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RUSH: Well, it’s one thing we can say with absolute ontological certitude: Prostitution has been legalized in Washington, DC. Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson, Chris Dodd (he gets a hundred million) Vermont, Massachusetts, on and on it goes. Greetings. We all got a screwed and prostitution has now been legalized. Great to have you, folks, as we kick off a couple days of broadcast excellence. We’ll be out on Wednesday and through January the 4th. We’ve got Mark Steyn in here on Wednesday and then best-of shows and guest hosts all next week and then we’ll be back. Also, a programming note: We have run into a couple of unforeseen snafus in the installation of the high-definition Dittocam, and I should have not promised it would be back today because I just should have known we were going to run into these snafus. Also there’s this, I continue to do the program standing up so as to relieve as much pressure as possible on my cervical spine where this pinched nerve is. It’s disc C5 and that screws up the angle of the camera anyway, so one thing cancels out the other, but it will be back, we promise, when we get back for the first of the year. Now, here’s the telephone number if you want to be on the program today. 800-282-2882. And the e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

We have a special message, ladies and gentlemen, from the Senate majority leader, a special Christmas message from Senator Harry Reid.

(playing of Harry Read Christmas Message parody)

RUSH: Merry Christmas, everybody. How’s that hope and change working out for you? Merry Christmas, happy holidays to all of you from all of us here at the Excellence in Broadcasting Network. You want to hear a liar lie? You want to hear a liar lie right to your face? We have two of them, two sound bites here. Barack Obama this morning in Washington at the White House, a press conference about health care and a number of other things.

OBAMA: The Congressional Budget Office now reports that this bill will reduce our deficit by $132 billion over the first decade and by as much as $1.3 trillion in the decade after that. So I just want to be clear. For all those who are continually carping about how this is somehow a big-spending government bill, this cuts our deficit by $132 billion the first ten years, and by over a trillion in the second. That argument that opponents are making against this bill does not hold water.

RUSH: That’s just an out-and-out lie, folks. I mean there’s no other way to characterize this. It’s not a prevarication, he’s not wrong, he’s not looking at a set of figures that are incorrect, it’s an out-and-out lie. Even Robert Samuelson today in the Washington Post, a column which says, ‘Passing Health Reform Could be a Nightmare for Obama.’ Well, by God we only hope so because it’s a nightmare for all the rest of us. It damn well better be a nightmare for President Obama and his political future. Robert Samuelson agrees, this is all about Obama and his legacy and nothing else. It will not cover everyone. Even by 2019 there will be something like seven or eight million people uncovered without health insurance. It will not control costs. It will worsen the budget and the deficit. It is going to raise taxes out the wazoo on virtually everybody. It is going to disrupt the entire health care system. It is atrocious legislation, all of that, that’s the summary of the Robert Samuelson piece. Here’s the next Obama sound bite from this morning at the White House.

OBAMA: When my administration walked through the door, the country faced a growing economic downturn as well as a deepening fiscal hole. Washington had passed massive tax cuts for the wealthy and an expensive new entitlement program without paying for any of it. Health care costs continue to rise year after year and little effort was made to cut wasteful spending. As a result, over the previous eight years, the — the national debt doubled, doubled. As I’ve said in the long run, we can’t continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences, as if waste doesn’t matter, as if the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money. That’s what we’ve seen time and time again.

RUSH: So he has the audacity here to say that Republicans spend your money like Monopoly money, and again blaming the Bush administration. This guy is a coward. He does not have the gonads or the spine to even stand up and accept what he’s doing. All of this is his doing. He cannot even proudly say, ‘You should like this, you may not like it but I’m telling you it’s the best thing for you, it’s the best thing for me.’ No, he knows it’s a disaster. He has to slough this off on his predecessor, the previous administration. ‘When my administration walked through the door the country faced a growing economic downturn, a deepening fiscal hole.’ Massive tax cuts are the cause of all this? Those massive tax cuts created more revenue to the Treasury than they had anticipated. They always do. The capital gains tax cuts alone caused more money to pour into Washington than anybody figured. ‘Health care costs continue to rise, eight years national debt doubled.’ This man has spent more deficit money in one year than the Bush eight years in total, ladies and gentlemen.

The audacity of this is Alinsky-like, simply go out and lie to everybody’s face. And you note what’s on tap here. I have known this from the get-go. Once they pass health care reform all we’re going to hear about is the deficit, and that is a code word for Democrats: we have to raise taxes. That’s what’s next. The deficit. And it will be blamed on Bush. And we’ve got to fix it. There are stories out there, the Chinese are now saying the world does not have enough money to buy up US Treasury bonds. The world does not have enough money to buy up our debt. The Chinese, the ChiComs are now saying this. I’ll take them at their word. The world doesn’t have the money to finance the spending of this out of control little child who thinks he is The Messiah, who thinks he’s saving everything. He’s botching everything he touches. Over at Copenhagen, it was unmitigated disaster.

He tried to blame the Chinese for everything, and they’re not taking it. Rarely have I seen — and I hoped for it, I wanted this kind of failure but not to the extent that he got what he wanted when it comes to health care. But he is failing in every which way you can imagine, other than in his agenda to totally remake and destroy the country. He’s not making any friends around the world in the process, but I don’t think he cares. Everything that was said about how health care reform will cut the deficit will be immediately forgotten. If health care reform is going to cut the deficit we don’t need raise taxes, do we? If health care reform, if that first bite, $132 billion over the first decade and $1.3 trillion deficit reduction the decade after that, then that’s fine, health care will do its magic so we don’t need to hear any more about the deficit, do we? But we will, we will. Along with all of Mr. Obama’s campaign promises about not increasing taxes for anybody making less than $250,000 and of course we’ll never hear another peep about those promised tax cuts that he made.

Cap and trade, that will also come along and that will help us pay down the deficit, all of this new spending is going to defy all logic but he’s going to say all these new things that he’s going to introduce will reduce the deficit, even giving amnesty to illegal aliens. That will come under the umbrella of deficit reduction. It will be sold as a way to get more taxpayers to pay down the deficit. We need more taxpayers, we need to legalize these people, they’re already here working. We need to collect taxes from them rather than have them send the money back home to Mexico. An argument, by the way, they conveniently avoid when it comes to abortion, we can outlaw abortion and have a whole bunch of taxpayers paying taxes. So the lying, the obfuscation, the outright insults to our intelligence continue. Let’s go back, by the way, July 23rd this year, Shaker Heights, Ohio, a wealthy suburb outside of Cleveland. Obama held a town meeting on health care reform, just a portion of what he said.


OBAMA: Reform will keep the government out of your health care decisions, giving you the option to keep your coverage if you’re happy with it. So don’t let folks say that somehow we’re going to be forcing government-run health care. It’s just not true.

RUSH: It just happened in the Senate this morning at 1 a.m. And the final vote will be Christmas Eve, 7 p.m., if the schedule is maintained in order to get this done before these senators go home and face the music from constituents, in order to get something done so the president can have something to really, really proclaim as a great achievement during his State of the Union speech. You are not only going to be mandated to buy insurance, it’s going to cost you an arm and a leg to do so. I’m not sure the left’s anger here is genuine because I think the really far, extreme left knows exactly this, that they’re going to get all that they want down the road. But some of the left are going after Lieberman. Paul Krugman said hang Lieberman in effigy. Can you imagine if I’d said that about Obama? Paul Krugman said hang Lieberman in effigy.

This is an outrage. You will not keep the coverage, if you’re going to be mandated to go out and buy insurance. Why did they just make poverty illegal? If they’re going to have a law that says you have to buy insurance — and, by the way, you now have to buy it from insurance companies, not the government, and you ought to see what insurance company stocks are doing. The wise investor loaded up on insurance company stocks last week knowing full well what was coming last night or early this morning. Insurance company stocks are through the roof because Barack Obama and Harry Reid have now mandated that every American buy it, which I don’t even think is constitutional. Of course I know it’s not. Also, Nancy Pelosi prevailed, ladies and gentlemen. The Botox industry has been excluded from tax increases, and replacing the Botox tax increase tanning salons will now be hit with a 10% tax on indoor tanning services, replacing the cosmetic surgery tax, otherwise known as the Botox tax.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I got an interesting note from a friend of mine who wants me to castigate you all for ‘not getting it.’ He wants me to castigate you in my audience for not understanding what’s going on. That’s not what’s happening here. Everybody in the country understands what’s going on. We no longer have a representative republic; we no longer have a democracy. What we have here is a whistle-stop casino. The game’s rigged. The dice are loaded. The roulette wheel is controlled. The cards are marked. They’re not counting on us being suckers. They know we’re suckers! They know that we can’t stop this. Folks, this is literally outrageous. I would not be this disquieted, this outraged over the health care scheme if the Democrats had just come out and said, ‘We want to take over health care much like Canada and England have. We want to appropriate one-sixth of the US economy.’

If they had told us, ‘Here’s what you’re gonna get and here’s how much it’s gonna cost and this is why we’re doing it. Here are the pluses and here are the minuses,’ then at least we could have had an open, honest, transparent debate with honest politicians and honest editorial writers giving their honest opinions. Then and only then could we say we have a democracy that is functioning, and I would call on myself and all of us to go with the will of the people, which are universally opposed to this. The vast majority of the American people have no desire for this. If I were Senator Ben Nelson, I would be ashamed. If I were Senator Ben Nelson I would be embarrassed. What a charade Senator Nelson ran and now trying to hide behind the shadow of the governor, the Republican governor of Nebraska.

All the Republican governor Nebraska did was say, ‘This is going to drive up our Medicaid costs. We can’t afford it,’ and so Reid says all right. Well, we’ll pay a little prostitution fee here for Senator Nelson and we’ll give you $100 million. If I’m Missouri, if I’m Kansas, if I’m all these other states outside of Nebraska — Connecticut, Louisiana, Vermont, and Massachusetts — I’m a little ticked off today, too, if I’m a governor of one of those states. ‘How come those states get bought off? How come my state doesn’t get bought off? How come my state’s going to have all these expanded Medicaid costs and these other states aren’t?’ I mean, this is simply outrageous. We have deceptions, we have deceit, we have payoffs. We have out-and-out bribes here taking place in what was once the greatest deliberative body on earth. We have secret meetings.

We have artificial deadlines. We have accounting gimmicks that would put Enron and Bernie Madoff to shame. They are so obvious, it’s embarrassing to have to even explain them. We have bills that don’t come due until 2014, after Obama’s possible second term and liberal senators getting another six years. So you can say good-bye to this being a representative republic. It’s simply not a democracy any more. This is a whistle-stop casino, and the American people are totally sold out; are totally ignored, mocked, and laughed at. The sellouts of moderates like Nelson, Landrieu, and others demonstrates once again that these so-called Democrat moderates are no such thing. They are liberals, liberals, liberals, liberals. In any important question, they are partisan Democrat hacks first and everything else second, and they have a willing press attaching the ‘moderate’ label to them to give them cover.

Just because they pretend to look responsible does not mean that they are. Only Lieberman is somewhat conservative, but not on economic issues. Now, if I’m an activist on the left wing, if I’m one of the kook fringe, I might be saying, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ While the bill is onerous and expensive, it’s a fiscal fraud. It’s tax increase on everybody at a time of 10% unemployment, as I understand the bill. It’s none of the stuff that they really said it was going to be, none of the stuff they really want. None of it! There is no public option (right now). There is no expanded Medicare (right now). Here’s what I think. You know, what they have done on here, ladies and gentlemen — and I know why they’ve done it — is they’ve front-loaded the bill with taxes and they’ve back-loaded the benefits in order to make the bill look fiscally prudent and to also protect the reelection of the criminals that pulled this off: The president and these senators that are up in 2010 and 2012.

Now, liberals like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and LBJ front-loaded the benefits. They back-loaded the taxes, Social Security and Medicare, in order to set the hook in the mouth of the middle-American taxpayer. By the time people realized what national fiscal calamities these programs were, huge, entrenched, selfish interest groups had sprung up to defend them to the death. So when people get taxes without benefits from Obamacare, they may rebel — and that’s going to happen for four years. The tax increases kick in next year, after this SOB gets signed. This is what happened to Reagan’s catastrophic health care plan for seniors. Reagan wanted to come up with a catastrophic insurance plan for seniors, and people found out about it, and this is when they pulled Dan ‘Rosty’ Rostenkowski out of his car in Chicago and practically beat him up. But they have front-loaded the taxes here and back-loaded the benefit for the express purpose of protecting themselves at reelection time. However, I think it may work just the opposite. It may work just the opposite. All these tax increases and no benefits? I don’t even like using the word ‘benefits.’ There’s not one damn benefit in this whole thing, but you know what I mean.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You know, the Associated Press here, State-Controlled AP has a story on the winners and losers in this bill, and there are no winners, there are no winners except the political class. There are no winners except the Democrats, at least temporarily. Ultimately they are going to pay a huge price for this in November liked they cannot imagine. Here are the winners as defined by AP. ‘Cosmetic surgeons –‘ Botox ‘– who fended off a 5% tax on their procedures. Nebraska, Louisiana, Vermont and Massachusetts. These states are getting more federal help with Medicaid than other states. In the case of Nebraska — represented by Sen. Ben Nelson, who’s providing the critical 60th vote for the legislation to pass — the federal government is picking up 100 percent of the tab of a planned expansion of the program, in perpetuity. Vermont and Massachusetts get temporary increases in the federal share of their Medicaid tabs. In Louisiana, moderate Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu negotiated $100 million for 2011 before announcing her support for the legislation.

Beneficiaries of Medicare Advantage plans — the private managed-care plans within Medicare — in Florida. Hundreds of thousands of them will have their benefits grandfathered in thanks to a provision tailored by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., that also affects a much smaller number of seniors in a few other states. Longshoremen. They were added to the list of workers in high-risk professions who are shielded from the full impact of a proposed new tax on high-value insurance plans.’ The Cadillac plans. ‘(Electrical linemen were already included, along with policemen, firefighters, emergency first responders and workers in construction, mining, forestry, fishing and certain agriculture jobs.)’ Obama had the audacity to say that he hailed the Senate for standing up to special interests! He praised the Senate for standing up to special interests. For crying out loud, this is nothing but a gift to one special interest after another. Here’s another winner. ‘A handful of physician-owned hospitals being built around the country — including one in Bellevue, Neb. — which would be permitted to get referrals from the doctors who own them, avoiding a new ban in the Senate bill that will apply to hospitals built in the future.’ This is also something given to Senator Nelson from Nebraska.


Now, the loser — and the one they didn’t identify here — is the American people, but that’s at the top of the list of losers. AP identifies ‘tanning salons, progressives’ i.e., liberals, ‘They had to give up on their long-held dream of a new government-run insurance plan so that Democratic leaders could lock down the necessary votes from moderates.’ There are no moderates. There are only liberal hack Democrats. And don’t forget, this is just the first stage. Tom Harkin said, ‘We’re eventually gonna get to a mansion, but this is just the starter house.’ I mean this is absurd, folks. ‘People making over $200,000 a year,’ the Medicare tax is going to go up by almost a full percentage point, putting ‘the Medicare tax at 2.35% on income over $200,000 a year for individuals, $250,000 for couples.’ And generic drug makers are losers. ‘They fought unsuccessfully to block 12 years of protection that makers of brand-name biotech drugs — expensive pharmaceuticals made from living cells — will get against generic would-be competitors.’

So they’ve shut down competition, they’ve shut down research and development, they have just generally made a mess of everything with the president out there lying saying it’s going to be a deficit reduction that is not going to run up any kind of expenses. It’s just insulting, and it’s not American, what has happened here did not happen in the greatest traditions of the United States Senate or the US Congress. What happened here is the in the greatest traditions of Chicago thug politics but not much else. You want to listen to Dingy Harry this morning on the Senate floor, a portion of his remarks.

REID: On average, an American dies from lack of health insurance every ten minutes. That means in the short time I’ve been speaking our broken system has claimed at least two lives. Another American has died, another American has died, two have died a preventable death, each of them. So as our citizens face heartrending decisions every day, tonight every Senator has a choice to make as well. That choice: Are you going to do all you can to avert the next preventable death?

RUSH: Folks, this is outrageous! Harry Reid is claiming Americans are dying from lack of health insurance as he is speaking! Harry, send ’em an ambulance and shut up. Give me the names. Who are these people that died while you were speaking? And might they have had the television set on? Could you be a leading cause of death here? He continued.

REID: All over this great country of ours people are dying soon, far too soon. More and more Americans who come down with the flu, or even develop diabetes —

RUSH: Stop this. Stop this. The flu! Another mess the government made. There was no pandemic. There was no epidemic of swine flu. The life expectancy in this country continues to go up. They cannot tell the truth in even one syllable of what they say.

REID: — suffer a stroke, are dying far earlier than modern science says they should die. More and more Americans who contract skin cancer or have a heart condition are dying rather than being cured.

RUSH: Can you believe this?

REID: This is not about partisanship or about procedure. This is not about politics. It certainly is not about polling. It’s about people; it’s about life and death in America. It’s about human suffering and given the chance to relieve this suffering, we must.

RUSH: He’s portraying a Third World country here with absolutely one hospital. I don’t know. This is before the vote at one o’clock this morning, and it’s just unseemly. ‘This is not about politics, it’s not about polling, it’s about people, it’s about life and death, it’s about human suffering.’ Yeah, it’s about the loss of freedom. That’s the single greatest casualty here, is once this becomes law, virtually every aspect of all of our lives will be regulated by people like Harry Reid and Barack Obama for whatever reason and motivation they conjure up. Now, here’s David ‘Rodham’ Gergen on CNN this morning, their newsroom show, the anchor Tom Foreman spoke with Gergen. He said, ‘Look, certainly a victory for the White House, but in many ways it seems like the fissure in this country between the left and the right, conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, I guess you could argue is even deeper?’

GERGEN: This is an historic moment. Senate of the United States has never voted for universal access before. This vote tonight, the 60 now ensures that the universal access bill will pass the Senate. That’s very, very important for them. Having said that, severe disappointment that this is the first major social legislation that’s passed in this country in more than a half a century that has not enjoyed a vote from the other side is I think brought us to the place where we can say historic legislation is about to be made but it’s a tragedy to me that it can’t be done with more support from the other side, that this couldn’t have been worked out in a more bipartisan way. The blame is pretty evenly divided here about who’s responsible for that, but the fact is the partisanship, the poisonous, toxic atmosphere that exists on the Senate floor tonight and in much of Washington is not healthy for the country.

RUSH: This is the fault of one person, Barack Obama. This is the fault of the president of the United States who wants a monument to himself. He is forcing the Democrats and probably not having to use too much pressure because they’re as leftist radical as he is for all intents and purposes. Tragic that this was passed with no Republican votes? Hell, it’s a godsend. It’s a damn godsend that Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins held their ground. Folks, this would be a disaster if just one Republican had voted with them, because then they could say it was bipartisan. The fact that the Republicans held out and are nowhere near this is the only decent thing about this, not only for their future but for ours.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’ll tell you something. The fact that Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins held out shows that even the dumbest… Sheesh. Uh… Um… The fact that Snowe and Collins held out shows that even the most obdurate Republican knows that this vote will be toxic for reelection, even in liberal Maine. If they thought this would help their reelection in Maine, they would have voted for it. I tell you, the internal polling on this must be incredibly bad for the Democrats. I just ran some numbers here during the break. Harry Reid said two Americans are dying every ten minutes, right? Let me make sure that I use the right figures. Yes: ‘Two Americans are dying every ten minutes.’ Shouldn’t that mean that we should get the health benefits right away, not wait until 2014? Do you realize that the Democrats are doing nothing about all those Americans dying every ten minutes without these benefits, the so-called benefits?

I hate to use that word. There are no benefits, period, in this debacle. Let’s call it the health care spending. The ‘spending’ designed to make sure everybody’s covered, to make sure everybody gets better health care than ever before, paid for by the tax increases on a couple of millionaires. Ahem! But we’re not going to start doing all the great things in health care until 2014. So the American people will continue to die while paying higher taxes. I ran the numbers here. There are 525,600 minutes in one year. And I know right now there are people going to their calculators trying to prove me wrong, because my track record on math numbers on the fly, I admit, is very shaky. There are 525,600 minutes in one year. So if we delay the so-called benefits — uhhh, the great new coverage, the great new health care at cheaper prices than ever before. If we delay the benefits for four years, that is 2,102,400 minutes. So the Democrats are killing 210,240 people by delaying the benefits for four years. According to Dingy Harry’s own words during the time of his speech, two Americans died. He didn’t even bother to send an ambulance! When you run the numbers out here, by delaying all the miracles in this bill until 2014: 210,240 people will die who otherwise would not have, because of Democrats. Where is the outrage? Go to the phones. People are eager to get in on this, I’m sure. We’ll start in North Platte, Nebraska. Hi, Becky, great to have you with us.

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