Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 03-05-25_WEDNESDAY_6AM

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

Trump address, classless response from the Left, surprised? Eric Peters talks the response, 2025 Mini Review, Real ID, or Real Compliant!!

The Bill Meyer Show podcast is sponsored by Clouser Drilling. They've been leading the way in southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at ClouserDrilling.com. Here's Bill Meyer. Good morning. It is Wheels Up Wednesday. Eric Peters joins me as always a little bit after 630. Always some good conversation on transportation politics. Of course, a lot of politics in the air this morning.

And we had last night the last night, the, uh, the president addressing joint session of Congress. And it was really so first I was a hundred minutes long. That was a long speech. Sometimes I, you know, I got to the point where, you know, Hey, you know, me, I'm on the toddler schedule because I have to go to bed early and, you know, otherwise I wake up screaming for my bottle and sucking my thumb, that kind of thing.

But yeah, I stuck it out. The only thing I would say sometimes if I could just get President Trump to say, okay, maybe just a little less is more, but hey, dawn is dawn. I tell you though, it was really interesting to see not only President Trump's mastery of the room, but also the just rank hissy fitting going on everywhere. The impotent hissy fitting, you know, frankly, what's going on. And I know they took Al Green, Al Green threw him out because he wouldn't be orderly and this and that. The others said, I'm going to do articles of impeachment.

This president is unfit. Al Green has difficulty reading the room. I don't think that's what people have much of an appetite for. But yeah, 100 minutes and covered a lot of stuff There were so many things that that were good some things that kind of go man like anything else You know never agree with anybody on absolutely everything But if there was a highlight at least to me the highlight is this particular break and I Did the only editing I've done to this clip,

if you didn't watch the speech last night, is that I just ended up shortening up the applause because the applause was so great, it would have gone on for a long, long time. But I think with the protection of the younger generation was one of the most important things that he talked about, in my opinion. My administration is also working to protect our children

from toxic ideologies in our schools. A few years ago, January, little John and her husband discovered that their daughter's school had secretly socially transitioned their 13-year-old little girl. Teachers and administrators conspired to deceive January and her husband while encouraging her daughter to use a new name and pronouns. They them pronoun, actually.

All without telling January, who is here tonight and is now a courageous advocate against this form of child abuse. January, thank you. Stories like this are why shortly after taking office, I signed an executive order banning public schools from indoctrinating our children with transgender ideology. I also signed an order to cut off all taxpayer funding to any institution that engages in the sexual mutilation of our youth. And now I want Congress to pass a bill permanently banning and criminalizing sex changes on children

and forever ending the lie that any child is trapped in the wrong body. This is a big lie. And our message to every child in America is that you are perfect exactly the way God made you because we're getting wokeness out of our schools and out of our military and it's already out and it's out of our society. We don't want it.

To me, that whole...that was like the money quote. That was the money moment for me at least because if you're not protecting the kids at this point, if you're not going to roll back the attacks on children, the attacks on gender, the attacks on women, the attacks on men, if you're not going to roll that back, what future does this country have? And the Empire, if you want to call, you know, Trump Luke Skywalker to use a, you know, take a Star Wars example of something, if he's Luke Walker, Luke Skywalker rather, and you have the Empire, the Empire is fighting back and fighting back hard.

And, and I know that President Trump was talking about the executive orders, but I did want you to also know that a federal judge in Maryland that same day had extended the block on the executive order from President Trump that would strip federal funding from organizations performing the biological castrations and chemical procedures of the gender-affirming care. In other words, all the butchery you know going on in the medical system today. So a federal judge has blocked this for the entire country, once again in one district,

but they do it for the entire country. And the LGBTQ activist group, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, PFLAG, they brought the suit on behalf of seven youths suffering from gender dysphoria, whose treatments were halted as a result of the executive order. Gender dysphoria is a real thing. You know, I'm not knocking that sort of thing. But this idea that you take the entire next generation and you encourage it and you hide it from the parents and you're going to pay for it with taxpayer funds and you're going to sit around there and scrape and bow for

the mentally ill island of misfit humans. The psychiatrist had it right a number of years ago in the big diagnostic book. Was that DMSO or I forget exactly what it is. You know it's the big really thing which they have all the psychiatric maladies know, maladies in here. You know, here's all the ways you're crazy. And gender dysphoria is another one of those. Usually gender dysphoria tends to work itself out by the time you're in your later, your later teenage years. So the idea that is, you know, the five-year-old that says that, you know, yeah, I know I'm a girl, but I want to be a boy, but I think I'd rather

be a boy, you know, that sort of stuff. You're supposed to just work through it, and it usually sorts itself out. But what mostly the left-wing side of this country has been all about has been, well, immediately have to go there, get the body parts chopped off, take them up to OHSU, which continues to make bank on these kind of surgical procedures. They make lots of money there. They have a couple of departments that I was reading about that do nothing but make artificial sexual organs in order for the mutilation to continue for the kids. It's their business. It's their business.

And this state legislature, not the Republicans, but you know, it's still standing by, you know, they're all over this. This state tends to be all over, oh, gender affirming care. And yes, we have to hide it from those knuckle dragging parents and this and that. You know where I'm coming from. So President Trump has ordered it, the courts are fighting back because this is just the setup. So this is what I'm getting at where it's just like, just because Trump is in doesn't mean the battle is over. There is lots, lots of work and lots of fighting to continue to do on this.

And probably the best thing that could happen would be for Congress just to, like he talks about, stronger than any executive order, just make it the law of the land. And that needs to be done. Because if you're not protecting the next generation, and if you are not allowing parents to be parents, and boy, the state of Oregon is really big on that, isn't it? You don't really qualify to be the parent. So we have to hide this from you because you neanderthal. You're not capable of dealing with the gender-affirming care that we're going to provide you through the government school, through the health clinic.

It's another reason why, remember, Diana Anderson was talking about why it was a bad idea to have these school-based clinics because this ends up being where the process starts, all that kind of stuff. So anyway, to me though, that was the so-called money shot, the money thing that was what to me really made it. Now number two on that list of what really made it was the Ukraine conversation and the calling out of Polkhanutist. I just fell out of my chair. I was just laughing. I mean, he actually did it. Called her out. I love this. With no end in sight, the United States has sent hundreds of billions of dollars to support Ukraine's defense with

no security. Do you want to keep it going for another five years? Yeah, yeah, you would say Pocahontas says yes. That's the sort of stuff we need more of. He just actually just called her out and said, oh, you just want to keep this going another five years. And the senator, Pocahontas, she says, yeah, yeah, she did. It astounds me how the roles flip here when it comes to war and paying for war and pushing

war because you know how the Democrats always talk about themselves? Remember the women in white that were always downtown in in Medford and they were you know they were protesting Bush and everything else and rightly so I supported their right to to to protest that war there are a lot of questions I had about that about that war you, Saudi Arabia, you know, the terrorists come from Saudi Arabia and then we go attack Saddam. You know, yeah, we could go down all those roads and re-litigate 9-11 and the war on terror. You know, you're either with us or you're without us, or you're against us, you know, that

kind of thing. And trillions of dollars and thousands of soldiers dead and many others maimed here. And the Democrats were against this one, but they're against, but they're for this one. They're for this one. And it's amazing to me. I don't know what it is that, you know, maybe it is that, you know, liberal white women especially seem to have a real love for Zelensky. I have a feeling they're the ones over in East Medford that are putting up the, you

know, support Ukraine. And listen, I have a feeling they're the ones over in East Medford that are putting up the you know support Ukraine and listen I have no problem with you supporting Ukraine But I think you need to support Ukraine with your own money and your own daughters and sons rather than just trying to Gin this up so that everybody else's daughters and sons and everybody else's money is is paying this effect I said I said pretty much that last night on Facebook. I had posted this because Bob Shan sent me a picture of the hissy fitters, as I call them, in downtown Medford. They were out there protesting Donald Trump and his policy in Ukraine and hate. It's not going to make America great. And of course, hate in the left-wing world is

you're doing things that we disagree with, as that's hate! Hate! And then of course, many Republicans will go, oh no, I don't want them calling me a hater! It's like, it's all right, we're going to get through this here. So the hissy fitters weren't happy about this, and they're waving Ukraine flags and all the rest of it, and hey, go ahead, you can donate sons and daughters and money to your cause if you want to. You're allowed to do that.

Send them over there and then Zelensky will sweep them off the street, which is what he's doing right now to what few military-age men are left there on the streets, and they impress him in a service. That's what they've been doing. In fact, President Trump was talking about that last week in that dust-up, that Oval Office dust-up. But the point is that these progressives, they really want other people's money. They want everybody in on this one. And I had opined on Facebook that in their worldview, America First means that the neoliberal world order keeps writing the hot foreign aid checks to the shadowy NGOs, like through USAID. And what I said was pushing transgender operas in Zambia.

I just like that because I don't know if they put transgender, I think they actually put transgender operas in Ireland or Scotland, if I recall correctly. That's one of the things that Doge found out there. But I said those days are coming to an end. And some of the response just really, really surprised me. There was a journalist, Cheryl Rice Jones, who responded. And Cheryl Rice Jones, according to her profile, is a journalist itself and studied English literature at Southern Oregon University and says, is this fellow practicing to be the next Alex Jones? What a shame.

She didn't actually go about anything that I actually said just saying, oh, you're sounding so much like Alex Jones. Gee, I didn't say anything about globalist eating babies on their private jets, Cheryl. Just saying, there are globalists out there, eating babies and getting the adenochrome and things like that. God bless Alex Jones, okay? But I find that fascinating and really all I'm raising the point is, is this really our fight? Is this really something that we get our children involved in, in our blood and treasure?

Because that's obviously what Zelensky was looking for. What he was looking for is security guarantee. He wanted our troops on the ground there. And that wasn't originally part of the deal, and it's still not going to be part of the deal. But the Sheryl Rice Jones and many other people who are commentating on that, they won in. And of course, most of them are older, retired. Why are they so eager to throw this nation into another

conflict? I don't get that. But anyway, there's a lot of this going on. That's what they look at is our democracy. We keep writing the checks and pushing that progressive worldview and transgender surgeries and affirming care and all this kind of nonsense. And those days are coming to an end. The one thing I disagree with President Trump on last night when he says that woke is out woke they we don't want this we don't you may not want this but it's not dead it is fighting back and so if you think that just some executive orders are going to fix this you're sorely sorely mistaken in my opinion. The hard work is really just beginning. In fact, I'm going to talk with Professor John Ellis

about that a little bit later. He's been on the receiving end of that woke stuff and under a lot of pressure, okay? 26 minutes after 6, this is the Bill Meyer show. Honey, we're out of water again. Did you call Clauser Drilling to discuss a replacement well? Not yet. I just talked to a company who said they'll beat anybody's price no matter what. No way. Remember the cheap plumber, electrician, the cheap roofer who disappeared halfway through? Mailbox full.

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of their metal shop. Please make reservations early. Bringing a sack lunch is recommended. For more information, visit MontanaRoofingServices.com. Hi, I'm Duane Barkley with American Rancher Garage and I'm on KMED. 628, join the conversation, 7705633. Something else the President Trump announced last night

at the joint address of Congress. Oh, by the way, did you notice how the, how many of the Democratic women were dressed in pink because they were out there protesting President Trump's, you know, treatment of, you know, his impact on, on women's issues. And this is the day after they ended up voting against all the Democrats, yes, including Wyden and Berserkly, ended up voting against protecting women's sports from dudes masquerading as women. They went down, they all voted against this and blocked it in the Senate. Yeah, they really care.

Yeah, they really care about women. Really they do. Whatever happened to feminism? I mean, feminism actually caring about women. I they do. Whatever happened to feminism? I mean feminism actually caring about women. I don't know. Maybe it was never about caring about women. Maybe it was just part of the revolution, I guess. But something else that President Trump had announced yesterday, and the story, it wasn't getting a lot of coverage, but he did mention it in his address that the United States has apprehended the top terrorists behind the bombing that killed 13 US service members during the 2021 withdrawal from

Afghanistan. He made that announcement and the bombing at Abbey Gate outside the airport in Kabul is where that happened and 13 service members killed in the bombing. One of them of course from one of my hometowns, my second hometown really, Milan, Ohio, Max Soviak. When I was back there for my class reunion last year, my 45th high school reunion, and we were all talking about that, and they had memorials for Max everywhere around that town, out in front of the school, Edison High School, and all the rest of it. It's a big deal for a lot of these small towns where these soldiers came from and finally there's going to be some justice delivered onto that another interesting aspect now this is not talked about this is just part of the the doge push here the trump administration is getting ready to sell

off a lot of federal government property here in the state of Oregon. Now, wasn't I talking about that? I think it was with Matt from Grants Pass who called me. We were talking about you have... No, Michael Shaw. Michael Shaw was talking about you have to sell off the assets, right? That's exactly what the Trump administration started doing yesterday with your $36, $37

trillion in debt and you're borrowing another two to four trillion dollars a year depending on how things are looking you're going to have to start cutting and you have to sell off some assets well 10 Oregon federal buildings on the chopping block now and they're for sale including including the James Redden US courthouse so the courthouse is going up for sale on West 6th and Medford just under 30,000 square feet it's a beautiful building isn't it I've never really gone inside I've never had to do anything in there but Trump Trump's going to sell that off.

Going to sell it off. I'm trying to think what could be done with that. I like it. So they're going to sell that one. Also a US Geological Survey building in Medford. That's about 3,500 square feet and another 2,000 square foot US Geological Survey warehouse. So there are two US Geological Survey warehouses in Medford at about 6,000 square feet overall and they're going to go up for sale. They're going to be on the market here. Now the market's a little soft at the moment. I don't know how long it's going to take to sell those things, but now the whole list included 320 properties. This according to Oregonian, O-Live.

And Portland buildings, the federal building in Portland is going to go up for sale, and that's 417,000 square feet. The BPA building, 483,000 square feet. And the 9-11 federal building, 9-11 Northeast 11th, a quarter of a million square feet and they're wringing their hands because the the offices are you know office industry is is really bad over in Portland right now so they're thinking it's going to depress the the price well that's all right what are these buildings worth they're worth what someone's willing to pay for them so we'll see what happens so I don't know

I would love to be able to buy that courthouse I had to tell you I just think those are such beautiful stately buildings buildings. What can we do for it? What can we put in the courthouse that would be really cool? I don't want them to do like what the city of Medford wants to do, like you know handing over that beautiful Carnegie building, library building to a non-profit. I don't want to see that happen. I'd like to see something good done with these buildings. Yeah, I know someone's saying, but they are, but when they handed the library over, they're doing good with the library building. It's such a beautiful building that could have fetched a much better pretty penny, in

my opinion. But we can agree to disagree. Okay. It's a 632 KMED 993 KBXG. We'll check the rest of the news here in just a moment. And then Wheels Up Wednesday with Eric. He'll join me in a couple. Welcome to Dustin Curbs parking lot maintenance where exceptional parking lot maintenance

services are provided to Southern Oregon from lot sweeping to construction cleanup. Pressure washing USA Today, Audian hearing has the highest quality hearing aids at the lowest prices, just $189. I actually like them better than my old $5,000 hearing aids. I could not believe how my hearing and life changed. Join over 500,000 happy customers by going to audienhearing.com. That's A-U-D-I-E-N hearing.com. You're here in the Bill Myers show on 1063 KMED. 637 Eric Peters rejoins the program. EP autos.com.com libertarian car guy politics and paper hit in the open road now. Eric welcome back good to have you on. Thank you Bill I always enjoy

being here. I can't help but be the DJ occasionally when I get a song you got to talk up to the woohoo part if you're going to do that you know? Right. Hey, did you see much of Orange Man last night on the, I don't know what you term them, Orange Man Bad, the way the left has been portraying them, they are just apoplectic. They're apoplectic today. The spirit was willing, but because I'm generally at my desk at about four in the morning, I tend to go to bed well before nine o'clock, so I didn't get to see it live, but I did see some of the highlights, including the Pocahontas thing and also watching Nancy Pelosi squirm, and that was enjoyable, much like watching Zelensky squirm a couple of

days prior. Now, I must have been in the bathroom there. I did have to take a couple of bathroom breaks at that point. So what happened with Nancy? I must have missed that one. What went on? The part that I saw, if I'm getting this correctly, was he began his speech and he talked about, you know, the usual bipartisan stuff about how Democrats could come together with Republicans and

let's try to work together for the good of the country. And she looked like she was about to have a stroke. She was gripping her cane and masticating her jaws and, you know, just looked extraordinarily upset. So Granny Wine Bucks was not really happy then? No. Okay. Al Green was thrown out of it and he ended up being escorted out and he's now saying today that he's going to draw up articles of impeachment because he's unfit. And I think Al's not reading the room really well right now, These people are so humorless they don't get it. Granted, Trump can be a clown sometimes but he's a funny clown and that's a good thing. These dour, always upset, always looking on the downside of everything.

People on the left, it's gotten tedious and tiresome and so seeing Trump needle these people is it's a tonic. It's wonderful. Yeah, I love that part especially with with Pocahontas too. I was really happy, though, about trying to do something to protect against the mind virus of the transgender-affirming care. Every child needs to have surgery performed on them

before they really know what's going on in their world. I think that's something which is, and of course the system is fighting back so harshly against that Eric. I'm shocked at how hard the system is fighting back on the transgender surgery issue. Aren't you? Well I'm not because it's critical for the success of the left that reality be fungible and that facts don't matter. That's why this issue is so important because if they can convince you that a dude, a man, is a woman and make you accept that because they say so, then they can make you accept anything they say and they know that. Yeah, the hard part of

watching the speech last night, the address, you know, that was going on was how they would keep the cameras on the mothers and the wives of victims of criminal people that had died miserably, some of the victims of unfortunately a Democrat, either incompetence or actually intending to cause disorder in the system. And you can see them just at the point where they're ready to break down in tears. They're doing everything they can do to stay stoic. That was a little tough. That was a little tough to watch. Yeah.

But, you know, I'm liking to see reality reassert itself as uncomfortable as it makes the left. And that's a very, very happy thing. Yeah. I want to dig back into reality because I'm having to dig into this particular issue, and that's real ID. My driver's license, because everybody knows that the only way that anybody knows that I'm a competent driver is that I have the state piece of paper or the plastic card.

And that way they know that I'm safe and that I'm who I say I am. But who I say I am is not enough, Eric. We know that. And so this is the deadline, May of this year, having to get to real ID. I'm going to have to do this. And I'm gathering together, I got my birth certificate and all the rest of it. You had an interesting article on this and this is kind of bringing it back to, you know, do we serve the government or does the government serve us? And it

seems like with Real ID it's getting down to more of this, well we're having to serve them and jump through the hoops. What are you thinking about that? Well I think it's telling that, you know, at least they're finally using the correct terminology. Real ID. It's not a driver's license. It's got nothing to do with whether you have demonstrated that you have basic competence to safely operate a vehicle. It's an ID. We all know that, and they're making it official. And not only is it an ID, it's effectively an internal passport, or at least an external passport initially,

because if you don't have it, you will not be permitted to leave the country or re-enter the country. And it's inevitable, because it's logical, that it's going to get to the point where you won't be able to travel probably from state to state without your so-called real ID. And that is what has concerned me because everything that I've noticed that FedGov does always starts with incrementalism. Well, we're going to need this real ID in order for you to get on an airplane. And then it's, oh, well, you have to get into a courthouse. Oh, then it'll be what?

Getting into a bank. And then, well, you know, we are having terrorist attacks on supermarkets because of the price of eggs. I'm just being, you know, engaging in some future headlines, you know, that sort of thing. And so- It can be entirely logical because, you know, didn't we see this before with the attempt to impose vaccine passports on people, which was another manifestation of this whole internal passports regime.

And if there's one thing that defines what an authoritarian state is, it's that you can't travel without your papers and having to constantly show your papers to government goons. And it's not just government goons. At this point, you can't even go into a store to buy cough syrup anymore without producing your ID. Exactly. And we have a lot of that, or buy Sudafed. I think you have to go to California

still at this point. No, maybe I think they did lighten the boot up on that in the state of Oregon because it was all about the methamphetamine scourge. But the real ID thing, real compliant is how you're talking about. And yet I don't know where I go. I suppose I could just keep my regular driver's license and then get my passport renewed, but they're probably going to close that loophole, I guess, over time. No, inevitably, of course they will. So it's only a short-term expedient to get your passport up to date in order to avoid having the real ID. Unless that law gets repealed, this is something that's going to become inevitable. And the big worry that I have

right now politically is that Trump ran to a great extent and won on, you know, getting a hold of the illegal alien problem, right? Well, how is he going to do that? You have to identify people, don't you? And how are you going to do that without IDs? Yeah, so probably not going to do anything to lighten up the boot on that particular issue. My whole point though is that real ID is a falsehood being sold to us because the only way, the only way that you could technically have a true real ID is if everything about your biometrics is put in there and of course this is a biometric ID, it's taking part of your biometrics, but do you think that the government would really have a real

ID system, Eric, that would make sure that undercover agents or spies or anybody else, I mean, if it's a real ID, how can you have IDs like that for people who are supposedly under the radar, right? Well, of course, it's for us, it's for the cattle. Exactly. That's my point. It's for everybody else, not the government people, really, is what the real ID is about. It's all about data collection and aggregation. You may have noticed that now not only do store clerks sometimes demand to see an ID to prove that you're of age, even if you're 60 or 70 years old, they will scan your driver's license. They'll do this

at the bank too. So it's not just identifying you. They're collating and collecting all this information with this pretext of showing your airfingers, quote, driver's license, which is nothing of the kind. So under, even under President Trump, civil liberties are something that we're going to have to continue to jealously protect. And I don't know, it looks like the rising state is a bipartisan state, unfortunately. I don't know how. Well, I think it's going to actually, we have to be more vigilant, unfortunately, because the red hat crowd, the people who voted for

Trump, and I know I'm speaking generally here and I know there are exceptions, but they tend to go to sleep when one of their guys is in charge. And even worse, a lot of them, they're all in on this authoritarianism because they think it's not going to be directed at them. Well, it's just like how things have flipped back and forth now, you know, back during the Bush administration, most Republicans, and I was even one of them too, was more in favor of the Iraq war at first until I figured it out. Wait a minute, there's kind of a racket going on here. And the left were the peaceniks at that point, and now we're looking at the situation and

it's the right wing that are the peaceniks. And I've got, we have people in downtown Medford that were hissy fitting yesterday in protesting about Ukraine. We have to be sending money and soldiers to Kiev, Eric. Right, of course. Wait a minute, these are all left wingers out there for the most part. What the heck's going on, the inversion that happens here? It's astounding, isn't it?

I know. It's very difficult to keep your eyes focused and not go batty when you have to deal with all of this stuff. Yeah, you know, the left has become the party of the elite and of war. And on the other hand, you know, we've got the alternative to it, which frankly isn't that much better in a lot of important ways. Eric Peters, automotive journalist, libertarian car guy, epautos.com. Eric, let's talk about some of the stuff you've been driving here lately. A great review of the 2025 Mini Cooper with one exception. I'm just looking at the size of the touchscreen, which you also have another article up there. It's like the touch, is the touchscreen

the entire dash? I mean, what? What happened? Yeah, you know, the car still looks the same. It's received a major update for this year, and the chief update is that they've all but eliminated all of the physical controls. You remember how the Mini used to have these kind of cool, old-timey, but yet modern toggle switches that reminded you of what it was like back in the 60s, and it had the cool, big round speedometer and all that stuff, and you had lots of stuff to do and keep you busy inside the car. They've eliminated practically all of that in favor of this pie plate touch screen

that controls almost everything in the car except turning the engine off and on and in my opinion it's it's extremely distracting for one thing but the other worry that i have is over time and my other article gets into this these things are going to start to fail and when they fail you're going to lose everything you know you can't even turn on the heated seats or adjust the fan without touching the screen so when that goes you've effectively got a useless car and. You can't even turn on the heated seats or adjust the fan without touching the screen. So when that goes you've effectively got a useless car and if you can't get a new pie plate, which you may not be able to get in 10 years or 12 years from now, what then? Yeah, a new pie plate. I love that thing. Has there been any evidence about how long these touch screens work? I mean touch screens have been out long enough that we can start getting some idea on how long they last out there in the real world.

Have you heard anything from the mechanics and such? Well, how long does a TV last? A smart TV? Or your cell phone display? You know, typically you get 10 years or so out of the thing before it starts to glitch. But a lot of times people want to hang out in their car more than 10 years, right? Well, that's the point, exactly. And it's really tragic because we had gotten to this wonderful sweet point where cars would go for 15 or 20 years easily, even longer if you took care of them, where now that's going back in the other direction. What's happening is that these critical parts fail and they're so expensive to replace, if you can even replace them, because they may not be available.

The manufacturers stop supporting cars they don't produce after a certain number of years, and then when the inventory of replacement parts is gone that's it you're out of luck you know you have to do a nationwide search to try to find something or resort to a used part and if you can't find either of those things well the car is basically useless. Is there a law that says that they have to support the car for a certain number of years do you know? Offhand I don't but I do know that they stopped doing it after a while and anybody who's had to deal with this knows you know you have say a 15 year old car and you need a service replacement part and they don't make it anymore now you know

for example I had to get a heater to the heater tubes for my truck my truck is an o2 model Nissan stopped making them luckily the aftermarket makes them but those are relatively easy to make because it's just a plastic part it's not a proprietary pie plate touch screen. Yeah. I know that for my Vanigan a number of years ago, there was a stock from the factory. There was this plastic kind of plastic fiber glassy tube that was the oil dipstick and measuring thing.

And it vibrated and vibrated and vibrated and they all cracked. You'd buy one every about every two years from the Volkswagen dealership and then and then finally they stopped making them They discontinued it and they said okay stop it go buy a new van You know that kind of thing is what they will tell you and but you know the aftermarket did do something about it There was a machinist at back East who actually went out there and did some CNC thing and machined it out of aluminum so it's like there's nothing's going to break this now. So it's great when you see something like that done creatively. In my opinion one of the great tragedies of this movement to all LCD touch screen interfaces

is that they could just have a standardized port in a new car and then you could plug in your display like an iPad or whatever you want. And then you could replace the iPad anytime you want. The iPad goes bad, no worry. With a model down the line, you know, five, ten, eight years, whenever the thing either fails or becomes obsolete and that would allow you to keep the car viable for 20 years, which is what it ought to be. So what should be done then, I think, if there is, and now this is one thing that maybe the

Trump administration could actually help in the regulatory system and that would be, ask the automotive world that if you're going to have touchscreens and you're not going to have analog switches and knobs turning things around there, maybe there are still some cars that have this. I don't know, Eric, but there should be a universal kind of like the air pollution port scanner thing that they have. It's the OBD port. Yeah the OBD port and it is a standard. Everybody is allowed to talk to it. The same commands go back and forth through it. Everything is the same. They could do that for controlling the vehicle too. Could they not? The real problem here is this stuff has happened so fast. You know

I remember I guess it was probably about 15 years ago, you began to see these LCD touchscreens in very high-end cars like Mercedes S-classes and BMW 7s. And then within about five years after that, they started coming down to the mid-priced models. Now everything has them. And it's a whirlwind. People haven't had time yet to catch their breath and realize, oh my gosh, what are the pros and the cons of these things? The touchscreens are single points of failure in the new cars. That's just it.

Everything goes through them. It's one thing if your fan switch went out in your older car or the cable snapped on your defroster vent or something, you'd still run the rest of the car. You had a discrete system you know meaning it was single so if the fan switch stopped working well okay the fan doesn't work and to fix it you have to replace that switch but everything else still worked now nothing works if the thing goes dark yeah and you know there's no there's no way to get around that other than replacing that pie plate. Other than that other than the pie

plate on the on the dashboard what did you think of the Mini Cooper? Well, two points. One good, one bad. The good point is they got rid of the three-cylinder engine that was standard in that car last year, and they put an appropriately sized 2.0-liter four in the thing that makes significantly more power, and that's great. The bad news is you can't get it with manual transmission anymore. They're all automatic only now. What are the last vehicles that still have manuals available again?

Well, you know, I should compile a list of them. There are a few. Some of the sports cars like the Mazda Miata still has it. The Subaru WRX that we talked about a couple of weeks has it. The Lanterra N, which is a competitor of the WRX. The Toyota Corolla GR. I think there's one pickup that still has it, which is the current Tacoma.

That's it. Everything else is automatic only. All right. Your overall impression though, fun car to drive? Very fun car, but the disappointing thing is they've, you know, and I know it's a combination of inflation and also this just pushing to make everything essentially a luxury car by including all these formerly luxury options as standards. The Mini now starts at almost $29,000 if you can believe that. As recently as 2020 you could pick one up for just over 23 and I

think like a lot of manufacturers what they're doing essentially is pricing the vehicle out of the market because that's fundamentally a young person's car. It's not a particularly practical car for a lot of older people, right? Well, I mean, it's not for older people who have kids and all of that, but exactly the point. So how many people who are 25 years old can afford a $30,000 car? Not a whole lot at this point. We hear about it. All right. Speaking of cars and maybe keeping some models going for a while, didn't you have something on EP Autos about this possibility of a four-door Mustang maybe coming out? What happened? Yeah, well it looks like Ford is developing a four-door iteration of the Mustang that's not going to replace the current coupe, the two-door, but that they're going to sell alongside of it. And I think that's really smart because

the Mustang is, again, another not very practical car that's gotten pretty expensive. It's not like it was when you and I were young and people could afford to get a fun car like the Mustang and have another car to haul the kids around and be a practical family kind of a car. So by making a four-door version of it, hey, you've got a practical sedan and one that could fill the slot that's been vacated by the Dodge Charger. That's right. And, and this is the really interesting thing. And I hope that Ford is thinking about this.

It could be an alternative to a semi exotic like the Porsche Panamera. You know, they're essentially going to build something that's very much like that. A four-door car, rear wheel drive with a V8 engine that potentially they could sell it for 40,000 bucks or so. And if you looked at what the cost of a Panamera is you could buy the four-door and the two-door Mustang for the price of a Panamera. Now if they were going to make a four-door Mustang and actually that sounds like a lot of fun to me because a four-door is a lot easier to get in and out of you don't have to flip the seat forward and

all that kind of stuff and I think the current iteration of the Mustang is not particularly roomy in the in the back Same with the Camaro of course the Camaro is gone though I think there's no mention that literally literally there's no leg room at all You mean you have to like put your pull your tuck your let your knees and legs up and put your feet on the seats If you want to sit back there And you have to duck your head the only people that can go back there are probably eight-year-old kids Yeah, I would vote for a four-door Mustang for myself. Now would they have to stretch

the chassis a bit to do that? They'd have to put a little bit of length on the wheelbase probably to accommodate it. But that's not a big deal. It's an easy thing for them to do and it's just much much preferable to turning the Mustang into a device, meaning electric car, which would be the end of the Mustang as has already happened to the Camaro. Yeah, love the idea and I hope that they take that. Could you advise Ford on that? Could you get in there and

get on their staff? Yeah, I've given them my own feedback and told them yeah do it do it now like Arnold used to say. Yeah, yeah don't wait here because I just don't want to see what happened to the Camaro happen to the Mustang and that we're going to make sure that there is as little fun on the road as possible. Okay? Yes, exactly. The more, you know, the more fun that we can that we can preserve the better it's going to be for the industry and I think for the country generally it's depressing to think about just a fleet of Johnny cabs up there that we all sort of sopherifically sit in while we're taken to our destinations. Indeed. Hey, the other thing I wanted to ask you about here, have you seen a trend

in Virginia where you live and other states to get rid of leaded gasoline, to ban it entirely? And what I'm speaking about is for raceways because here they're trying to do this in the state of Oregon. There is a state legislator, a legislator, who of course is afraid that somebody somewhere is having too much fun. Oh, sure. And leaded gasoline, of course, required

for these super high compression exotic racing engines. Well, not just that, it's aviation fuel too. Oh, really? Yes. Oh, for the pipers, things like that? Private aircraft with piston engines need leaded high octane fuel too. Oh, okay. So they want to get rid of leaded gas entirely.

And I'm thinking, of course, I guess once again it's the gangrene way of looking at the world. Have you seen much of that elsewhere? Not yet, but I haven't looked into it, and I will now that you have prompted me to do that. Yeah, because my concern here is that the amount of gas burnt every year at like the racetracks and things is probably infinitesimal when you look at the whole. It's just a virtue signaling. It's another attempt by these people, as you say, to just stop anything that's potentially fun. It's got nothing to do with any objective criteria. If you had to, if you required them to come forward and say, okay, demonstrate that what you're talking about is going to have some kind of a meaningful impact relative to the

cost, they wouldn't be able to do it. Yeah. Unless that, of course, this is the part that I always get suspicious when I see legislators doing things like this, that maybe they're in the throes of property developers who would want to grab a racetrack. They're pretty big and sometimes they're in nice areas of the city. You always wanted that kind of stuff. I'm sure that I don't doubt that that's a factor. Yeah, kill it and then, hey, there you go.

And by the way, keep contributing to my campaign. All right. Hey, what are you going to be reviewing next week? What do you think? What's in the driveway? Oh, I know it's not here yet, it's coming tomorrow drumroll please okay another crossover SUV right yeah it's a Nissan Murano but there is at least one interesting thing about the Murano and that it kind of bucks the trend a little bit it has a fairly powerful four-cylinder engine that isn't turbocharged now the thing about that engine you probably have heard about it, it's one of these variable compression engines.

Have you seen that? Oh, is that when they, the one that changes the crankshaft angle of some sort to... Yeah, it's... It looks pretty complex to me, right? It's pretty complex. Now, you know, the upside is it doesn't have a turbo. The downside is that it's got this fairly complicated crank and rod relationship that I'm not sure that I'd potentially want to be

the one holding the bag for that. Well that might be the one you get the extended warranty for. Right. Hey, speaking of which, I wanted to ask you about the, now the merger, the merger talks for Nissan, that's gone, right? It's off. That's gone. Yeah, it looks like Nissan now is courting an electronics supplier That's in I think it's in Hong Kong and I can't remember the name of the company So that is done They're still on the bubble though, aren't they? Yeah, they're not a good you mean You mean, is Nissan in good shape? Yeah, that's what I'm getting at here.

Nissan is in terrible shape. They badly need to find somebody who's willing to bankroll things and provide them with the capital, the infusion of money, that they need to not go bankrupt. They're probably in the same basic position that Volkswagen is in right now, that if they don't turn things around this year, this might be their last year. Is it that dangerous for Volkswagen right now? Oh yeah, it's catastrophic.

Really? Absolutely catastrophic. Is it because of the EV push? Absolutely. You know, in general conditions in Germany as well. But yeah, the EV thing, utter disaster. You know, they're rolling out their latest device, which is this ID buzz that's designed to look like the old hippie wagon, you know, the old wagon yeah and the thing starts at $60,000

they're out of their minds you know I mean how many of these things do they think that they're gonna sell leaving aside you know all of the problems that electric vehicles have it's $60,000 well of course I can't you know you take that out in the middle of the National Forest and that'll be the the next massive forest fire when the battery pack guy gets gets a rock thrown at it I don't know these people it's like they don't even remember what the name of the National Forest and that'll be the next massive forest fire when the battery pack guy gets a rock thrown at it. I don't know. These people, it's like they don't even remember what the name of the company is. You know, Volkswagen, people's car. People's car.

You know, every man, normal people. Not people who can afford to spend $60,000 on a vehicle. Gee, what is elite in German, right? It should be elite people's car, right? Yeah. All right, Eric, well, keep us up on it. Great stories in journalism and comments and so much more over on epautos.com. We'll catch you next Wednesday. Be well. Thanks again.

Thanks, Bill. Couple minutes after 7, this is KMED and KMED HD1 Eagle Point Method KBXG Grants Pass.