The news has been pretty grim regarding the new virus making the rounds of most of the world this year, wreaking havoc on China, where it originated, and spreading quickly to other countries, including the United States. It is fortunate that so far the US has very few cases, but that could change rapidly.
Now, China is a Communist country, and the way its leaders are handling the crisis reflects that. Tyrannies tend to lie about any conditions that could make them look bad to the rest of the world, and this communicable disease is a perfect example of that. They took weeks to disclose the original outbreak, and it’s pretty well known that even now their statistics do not accurately reflect the numbers of infections and deaths there. My take? To Xi Jinping: I hope that he is afraid, VERY afraid. This is an enemy that he has no defense against. Even the Dictator of China is not immune to this novel virus that some say might have been deliberately created in his country.
To Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei: I hope he is also VERY afraid, seeing that his Deputy Health Minister has tested positive for the virus. Even the Supreme Leader of Iran, who is famous for oppressing his people, is not immune to this deadly infection. Cases are multiplying rapidly in Iran, and I wonder if it takes a very tiny snippet of RNA to bring down the nuclear-weapon-seeking “Islamic Republic” of Iran? [Edit March 3] Here is a link to a news story about the virus spreading in Iran, and at the top ranks of clerics and Parliament. Will this weaken the regime? We can only hope.
And to Dictator Kim Jong-Un of North Korea: His country shares a border with China, but we hear very little about what is going on there with the virus. It is well known that the health of the average North Korean has always been borderline starving, and those whose bodies are already in marginal health will likely succumb to this kind of disease much faster than healthier, better-nourished people.I pray that this evil dictator, who murders his own relatives, is VERY afraid today. This tiny piece of living thing is a bigger threat to himself and his country than perhaps anything that he has previously encountered.
All of the above countries have some important things in common that will prevent them from adequately addressing, and protecting their people from, the new virus. All three places are basically still Third-World countries, with medical systems that are much less advanced than the rest of the developed world, and are somewhat closed to outside influences. Even relatively-advanced China has a countryside populated with poor peasants, who have lesser access to hospitals. One other characteristic of all three countries is that tyrannies care little for the individual person, over and above their ability to do work, and have less interest in saving their lives.
I feel very sorry for the majority of the people who live under dictators and communist regimes, because their futures are most likely to include a greater degree of suffering than citizens of advanced economies.
Although, we citizens of an advanced economy in the US have watched the stock market plummet this week, losing 1,000 points today alone. That is “panic” territory, with many people selling much of their portfolios. This picture says a lot.
I’m not panicking yet, but I think we should all be concerned, watch the news, and take the advice of health authorities about what precautions to take.
One last thing. The first US case of the virus was a man who lives in my general neck of the woods, and he has recovered and returned to his home.
Peggy Noonan is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, who writes a weekly column on Saturdays, entitled “Declarations”. Now, I admit I’m almost a week behind in reading my hard-copy Journal-this quote is from last Saturday. In her article entitled “The Democrats’ Unserious Week”, she describes all the foolish and malevolent behaviors of the House Democrats on the night of the President’s State of the Union speech. She decries the Speaker of the House’s inane and childish tearing-up of her copy of the speech, in plain sight on national television.
But Ms. Noonan really reveals her heart when she says, describing the President’s appeals to black Americans “This is a realignment I have supported and a repositioning I have called for and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t please me to see it represented so effectively and I very much regret that the president is a Bad Man and Half Mad because if he weren’t I’d be cheering”.
Ms. Noonan, the sentiment highlighted above is just plain mean. By calling the President of the United States a bad man and half-mad, you not only cast aspersions on the character of the legitimately-elected outsider non-politician leader of the free world, you cast aspersions on the millions of American Voters who elected him in 2016, and avidly support him now, and through all the horrible sticks, stones, slime, and lawsuits that he has been subjected to since the day he was elected. President Donald Trump is most definitely neither half-mad, nor bad. This President is the most Pro-American President we have had in recent memory, and we The American People will lead him on to a second, and much larger Victory in the election of 2020. And many of us will not only be voting in his favor, we will be voting against you, and your ill-considered description of him. President Trump has helped bring America back from the decline perpetrated by Barack Hussein Obama and his henchmen, and we hope to see millions more black Americans abandon the DemocRat party and vote Republican this year.
I just realized one thing about Rush that I had never thought of before. I wonder if it has also occurred to the rest of Rush Limbaugh’s loyal audience, that he is human, and he might not be around forever. I think most of us just took it for granted that, from noon to 3:00PM ET, or whenever his program is on where you live, when you turn on your radio, he’s there. Every day, for three whole hours, he has been there, pretty reliably, for over 30 years. It simply never occurred to me that someday he might be gone. So the announcement that he was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, just hit me like a ton of bricks. Now that I’ve had a chance for it to sink in, and have heard last Friday’s show (I listened to the first hour live through his Web site, before people started interrupting me at work), I am again reminded of his likeness to a Bobo doll-you can knock him over, but he keeps getting back up every time. And one of the reasons for that is his irrepressible optimism, about himself, about life in general, and about America.
Here, from his two books, are some of what I consider Rush’s best, most pithy, pronouncements.
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So, take some advice. Lighten up. We should all laugh more at ourselves. I don’t need to improve much in this area, but admit it, many of you people do. Many of you take things far too seriously in most cases. Come on, laugh at yourselves, folks.
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We need to encourage people to contribute to the economy, not to sit around basking in self-pity. We need to help them get out of the situation, rather than glorifying and perpetuating it. Encourage them to become economically equal members of this society, rather than a collection of sycophants sidling up to the pig and looking for the biggest nipple they can find.
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Don’t fall prey to the seductive emotional appeals of the Democrats as they attempt to pit one group of society against another with their politics of class envy. Let the facts speak for themselves. If a liberal president gets elected, he, like Jimmy Carter, will make sure “fairness” applies to all economic levels. He will see to it that we all get poor again.
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The way to save endangered species is to give someone a stake in preserving them. By allowing legitimate ranches to privatize them, we can make sure others don’t pulverize them.
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People are going to have to learn to depend less on the government. We are going to have to separate them from the federal budget sow. But we can also make their lives better by giving them more choice in how the tax money they do pay is spent.
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I refuse to believe that people, who are themselves the result of Creation, can destroy the most magnificent creation of the entire universe.
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Environmentalists always appeal to the memories of a simpler, more natural time. They are regressing, wanting to go backward in time.
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I want this to be a great country, and a great country needs as many great individuals as there can be.
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For the black leadership to continue to encourage their people to absorb themselves in the past, instead of helping them to get beyond the bitterness, is doing them a great disservice.
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…man is a spiritual being. If his faith in God is destroyed, the void will be filled with something else. Throughout history that substitute for faith has been a belief in a man-made god called the state. Untold crimes have been committed in its name, Hitler and Stalin being the most bloody recent examples.
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I am convinced that the most important thing conservatives have to do to win is to just keep saying no to the left. No to their special-interest giveaways. No to their pork-barrel spending projects. No to their privileged congressional empire….Be confident and patient, and never forget History.
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Yes, I am fortunate that I have the opportunity to do what I love. But nobody handed it to me on a silver platter. I had to work at it and prove myself every step of the way. My story is nothing more than an example of the Original American Ethic: hard work, overcoming obstacles, triumphing over enormous odds, the pioneer spirit. These things, my friends–not such vacuous symbolic gestures as wearing ribbons on lapels or government intrusion into every aspect of our lives–are what built this country.
~~~
A man from Alabama recently wrote me a computer letter accusing me of being too upbeat and optimistic. He said that by listening to me, one would get the idea that there is no hurting or suffering going on in the world and that everything is working out for the best. Wrong. I realize that there are failures and suffering. I just happen to believe that there would be a great deal more of them if everyone had that writer’s pessimistic, defeatist attitude. …What “the Suffering” need is steady doses of confidence-building optimism.
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I have not written a doctoral theses about free enterprise. Humbly speaking, as the Doctor of Democracy, I am free enterprise. And I operate in the real world, not in the insulated atmosphere of the ivory-tower academy.
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Don’t believe the doomsayers. Don’t believe the negativity-mongers. Don’t believe the America-bashers–even if one of them is the president of the United States. Don’t buy into the lie that punishing high achievers will bring you happiness. Your own success–born of your own ingenuity and industry–is what will make you happy.
This is the saddest post I have ever written for this blog, which has been going since 2010. At the end of his three-hour radio program today, my Hero announced that he had been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. This announcement shook me up, as you might imagine given the title of my blog. I have been a RushBabe for as long as that appellation has existed. Rush has been my go-to source of information and commentary on every possible subject, for as long as I have been an addict (2001). He is absolutely irreplaceable, and has risen above all possible sources of competition.
No radio host, of ANY persuasion, has Rush’s reach or audience, or reputation for straight-talking. No one can match his sense of humor, or ability to get to the heart of any issue in few words. He has always been the master of the pithy phrase, and if he’s not really right 99.7% of the time, he’s so close as to not bother with a distinction. What Rush says, goes. Rush always says that he knows the Left better than they know themselves, and that is perfectly true. He can divine intentions from very few words of any leftist, and communicate that to his audience. Remember Air America? He had them pegged from Day One, and they didn’t last long.
We all know the the Left has zero sense of humor. Well, Rush has it all. Every last dotted “i” and crossed “t”. I remember the first time I heard Rush on the radio. It was early in 2001, and I was in my boyfriend’s (now Hubby) car on the way out to dinner-I even remember where we were, going south in I-5 in Everett. He turned on the radio, and Rush happened to be on. I said “You’re not going to make me listen to Rush Limbaugh, are you?”, and he didn’t say anything, but he left the radio on. Well, after I had listened to about ten minutes, I was laughing out loud, and I was hooked! I remember saying to boyfriend, “This guy is just hilarious!”, and the rest of the drive was very pleasant, since we had something to talk about. We loved his fake commercials, and the “Justice Brothers” skits, making fun of the Left, and race-baiters everywhere. He made Paul Shanklin, who did those skits, more famous than he otherwise would have been.
Who hasn’t heard Rush claim that he lives rent-free in someone’s brain? And who hasn’t said that he lives rent-free in Their brain?! Well, he lives rent-free in my brain, I don’t know about yours.
Rush also made a lot of people very popular, with just one or two words. All he had to do was mention any Web site, and it would immediately get so much traffic that it would crash. He mentioned this often, when warning fans what they would be in for if he gave out their address on the air. That’s how influential he is. Advertisers beat down his door, begging to be a sponsor of his show. In fact, when he said something a leftist didn’t like, and that leftist trashed Rush, it just made him more popular! More than once, the internet trolls tried to get people to boycott his advertisers (as a way of getting to him), but it would never work. Loyal fans just directed more business their way, and made the advertisers and Rush even more popular (and wealthier, too).
Rush has had his problems before, and always been honest with his listeners. I know he’s had weight problems, and you could tell from the various pictures he’s post how his weight would fluctuate (a condition that RushBabe is quite familiar with). We also were with him through marriages and divorces (and we were thrilled at his marriage to Kathryn, which should stand him in good stead now that he has her by his side). Then, there was the issue with drug use (where the lame media tried to destroy him without result), and his resulting deafness. And he has come out on top every single time. For someone who lives by his voice, he triumphed over his deafness astoundingly well. If you had not known him before, you would not have a clue about it at all. And we were all right there with him, lending support, every day.
Earlier, Rush also made me smile, with his cat tales. I was jealous, because he had two different Abyssinian cats, and I had one at one time, too. So I could perfectly understand when he had to pull a kitty off the curtains! This is one of my favorite pictures that he posted on his Web site. Can you resist either of these fuzzballs?
In 2005, I was fortunate to be able to speak to Rush on the air. I actually called in from my desk at work, and I don’t think my boss ever found out about it! I was on hold for over an hour, and did my work while I waited. This was around the time of Hurricane Katrina, and I thought he’d get a kick out of my idea for what to say if we had to evacuate the city during a disaster. With Seattle trying to get everyone out of their cars and into public transportation, no way would I offer anyone else a ride out of town! Well, he was a very gracious host, and carried on a fine, two-way conversation. He liked my tale of how I got to start listening to his show. I still remember, and will always cherish, that opportunity to speak with the world’s smartest talk-show host.
In 2006, my husband and I took a short vacation in Upstate New York, after the Everett Symphony gave our concert in Carnegie Hall. I was wearing my Rush Limbaugh Club Git’mo t-shirt. I just had to have hubby take my picture in front of the Democrat Party booth at the Albany July 4 Fair.
In front of “enemy lines”, July 4, 2006 in Albany, NY
It’s remarkable how Rush can talk at length about just any item of news or information, with no notes and little hesitation. His breadth of knowledge is profound, and there seems to be nothing he is unfamiliar with. He would speak at CPAC, or one of his “Rush to Excellence” tours entirely without any prompting or notes of any kind, and his audiences always listened closely and applauded in all the right places. Every year, he would have his Leukemia & Lymphoma Foundation telethon on his show, and raise literally millions of dollars; he got me to become a donor! His sale of Betsy Ross T-shirts also raised many millions of dollars for the Tunnel to Towers Foundation.
Having a medical background from my pharmacy technician days, I know what a formidable foe cancer is, especially lung cancer. But the unsurpassed American pharmaceutical industry has come up with many new treatments for all kinds of cancer, and I will never count him out as long as anything remains untried. I expect that Rush Limbaugh will have access to the very best oncologists that exist in this country, and the very latest treatments. I’m sure that he is aware that he has at least 27 million supporters out there, who will all be sending their prayers heavenward on his behalf. Just the members of the Ricochet “Divine Help” group will be sending up some pretty powerful prayers.
[Update on February 4]
Tonight President Trump will give his State of the Union speech, in the Camp of his Sworn Enemy, the DemocRats of the House of Representatives. My Hero, Rush Limbaugh, will be in the audience for the speech. And he will be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by his friend, Donald Trump. That award couldn’t happen to a more deserving Champion of Liberty in our country.
From the Fox News Web site, praise for Rush from Andrew McCarthy.
Rush Limbaugh is a true National Treasure, with the biggest heart on the radio. I urge all my followers to keep him in their hearts, and in their prayers in the days ahead. Rush, We Love You! You will live Rent-Free in our hearts forever.
No, it’s not the Partisan Impeachment of President Donald Trump.
It’s the Exit of Britain from the European Union (Brexit for short), which is to happen tomorrow. In the last election, Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party won in a landslide, taking veto-proof control of Parliament, and flipping many districts that had voted Labour for generations. That election drew some notice, but it was quickly buried by the news of the Impeachment drama in Washington DC. I have watched all my favorite news sites, and seen literally nothing about this huge story.
Tomorrow, the Prime Minister will give a big speech, describing Brexit as the “dawn of a new era” in his country. In 2016, 52% of Britons voted to leave the EU, but the waffling government, led by waffler-in-chief Theresa May, dilly-dallied and hemmed and hawed, to avoid the actual exit. The British had had enough, and elected a more-Conservative government to make Brexit happen. Many changes will come for Britain in the coming months, but they will be mostly positive. No longer will they be at the mercy of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.
Well, it is actually happening. Tomorrow. We here in the US should be celebrating Britain’s new choice of Liberty over disappearance into the European Blob. President Trump has already spoken of a new bi-lateral treaty between our two countries, to recognize the Special Relationship we have had for a long time.
In the past few days, there have been multiple shootings in downtown Seattle. Ordinary citizens are wondering if they should be going there at all, and are expressing their opinions publicly. Local businesses are appealing to city government to improve conditions in their neighborhoods, so they are not confronted with drug deals, gang shootings, and homeless people in their doorways on a daily basis.
Dori Monson, radio host on KIRO Radio, has published an excellent article on the local site MyNorthwest.com. He attributes many of Seattle’s problems to the city elected officials, many of whom are politically-correct 1960s radicals who now hold the power. City Police, distrusted by many, seem powerless to stop the rampant crime and drug dealing. Criminals with multiple felony convictions are released onto the streets to continue their mayhem. Respected local businesses, like Bartell Drugs and Barnes and Noble Booksellers are closing up shop, leaving empty storefronts behind.
But the Citizens of Seattle elect their Government. Too bad they get what they elect.
President Donald Trump and his First Lady, Melania, published a video Christmas greeting to the nation. See below.
Just look at that still-shot. They do not look very happy, do they? Perhaps that might have something to do with the way they have been treated for the past four years by the despicable (so-called) democrat party and the Media. The entire Trump family has had their names dragged through the mud, been slandered and libeled regularly, and been slimed in all manner of media, ranging from the fish wrap New York Times and Washington Post, to the sleaze-filled Daily Kos, Salon, and Puffington Host (hat tip to James Taranto).
President Trump’s campaign was spied-upon, his campaign aides surveilled by the FBI, his cabinet members hounded out of restaurants, and his supporters injured on the streets. And he has been impeached in the House of Representatives, for the simple reason that they Hate Him. His term in office has been the most productive, beneficial, and economically excellent in many decades. The country is manifestly better-off today than at any time since the Obama Recession. Today’s unemployment rate is the lowest in 50 years, and today more minorities are employed than ever before. The average American pays less in taxes, has a better job with benefits, and is subject to fewer onerous Federal regulations than he has seen in recent memory.
But President Trump has continued to fight against all the stones that have been thrown at him, and has come out of it even stronger. He has fought off the Never-Trumpers of his own party, and has remained upbeat and optimistic about the future of the United States of America. Unlike most of his enemies in the Left Party and the Media, President Trump cares deeply about this country, and wants to keep it strong in the face of the many external foes that wish us ill.
So, a Very Merry Christmas to our President and his family. Keep the Faith, Sir, we are with you!
![Thinking about the “Novel Coronavirus” epidemic [Updated]*Dictators Beware](https://rushbabe49.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/iu.jpeg?w=700&h=430&crop=1)
