In Denial: Limbaugh Claims CBO Is "Lying" That Health Care Bill Will Reduce Deficit

By Tom Allison

Rush echoes Fox, distorts corrections bill proposal

Rush kicked off today's show distorting reports that Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) is proposing a rule to advance health care reform by passing a corrections bill to adopt changes to the Senate bill. In fact, throughout today's show, Rush distorted the proposal, repeatedly commenting that "they basically want to pass the Senate bill without voting on it." He called it a "twisted scheme" to "bend the rules" that would be a "slap in our face" and "spitting in our face." Rush also compared the rule to "deeming" that Obama won re-election in 2012 without the people voting. As Media Matters noted, the House has already voted on and passed a health care reform bill, and a legislative rule reportedly under consideration would still require the House to vote on changes to the Senate's health care reform bill. Despite this, Rush asked "why even have a Congress" and why we couldn't just deem there to be "full employment" or "deem the end of the Republican Party." Rush responded to a caller later in the show that Slaughter was "writing the rule" and recommended that the caller "deem yourself to a million dollars."

Also on the health care front, Rush attacked the nonpartisan CBO's score of the Senate health care bill passed on Christmas Eve. Because they estimated that the bill would reduce the deficit by $118 billion over the first 10 years, Rush accused the CBO of "lying" and "cheating."

Rush then picked up on a report on China ordering journalism schools to train all journalists in communist theory in order to support the state rather than to criticize it. Rush's commented that you could go to any journalism school in America if you wanted to learn Marxist and communist news theory.

Rush takes credit for misinforming the public on climate change

Rush picked up on a recent Gallup poll that showed Americans' concerns over global warming have been dropping, commenting that "the country is thanking me" and declaring that global warming is a "big lie."

Pivoting back to health care, Rush claimed that Organizing for America was coordinating its "Obama-droids," "aliens," and "union thugs" to call into talk shows today that discussed health care. Rush asked his screener to be on the lookout.

Next, Rush read from an article in a communist newspaper, People's World, asserting that protesters were calling for insurance executives meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., to be arrested. Rush baselessly claimed that Obama was somehow responsible.

Limbaugh went on to read reports about Rep. Eric Massa's "snorkeling" of fellow Navy officers. Rush asked where the controversy was, considering the Democrats' support of a repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Limbaugh turned to a House vote on whether to continue investigating Massa, commenting that Pelosi knew about Mark Foley's inappropriate contacts with congressional pages. Memo to Rush: Dennis Hastert knew. Later, Rush again tried to rehabilitate his comments that he wanted to make Massa a national story when he thought Massa was forced out because of his resistance to health care, telling Democrats, "He's you!"

Rush picked up on Chris Horner's article at Pajamas Media forwarding some of the tired smears and false claims about climate science, concluding that NASA's Goddard Institute, the U.N., and the University of East Anglia all knew that climate science was junk.

Rush then took a caller who said that her premiums have recently gone down, and Rush warned that the caller should lock her doors in case the SEIU came after her for not vilifying the insurance companies. Going with the theme, a second caller identified himself as one of the few conservatives in his labor union. Rush stipulated that he was one of the few "still alive."

Shifting gears for a minute, Rush addressed this report on Kansas City, Missouri, closing city schools, taking the opportunity to say that's "all about racism" and to attack public schools in general for not teaching the kids.

Rush tries to explain calling David Paterson a "massa"

On Tuesday, Rush added another chapter to his long history of racially charged comments, telling a caller that if New York Gov. David Paterson chose Rep. Eric Massa's replacement, "For the first time in his life, Paterson is gonna be a massa." Limbaugh didn't have anything to say about it yesterday. Today, he broke his silence, doing his best to explain to his remarks, vaguely claiming he was taken out of context, that the Democrats are the ones trying to force Paterson out, and that "his name is Massa."

Mike Burns and Michael Timberlake contributed to this edition of the Limbaugh Wire.

Highlights

LIMBAUGH: Hey, is everybody having fun now? Everybody -- House Democrats meeting behind close doors. Even as we speak. They've been meeting behind close doors since I got here this morning. And they are trying to come up with a new rule.

The "Slaughter rule, appropriately named after what they're trying to do to this country. This is Louise Slaughter, she's head of the House Rules Committee. And basically what they want to do is just deem the Senate bill to have been passed.

Without voting on it, just deem to have passed in the House, and then write their own corrections bill, reconciliation bill, send that back to the Senate and put the onus on them to pass what the House wants. That's what the big meeting behind closed doors is about, that, and I'm sure some other things.

[...]

LIMBAUGH: We also have -- let's see -- the updates on what's happening here with the health care bill and how the House Democrats -- I mean, really, they're just -- and they can probably do it. I mean, they can make their own rules. They can just say, "Yeah, we're going to deem the Senate bill passed in the House. Nobody's going to vote for it. We're just going to deem it passed, and we're going to add our changes. We're going to send it back over there to the Senate, make them deal with it."

[...]

LIMBAUGH: Now, and since I -- we gotta talk about health care, right, to qualify for the smear calls, spam calls? So here -- here's the story. This is from the Communist Party USA's newspaper, called the People's World, formerly the Daily Worker. And it was published yesterday.

"Some five thousand activists demanding health care now descended on the nation's capital March the 9th to call for the arrest of the nation's leading health insurance executives who had gathered at the Ritz-Carlton hotel."

Now, understand this is being done within the Obama imprimatur. This is being done with the approval and probably the orders -- under the orders of Obama. These are the same people that showed up on the front yards of AIG execs to hassle them over bonuses. Now you got the Service Employee International Union -- primarily is who did this, but there were a lot of others -- showing up at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington demanding that insurance company executives be arrested.

[...]

LIMBAUGH: And the CBO -- let me find this. This is just outrageous, too. The CBO now has a score of the Senate-passed health bill. An estimate of the budgetary effects of the Senate-passed health bill. And they say that it's going to reduce the deficit by $118 billion.

[unintelligible] the bill's passed in the Senate on Christmas Eve, and CBO has just released an estimate of the budgetary effects of the bill that passed the Senate. "Today's estimate differs from the estimate for a slightly earlier version that we released on December 19th in that it encompasses all the amendments that were adopted by the Senate, reflects a revised assumption about the enactment date, and incorporates some technical revisions.

"The CBO, the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that on balance, the mandatory spending and revenue effects of enacting the Senate bill would yield a net reduction in federal deficits of $118 billion over the 2010-2019 period."

That's frankly a lie. There's no way any of this is going to reduce the deficit. This is just another estimate of the already-passed Senate bill. This is not an estimate of the reconciliation bill that the House and Pelosi are somehow working on now.

This CBO estimate's based on numerous cheats, numerous shams, such as front-loading the taxes for four years before any so-called health care reform benefits begin being paid. And don't forget this -- Congress has off-loaded many costs to Medicare and Medicaid, like the $250 billion so-called "doctor fix." This is nothing but a bunch of gimmicks.