RUSH: How can this be? How in the world could this have happened? For the life of me, folks, I can’t figure it out. ‘Jobless Claims Increase Unexpectedly.’ Who knew? I mean, I thought the most recent report we had was that 162,000 new jobs were created and the recovery was in full steam and we’re going to come back to glory, and now this? ‘The Labor Department said Thursday that first-time claims increased by 18,000 in the week ending April 3, to a seasonally adjusted 460,000. That’s worse than economists’ estimates of a drop to 435,000.’ Of course, here comes the excuse, there’s always an excuse. ‘Easter can be difficult since the Easter holiday occurs in different weeks each year.’ I’ll tell you, they’re brain-dead. The media is totally brain-dead. They’re going outta business right before our very eyes and they don’t care.
Anyway, greetings, folks, great to have you here, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
‘Slightly more than 5.8 million people were receiving extended benefits in the week ended March 20, the latest data available, a drop of about 230,000 from the previous week. The extended benefit data isn’t seasonally adjusted and is volatile from week to week.’ These are the ones that don’t count. We’re not even factoring the people here who have given up looking for work, we never do in this report, which is called the U3. CNN: ‘Jobless Claims Soar.’ Drudge has a great headline and picture. He’s got Obama smiling big time with the Russians as he’s signing this worthless — well, it’s not worthless, this stupid arms reduction treaty over there in wherever he is, and the headline is: ‘Phone Home: Jobless Claims Rise Again.’ Obama with a big excrement-eating grin on his face. ‘The number of Americans filing for unemployment insurance for the first time jumped last week. … Continuing claims data exclude people whose benefits expired or those who have moved to state or federal extensions. It reflects those filing each week after their initial claim until the end of their standard benefits, which usually last 26 weeks.’ What 26 weeks, we’re up to 99 now, and they’ll be extended again.
Folks, look, don’t misunderstand here. I’m not joyous about this. I’m crushed by this. I am so angry by this I can’t describe it, ’cause all of this is by design. All of this is. Where is Obama’s laser-like focus on the economy and jobs? It doesn’t exist. Here from MessNBC: ‘Study: 1.2 million households lost to recession — As friends and families double up, ‘overcrowding’ is up fivefold.’ What recovery? This is basically 1.2 million people who are homeless. You realize homelessness never even exists usually during a Democrat regime. Homelessness is exclusively a Republican presidential problem, but they can’t even hide this.
‘Since Richard Brown lost his job to the recession and his Boston home to foreclosure a year ago, he’s been working short-term consulting assignments until he gets back on his feet. In the meantime, he’s been ‘couch surfing.’ ‘I’ve lived with my brother, my cousin, my friend and my dad,’ he said. ‘The IRS keeps calling me, asking me: ‘What’s your address?’ And I say, ‘What week is this?” … ‘Given the depth of the downturn in 2009, and the ongoing weakness in the job market through the beginning of this year, this study gives no reason to expect that household formation has picked up at all,’ said Gary Painter, a professor at the University of Southern California who conducted the study.’ Really? Who knew? So in the midst of a story about 1.2 million households lost to the recession, we get a guy saying there’s no reason to expect household formations picked up at all. Really? What’s your first clue? Why did you need to do a study? All you gotta do is look out the window. It’s just depressing. Falling home ownership levels, rise in homelessness.
‘So far, lenders have been slow to cut the size of a mortgage to make monthly payments more affordable.’ I thought Obama took care of that. ‘As a result, an increasing number of families are walking away from their homes in a process known in the industry as ‘strategic default.’ Between 2005 and 2008, those 1.2 million households were lost even as the population grew by 3.4 million.’ All right, folks, look, time’s up. We have had enough and we do have enough hard evidence to pass judgment here on the regime. Enough time’s gone by, sufficient facts are known. We don’t need any more evidence. We don’t need any more unemployment numbers or foreclosure numbers or homeless numbers. We don’t need any more evidence to conclude that the Obama regime either hopes this country fails or doesn’t know how to help the country succeed. It’s one of those two options.
We have his budgets. We have seen the deficit. We know the underemployment and employment numbers. We know tax increases are coming. It’s clear Obama is not serious about developing domestic energy supplies. We know that the public sector is expanding at the expense of the private sector. We know that our relationships with allies very deteriorated. We know we aren’t safer. We know the country is more divided. We know the State-Controlled Media has no intention of practicing journalism ever again. We have enough hard evidence to make sound judgments about Obama, his czars, and the regime. Either Obama hopes we fail or is unintentionally causing failure. This is not speculation. That’s fact. What isn’t known is the extent of the damage. But I’m going to make some predictions about that which are not pretty coming up soon on this program. We don’t know the exact date of our country’s future bankruptcy, but we just know that it is a certainty under Obama’s direction and the help of Democrats in Congress and the government-run media. America is being administered statist-assisted suicide. Obama is Dr. Kevorkian. Forget Obama and Kevorkian’s intentions. The patient’s going to die if Obama isn’t stopped, politically, if he’s not stopped, if these policies are not reversed, that much is clear.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: It’s this simple, folks. We gotta face this head on and straight up. If the policies of this regime are not reversed, we can all expect inflation to kick in at some point. That is an economic given. When that happens, more jobs will be lost. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have a second housing bubble when interest rates inevitably increase, as they are starting to do now. More bankruptcies, once the Obama tax increases and the health care plan kick in. The recession will continue. The government will continue to grow. The private sector will continue to shrink. And, of course, the government-run media will continue to act like a bunch of stupid clowns who claim that all this is unexpected, while they applaud it. If this continues, the gross domestic product can do nothing but shrink. Stock market will drop in the next year or two. They’re already skittish, world stock markets skittish today, including ours over the rising debt crisis in Greece. Wait ’til they hear about California. The value of the dollar will decrease. The prices of energy will increase. The availability of energy will decrease. 
I expect that Iran will get a nuclear weapon. Obama’s talking about, ‘We’re gonna get really, really tough on sanctions now.’ But we’re not going to get really, really tough on sanctions because we’re not going to do anything that would harm the Iranian population. Well, there’s no way we can sanction the mullahs and sanction Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We cannot surgically strike with sanctions. The whole point of sanctions is to hurt the population, make the population pay for what the regime is doing. If Obama would just treat Iran like he’s treating the United States of America they might get the message. Stop and think of it this way. Barack Obama is willing to do more damage to the United States economy than he is to the Iranian economy or anybody else’s. He’s willing to applaud dictators around the world, from Hugo Chavez to Daniel Ortega, who are ruining their countries — in the case of Chavez, despite having huge oil reserves. There’s an energy crisis, there’s an electricity shortage because it’s a dictatorship, or essentially one, certainly a socialist country. You can almost count on the fact that illegal aliens are gonna get amnesty. So the president will continue to be a failure and drag as many of us down with him as possible, except he won’t be dragged down. He’s in the White House living his life of royalty, flying around on Air Force One, inflicting untold damage on this great country.