RUSH: ‘President Obama says that the nation is in a very deep recession and it will take considerable time to recover.’ Ladies and gentlemen, we are in a bad recession precisely because of President Obama’s policies. His policies have deepened the recession, and they are responsible for lengthening it, and his announced ‘solutions’ today to speed up more government spending with more hiring of ‘shovel-ready jobs’ and so forth is only going to compound the problem and make it even worse because none of this will be taking place in the private sector or generated by the private sector where economic growth and recovery takes place.
The question remains: At what point will people who voted for Obama begin to see it this way? I fear it’s going to take much longer than anybody thinks. Republican ‘Chuck Grassley says that President Barack Obama ‘got nerve’ to go sightseeing in Paris while telling lawmakers it’s time to deliver on a health care overhaul.’ Grassley is the top Republican on the finance committee. He ‘is key to any bipartisan health care deal,’ and using Twitter out… By the way, that reminds me. I’m getting e-mails from people. ‘Hey, Rush, I saw your tweet the other day.’ I do not have an account on Twitter. I think there are three or four phony Rush Limbaugh accounts on Twitter. I don’t ‘tweet.’ I resist the tug of popular sentiment. When everybody else gets involved in something, I purposely don’t. I have no interested in ‘tweeting,’ so I don’t have a tweeter account or a Twitter account nor a Facebook account nor any of these other things.
So whatever you’re seeing supposedly ‘tweeted’ by me is not the case. Anyway, Chuck Grassley’s attitude is significant here because ‘any hope for bipartisan consensus on health care rests on an alliance between Grassley and the committee chairman, Max Baucus. The committee has been laboring to come up with a health care bill that Democrats and Republicans can support.’ This health care bill is the focus right now and ought to be the focus of everybody’s energy to oppose and to prevent it from happening. Because if they get it, ladies and gentlemen, it will allow them to regulate virtually every aspect of our lives, to regulate and control virtual every aspect of our lives. Not to mention raise everybody’s taxes, which will further choke off any economic recovery. It is obscene and it is absurd what is being attempted here. And I’m telling you, anybody with a brain understands it isn’t going to work. It’s not going to provide any real solutions for health care problems today. It’s going to make health care worse. It’s going to make the budget deficit worse. It’s going to make the private sector worse. It is going to destroy, if it happens, even further the American economy as we have all come to know it and, for most of us, have lived it. Let’s get some audio sound bites from the past on this economic catastrophe. Let’s go back to February 2009. This is President Obama in the White House, a portion of his remarks.
OBAMA 2009: Make no mistake: a failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe and guarantee a longer recession, a less robust recovery, and a more uncertain future. Millions more jobs will be lost. More businesses will be shuttered. More dreams will be deferred.
RUSH: All that’s happened. All of that’s happened and he did act as he wanted to act. We passed the Porkulus bill. He said it had been passed immediately or we would face catastrophe. It was passed immediately. We are in the midst of a catastrophe, and the president says today it’s even worse! We are in a deep recession. It’s gonna take even longer to climb out of it. So we’re going to compound the same problem by spending even more money, which means we are going to print even more money. Saturday, a portion of the president’s YouTube address.
OBAMA: Simply put, the status quo is broken. We cannot continue this way. If we do nothing everyone’s health care will be put in jeopardy. Within a decade we’ll spend one dollar out of every five we earn on health care, and we’ll keep getting less for our money. That’s why fixing what’s wrong with our health care system is no longer a luxury we hope to achieve; it’s a necessity we cannot postpone any longer.
RUSH: Okay. The same situation, the same circumstances are being served up to us. Back in February we could not wait for the stimulus. We were facing a catastrophe. In fact, let’s go back to October. We could not delay TARP. We could not delay bailing out the banks. The country would fall apart in 24 hours. Two weeks later it was passed and the country was fine, had not fallen apart. February, ‘We have to act now. We cannot delay! A catastrophe is right around the corner.’ So we got Porkulus, and the same strategy is now being employed to create this crisis and fear mentality on health care. ‘If we don’t get that done, everything falls apart.’ Don’t fall for it, folks. It’s a ruse.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: During the break, I listened to a little audio of Obama with a cabinet meeting today, and he was talking about the recession being worse. And he said, essentially, it was all George W. Bush’s fault. He said circumstances beyond his control when he assumed office blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I am infuriated when I hear that. This is gutless. President Obama, it’s time to stand up and be a man — and men who are six months into office do not continue to blame their predecessors. You, sir, have committed far more egregious budgetary errors than the Bush administration could have ever dreamed of. Mr. Obama’s financial plans, his economic plans are an unmitigated disaster that are destroying the United States economy. There is no other way to put it. There is no previous president in this country who set out to do what Barack Obama is doing.
No president in the history of this country sought to destroy the economy of the United States of America. Barack Obama must want that to happen because that’s what his policies are doing, and today he doubled down on them. He is not retracting them. He is not trying an alternative. He is 
doubling down on that which has led us to 9.4% unemployment. Even today he’s speaking about how the good the news in unemployment is, that ‘only’ 345,000 people lost their jobs last month, as opposed to 600,000 the prior month. So this is good news. Never mind that we’ve reached a 25-year high in unemployment. Never mind than the one program of his has help anybody revitalize their own economic fortunes. His policies have put nothing but boulders and obstacles in front of everybody. We find out today, ladies and gentlemen — from none other than I think the Detroit Free Press.
The Detroit Free Press has a big story on how it was Steve Rattner, the car czar, of Obama, who forced the bankruptcy on Chrysler. Chrysler didn’t want it. They had secured some concessions from the UAW to freeze wages, to promise no strikes for six years, to reduce the pension contributions and all that, and the administration wouldn’t hear of it. They demanded bankruptcy. They demanded a deal with Fiat. Chrysler did not want it. The administration forced it on them. We have autocratic control of the US economy in as many sectors as Obama can secure. The next big one is health care — and if he gets that, you can say go back to the notion of freedom as you have known it, because virtually every aspect of your life can be regulated on the premise that any ‘risky behavior’ that they define as risky is going to raise health care costs.
And so the offensive objective to keep health care costs down will allow them to dictate what you eat, what kind of car you drive — how far you can drive it, where you can drive it, if they want to. Think no limits. This is what is desired.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: To the phones we go, to John in Lake Zurich, Illinois. Hello, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Good afternoon, Rush. I called because I’m in the computer IT industry, and I’ve worked on a lot of systems at financial institutions, and what Obama’s proposing to do with the health care system is basically replace everything in one fell swoop, which no responsible corporation would ever do with one of their major systems. Typically they would pilot test it first in an isolated area, then they would gradually replace different parts of the company at different times so that if something bad happened there would be a fall-back. The Republicans, I think, or anybody who just wants to make sure that they preserve the good things that we’ve got in our health care system right now, should demand that we set up pilot programs and any of the states that have tried to do this already have all failed miserably. So I think if we —
RUSH: If I may interrupt.
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: Two things. This is not criticism. Please don’t take this personally. I’m just listening to what you’re saying, and I know from the corporate standpoint you’re dead-on accurate. You don’t roll something out without testing it to know it’s gonna work, too much is invested in it, you gotta have a fallback if it doesn’t work, but right now telling the American people that no corporation would do this is not the way to sell opposition to it. I’m sorry, it just isn’t. If you tell the American people that no corporation is going to do this they’re going to think it’s the way to go because he’s made people hate corporate America. The second thing — and this I do disagree with you on, respectfully so because I know you’re a smart guy — but the Republicans need to oppose this philosophically. They don’t need to oppose it on the edges and say, ‘Look, why don’t you try this in a couple states or it’s been tried in a couple states and it hasn’t worked.’ They need to oppose this from start to finish the way it is being structured. They don’t want any part of this. They don’t want one vote for this plan.
The Democrats are going to run around and try to get as many Republicans votes as they can, just like he did for the stimulus, just like he did for anything else so that he doesn’t have to take the blame alone, so the Democrats don’t take the blame alone. This is an utter disaster. It doesn’t need to be tested. We don’t need to test it to know it isn’t gonna work. It does not work in Great Britain; it didn’t work in Canada; it didn’t work in the Soviet Union and it doesn’t work in Cuba, I don’t care what the hell anybody wants to tell me about it. I don’t see anybody in this country sending any of their family to Cuba for serious medical care. If it was the best in the world they’d be trying to find ways to get in there secretly and violate our laws, you can’t travel there. All of this is bogus! There’s not one aspect of this that recommends itself. Not one.
Madeleine in Melbourne, Florida. Great to have you here. You’re on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, it’s an honor.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I got two quick things. I just want to say what a great feeling it gives me to know that Michelle and the kids are having such a nice shopping spree over there and the romantic dinners and he’s out playing golf while I’ve been out on another wasted day practically in tears trying to find a pissy waitress job. My restaurant closed down three months ago and does he give a rat’s you-know-what about the little people?
RUSH: Aren’t you happy that your president is able to go play golf during these trying times, he needs the break, he needs to recharge and rejuvenate himself from the horrible circumstances he alone has to deal with? And of course who can blame the first lady and the kids for going sightseeing, isn’t that a wonderful thing for first ladies? Aren’t we as Americans proud to see that?
CALLER: It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, I tell you. Number two, thank God my husband has a good job, but you were mentioning about the health care thing, we have benefits through his company. What happens when everybody gets free health care, do we still have to pay through his company do you think or are we going to be able to get off this and get it free like everybody else or are we going to be paying double the price? I have no clue what’s going to happen.
RUSH: Everybody is going to be paying more. There will be taxes on the company-provided benefits. Either the company will pay the taxes or the employee will pay the taxes as imputed income. There are also other tax increases planned. Obama is planning on limiting, if not eliminating, all tax deductions for the top tax brackets, as a means of raising more revenue. It’s another tax increase, which is going to provide many disincentives for people who engage in charitable activities or whatever to get the tax deduction for it. It’s a disaster in the making. It is an outright utter disaster he has planned. What’s going to happen, the answer to your question is people are going to get laid off. As everybody is going to be required to have health insurance and health coverage businesses are not going to be able to afford it, the recipients are going to have fewer jobs. They’ll have to fire people; they’ll have to lay people off.
CALLER: Well, that makes me feel so much better.
RUSH: It should make you feel better. It should make you feel a lump in your throat. We are on the cusp of an unmitigated national disaster and catastrophe. There is no possible way to overstate this. Folks, you know me. I am not an alarmist. I am an optimist. I try to find the good things about every day. I want to enjoy life and I want to help as many other people enjoy life. But I tell you, what I see coming down the pike as it gets worse and worse and worse, the architects of this thing, let’s do more of what’s making it worse, it’s time to put the foot down. It’s an unmitigated disaster. It is a Obama-caused tailspin and it has to be stopped. It must be stopped, for the sake of everybody’s kids and grandkids and great-grandkids and the country as well. Madeleine, thanks much for the call.