, and I don’t think it is, but if it is, if you look at it as a scandal, then this is Obama’s scandal. It would be a mistake for us here to get sidetracked the way they want us to and start dumping on Chris Dodd. It would be fun to do and it’s easy to do, and yeah, Dodd lied, he told CNN on Tuesday he had nothing to do with it, last night he admitted he did. He said that it was the administration and the Treasury department that asked him to put that back in there. There’s one thing, I’m trying to check on this and haven’t been able to confirm it. The amendment on the AIG bonuses had to be in there before the conference. The conference committee, they didn’t look at the whole bill, they didn’t read the whole bill, Obama didn’t read the whole bill, nobody read the whole bill, Obama wanted it too fast and that’s where some of the mess is coming here. A lot of people didn’t know the bonus provision was in there. But Dodd was not one of the conferees, I don’t believe. I don’t think Dodd was one of the conferees.
In the conference, the Senate and the House conference where the two bills are reconciled, the stimulus bill — we’re talking Porkulus bill, now — all of the amendments are looked at, all of the amendments are examined because they have to agree with each other in the conference, the House and Senate bills have to be identical, so if there are differences in the amendments then they have to be reconciled in the conference, and this thing had to be put in there before the amendment because it was not taken out, it was in there. What I’m talking about was the amendment to exempt these bonuses from any limitation, from any tax, in essence, the amendment to allow these bonuses was in the Porkulus bill. Dodd is saying that he was asked to put it in there by the administration, but he will not name or identify the administration official who requested the AIG bonus allowance. So we need to know who this guy is in addition to knowing the names of the recipients of the bonuses. And these people are getting quite scared, but I’ve got obviously two prongs of thought on this.
I’m a big privacy guy. The invasion of privacy from the government is something that we all ought to oppose. This is scary stuff, and Barney Frank yesterday saying, ‘I don’t care, I don’t care what the death threats are, we’re going to get the names, and I can’t guarantee they won’t be on the front page of the paper.’ CNN is even playing the death threats now. CNN got tape of the death threats, and they’re playing some of these death threats that have been phoned in on their cable network. Now, these people at AIG do not want their names to be mentioned, and they don’t want their salaries mentioned, they don’t want anybody to know anything about this, and I totally understand. In fact, I agree with it. But the more these kinds of outrages happen, the more it will be that more people see the truth of just who we’re dealing with here in the modern Democrat Party, led by Barack Obama. Like Ed Royce, who is a Libertarian member of Congress from California — we’ve got the audio of this coming up later — Ed Royce said he’s going to vote for the 90% tax on the recipients of the bonus money at AIG. Here is Ed Royce on the floor of the House of Representatives today.
ROYCE: We should vote aye on this bill, and the reason we should is because it’s going to stop executives from coming here to take TARP funds from Washington. It’s gonna stop capitalists from being converted into quasi-socialists. That’s the reason we should vote aye. You’ve gotta put up a firewall between government and the markets. You don’t want these fellows down here with their lobbyists. You don’t want these men and women, these executives down here trying to figure out ways to get the taxpayers to back them so that they can become quasi-GSEs.
RUSH: So his theory is tax ’em, tax ’em and let everybody know who they are, tax ’em so that they have a disincentive to ask for money the next time around so they don’t get involved with the government. Now, you could take this theory of his, and it’s sensible, it makes some sense to a certain extent, especially since the Republicans can’t stop this, in the House. The Republicans don’t have the votes to stop this tax increase in the House. So here’s Ed Royce, ‘Okay, I’m going to vote for it, and you guys learn something from this. Don’t ask us for any more money.’ There’s a little bit more that people have to learn, but this lesson would be good. So you could take this, and you could say, okay, let’s apply it to their privacy, let’s have them lose their privacy, let’s have these recipients, the bonus recipients, let’s put their names on the front page of the paper, and let’s put how much money they earn, and then let everybody know that it was the Obama administration that was behind this happening, along with the Democrat Party.
Now, the risk here, and it’s a big one, and I would say this to Congress and Royce, the risk is that a whole bunch of Obama voters are finally going to see this and be outraged and shocked and get upset at Obama. And I have my doubts about that. I think most of the people that voted for Obama, or a good percentage of them, anyway, would love this, they would just love these people getting a 90% tax increase because Obama and the Democrat Party have been ginning up hatred and class envy for corporate executives and the achiever class in this country for years, for decades, and it’s all coming home to roost now. A lot of people just have a full-fledged hatred for these people, regardless the details, and Obama loves this, make no mistake, he loves this focus on anti-capitalism. It is exactly what he wants. He said something — and, folks, look at me, I want you to hear me on this.
There are two things that are happening right now that may well cause civil unrest this summer if they continue. We talked about one of them in today’s brilliant Morning Update. Nancy Pelosi was addressing a gathering of both legal and illegal immigrants. Nancy Pelosi said it is un-American to enforce immigration law. It is un-American for the ICE people, the immigration enforcement people, to target illegals, identify them, and set them up for deportation or some other way of handling them. She said that is un-American. Obama yesterday in Costa Mesa starts talking about immigration reform, and he’s gonna try to fast track it, and he made it plain that one of the things he wants to do is get the 12 to 20 million illegals legalized as soon as possible, and he suggested that they join unions. Now, we know that in large parts of this country and across the political spectrum illegal immigration is still a huge thing. If this administration moves full speed ahead toward amnesty once again and Pelosi and others continue to say that the enforcement of US law is un-American, there are going to be some people who aren’t going to take this well.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed the second prong of this, the barrel price of oil is now flirting at 50 to $52. Gasoline prices in parts of the country are up 8%. You know what happens in the spring, gasoline prices always go up for a while, then they come down in the summertime. But prior to Memorial Day, you can make book on the fact that the gasoline price is going to go up. If gasoline prices start ticking back up in the midst of this recession, in the midst of all this unemployment and the administration continues to start fast tracking the amnesty for illegal aliens for the sole purpose of getting them in this country to join unions, we are going to have a powder keg situation this summer. I will state to you that it is a powder keg situation that President Obama will relish. Remember, this is an administration whose objectives require chaos. The more chaos, the more people will demand Obama do something about it. The more chaos, the more people demand government fix it, whatever ‘it’ is. Obama and the Democrats will only be too happy to oblige. So there’s a lot heading straight for us, while we’re heading straight for it, big time down the road, ladies and gentlemen, and there’s no end in sight to this.
This AIG bonus thing, this is so outrageous. You know, even Shepard Smith, who tends to be liberal, Shepard Smith blew up yesterday afternoon after the House hearings. He said, ‘You people can’t have it both ways. You can’t create the law that awards these bonuses and then get to sit up there and act like you had nothing to do with it, and then put this poor guy that you hired for a dollar a year on the grill,’ meaning Ed Liddy. And Ed Liddy ran rings around these people. Congress and its incompetence, its demagoguery on full display yesterday, and Shep Smith you said, ‘You know what? I think we need to bill these people for lost advertising. We went wall-to-wall with these hearings, we had to broom all of our commercial breaks, and we had to sit here and watch this embarrassment, our government,’ he was really fired up. You don’t see this kind of stuff from Shep unless he is talking about people like me. He got fed up yesterday. They are losing money at the cable networks having to cover this stuff and it’s a joke. The whole thing is a show. The whole thing is a sham.
Now we got Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and they’re going to be awarding retention bonuses. How about a 100% tax on them? How about a claw-back on how much money Franklin Raines got or Jamie Gorelick? They helped start all this in the first place. Are they going to be included in this bill? We have their names. We already know of a bunch of Democrats who not only engineered fraud at Fannie Mae, got wealthy in the process, we know their names. We know who they are. We know what they did. Why not include them on the list of tax confiscation. And how about this, as long as we’re at it, how about, ladies and gentlemen, we also include in this bill the denial of the automatic pay increase for members of Congress who voted for the stimulus bill? The stimulus bill grandfathered in these bonuses, that would include every Democrat in the Senate, almost every Democrat in the House, and three Senate Republicans. Why not ding their salary? Why not cancel their pay raise? They got their pay raise in the stimulus bill, which is where these AIG bonuses are being paid out.
I gotta take a break. A little long here. We got lots to do on the EIB Network and, ladies and gentlemen, Barack Obama’s teleprompter now has its own website. I’m convinced that the Obama teleprompter listens to this program. The Obama teleprompter has its own website. It’s baracksteleprompter.blogspot.com. Let me just read to you the most recent post on the Obama teleprompter blog: ‘I should say up front that Rush Limbaugh is not my kind of guy. He sometimes speaks from notes, and often off the top of his head. If he really wants to impress the electronics community, he ought to spend some time learning how to use me. Then maybe folks would take him a bit more seriously. But I digress. Rush to his credit has identified me as a key player in the White House, and while he didn’t formally request an interview with me — nor did he submit his questions for approval with Gibbsy as ‘real’ journalists like John Roberts do — he has posed a number of interesting questions.’
I did ask the teleprompter several questions yesterday, and the teleprompter heard those questions. And the teleprompter said, ‘I will begin answering today in a new, regular feature: Screen Shots with Rush. Screen Shots will be intermittent today, as I’ve got my West Coast gig, and The Big Guy has a number of phone calls to make to foreign leaders, and he needs me there in case he needs to appear to pull some hip overseas cultural references off the top of his head. That, and he can watch the first round games on my second screen at the same time,’ meaning the NCAA. So the Obama teleprompter now has its own blog. I realize that many females in the audience are going to consider this next comment pompous. Do you realize, ladies and gentlemen, there is an entire industry dining off of me?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let’s go to the Obama town meeting in Costa Mesa, California. Here is a portion of what the teleprompter told him to say last night.
OBAMA: During the campaign, uh, I was asked repeatedly about this, and I reiterated my belief that we have to have comprehension immigration reform. People who have been here for a long time and put down roots here, have to have some mechanism over time to get out of the shadows, because if they stay in the shadows, in the underground economy, then they are oftentimes pitted against American workers. Since they can’t join the union, they can’t complain about minimum wages, et cetera, they end up being abused —
FOLLOWERS: Yeah! (applause)
OBAMA: — and that depresses the wages of everybody, all Americans.
RUSH: So the teleprompter told Obama last night in Costa Mesa, California, to basically come out for illegal immigration or amnesty. It’s time to get ’em out of the shadows because their existence in the shadows is depressing all American wages ’cause they can’t join unions. Now, I want to take you back two summers ago when the Bush administration with Ted Kennedy and John McCain tried to ram through amnesty, much the way this stimulus bill was rammed through. Nobody saw it. Nobody was allowed to debate it. There were no hearings. But everybody knew what it was in this case. It was amnesty. It was total abrogation of US law for 12 million to 20 million illegal ‘citizens,’ and of course the peasants at that time with their pitchforks stormed Washington and got the thing stopped, got the thing shut down.
As I warned you people then: Don’t think that they heard you. Don’t think they’re going to pay any attention in the future. They’re going to look at this as you stopped ’em this time but they’re going to go around it another way, go about it another way. They’ll do it piecemeal, bit-by-bit rather than trying to bite it off all in one big mouthful — and here it is. It’s coming back now, and we all knew that it was coming back. It’s going to be brought back at a period of time when gasoline prices are rising. This is an issue that crosses party lines. It irritates and agitates people across party lines two things to this and you’re creating a powder keg. You throw in the fact that he now is encouraging these people to get manifest so as to join unions, and couple that with card check.
I know some Democrats are starting to back away from this, but the administration is not. They are hell-bent on getting card check, and again, just to refresh your memory to explain card check. So many things are labeled and titled in ways in Washington that they mean the exact opposite of what they’ll do, and that’s what card check is. It’s called the Freedom of Choice Act, or the Freedom of Employment Act. It’s the exact opposite. There is no freedom. This is an open ballot. Imagine this. You’re working at your small business and Tony Soprano walks in, and he’s got a lead pipe with him, and he says, ‘We’re going to unionize this place, or at least we’re going to vote on unionizing this place, and we’re going to vote in public.’
Everybody’s votes are going to be known, and Tony Soprano standing there with his lead pipe. Well, how many people are going to oppose Tony Soprano? How many people are going to vote ‘no’? Nobody wants their kneecaps busted. I’m speaking figuratively, of course, but the intimidation factor of publicly voting, not the secret ballot which exists today, and the whole purpose is to unionize as many small businesses as possible in the country. Then after that’s done, here comes amnesty. Here comes another round of illegal immigration reform. You couple that if this keeps happening with rising gas prices, rising unemployment. Folks, I hate to tell you what might happen. That’s a fuse. That is a fuse on a powder keg, and some might say that it’s lighting the fuse. I’m not going to go so far as to predict that, obviously.
But I’m telling you, I won’t be surprised if it happens; and if it does, that kind of chaos that will result, that kind of anger will be… See, we’re living in a world where we think that kind of anger will redound to Obama’s — not positive. It will hurt him. It will not redound positively to Obama, to his benefit, just the exact opposite. You have to suspend logic and everything you know when talking about what this administration and this president wants to do. Chaos is exactly what they want. The market was plunging, $3 trillion vanishing in wealth. Was there any concern about it? No! They loved it. They love the fact that Wall Street, where all your 401(k)s are and all of your pension plan, were taking. They love the fact that nothing that you thought was safe, was safe. They want you thinking the only thing safe is government. They love this chaos over AIG.
They created it! These are the Obama bonuses. These bonuses were snuck in, kept in by the Obama administration — and Chris Dodd fell on the sword last night. After lying Tuesday, told the truth yesterday, he said, ‘Somebody in the administration made it stay in there.’ He will not identify that person or persons. Meanwhile, we’re trying to, you know, gang up on Geithner and so forth. Look, folks, anybody thinks Geithner’s gonna get canned needs to remember two words: Janet Reno. People like Obama want this kind of guy in charge! He distracts attention from Obama. All these things… I know this may be hard to logically get your arms around. We look at it. Okay, let’s say there’s a lot of unrest. Let’s say there’s anger and hell to pay over rising gas prices, anger and hell to pay over amnesty if it comes down the pike again, hell to pay on these bonuses.
Everybody mad already, right? There’s already a lot of agitation out there. What are Obama’s approval numbers? They’re still high. They’re anywhere from 58 to 60%. They’re still high. It’s not hurting him. He loves this! This chaos and his ability to go straight to the people like he did in this town hall meeting with his teleprompter, this ability to go straight to the people and tell them, ‘It’s Wall Street’s fault, it’s AIG’s fault, and we’re getting even with them and they’re not flying their corporate jets anymore and they’re not going to Vegas anymore — and, by the way, your investments are not safe with these people,’ all of this fits in the master plan. You gotta remember, now, he has the ability — and he’s doing it. I mean, it’s not true to say he’s not in trouble.
I mean, they are in disarray. It’s clear that this man has no executive experience whatsoever, and nobody in his administration really knows what they’re doing, but they have an objective. They have an idea, and they’re aiming for it, and they’re doing it. Whatever chaos is created in the process they are going to try and use to their benefit. So when these kinds of things happen, when the Geithner stuff blows up, the AIG bonus stuff blows up, ‘Uh-oh! Time to get out of the White House and head back to my 24-year-old, fawning audience that’s going to sit here and say, ‘I love you, Barack! I love you!” and that’s going to be the pictures everybody sees, and there are going to be teeming crowds. He’s going to do it where? In Orange County! Why, Orange County used to be a hotbed of Reaganism. He didn’t choose this, by the way. Orange County, Costa Mesa. ‘I love you, Barack! I love you, Barack. I l-o-o-ove you, blahhh, wah,wah!’ (crying) They have tears streaming down their cheeks. Now, in that framework, let’s listen to what Obama’s prompter told him to say about immigration.
OBAMA: During the campaign, uh, I was asked repeatedly about this, and I reiterated my belief that we have to have comprehensive immigration reform. People who have been here for a long time and put down roots here —
RUSH: Oh, yeah!
OBAMA: — have to have some mechanism over time to get out of the shadows —
RUSH: Yes!
OBAMA: — because if they stay in the shadows —
RUSH: Yes!
OBAMA: — in the underground economy —
RUSH: Yes!
OBAMA: — then they are oftentimes pitted against American workers. Since they can’t join the union, they can’t complain about minimum wages, et cetera, they end up being abused —
FOLLOWERS: Yeah! (applause)
OBAMA: — and that depresses the wages of everybody, all Americans.
RUSH: You hear everybody giving the applause out there? ‘Oh, that’s right! Barack cares about people.’ So he wants amnesty and he wants the illegals in unions. While everybody’s all worked up into a tizzy about the AIG bonus BS, he’s out there already moving on to the next agenda item. Let’s now move on to audio sound bite 15. Here the Obama teleprompter told him to take responsibility for the mess he inherited.
OBAMA: Washington’s all in a tizzy, and everybody’s pointing fingers at each other and saying it’s their fault, the Democrats’ fault, the Republicans’ fault. Listen, I’ll take responsibility. I’m the president. We didn’t draft these contracts, and we’ve got a lot on our plate, so for everybody in Washington who’s busy scrambling trying to figure out how to blame somebody else, just go ahead and talk to me, because, it’s my job to make sure that we fix these messes, even if I don’t make ’em.
FOLLOWERS: (wild applause)
RUSH: Oh, how magnanimous. Oh, man! Look, I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it, I didn’t make the mess, but I’m more than happy to clean up the mess, even if I don’t do it. Why, this is Charlie Brown. What he says, that kid on the Simpsons, what’s the young Simpson kid? Bart Simpson! The teleprompter had Obama sounding like Bart Simpson last night. ‘Nobody saw me do it. You can’t make me tell. Nobody saw me do it, you can’t prove anything.’ What do you mean when you say here, ‘We didn’t draft these contracts?’ Mr. President, buddy, these are your bonuses. Your insistence kept these bonuses in the stimulus bill.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, to Obama’s teleprompter. I want to replay the sound bite here, because this has almost biblical overtones, President Obama’s teleprompter telling him to say that he takes responsibility for a mess that he didn’t create.
OBAMA: Washington’s all in a tizzy and everybody is pointing fingers at each other and saying it’s their fault, the Democrats’ fault, the Republicans’ fault. Listen, I’ll take responsibility. I’m the president. We didn’t draft these contracts, and we’ve got a lot on our plate, so for everybody in Washington who’s busy scrambling trying to figure out how to blame somebody else, just go ahead and talk to me. Because it’s my job to make sure that we fix these messes even if I don’t make ’em.
RUSH: He did make this one. This is totally his! This bailout, this is totally his doing! His administration wanted the bonuses in there, but that’s beside the point. This is a diversion. This sounds awfully familiar, I’m sure, to a lot of you people who are people of faith. What was Obama’s teleprompter telling him to say here? The teleprompter essentially told Obama to say, ‘I’ll pay for your sins, even though I’m innocent.’ That’s what the prompter told Obama to say, and he said it. I’ll pay for your sins, even though I’m innocent. However, ladies and gentlemen, you and I both know that President Obama is not a savior. He can’t even make a cabinet.