Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 10-22-25_WEDNESDAY_8AM

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

Paul French from the Rogue Repretory Singers - really great concerts lined up for this weekend. Governor Cliff Bentz on the shutdown, obama subsidy expiry, oh, and how little energy the NW actually has.

The Bill Myers Show podcast is sponsored by Klausur drilling. They've been leading the way in southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at Klausurrilling.com. And we're about 50 right now, and we have David. Hello, David. What's going on in your world this morning? What's on your mind? Hello, David?

Oh, yeah, right here, Bill. Oh, hey, David. I'm glad you're here. What's on your mind here? You've been very patient, waiting online, blinking, hopefully not angrily. I know. There's, listening to your financial guide just before the top of the hour, have you ever read this book called Ecotopia? It's kind of a famous one from about 50 years ago. Yeah, yeah, just so you know, he was not a financial guy. He was a golden silver dealer in town,

Southman, in the South Side. That's just so you know, he wasn't a financial guy, but we were talking about that. But Ecosopia, though. No, I can't say I've read that one, but tell me about it, please. Well, it's sort of a science fiction story about how America, the falls to the corporations, it's, I think it breaks up into 11 different chunks. There's the mining empire and mineral, or excuse me, the agricultural empire, and there's industrial and there's, so there's these different categories in America has chopped up. That sounds like a really interesting book, though. Who wrote it, do you know?

I'll think of his name, Ernest Columbine. Oh, okay. Is it an old book or relatively recent vintage? It's like, might be before the 60s, but somewhere around the middle of the last century. Okay. And so the Pacific Northwest survives because we refused to fall for the games that those guys wanted us to use company script. And if you remember how bad it was living with company script, no matter what the value of an item was the boss man was the one that set the prices. And so the Pacific Northwest was able to survive because it didn't fall for it.

That's really interesting. That kind of reminds me of, well, the company script. My grandparents, of course, grew up in a company town in the coal mining time, you know, of the 1930s, 1940s. And so pretty familiar with how that ended up working out. But are you kind of alluding to the currency as, kind of company script right now? Is that kind of where you're going on this? Absolutely. If you just look at the end of July of this year, which is just what three months ago, gold was at 3,300. And I think I've told you this before. I'm a baby boomer.

When the baby boom was just hitting the job market, the minimum wage was $1.60, and the ounce of gold was 32. and so it took you exactly 20 hours at minimum wage to buy one ounce of gold, 20 hours. And so when I hear the price of gold has gone up to, what did he say? Or I looked at it up. Yeah, it was a little over $4,000 right now, but it was like $43.50 the other day. Right. So the minimum wage should be $202.17 right now. $202.17 is what the minimum wage should be.

be right now if we were to have the same ratio of 20 hours to one ounce of gold. Pretty funny how you bring this up because I have a person who has been pitching me for guest work, and they're claiming that we should be valuing our labor in gold. It's kind of going down your deal. I might invite this person on just to explore, just what you're talking about, David. I'll see if I get him on, okay? I think that's interesting. And so the end of July, it should have been $163.868. So it's gone up, you know, approximately $40 just since the end of July, the minimum wage. And when you start looking at how before the rise of Hitler, tied to it, there were people that were trying to bring down the German Republic and replace it again with the Kaiser. You know, the Kaiser had his saboteurs in the Weimar Republic, and they had the hyperinflation

where you needed a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread, and everybody was starving because they believed the fake numbers. That's the issue, is there's fake numbers, and they want us to believe them. All right, David, I appreciate the call. I'd like to explore that, and I'll see if I can look into that gold versus the cost of labor, too, okay? Appreciate your call. Thanks for bringing it up. Ecotopia. We're going to have to look that up. Egotopia.

11 minutes after 8. We're going to take a little detour here for a little bit. I want to talk with Paul French. A pallet cleanser. You know, we need pallet cleansers every now and then. We've been talking about gold serious rebuilding, you know, ballrooms and what's going to happen with 15-238. How about just going out and seeing an amazing concert?

We'll talk about that coming up. of each K-4-VIN 2029-A.S. Ashland. 14 after 8. Congress and Cliff Bens will be joining this program here in about 15, 20 minutes or so, and we'll be talking about some of the political. But right now, it is non-political. This is a non-political zone. We're talking about, we are talking about the arts. And that's, in fact, Paul insisted, do not talk about politics with me.

No, he didn't say that. But Paul French is joining me. He's the musical director, the music director of the Southern Oregon Repertory Singers. Isn't that right? That's right. How long have you been in existence? And I must say that I know practically nothing about you. And so I'm going to have to come and see a show and see what you're all about. Well, that would be terrific. We'll get you tickets of the group. We are in our 40th anniversary season. And I have been there for 35 of those years. So this is where you say, you can't have worked that long. You look too young. You can't have worked this long.

No, what I, see, when you're talking about 35 years of singing, though, I'm saying, okay, Paul has perfect pitch. Hey, give me, uh, my wife has perfect pitch. Oh, she does? I have pretty good pitch, but perfect pitch you're, you're born with, and I was not. Yeah, it's nothing, nothing you can learn then, right? You can't learn, you can't learn perfect pitch, no. You can learn to be actually very good, uh, and get pretty close. Yeah.

But it's not necessary. It's a help. Unless people sing out of tune, then it's painful. And then that's when you wish you could learn perfect pitch, where I'm sure they'll. But in all seriousness, you've been there a long time then and doing a lot of work here. And you have the 40th anniversary season concert, which is going on this weekend, right? We have concert Saturday and Sunday. Yes.

I came here in 1990 to teach at SOU, and that same fall took over with Southern Oregon Repertory Singers, and it's been a joy to watch the organization blossom. How many singers do you have in the group? There's a pool of singers, but for a given concert, we probably have around 70 singers here. We started a long time ago with 20 singers when I started and no budget. No one got paid. It was a left pocket, right pocket group. And it's been astonishing to see the support from the community this year. We have 70 singers. We give four concerts. We have a half million dollar budget. Cool. We pay 24 the singers to sing. It's, you know, the Rogue Valley is, as you know, is an exceptional place to live.

It's so beautiful. We have all these outdoor activities, small communities, great people. And yet, in this small area, such an abundance of support for the arts. For example, in choral music, there's three, actually four, big choirs that this region supports is just it's a tribute to the whole rogue valley so in essence we punch above our weight so to speak right way above uh i mean many mid-sized cities would not field four choirs uh as we have here all right so what's the secret sauce for this weekend then what are you hoping to put together or i guess you have a really great program plan and let's see

your wife Jody is, is it a companyist? Is that what this is? She plays piano for the group and she also composes for the group and has written a couple of pieces, one for this concert. One is a beautiful setting of an old Celtic prayer. My mother was Scottish and I lived in Glasgow as a boy and love Scotland, and my wife, Jody, also love Scotland. We've been many times and has been inspired by the beauty of Scotland. You know, that's kind of on my bucket list. Linda and I, my wife, Linda, and I have both dreamed of going to Scotland at one point. I don't know if I necessarily want to eat the haggis, but we'll see.

Yeah, it's better with a little drambouy. That's what I understand. But drambouy, hey, we'll take that to the bank. So, anyway, you got a great setup this weekend of, I guess, of classics, modern-day classics. Why did you give us a breakdown on what you're going to be singing? Yeah, so my philosophy of music, which will lead into why we're doing what we're doing, is very audience-friendly. I think about what do people like, which classical music got a bad reputation in the mid-20th centuries with atonal music and which people didn't like um what do you mean by atonal

for the non-music geek a atonal music is is music that that has no tonal center so you you can't hone in on on where you are would you say more of a more of a dissonant style it's so much dissonance that you lose track of where you are okay yeah Yeah, and there was a rift between the public and classical music, and I'm trying to heal that rift. Good. Yeah, we, on the classical side, you look at popular music, and I don't like these words, right, because popular music, what's the opposite of popular music? Unpopular. Unpopular music, and then, but what do we do about Handel Messiah or classical pieces that people really like?

So we don't have the right words, but there is a form of classical music that can speak to people and, in fact, inspire them and give them an oasis of beauty. Well, as an example, you know, handles Messiah, you know, no matter your religious orientation, one of the most beautiful pieces of music, just music, in my opinion, ever composed and performed. If you were dropped in the middle of the Amazon and went, hallelujah, someone will go, hallelujah, and everybody knows it. Yes, exactly. So that's what I'm, so the program this weekend is full of what I like to call big heart music, music that really touches you. I like that music. I also like a huge variety, so we're doing Bach, you know, a contemporary of handle. And that's what, Gloria.

The Gloria from the B minor mass, which personally, that's my desert island piece. It is, not? It's so exciting. And people that don't like Bach think of him as this gloomy Lutheran, you know, writing organ music in minor keys that nobody likes. Never has any fun. Never has any fun, exactly. And this is not that. This is like a dance.

and it inspired the title of the concert. This guy sing, because it's the song of the angels, you know. And so several pieces in the program talk about angels. So some music by Old Masters, Bach, Rheinberger, lots of music by contemporary people writing incredible music. For example, Morton Lortzen were doing one of his most famous pieces. He's probably the most important composer of the last 50 years, though in the last 25 years, Eric Whitaker is now probably the most performed choral musician.

We're doing a piece of his called San Chappelle about the King's Chapel in Paris, where a young girl walks in and looks at the incredible stained glass windows, and as she looks at them, they come to life and they sing to her. So that's another thing about singing. And it's incredible, I can't tell you how beautiful this piece is, and many of the pieces we're doing. They will go directly to the heart and make people feel so glad that they came. You know, Paul, what I really enjoy about talking with you, Paul French is with me, and we're talking about, well, Paul French is the music director of the Southern Oregon Repertory Singers. They are performing Saturday at 7.30 in the evening, Sunday at 2 o'clock, this.

concerts this weekend. What I really find infectious with you is that you are, a lot of times when you're an interviewer and you talk with someone, somebody comes in and I swear they're not as interested in this as you are, but this passion that you have for singing just comes through and it's infectious. And I just wanted to say bully for you, so to speak.

You know, singing is so basic and primary. And we have these beautiful texts to work with some musical mediums don't have. So you take a thought like, she is so beautiful. Okay, there's sort of a nice thought. But in poetry, you get Lord Byron saying, she walks in beauty as the night. So it elevates that thought. then if I sing that, it can be elevated again because music is so powerful.

Or then now think 70 wonderful singers singing that in harmony, it's like that thought is elevated several times. And that's why I think choral music, when it's done well, is incredibly powerful. What kind of challenges do the arts have these days? I'm just kind of curious if it's a struggle to get people into music education these days. I know that even K through 12 is not doing nearly as much of this as even when I was a child back in the day. How do you see the health of it? It's sad to watch what's happening.

You know, the world is constantly changing. Sadly, a lot of the directions that things are going are, I think, based on show. short-term solutions when it's the long-term we need to be thinking about. It's sort of like the difference between treating a symptom and treating the problem. Our souls need beauty and the arts we do. It's part of what we are. And to ignore that, and the teaching of that is to our peril. All right. I just wanted to mention that with the electronification, I don't know if it's a term or not, of a lot of music. Yeah.

I think that people have gotten, young people especially, and maybe they were getting away from that at this point, thinking, well, I don't really have to learn how to sing because I can fix it with auto tune, or I can do something like this. And that's why I really enjoy you waving the flag for a live musical performance. There is no auto tune.

There's no artificial intelligence involved. This is physical, biological intelligence, and skill on the stage. And live music making also, the audience plays a huge part in it. You know, when you do a program several times for different groups of people, those performances are radically different because of the energy of the audience. Symbiotic relationship. It really is.

You know, you feel when people are with you and it helps you. Well, let's make sure people are with you this weekend. How do people end up getting tickets for this? do they cost and you know all that kind of good stuff you know i i am no longer in charge of the price of tickets i know there are are cheap tickets available uh in certain categories uh i would go to repsingers dot org is our is our website and all the information is posted there and one of the ways that the organization has grown is we now have a full-time executive director, which she's able to take care of other things.

You can't do everything. And so... Anyway, I'll just put this up then. Repsingers.org. I'll also put up the ticket office, 541-552-0-900. But it is an affordable concert to see, is what you're telling me, right? Well, you know, affordable, people pay 150 bucks to hear Billy Joel, so I get a little weary of people saying, oh, classical music's for the elite. Well, our tickets are a lot cheaper

than that. Well, what you also have to remember, though, is that classical music, you know, we talked about classical music for the elite. Classical music was the pop music of its day. Exactly. That's all it was. Yeah. You know, it was just this happened to be the, you know, some of the best of the pop music of its era. So I'd like to just to get in. So we do a lot of sort of art music, but we're also doing an arrangement of I Love Paris in the Springtime. We're doing Great song, Cole Porter, yeah. Wonderful. We're doing Haitian folk songs sung in Haitian.

We're doing a blistering gospel blues number. We do, I like variety and programming. People are going to walk away satisfied, is what you're telling me, right? What I hear is they say we go away floating on a cloud. Well, we could use more of that here in Southern Oregon, all right? Paul French, the music director of the Southern Oregon Repertory Singers performing this weekend. I'll get all the information, all your information up on kmED.com and i thank you for coming in getting a chance to meet you thanks for having me

we we are especially hoping to develop more of a relationship with with medford okay we appreciate that greatly thanks for coming in okay it is 828 kmED kbxg and grants pass this is the bill meyer show hi this is bill mire and i'm with churice from no wires now your dish premier local retailer it's time to switch to dish if you have direct tv or cable tv you're one stuff accessory and protection shop welcome to the bill mire show on one oh six three km ed great to have you here it is 834 congressman cliff bence in studio and uh even though the government is uh partially shut down uh congressman benz is here hello congressman welcome back good morning bill yes to what do we owe the pleasure you being down in the district here in southern oregon well with with the

uh as we wait for five democrats on the senate side to step up and reopen government uh there's no real reason to be uh in dc pending pending five democrats in the senate stepping up there there's the way to put it so it's really just uh all in the senate that's all the matters right now five democrats in the senate including what senator murkley well i'm sure senator murkley senator widen and that would make two of the five right there if they would choose to reopen the government that would be great yeah he's been on a filibuster i don't know if he's still in the filibuster at last uh at last check he was uh was still talking senator murkley and uh and essentially uh decrying uh don't trump's authoritarianism et cetera et cetera

and uh i i don't exactly know what this has to do with uh reopening the government at this point or getting things back to order i know that the uh that the democratic the democrats have been really big on the medicare supplemental not medicare uh it's actually obamac supplemental programs going into Medicaid, which is the Oregon Health Plan here in the state of Oregon. Is there any wiggle room in this whatsoever, in your opinion? Because these tax credits were supposed to expire this year, always were supposed to expire. And the way it was explained to me, and I think you've mentioned this too, is that this was

also backfilling a lot of non-citizen health care, at least in the state of Oregon it is. and this is why Republicans are not in favor of renewing this. Is it still pretty much your solid wall of opposition on this? What's the take on it so far? Well, this area is pretty complicated. It's the nicest way to put it. Yeah, it is. And I understand that.

Right. So Medicaid was expanded during the Obamacare enactment to add folks that were eligible because they didn't make enough money. There was no issue as to condition or anything else. It was simply a matter of how much you didn't make. So that was what we call the expansion population. It's about 40% of the total Medicaid population. About 60% are people who were covered originally,

which was, you were disabled or you're pregnant or you're a child. These groups are not affected in the big bill. Yeah, Oregon ended up expanding, though, the amount of Oregon Health Plan recipients. It took every opportunity to expand it. And I guess now, unfortunately, the Piper has to be paid. Well, in a way, the Medicaid program itself, you qualify because of either the original population, which, as I said, was the disabled, the elderly folks that fall into those categories.

And then the expansion of the population, which was or is the Obamacare group that was added into the Medicaid program. The other group, to make it clear, is that you could buy insurance through the marketplace, and that is not Medicaid. That's Obamacare on the insurance side of things. And that's what people are talking about. It's very expensive for what I understand. Without this subsidy. Why they call the Affordable Care Act is beyond me, because it should be called the,

boy, this sure is an affordable care act. It should be called many things, all of which reflect the failure. of Obamacare at that level. But you also know that as a matter of politics and the Democrats are playing that card, that once a benefit is given, it is very difficult to see a benefit go away, even though the deal to bring the benefit in was always that it would go away the end of this year. So those are, now, the it that's going away is the subsidy. There are two subsidies.

One doesn't go away. The other one does go away for the insurance part of, we'll call it, Obamacare, but it's the ACA, the Affordable Care Act. The challenge is how in the world did the cost of this program get so high? And the short answer is it was poorly designed, and the insurance companies in that space are making a lot of money. But I will also say that there was no control features put in place to try to keep them from doing so. And what's happened is premiums have skyrocketed for the type of insurance that is reduced in cost, with these subsidies.

So the Democrats extended the subsidies after COVID, because the subsidy we're talking about, was created just because of the lower employment during COVID, and it was supposed to expire. They extended it to this December, they being the Democrats. And now they're running around saying it has to be extended. Well, why didn't they extend it when they were in charge? Whatever the case may be, in the meantime, the cost of this has gone through the roof. The question is, and it needs to be carefully discussed, than just throwing more money at this or rather just extending it and saying, well,

somebody will get to it. We've got to figure out how in the world to do the job better. People have to have this kind of, a kind of coverage. But the question is, how do we do it better? Now what's happened is the Democrats have said, unless you, if you look at what they've asked for, spend $1.5 trillion, we're not going to agree to anything. That's what they're saying. That's what the government is shut down. They are asking for $1.5 trillion. trillion if you look at the bill that they've created that says what they want. Now, not just the expansion of these tax credits. So is the House willing, now the deal here that is being talked about right now is that

President Trump and Republicans are saying, okay, hey, listen, we reopen it and then we start negotiating on this. Would this be in good faith a discussion with the Democrats to maybe do something to try to fix? You can't fix it all. You certainly can't come up with $1.7. trillion. That's for sure. But is there political will to do good faith negotiation after the government gets reopened? Oh, absolutely. And I think that's a charade, if you will, or an excuse

or whatever you want to call it, that the Democrats are using and saying they can't get along with us because they don't trust us. You can write the law so that it is binding on the president. that's who they're busy pointing at. Really, much of what you see going on here, if not all of it, is being driven by the success that the president has had in getting all kinds of things done, and whether that's settling wars or whether that's stepping up

and getting the big bill passed or whether it's any number of other things. In speaking of which, I wanted to talk about, you know, the court changeover the other day with Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, three-judge panel, been saying that President Trump does have authority to put National Guard troops in the city of Portland.

I imagine you're relatively supportive of that. What's your alert to take? Well, what I've told the mayor of Portland when he called me and what I've told the governor, when I spoke with her about these issues, I said, you know, if Portland City Police would do their job, we wouldn't need to have troops in Portland. What was the Portland City Police would do their job? What was the Portland mayor's reaction when you said,

hey, troops wouldn't be coming if things were okay? What did they say? said, well, Congressman, he said, you have to look at my city council, 12 members, four of whom are members of the Democrat Socialist Party of America. And that city council leans far left, and they don't want the city police helping. And by the way, Bill, as you probably know, the city police and the Portland Police Bureau, PPP, it has been dramatically underfunded and is being the number of people who are in that, in that police bureau are less than one half of what would be normal for a city Portland size.

So for them to say that they're capable of defending the folks trying to do their jobs at ICE would probably be a huge question. But the real issue is the city council doesn't want to help ICE in any way. Even they don't even want to help keep them safe. But you see, that's not the Portland City Council's call. And I think that's what they're going to find out here because it's one of these things to say, all right, we're not going to have Portland police defend ICE. That's fine.

That doesn't mean that ICE or the president or the administration can't defend for them if they're not going to do it. Well, that's exactly what the panel said at the Ninth Circuit. They said they list pages of the types of violence that was conducted against the ICE headquarters in Portland, pages. You can go through and read the opinion and you'll see incident after incident after incident listed by the three-judge panel. I know that Governor Kotech, of course, not a real fan of this. too and it said that this will end up inciting violence and if the presence of National Guard in my opinion at you know just around the ice facility if that causes uh violence to break out that's not from the National Guard that's because you have a you know you have a bunch of

I guess misbehaving children that have yet to be spanked and weren't disciplined or have daddy and mommy issues I don't know what's going on if there's that kind of logic as my brother who was the county sheriff one of my younger brothers said Without order, you can't have law. And Portland has become accustomed to being a disorderly chaotic place. But you can be as disorderly in protest as much as you like as long as you're not hurting other people or putting them in danger. And people simply need to look at the Ninth Circuit,

three-judge panel's opinion. It's a two-to-one opinion. And look at the list of things that were done to put the ICE folks in jeopardy. the federal employees, many from Portland, in danger. So why would they say, well, we have a perfectly great town. It's just in one city block that we have these problems, so we're going to ignore them. What? So I guess we can, you know, justice is an all-a-cart thing, Bill.

You can pick out where you want justice, and you can leave other places without it. And that's what Portland apparently wants to do. I want to shift gears to something to just a little bit of a kerfuffle we were talking about this morning. that had to do with the remodeling or the updating of what's going on at the White House. Did anybody know about that before the construction crew showed up? And it's kind of curious, you know, that putting in the ballroom. Oh, yes. Well, we knew it was happening.

The details weren't clear. But I would just say I've been in the White House many times now, and I was just invited by the president along with 60 or 70 other Republican Congress men and women. to have dinner in the rose garden three weeks ago. And the rose garden has now been, the lawn has been removed. Not a rose was harmed. Not a rose was harmed.

Okay, good. The roses have not been harmed. The roses are fine. The grass that used to be there, and then when people would walk out of particularly ladies in high-hilled shoes, they'd sink into the, you know, sod. Yeah. So that wasn't working for purposes of having gatherings.

So they puts a marble patio in. That's just off, by the way, because what happened is we got there. We were taking 20 a time into the Roosevelt room, and then we walked into the Oval Office, shook hands to the president. He gave each of us a challenge coin, although I would call it a challenge coaster.

It's pretty big. I actually showed it to some of the folks guarding the door at Longworth as I went in Saturday morning to go to work, and I said, hey, boys, girls, come over and take a look at this presidential challenge coin. And one of them, they were all handing it around, and one of them said, well, you wouldn't want to drop this on your foot. Well, you know, everything's bigger and better with the president. You know how that goes?

It is the Trump world. We get to your point about the remodel. The building has been remodeled many times over the years, many times. Now, to my knowledge, though, they usually went to Congress and had some conversation about that. Wasn't that the case, or am I wrong about that? Yeah, it depends. I don't think you're wrong. There's a commission that's supposed to be involved, and I don't know exactly how involved they were in making the decisions.

I will say the East Room is where they usually gathered everybody up to have dinners. And it will hold at the most. And I've been in, again, many times, not for any of the dinners, but it holds about 200 people. So there's no doubt they needed a bigger space. And so that's what's being added. Okay. So no problem with that. I'm just kind of curious because it seems like kind of pop out of nowhere, you know, that sort of deal in the news cycle.

It's like, really? It's the first time I've heard about this, but neither here nor there. What about the energy world here? Energy very expensive and getting more expensive all the time here in southern Oregon. And this is the same time that we're going to be bringing in lots and lots of data centers here. And what is your overall impression of how Northwest and Southern Oregon and Oregon in general are looking as far as energy supply and growth for the future? So Oregon's on the precipice of having rolling blackouts for real. And if we have a drought on a Columbia River system, we will have rolling blackouts because we do not have enough electricity right now.

We don't. And so we could go through the technical details, which are many. For years, I have worked inside this space, both in the Oregon legislature, and now I'm on the Energy Subcommittee of Energy and Commerce in D.C. And so I've made one of my goals to try to figure out what to do about this. this really bad situation. It's bad for many reasons. We can go back and say, well, if the Democrats in the Oregon legislature had not banned all use of electricity generated by coal or which they did and ban the use of natural gas to generate electricity in Oregon or ban the use of nuclear to generate electricity in Oregon, we wouldn't be facing this difficult situation. And that

would be substantially true. But let me go on and say that there's a huge amount of solar that's available, but there's a big huge problem, Bill, and that is that we don't have transmission. We don't have the wire to carry the electricity generated out in our district up north of here to places that needed, including us, by the way. And so that transmission is held for the most part in the northwest by Bonneville Power Administration, BPA, and BPA has become extraordinarily slow in allowing or helping construct transmission. And this is an absolute barn burning down emergency as far as I am concerned. And to that end, I've been meeting with the director of BPA, John Hirston, and others, saying you have to allow self-build so that groups can build their

own transmission and then have BPA take ownership of it. Oh, are you telling me that the system is designed that you can't build your own power lines? Well, you can't if you're trying to tie into the BPA system, and it's going to be part of the BPA system. So the BPA won't build it or doesn't have the resources to build it, but then they would say that. I, Bill, I think it's more of a situation where BPA has not had the experience to build, and it can plan until the cows come home, plan and plan and plan and plan and plan some more. I wrote a letter to John Harriston, the director, BPA, three months ago. And I said, hey, director, you need to say that you will allow self-build. So these solar farms and other places can build the substations and then

the lines, according to your requirements, and then they'll turn over ownership gradually over time to you. You've got to allow this to happen because you're not building the transmission we absolutely need. Yeah. Is this a bit of a turf war in the agency world? You know, I don't know because you have to go down

into the interior of BPA to sort that out. But I will tell you that I got a letter back two months after I asked from Mr. Harrison saying, you know what? We kind of agree with self-filled.

We just have to study it some more. For real. I have the letter. I don't have it with me. But the truth is they're busy saying we have to study. No, study in time is over.

We're to the point where we have to have this transmission. Yeah, how key is this? What kind of, I know that the Northwest Power Generators have been saying in their reports for a while that our odds of rolling blackouts just exploded over the last few years. Are you seeing anything which is even worse than what the Northwest Power Commission was reporting? Well, I think it's absolutely worse. I don't think people understand as they watch their power bills go up literally every six months, how short of power we are. They just don't, people don't understand that.

Okay. And there's other things going on. I think a lot of what Oregon's power policy, if you want to call it that, and this is from the state level, was that there is always going to be someone available to purchase power from. Would that be a fair assessment that, you know, we don't have to worry about generating it? Is that the way that the state ran it and now we're kind of stepping on our feet over this? Okay. There isn't always going to be a place to purchase it because even if you could, how would you get it here? We don't have the transmission.

That's what I was getting at here. This is back to that. Yes, but it's not just that. Right now, Bill, if you want to put in a gas-fired plant, you can't do it in Oregon, illegal, but you could do it maybe somewhere else. Oh, I know, a northern Idaho, because they're trying to put one there. Guess what you can't find right now. You have to wait seven years to get one.

Transformer? A turbine. Oh, a turbine. And so turbines, there's a huge shortage of turbines. And so you have to get in line to get a big turbine or go find one that someone's quit using someplace, somewhere around the United States, but the demand for turbines right now is through the roof. The reason, of course, the future of the world in many ways is going to be driven by artificial intelligence that takes huge amounts of power. But you know what takes a huge amount

of power also? Processing rare earth minerals. It's huge amounts of power bill. And guess what? Who doesn't have the power? I'll just tell you right now, if you, Elon Musk came in and talked to us about two months ago to the Energy Committee. And he showed a graph, a chart, and that showed China's energy generation going straight up, straight up. And you know what ours is doing in the United States? It is flat as a flounder. Yeah. Because we keep decommissioning all kinds of firm generation, whether it's natural gas or coal,

and what are we trying to replace it with, intermittent? Yeah. Temporarily, could the administration, could there be encouragement to the administration to put a moratorium on the decommissioning of power plants? Well, actually, I think California has done that. they were going to decommission the Diablo Canyon nuclear, and they stopped that quickly because they're in big trouble, too. Everybody's in big trouble. But this is truly a situation that requires immediate attention, and that's why I've been focusing much of my time, even

during these last three weeks out of my home office as I try to figure out how in the world to address these really super important issues. I'll tell you what, keep us in the room on this one, because that is the big one, because electrical power, that is civilization. There's no way of getting past that. And how about economic expansion? Yeah. Because Intel needs huge amounts of power up in Portland. Oh, and we're supposed to put all of our vehicles on the grid, too.

That would be, other than that. What could go wrong? Congressman Cliffbats, we appreciate you coming in. You were welcome anytime. Thanks for the update. And, well, onward and upward. and how long do you think the shutdown lasts, huh, if you were a betting man on this? Well, there's an election coming up on November 5th, I think.

I forgot the exact date. I don't think we're going to see anything happened before that. You don't? No. And the best guesses that I have heard sometimes after, sometime after Thanksgiving. This is really bad bill. This is bad, bad, bad, because people on SNAP will not be getting SNAP, the food stamps during the month of November. Okay.

And that is, and I just want to say again, five Democrat Senate. could vote for the bill that I voted for four weeks ago, and this would be over, and those people would be getting their benefits. So the Democrats are holding America hostage. It's not good. Congressman Cliffbentz, appreciate the take. Thanks for coming in. We'll have you back. 856. Let's say that again. Need a little more coffee. This is the Bill Meyer show. Need a roof that performs to get there early. Learn more at markpatrickseminars.com. Hi, I'm Steve Potter, Body Shop Manager of Looky of Body and Paint, and I'm on 106.7, KMED.

Delighted to have had you here. Tomorrow, of course, conspiracy theory Thursday. Always a lot of fun. I'll give an email of the day. Sponsored by Dr. Steve Central Point Family Dentistry. Hans Albuquerque says, Bill, you were asking earlier, what if Kamala did it?

If Kamala built the ballroom and, you know, didn't ask anybody about this like President Trump is. I asked a very conservative friend, what if Kamala did that? They said, that's great. No one wants to sit in the overflow at a presidential event, regardless of affiliation. Point well taken. My point, though, had to do with corporate America that also is involved with government,

I mean billions, if not trillions of dollars in government contracts, with them helping foot the bill too. To me, I'm concerned about the appearance of undue influence. But we can talk more about that tomorrow. Email Bill at Billmyershow.com. See you then.