RUSH: Why would TIME Magazine run this story? It’s on the website. You know, TIME Magazine is… What do they have, 40 covers of Obama in like 20 weeks? And it says here ‘Obama’s Stimulus 
Plan Failing by its Own Measure,’ and here’s how it’s written in a story by a guy named Stephen Gandel. The lede to the story is: ‘The $787 billion stimulus plan is turning out to be far less stimulating than its architects expected.’ See, this is where everybody’s missing it. This stimulus plan is doing everything its ‘architects’ intended it to do and that’s prop up the states first and prop up Democrats first, prop up unions first and second, and not ever stimulate the economy. Now, I have to think, for TIME Magazine to run this story, there has to be some sense that they better cover their rear end on this journalistically. TIME Magazine, they have been in the tank. It seems like every week or every other week Obama is on the cover of TIME Magazine or Newsweek — and if it’s not Obama, it’s Michelle (My Belle) on the cover.
From CNN Money: ‘National Health Care May Never Happen — The latest polling looks great for President Obama: It shows that Americans love national health care.’ Yeah, but what’s the rub? ‘If history and polling trends are any guide, however, that will change. Voters right now are in what the famous pollster Daniel Yankelovich called the Wishful Thinking stage — a moment in the life of an opinion analogous to the dreamy early days of a relationship.’ This piece goes on to say that Americans love the idea of health insurance for all until they realize how much it’s going to cost them, and this is not speculation here. ‘Similar scenarios played out in 1993 when the Clintons pushed for their ill-fated health care plan and in 1988 after Congress passed an insurance plan to protect the elderly against the costs of catastrophic illness.
‘In 1988, polls had shown that Americans overwhelmingly favored such a plan in the abstract, and large bipartisan majorities passed it in both houses. Only the top 40 percent of seniors would have paid a tax surcharge to fund the plan, but those were the people who tended to carry supplemental insurance already. Once they realized what was happening, they howled in a way that legislators couldn’t ignore.’ Remember, this is when Dan ‘Rosty’ Rostenkowski got beaten up by constituents in Chicago, outside his car. ‘Congress repealed it. None of its provisions ever took effect. Today, with more ambitious reforms on the table, a scenario not unlike 1988’s could be taking shape. Dig deep into the latest polling, and you’ll find that while most Americans think the state of health care is a serious problem, 77 percent say they are satisfied with the quality of care they receive.’
Now, why is Obama, then, pushing it? Well, Obama is pushing health care — and he wants this done by August. He’s got to get this done by August! He wants to get this done by the recess because the economy is tanking. I’m going to tell you why he wants it fast. The economy is tanking. Obama knows better than anyone else that it’s tanking, and he also knows that by the end of the year he cannot pass health care because the state of the economy is going to be so bad that everybody will know it. So the tactic here is speed and deception, the same tactic being used with Sotomayor and her confirmation hearings. The public is not going to be in any mood for a massive new spending program of any kind when the depth of the current spending and its disastrous consequences are known, and they will be known — and they are going to get worse. The circumstances are going to get worse.
Mort Zuckerman today has a piece in the Wall Street Journal: ‘The Economy Is Even Worse Than You Think.’ Mort Zuckerman is the chairman and editor of US News & World Report. He owns the New York Daily News. ‘The average length of unemployment is higher than it’s been since government began tracking the data in 1948,’ is the subheadline of his piece. Now we got Timmy Geithner out there saying… Is it Geithner? Who was it? Somebody said we’re going to have a jobless recovery. Was it Geithner? Was it Larry Summers? Somebody said it. I got it here somewhere. How do you have a jobless recovery? Oh, I get it! Wall Street comes back. Goldman Sachs is doing fine. They have a $3.4 billion profit. Goldman Sachs is doing fine. Wait ’til Americans find out about that.
They thought Goldman Sachs and Wall Street going to be punished by Obama.
I mentioned a piece yesterday by Robert Samuelson in Newsweek magazine on the rich not being recession-proof this time, and I read that again. The most important part of the article in the Samuelson piece yesterday, is a discussion on a Wall Street Journal article and the reaction thereto. Now, here’s from the Samuelson piece. Quote: ‘In April, The Wall Street Journal ran an article sympathetically portraying families with incomes around $250,000, the level that President Obama has targeted for tax increases.’ Sympathetic to those people. ‘By most measures, these families rank in the top 2 percent to 4 percent of the income spectrum. But many — possibly most — see themselves as ‘upper middle class’ and not ‘rich,’ the paper reported.
”I’m not after sympathy,’ said the wife of a surgeon who makes about $260,000. ‘What I want is a reality check on what rich means. I can pay my mortgage and can buy some clothes. I’m not going without, but I’m not living a life of luxury.’ The mayor of San Jose scoffed at $250,000. That’s what a two-engineer couple might make, he said. It put them in ‘the upper working class’ and wasn’t enough to ‘buy a home in Silicon Valley.” So how can you say you’re rich if you can’t buy a home in Silicon Valley? ‘The article triggered an outpouring of e-mails — many applauding that someone had finally described their harried plight; others sarcastically wondering what planet the whiners lived on.’ How could you make $250,000 a year and be complaining about it? ‘But so much angst among the affluent — however defined — attests to something else,’ Samuelson, this is his point: ‘the present recession, unlike any other since World War II, has deeply shaken the nation’s economic elite.’
And that was the theme of his story, but I didn’t mention to you his quoting of the Wall Street Journal piece in April that closes the loop. Now, this illustrates very well why it is so dangerous to allow the government to pick and choose tax winners and tax losers. If you make $10,000 you’re okay taxing the rich guy making 25,000. If you make 25K, tax the rich guy making 50 because he doesn’t need it all — and on and on and on and on and on. If you make 75, tax the guy making a hundred. You make 250, you’re getting soaked and everybody wants you to get soaked! That’s another problem here: 43% of taxpayers now do not pay income tax. They pay FICA, payroll and all that, but they don’t pay income tax. Now, how can you have a representative republic when almost half of the people do not pay taxes?
And when those people don’t pay taxes, they understand who’s supporting them. So they favor tax increases on everybody else. The natural human tendency (meaning your average Democrat) is to think that anyone and everyone who makes more than you is just a selfish bastard if he complains about taxes. Obama, politicians like Obama know this. They deliberately twist and use that class-envy reaction under the big lie of fairness, to gain even more control of the economy and then use that control for their ends and best interests, not the nation’s. So this is why flat tax, Fair Tax, works. This arbitrary setting of rates based on what Obama thinks is rich, leads to even further diversions and divisions in the country among the population. Plus it doesn’t raise any money! You know, the fascinating thing?
If you were listening yesterday and you heard me say you didn’t want to listen and you didn’t want to believe me that Obama is purposely destroying the middle class — purposely destroying it, purposely raiding it, taking capital away from the private sector and transferring it to governments and unions and so forth. If you don’t want to believe that, if you just can’t bring yourself to believe that anybody we would elect president would want to destroy, because you can’t believe that somebody like Obama grew up hating America or being told it was unjust and immoral now has a chance to fix it — you just don’t believe it. Ask yourself this. We’re running huge, as Jim Sasser in Tennessee says, ‘defycits.’ We got deficits coming out of every bodily orifice. We got deficits coming out of the mouth of every river in this country. We got deficits everywhere!
We got a $2.5 trillion budget deficit this year, a $12 trillion forecast, and there’s more spending to come. Now, wouldn’t you think that given that reality, one of the first things on the minds of people in Washington would be revenue generation? And isn’t that what you think taxes are for? ‘Yes, that’s right Mr. Limbaugh! We are taxed.’ This is the voice of the New Castrati.’ That’s right, Mr. Limbaugh! We are taxed so that we citizens can do our civic duty and pay for all of the goods and services that our government generously provides for us.’ Okay, you believe that. You believe it’s the purpose of taxes, raise money for the government to provide our roads and bridges and our schools and toasters and whatever the hell else. Have you seen the decline in revenue being generated by virtue of taxes given the recession?
There are more and more people out of work. More and more businesses are closing. One of the reasons the deficits are so high is that there is far less tax revenue being produced. It’s just a simple matter of math. So here we have the smartest people in the world, the Obamas and the Larry Summerses and these guys, and their policies are creating less revenue. ‘Less revenue to run the country to provide the goods and services that we the citizens need and crave,’ and yet they’re not bothered by it. They continue with policies that will result in less revenue still being generated via taxes, and what are they going to then do? Raise taxes on the remaining people who pay them. By the way, if you make under 250 grand and they do this health care, you’re going to get soaked like everybody else. If you’re one of the 43% not paying income tax, get ready.
You’re going to get soaked with a value tax, a VAT tax, some kind of sales tax. It’s going to happen. We’re all going to pay higher taxes, under the theory that that will raise more revenue. It’s going to reduce revenue because it’s going to slow down the economy even further, and it’s going to cause more people to lose their jobs. We’re going to have fewer taxpayers, and when you have fewer taxpayers, you have less tax revenue. Yet none of this bothers them. They are prepared to fully implement every stage of this, to create less revenue, more unemployment. It can’t be that they’re just naive and mistaken, even after a year of this. Now, there’s talk of a second stimulus now! After the abject failure of the first, and the first stimulus, we’ve only spent 6% of it — and it’s all gone to the states to help with their own budget deficits and to the unions.
We haven’t even spent it. They know it’s not going to stimulate anything, economically. Now they’re talking about a second one. There is no other conclusion than there is an ongoing effort to remake the structure of this country from a free market capitalist system to a command-and-control, government-run system for the express purpose of making sure that everybody is equal — or as equal as they can make it — that nobody has any more than everybody else. And if they do, they’ll tax that. That’s who these people are. They have grown up, they have been taught, they’ve been raised that America is unjust and immoral. Obama goes over there and says we gotta get rid of all missiles, while he’s dropping bombs and firing missiles in Afghanistan.
This CIA program… The New York Times knew about this program, by the way, in 2002, we found out. They knew about this program. They talked about it on Sunday. They knew about it back in 2002. It was a program designed to kill — at close range, not with missiles or bombs but at close range — Al-Qaeda leaders in 2001, which makes total sense. Right after 9/11, you wanna go get those guys. Everybody said, ‘Go get ’em! They’re at Tora Bora? Go get ’em!’ The Democrats all said, ‘Well, you didn’t get Osama, so you failed,’ and Leon Panetta has canceled the program. He cancelled the program, while Obama is implementing it in Afghanistan we’re dropping missiles. We’re going in trying to get these guys in close range. Oh! Another story in the Stack of Stuff. You know what? He may not be able to close Gitmo in January.
He just might not be able to do it — and it’s Bush’s fault. (interruption) What? Bush didn’t tell him how fully intertwined Club Gitmo was with the War on Terror and how there was nowhere else to put these prisons ’cause nobody else wanted them and so forth. It’s just like Biden said. What did he say? ‘We underestimated or misread how bad the economy was because Bush didn’t tell us. We didn’t have the right figures.’ It’s the same thing with Gitmo. (interruption) That’s like my whole point. They did know how bad it was. We all knew how bad it was. Everybody knew how bad it was. They knew how bad the economy was. This was all smoke and mirrors because they still want people to believe that Obama’s oriented towards fixing it. What they don’t know is he is fixing it his way. It’s working exactly as he wants it to. His whole point is to go out there and convince people that it’s coming. The recovery and the rebound and your job, it’s coming. ‘It may be even worse if we hadn’t done the first stimulus.’
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: A very strategic announcement by President Obama this morning. During the confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama at the White House, after a meeting with the Dutch prime minister had some words, and nobody broke away from the hearings to cover this. Well, not on the two channels I was watching. I didn’t see them break away from Sotomayor. They played video later after it happened during a break in the hearings for Sotomayor. But here’s President Obama. Now, if you’re going to make this announcement, what better time to do it than when the world is focused on a Supreme Court confirmation hearing?
OBAMA: My expectation is, is that we will probably continue to see unemployment tick up for several months, and the challenge for this administration is to make sure that even as we are stabilizing the financial system, we understand that the most important thing in the economy is are people able to find good jobs that pay good wages.
RUSH: Now, how is that hope and change working out for you? This, folks, is outrageous. He tells us unemployment is going to tick up. He could announce a couple things today that would not turn the job situation around immediately, but would change attitudes immediately. Eliminate corporate taxes or reduce them to 25% to whatever, capital gains, personal tax cuts, any number of things, and I tell you, Wall Street would go nuts and so would the private sector. But he says we gotta stabilize the financial system first. He says it here. ‘The challenge for this administration is to make sure that even as we’re stabilizing the financial system –‘ like coming up with more money to give people to pay their mortgage when they’re out of work, that’s going to stabilize the financial system ‘– we understand that the most important thing is are people able to find good jobs that pay good wages.’
Now, we have to be very careful here, ’cause he doesn’t mean a word of that. If he wanted circumstances or people to be able to find work at good wages, he wouldn’t be doing the policies he’s doing. Oops. Thought I was finished. I still have seven seconds to go. So I’ll say it again. If he really wants to create jobs, he wouldn’t be saying and doing what he’s doing. No mistakes.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: The Politico today: ‘Obama’s Rosy Scenario Turns Thorny.’ This is by Jeanne Cummings. ‘President Barack Obama’s economic forecasts for long-term growth are too optimistic, many economists warn, a miscalculation that would mean budget deficits will be much higher than the administration is now acknowledging. … Alternately, if Obama clings to current optimistic forecasts for long-term growth, he risks accusations that he is basing his fiscal plans on fictitious assumptions — precisely the sort of charge he once leveled against the Bush administration.’ And on page two of this story is a former Clinton administration economic advisor, actually, Robert Shapiro: ‘It’s also dangerous and risky because if the forecast doesn’t come true, you’ve undermined the basis for the rest of your policies.’
That’s exactly why they’re doing health care by August. That’s exactly why they’re trying to do everything before it bombs out, and it’s going to bomb, they know it’s going to bomb, they want it to bomb, they want to get this done before it bombs. If you have ever trusted me on anything, trust me on this. This is intentional, the speed at which they are proceeding to get all this done is to get it done before it gets so bad everybody has to acknowledge how bad it is and how wrong the plans to fix this have been. Obama’s first forecast after the stimulus bombed is what the Politico says. Economists say his long-term predictions are no better. Forget growth, they’re saying forget growth. He’s so wrong on deficits we’re not going to have any growth, by design. If you have never trusted me before, trust me now, all of this is by design.
It has been pointed out to me, by the way, and this is a good point, that the Democrats, Biden and these guys, are saying the same thing about the economy they said about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. All of these Democrats, remember how eager they were to go in there and take out Saddam, Hillary and all that bunch. They believed, 1998, we have the audio of all of them saying Saddam’s got these nuclear weapons, mass destruction weapons, we gotta go in there and get ’em out, bad, bad, bad, when Bush said so, they did, same thing. But then, when no weapons of mass destruction of significance were found, what happened? Well, Joe Wilson surfaced and that started this whole parade of Bush lied, Bush lied to us. And that’s essentially what Biden is saying, the same script, when Biden says, we misread, we guessed wrong, we didn’t know how bad it was, they’re saying they’ve been lied to again. These poor old Democrats lied to again. No, Obama didn’t lie to them; Bush did. Bush lied to them about Gitmo. Bush lied to them about weapons of mass destruction. Bush lied to them about how bad the economy was.
So now the phrase is: Obama Lied and the Economy Died. Obama Lied and the Economy Died. Never mind that anybody can see the economic numbers just as we can see them — and these people can see more economic numbers than we do, they are members of Congress, after all. But we didn’t know, Bush lied, we didn’t know how bad it was. Same tactic. All right, now, Snerdley is asking me how long is it going to — look, that’s the question, how long does any of Obama play? We don’t know. How long does it play with his voters? Now, the CBS poll interestingly that has Obama falling to 57%, let me find this. If you dig into this, 57% that’s his approval number, and that’s down from 62, the CBS/New York Times. Fifty-seven percent say that the country’s on the wrong track. He has lost six points in his approval numbers almost entirely from Democrats and independents, and the poll says it’s the economy that’s hurting him. So maybe the questions in the process of being answered, but as you heard, Harry Smith and Schieffer doing their best to cover it up, maybe even blame the poll a little bit.
Now, there’s one thing about this poll I have to tell you that could mitigate it all. Republican support for Obama has actually risen by a point. It is Democrats and independents that account for his drop. So the Colin Powell Republican crowd loves the guy. They probably called McCain, I’m sure he said he approves. And I’m sure they called Colin Powell, I’m sure he said he approves of the way Obama’s doing things. But he’s down six points from Democrats and independents.
Okay. Back to the phones we go to Cheshire, Connecticut. John, thank you for holding, and welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, second-time dittos from Cheshire.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, you know, diving into this how-long-does-it-play issue and something you brought up early in the show, with this $12 billion that he wants to spend now of money that we don’t have on community colleges, and, you know, part of my thought process is, number one we’re not giving a basic education to our kids at the high school level, so what’s happening is these community colleges are taking the place, really, of what kids used to get in high school.
RUSH: You know, you are exactly right. I don’t want to offend anybody here, but of course I’m me and that’s generally not possible for me to avoid, is offending people, but I happen to, over the last five or six years, have run into some people that were taking courses at a community college, and I had them in junior high —
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: — and high school. I said, ‘Whoa,’ but I’ve always wondered about this, why we need job retraining centers. What the hell is school for in the first place?
CALLER: Right. I mean, there used to be a vo-tech program that was out there that kids could take that wanted to do that sort of thing, but along the lines of, you know, you ask how long does it play, I see this as kind of another $12 billion of money that’s coming to keep people in the system for another two years. You know, we talked about the nursery school indoctrination, where they want to start the kids earlier. This is a way of keeping people in school for an extra two years and the brainwashing process can continue because if they’re not out there actively seeking a job and maybe, you know, falling on their butt —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — in terms of life —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — and they’re sitting in a classroom for two years getting God knows what out of it in terms of the indoctrination —
RUSH: And if they’re losing their jobs and their health care is not portable, and they’re scared to death about losing their health care, they’ll support health care, it’s like Marie Antoinette. Now, she didn’t actually say this, Marie Antoinette has been crucified theoretically, philosophically by history. You know the whole thing, ‘Marie Antoinette, they don’t have any bread.’ ‘Fine, let ’em eat cake.’ When I first heard that I was a kid and I said, ‘What’s wrong with eating cake? I’d much rather eat cake than bread. Give me a good old-fashioned white cake, yellow cake any time over bunny bread or some of this store bought processed.’ ‘No, no, no. Cake back in those days was the scrapings from the oven.’ I said, ‘Oh, okay.’ But let’s go along with history and Marie Antoinette, ‘They don’t have bread, let ’em eat cake,’ Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, ‘They don’t have jobs, let ’em hear about universal health care.’ That’s the plan. You’re right on the money out there, John. I appreciate it.