RUSH: Now, folks, let me address this, because I got an e-mail, I mentioned it briefly at the conclusion of the previous hour. I’m not trying to dispirit anybody but I must be honest with you about how I think the Democrats are going to play this, and I have to be honest when I tell you I don’t think they care about losing their majority. That’s how committed to this they are, and I don’t doubt for a minute that health care and health insurance will become the new third rail, just like Social Security. Every election they’re going to accuse Republicans who want to take away your health insurance, just like they traditionally accuse Republicans who want to take away Social Security. It’s the way they play the game.
Now, I think you all should keep calling offices, flooding offices with faxes, e-mails, and so forth, and do the rallies. They have helped. They have made a huge difference, they’ve delayed this. This was going to happen in August. Remember, they wanted all this to happen in August. And the protests did matter. But honestly, this isn’t the long view. This is a spontaneous grassroots uprising that is happening, tea party movement and so forth that, as I say, did in fact slow this down, and it will make a difference in November. Movements take time to develop and the conservative movement, this one, after decades of neglect, is on the march. Conservatism is on the ascendancy. Now, when we face the kind of despotism that we’re facing in today’s Democrat Party, it takes all kinds of people doing all 
kinds of things. The public is energized. There are people who are willing to go to jail rather than be forced to buy health insurance. They are willing to do it. I got a guy waiting to talk to me who is a small business guy in St. Louis — well, let’s grab him now. Jim in St. Louis, I’m glad you called, tell everybody what it is that you are suggesting.
CALLER: Well, Rush it’s very, very great to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Longtime listener. Listen, I think even though I’d love to talk to you, I want to talk to small business in this country. I think small business could stop this health care dead in its tracks. All we have to do as small business for a short term pain for a long term gain is just shed your payrolls down 50%. Let’s overrun the unemployment offices to where they cannot deal with this crisis and let them know that we as small businesses in this country are the ones in charge and without our money they can’t do any of this. We are the ones that allow them to do to us what they are doing. If we quit sending our money to these people, they cannot implement these programs. They work for us. We do not work for them. I’m tired. I’ve run a company for almost 30 years. I’m in the housing market and I manufacture window products. And I can tell you this. I know that everybody this time is hurting, but you know what? For about two weeks we could bring Washington to their knees.
RUSH: Okay, Snerdley, Dawn, Brian, you’re fired. Do not come back. You are going on the unemployment line next year. We’re going to flood — (laughing) well this is what it’s going to take. Would you do it? If you were an employee would you accept being fired on this principle?
CALLER: Yes. I’m looking at my family and what’s going to affect me the next 30 years of my life. What if you don’t take a stand for two or three weeks to what’s going to affect you for the next 30 years of your life while you’re alive? What are you going to do about your parents when this passes?
RUSH: Well, now, wait a minute, what’s to say it’s just two or three weeks that people are going to be unemployed?
CALLER: Rush, we pay payroll taxes every week to the coffers of the federal government, every week. You start drying that up, the only way that they can do anything is with our money. And the only way they get our money is we have employment, and the time you start taking away the withholding, you quit paying them the Social Security, you quit matching unemployment benefits, you quit doing that, they do not have the money in the state of Illinois right now where I have my business to even keep unemployment checks current.
RUSH: I know. Chicago has had to shut down for budgetary reasons.
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: The city of Chicago. Now, here’s the thing. When you’re dealing with rational people in government this makes great theoretical sense, but this bunch will just turn on the printing presses, which is what they’re doing now.
CALLER: They will not be able to sustain. They need unemployment numbers not to be at 500,000. They need them to be at 1.5 million for a week and then panic is going to have set in to let them know, ‘Look, business in this country runs this nation. You don’t. And either you come back down to the table and talk to us –‘ we as businesspeople across this country have to make them come to us and then maybe we can get a dialogue. The way we’re going about it now, there will be no dialogue. And the only way there’s no dialogue now is we keep sending them our money.
RUSH: Well, that’s because people have to eat. Look, philosophically I admire what you’re saying, and it would be great to be able to some way deny them this money, but at the same time people have to eat, they have to feed their kids. So you’re suggesting go on unemployment, get by with just what you get on unemployment for a while just to make the case, run real unemployment numbers way, way up like triple ’em, to send a message.
CALLER: That’s correct, because there’s one thing for sure. When this takes effect, the unemployment numbers are gonna go up because the employers aren’t going to go along with it when it does go into effect. So it’s either now or later.
RUSH: That’s the design. That’s the design, to get ’em going to government for their health insurance and for their health coverage.
CALLER: We have to reverse the design. We have to give them the design before they get it passed.
RUSH: I’m sitting here thinking. Snerdley is sending me a note, Jim, suggesting the AP lead headline tonight will be: ‘Limbaugh Calls for One Million to be Fired Before Christmas Day.’ New York Times: ‘Limbaugh Fires Millions,’ Washington Post: ‘Women and Children Hardest Hit.’
CALLER: Well, I can understand that, but I think the American people have gone through a lot of pain right now, and I don’t think the pain is as great as it’s going to be here in the future.
RUSH: Well, now, that is a point. It is going to get worse. There’s no question. This is a tough call. But what I want to emphasize about what Jim said here is that we still do run this country. We still do run the country. This kind of action is not unprecedented. We’ve had the Boston Tea Party and any number of other things. I want to find for you in my stack — let me take a break and find it — I gotta find the tipping point for the Founding Fathers to say, ‘Enough!’ and rebel against the crown to found this country. Jim, thanks very much for the call.
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RUSH: Okay, small business caller from St. Louis, Jim was his name. Without realizing it, what Jim was advocating was a leftist strategy to destroy the country and it’s called Cloward-Piven, and these are people, Saul Alinsky bought into them, they go way, way back. They predate Alinsky, and Obama is a big believer. I think — now, allow me the opportunity to be wrong on this — I think they were Columbia University types, Cloward-Piven. The idea was to flood the welfare system, flood the welfare state to make it collapse, to bring on a revolution. Now, the kind of revolution Cloward-Piven want is a revolution not where the people run the show, but where the people have nothing to say about anything, just flood the system to prove it doesn’t work and then get everybody worthless, powerless, with nothing, with only the government to come in and save the day. That’s their theory on it. Jim’s theory of the outcome is different, that government would have to cave. It’s like France, when the people in France go on strike, when they get ticked off they just go on strike. There are any number of ways of pulling this off. Just don’t go to work. You gotta make sure that you don’t get paid when you don’t go to work and you gotta be willing not to get paid if you’re going to do this. It will require a huge commitment.
Here’s Tanya in Marion, Illinois, who wants to weigh in on it. Great to have you here. Hello.
CALLER: Oh, my God, Rush, what a privilege. I am so thankful I am calling after Jim.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I am a caseworker in southern Illinois. I’m probably going to lose my job over this —
RUSH: What kind of caseworker?
CALLER: I am a welfare caseworker.
RUSH: Welfare.
CALLER: I hand out food stamps.
RUSH: Okay.
CALLER: I hand out food stamps and medical cards. You follow Jim. You lower those tax rolls by 50%. They all hit the food stamps, the department of public aid, they come in, they get food stamps, they get free medical, state of Illinois, you get free medical if you got kids in the home and you make less than, you know, X-amount of dollars and if you’re on unemployment you get it automatically. And it will destroy the food stamp which is of course everybody knows the Department of Agriculture, which is yours and my tax dollars. Our state’s close to bankruptcy as it is. It is a joke. But if they follow Jim and then they all hit the public aid offices to make a point about what they’re doing in Congress, Rush, I’ve listened to you for 15 years, I worked at Boatmen’s Trust company in St. Louis, prior to that I was at Citicorp in St. Louis, I have followed you, I have personally had lunch with your cousin in Cape Girardeau when he was running the bank at Boatmen’s down there. Due to a seizure disorder, I have had to go to the state where I am a union employee. Though I pay the nonunion dues, they hate me because of that, but I am now protected, they cannot fire me. Now, of course my salary’s dropped in half but that’s beside the point. I have a job, they can’t fire me, and I’ve taught my kids the best I can. I’ve listened to you forever. A thousand times I have called you. And this could not have been the — it was the most opportune, opportunity for Snerdley to take my call.
RUSH: Opportune time for you to get through. You know, yesterday we had a story about food stamps and how more Americans than ever are on them and the poverty level is at an all-time high, and the story was about how businesses are adjusting to the first of the month and the end of the month when the government dumps the food stamp benefits on these people’s debit cards.
CALLER: Oh, you bet, the grocery stores, absolutely. Rush, okay, just for your listeners, I am college educated, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, bachelors, MBA, okay? And I’m making $50 grand a year, okay? That’s it. But that’s okay. That’s okay. I’m doing just fine. I have taken a second job at a little convenience store called Huck’s. I work 20 to 26 hours a week to put groceries on my table. But, Rush, what eats me up more than anything in this world is when they talk about the obesity problem, they talk about how everybody is obese, guess who comes in to the little grocery stores and the little Huck’s and the convenience stores across this nation and they buy the candy and they buy the Red Bull? I’ve never in my life tried Red Bull because I can’t afford a $3.50 energy drink.
RUSH: You ought to try it with vodka.
CALLER: We don’t sell liquor at the little store I work at. I work 40 hours a week at my real job and 20 to 26 hours a week on my second job, and I barely have food for my two kids, it is a joke. And they come in there, and they go crazy because they’ve never had to pay for themselves ever.
RUSH: Now, this is the point about all this. The point about all this is that this is the greatest country with the greatest economy in the history of humanity, and yet the poverty level is at an all-time high under whose tutelage? The Democrats have been running all the spending since 2007. Obama is the president. And now we’ve got a record poverty rate, we have a record number of people on food stamps, and we have the federal government working with business to timely dump these food stamp and other benefits on their debit cards, and then they head to the stores to stock up when that happens. See, my theory is that this is all by design. My theory is that this is by design to make sure as many people in this country dependent as possible.
I maintain to you that if your strategery were implemented, that if we added to the unemployment rolls one million people next week rather than the 500,000 that are going to show up, that there are people in the Democrat Party who would rub their hands together and go, ‘All right, all right.’ They may not understand what’s going on, that it was part of a movement, but believe me, this is the hideous nature of this. The chaos that we’re seeing has been created, the chaos is on purpose. The employment situation is on purpose. Everything that Obama has done since he took office has been contraindicative of what to do to create jobs. He is doing just the opposite of what’s necessary to create jobs. He is stifling investment; he is offering no incentive whatsoever; he’s got these health care plans and cap and trade lurking in the future; people who are going to be responsible for investing in business or lending money to people have no idea what the rules are going to be, this is by design.
This economy is coming to a slowdown, and the difference is that it’s on purpose. A lot of people don’t want to believe this because they can’t understand why anybody would want to do it. All you have to do is look at what they’re doing with health care to understand it. It’s power. It’s control. And it’s power in perpetuity for them. The more people who have these debit cards every month waiting for the government to load ’em up with benefits so they can go to the Huck’s and pick up some Red Bull and candy, the happier people like Obama are. I mean it’s hideous. These people are anathema to the traditions, institutions that have made this country great. It’s not just people are going to be looking at what they’re eating, you wait ’til people have a big screen TV next door for you when you’re illegal and they call the government on you. Citizens are going to be pitted against citizens once this health care thing passes, it’s disastrous.
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RUSH: Cloward-Piven was indeed from Columbia University. ‘The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, then both sociologists and political activists at the Columbia University School of Social Work, in a 1966 article in The Nation. The two argued that many Americans who were eligible for welfare were not receiving benefits, and that a welfare enrollment drive would create a political crisis that would force US politicians, particularly the Democratic Party, to enact legislation ‘establishing a guaranteed national income.” These people were anti-free market, they were anti-capitalist, they were pro-statist, doing everything they could with their strategy here to blow up the country as it existed and exists, same thing with Saul Alinsky.
Now, I don’t think you would even need to layoff workers to do this. Just don’t send the tax payments to Washington. That would be one way of doing this. Because Jim in St. Louis was right, I mean the feds rely on all those payroll taxes from all these businesses, sales tax and all this. If every business just banded together and said we’re not sending the money, just stop sending it, put it in an escrow account, the feds do not have the personnel to even to attempt to collect those taxes. (interruption) Well, that’s the thing, they’ll just print the money, but, no, that would be unrest they would have to deal with. Here’s the next AP headline: ‘After Calling for Mass Firings, Limbaugh Calls for Mass Tax Evasion Two Days Before Christmas.’ (laughing) Probably right. That’s probably what’s going to happen.
I’m thinking about Tom Friedman. This little punk who goes over to Copenhagen talks about how wonderful Copenhagen is comes back here and describes what a rotten place we are, it’s like leaving the Jetsons and returning to the Flintstones. Friedman is the perfect example, folks, of a statist. He’s wealthy — he married into his wealth, by the way, he married into it — he lives on several acres on an estate. He travels the world on an expense account. He eats the finest foods. But he doesn’t produce anything. It’s like Obama. He produces nothing but words. He appreciates nothing. He acts like he’s leading some kind of revolution against the very society that enables a person like him to succeed, totally ungrateful for what this country has made possible for him. He hasn’t produced diddly-squat. He’s out there thinking he’s leading a revolution, one of the smartest guys walking the planet. Copenhagen, yeah. That’s the Jetsons. Flies back to Newark, why, that’s the Flintstones.
The straw that broke the Founding Fathers’ backs. The Intolerable Acts of 1774. When you listen to this stuff, these Intolerable Acts, this is the stuff that broke the camel’s back for the Founders. This makes what’s happening today seem like child’s play. ‘The British government responded by passing several acts which came to be known as the Intolerable Acts, which further darkened Colonial opinion towards the British. They consisted of four laws enacted by the British parliament. The first was the Massachusetts Government Act, which altered the Massachusetts charter and restricted town meetings.’ That ticked them off. That’s why freedom to associate is in the Constitution, because it was restricted. ‘The second Act, the Administration of Justice Act, ordered that all British soldiers to be tried were to be arraigned in Britain, not in the colonies.’ That ticked ’em off. ‘The third Act was the Boston Port Act, which closed the port of Boston until the British had been compensated for the tea lost in the Boston Tea Party (the British never received such a payment).’ That ticked them off. ‘The fourth Act was the Quartering Act of 1774, which allowed royal governors to house British troops in the homes of citizens without requiring permission of the owner.’
Those were the four things that sent Founding Fathers over the edge. They already escaped for freedom of religion. So that was already in the deck. Now, these things seem like child’s play compared to what is happening today. And people ask me all the time, ‘Rush, do you think that there would ever be a revolution?’ Let me just tell you this. Here’s the third AP headline, Snerdley. I do think the American citizens and their anger is going to translate into some sort of citizen action. You can feel it percolating in every one of these phone calls that we’ve taken for the past six months here. Rebel, maybe, I don’t know how it would manifest itself. Firing people, laying people off, not paying taxes, it could be any of these things but it’s going to be something huge. I don’t pretend to know what it is. But with all of the millions of Americans out there asking, ‘What can I do?’ Snerdley, tell me the truth, every call, if you chose to, you could have put up there for the past two months, ‘What can I do?’ Every single call could have been, ‘What can I do?’ Everybody out there wants to know what they can do, and at some point this is going to translate into action.
Fourth AP headline tonight: ‘Limbaugh Calls for Obama Overthrow Amidst Economic Recovery.’ They’ll throw that in there. Everybody asking, ‘What can I do?’ The fact that so many people are asking the question will produce the perfect response, and it’s going to be some sort of refusal to obey. It’s going to be rooted in some sort of refusal to obey some of these un-American dictates that are being called health care legislation, Senate health care legislation, cap and trade, whatever it is. You know, we had the Rock the Vote video, the audio yesterday. Let these little young socialist youth out there, let them go ahead and withhold sex from people who oppose health care. The adults will withhold consent of the governed. That’s what we’re going to do. You know, let ’em go around there with Susan Sarandon’s daughter playing games with withholding sex and so forth. (interruption) No, no, no, that’s what she did. She and some stupid hare-brained actor have cut a video for Rock the Vote and they basically tell people who don’t support them on health care they’re going to be frozen out of the bedroom and they’re advocating everybody do that. Fine, you go play those games. We will withhold the consent of being governed.
There is going to be some sort of refusal to obey the, quote, unquote, the crown, refusal to obey the government here. That’s where this is headed, that’s how un-American this is. And every time Tom Friedman comes back from some faraway eastern European capital where cell phone coverage gets shut down with a little snowfall and starts comparing this country to the Flintstones and that place to Jetsons, fine, stay there, Tom. If they’ve got it down pat, they live the way you think we ought to live, go where they live that way, but we are not them, this is the United States of America.
I just got a note here, a press release: ‘Today, US Senators Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) and John Ensign (R-Nevada), raised a Constitutional Point of Order on the Senate floor against the Democrat health care takeover bill on behalf of the Steering Committee, a caucus of conservative senators. The Senate will vote tomorrow on the bill’s constitutionality. ‘I am incredibly concerned that the Democrats’ proposed individual mandate provision takes away too much freedom and choice from Americans across the country,’ said Senator Ensign. ‘As an American, I felt the obligation to stand up for the individual freedom of every citizen to make their own decision on this issue. I don’t believe Congress has the legal authority to force this mandate on its citizens.’ ‘Forcing every American to purchase a product is absolutely inconsistent with our Constitution and the freedoms our Founding Fathers hoped to protect,’ said Senator DeMint.’
So now it will naturally lose. But it still is a good idea because they’re standing up and they’re getting it out there. Well, let’s see just how much coverage this gets. Mr. Snerdley, let’s just see how many of the State-Controlled Media actually spend time reporting a vote on the constitutionality of the bill. I expect what will happen is, they will report it after the fact and after the Senate has voted that it is constitutional.
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RUSH: Back to the phones, to Cecil, Amarillo, Texas. Welcome, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Good morning, Mr. Limbaugh, or I should say good afternoon. I’m a former progressive Democrat forced into conversion by being required to watch your television show, and I agree with you most of the time. In my position I’m just going to refuse to purchase health care. I’m going to make them put me in jail and take me the court. It violates due process. My money is my property. They can’t take my property without due process, and they can’t put me in jail for a fine. If I owe a traffic fine they can’t put me in jail for that, it’s unconstitutional. So I would suggest if people are really upset about it, just force ’em to put you in jail and take you in front of the courts. Jury nullification works, and that’s basically when the jury says, ‘Yeah, you committed the offense, but it was all right to do so,’ in a nutshell.
RUSH: Like the O.J. jury.
CALLER: Well, no, because there was evidence on both sides of that, you know, I mean you could argue —
RUSH: No, no, no, I was being lighthearted, but jury nullification, that jury was going to find him not guilty because of things that had nothing to do with the case.
CALLER: Right. Well, in this case jury nullification, I’ll give you an example. There was a Navy SEAL down in south Texas, some kids shot his dog, he chased them through several counties before they were finally apprehended. He had the opportunity to shoot ’em and kill them and if he’d have went in front of a jury, the jury would have found him not guilty, but he didn’t, you know, he restrained himself, he’s a Navy SEAL and he used his training, and he restrained himself, but had he killed them, no jury in Texas would have found him guilty even though he had actually committed the offense of murder. So the same thing here. If you refuse to purchase health care insurance, people in the jury of similar mind just turn around and say you’re not guilty irrespective of whatever the state presented as evidence.
RUSH: Wait a second. Along these lines, I have read some of the bill now. There are exemptions. There are religious exemptions for American native Indians. There are exemptions for people experiencing financial hardship. I kid you not. Now, I have a question because I have a naturally inquisitive mind. If people who are experiencing financial hardship are exempt from having to buy insurance, then how does this bill cover the uninsured? Aren’t we told that most people are uninsured ’cause they can’t afford it, and doesn’t this bill really only make people buy insurance? That’s what this is all about. So if we except the very people we’re trying to force into insurance, what exactly is being accomplished here?
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RUSH: Here’s Ernie in Chico, California. Ernie, it’s great to have you with us. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, thank you very much. Conservative, conservative here in Northern California, and I just wanted to say a couple things and then ask you a quick question — and, by the way, thank you for commenting on the reason for the season. I appreciate that.
RUSH: You bet, sir.
CALLER: I have been in business for 20 years, and I’m just starting to get into politics. Well, I’ve always been in politics, but just starting to get heavily into it here in the state. And just a couple quick comments on Jim who called earlier. You know, we’re already in Northern California here I’m seeing lots of and lots of, businesses going out of business, cutting back. You know, it’s a state that has its own problems. It’s in bankruptcy, and we’re seeing that throughout numerous cities in California.
RUSH: Mmm-hmm.
CALLER: And we’re dealing with the medical community and in health care. You know, I know a lot of the doctors, this is the business that I’m in, in their own practices — especially when they’re dealing with Medi-Cal, that is a joke any way the fact that for the last three years these guys, these business owners — which are doctors — not getting paid for two, three, four months at a time from the State of California because of Medi-Cal.
RUSH: And it’s going to get worse.
CALLER: Can you imagine if the federal government decides to do it? The state can’t even get their budget under control and they go for two or three months and they don’t pay?
RUSH: It’s going to happen. That’s what bundling is all about. That’s exactly what bundling is all about, and the reimbursements are going to be less. Doctors are going to be earning less. This is an utter disaster. But that stuff’s not going to start for four years.
CALLER: One of the comments that was made to me from one of the local doctors up here is basically that, you know, when you deal with the Blue Crosses — the health care industry or the insurance agencies right now — they can get something through within a week when they ask for it. On Medi-Cal, it takes a month or two to get an answer back on some kind of a procedure. So how in the world can government think that it’s going to be able to do anything better? It can’t. We have a pretty good health care system right now. I’m sure it needs to be taken care of in dealing with lawyers and some other things and being able to go across state lines.
RUSH: The question that you ask… The correct question is not, ‘When is the government going to realize it can’t do it?’ The correct question is: ‘When are the people who support this going to wake up and understand?’ I’m not talking about the elected officials, because they support it for a whole different reason. They don’t care how it turns out. They don’t care how it functions. Do you think they care how bureaucracies function at all? They don’t! There isn’t one that functions smoothly. The real question is: Average Americans, Democrats who are for this, when are they going to realize that what you describe is headed their way as a matter of daily life?
CALLER: Well, yeah.
RUSH: You would hate to think that it’s going to take the implementation of the program to make that happen. Look, Ernie, thanks for the call. I appreciate it. I’ve got just a minute and a half here. I want to say something. I went through all of these bribes. I looked at what Ben Nelson got and all these states got. All these bribes are exemptions. The state of Nebraska will be exempted from having to pay the new mandated Medicaid costs for new Medicaid patients. In Louisiana, more money will be sent there to help the state pay for it. The very act of bribing these Senators, to me, is a tantamount admission to what a lousy piece of legislation it is. If in order to get Senators to vote for it you have to exempt their states from the provisions, then you are saying, ‘We have here a punitive bill. We are going to wreak havoc on everybody. We are going to punish everybody. That’s the only way we can make health care equal,’ and in the process, some people don’t want to be punished or they won’t vote for it so they’re exempted. I mean, the very fact that these deals were made is the proof of how rotten this is and how it is not — in any way, shape, manner, or form — the way it is being promoted.
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