Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/8/23: Seymour Hersh EXCLUSIVE: SHREDS NYT Nord Stream Report, Warren Slams Fed Rate Hikes, Biden Defends Medicare Future, China Accuses US Of Containment, DC Crime Bill, Ryan Vs KJP Spying Question, German Chancellor on Nordstream

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

Ryan and Emily are joined by legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh to discuss his belief that the New York Times Nordstream report is fake, Elizabeth Warren slams Jerome Powell for considering future interest rate hikes that may cause a recession, Biden says he has a plan to extend the future of Medicare, Biden administration considering reviving detention of migrant families, China accuses US of containment leading other Western countries to encircle and suppress China, a DC crime reform bill thats puts the spotlight on DC statehood, Ryan asks Karine Jean Pierre a question on the FBI spying on Americans, Ryan looks into Matt Gaetz calling for all American troops to leave Syria, and Emily looks into the January 6th Tapes and how Media is ignoring the real scandal.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Welcome back to CounterPoints. I'm Ryan Grim here with Emily Jashinsky. Emily, how you doing? Great. Happy Wednesday, everyone. CounterPoints Wednesday.

Let's make that a thing. All right. So we got a lot to talk about today. We've got the Fed is going to continue to jack up interest rates, continue to drive up unemployment. According to Elizabeth Warren, we're going to talk about the confrontation between her and Chairman Jay Powell. We're going to talk about the battle between the Biden administration and House Republicans over the future of Medicare and tax policy. We're going to talk about the new Dominion documents that are

out. Also, the latest on the Tucker Carlson controversy, I guess we could just call it that. And your showdown with Karine Jean-Pierre and the White House. Karine Jean-Pierre. And also, later today, there will be a vote on the House floor on a war powers resolution sponsored by Representative Matt Gaetz and also backed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus to force Biden to end the occupation of Syria. The roughly 1,000 troops that are still there, we'll talk about that as well. But we wanted to start the show because we were lucky enough to get Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh in for an interview.

We talked to him about both his reporting on the Nord Stream Pipeline and also his latest piece out today on his 50-year relationship with Dan Ellsberg, who recently announced that he has a terrible form of pancreatic cancer and has very little time left to live. So we're going to start with this interview. We're joined now by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, who is out with a new piece on his substack called My 50 Years with Dan Ellsberg, also joining us to talk about his reporting on the Nord Stream Pipeline. Seymour Hersh, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, glad to be there, you guys. Right. And so I wanted to start by asking you what you thought of this new reporting from The New York Times and then also from the German press, which in some ways supports what you had reported about the Nord Stream pipeline and in other ways contradicts it. But first off, let's start with the sourcing. As a journalist, when you looked at The New York Times report, what jumped out to you about it?

Well, first of all, my secret thought always has been it was Somalia. I think Somalia. And then I learned it was on the Indian Ocean. So I now make it Nepal. What am I supposed to think about it? It doesn't, you know, Ryan and Emily, it doesn't matter what I think. I mean, it's either a story or it's not a story. And in the first place, the thing I'm accused of is not naming sources. And of course, I noticed both the story in the New York Times and the Washington Post this morning. I still get the

papers in print. I like to see a paper. Both had no sources in it either. And when I worked for the New York Times for, what, seven years during Watergate in Vietnam, I was hired to do Vietnam. I was actually working at the New Yorker and left the New Yorker to go work at the New York Times because at that point in 72, it was a straight newspaper. In other words, there were guys in Saigon, Homer Biggert and Dave Halbersam and Neil Sheehan, who were doing great reporting.

And the Washington Bureau was, as it always was in those days, very pro-president and, you know, and the government. And I was hired to go make whoopee there by Abe Rosenthal. And at that time, it was a different newspaper. I just, you know, I wrote maybe a thousand stories in seven years, including stuff, really important stories about Chile and the CIA and NSA. And 99% of them had no sources, but they all, you know, they trusted me. Even when I wrote a story about domestic spying

that I didn't tell the editors about on Friday, and I wrote 7,000 words that day and was on the paper Sunday with banner headlines and seven unnamed sources. And one editor asked me a question. So it's just a silly thing to decide that because I don't name sources or I don't put anybody in a meeting, which is a critical thing not to do, that it doesn't exist. That's just an excuse. And so just in, you know, the New York Times has a lot of very good reporters on it.

And I've, you know, and ditto for the Washington Post. My argument has always been since I left the newspaper business and I saw who got promoted and who did not, I'm convinced that if we got rid of 90% of the editors, we'd be much better off. Do you get the sense that your reporting shook the tree loose, to borrow a phrase that Ryan used earlier, on the rest of these stories that are now coming out where it seems that people in the intelligence community are either putting forward information that in some sense could fit into your reporting or in other sense could not.

But do you get the sense, though, that some of these people are coming forward because your report really did shake the tree loose? Well, not here. Not here in terms of the major media or even CNN. I think we're talking about post-Trump, And post-Trump really changed the media landscape. You were Fox, you were either Fox or CNN and MSBC, and you were either the New York Post and other papers like that, that conservative, or you were with the New York Times and Washington Post.

And so the papers just fell that way. And so when I come up with a story that's very anti-Biden, look, what's going on now in this White House is terrifying to me. I don't know if anybody's paid attention to what the, I think the prime minister of China, the number two guy in China has been saying. they're writing us off. They've had it with our snotty comments and canceling meetings because of a balloon. You know, a secretary of state canceling a meeting with his counterpart because of a balloon and publicly doing it and pointing his finger at a public meeting at a senior Chinese official. I can tell you, I know Americans who have Chinese descent in the government, who have taken diplomats abroad, serious guys. And one thing you do is you never do what Tony Blinken did

when he was in China, pointing a finger in public to his counterpart. You just don't do that. And so these guys, I don't know what, Blinken and Sullivan and Nuland, I call them Wink and Blinken and Nod. If you've ever had kids, you know what I'm talking about. The children's story. They're just out of their league here. They may have wonderful degrees and diplomas and experience. They're just out of their league.

Do they really want to get into a NATO war? And there's no question, we've been increasing the amount of American troops in Poland secretly and deploying much more force, many more arms up in that area. Obviously, with the idea, I would guess, that the president may authorize or they may push for NATO actually to make a physical presence. It's going to be over in Ukraine.

It's just a question of when Putin pulls it, whether you like Putin or don't like Putin. How can you like a guy that started the bloodiest war in Western Europe since World War II? We had the Balkans and Czesna, but this is something else. So you have to fault him for that. But it isn't without some reason or at least some provocation. We expanded NATO to the east. Everybody who's watching our show knows what I'm talking about. We also put what we call defensive missiles that can be turned overnight in the missiles that can throw

nuclear bombs into Moscow, 800 miles away, with seven minutes. How far would it take? We've also escalated that, escalated the rhetoric. And I don't know what the goal is. I don't know if they know what the goal is. You know, I guess historically presidents who have wars do better in elections.

I mean, that's just a fact that the public rallies around a president. I don't know what's going on in that White House, but it's very scary and very dumb. And the story they put out yesterday is just another example of idiocy. It's not working. What happened here? Well, let me just say this. What happened here with the press blackout did happen in the rest of the world. It's all over the world. Joe Biden made a decision to blow up the pipelines because he was afraid that, he learned then that there was a stalemate coming at best in war in Ukraine. He wanted more support from Europe,

Western Europe and Germany. And historically, since the Kennedy years, American presidents, this was all part of the containment business, the post-World War II Russia containing communism business. Historically, presidents have been frightened and worried about the Russian influence because of its huge amounts of natural gas and oil that they were selling in Europe. They always try to stop it. It's nothing new.

So there you are. We're in a terrible place right now. The crap they put out yesterday isn't going to work. Nobody's going to believe. Nobody's going to believe that. What Der Zayt said, some guys in a yacht dropped it. We're talking about C4 with enough C4 to blow up a major building in Washington or New York even for each of the pipelines.

Just go ahead. I'm sorry. Yeah, you alluded earlier to some of the criticism that was coming at your story around, you know, not naming the key source that it was based on. Are you working on any follow-ups along this? And are you picking up dissent within the administration? Should we look for any additional reporting or are you hoping that the press more generally picks this up and follows it? I'm hoping that the major press is going to pick this up and follow it. I've had, from the day I wrote Me Lie, I've had people for months say it can't be true.

When I wrote the story, what was the story, I mentioned the one about domestic spying, and I said the CIA had been spying on literally hundreds of thousands of American anti-war citizens and reporters and congresspeople. And the Washington Post, for three months, every other week, by a good friend, Larry Stern, I adored him, who was one of their senior editors and reporters, was writing the stories. I mean, a buddy of mine saying, Hersh is dead wrong. It was the FBI.

And then, of course, to his credit, Bill Colby, the head of the CIA at a hearing, told the truth. He said, yeah, there's something to it. But anyway, the bottom line is, no, I'm not hoping for the American press to do anything. The only thing that's going to happen is in Europe, you know, here's what the president did, as far as I can tell. And by the way, I've been writing every Wednesday on my sub stack. And I wrote one of the pieces I wrote was all about Norway. If you remember, I said that Norway was involved. I wrote a piece about how Norway worked with us early in the Vietnam War.

We were going and provoking stuff in 1964, before North Vietnam even got into the war. Seals were working on Norwegian boats, advanced PT boats, larger PT boats than the one that Kennedy was in in World War II. They were going deep, and they were driving up on the coast of North Vietnam, dropping seals off, going in, gutsy guys, trying to blow up radar sites and military sites. And two of the guys even got wounded badly and crawled back and made it back and got medals of honors in secrecy.

I wrote a piece about that a couple weeks later, making the point that it's not unusual. We have a history of working with Norway. I actually have a photograph of Bill Cosby, who was one of these guys in the CIA. He was in the Office of Special Services, OSS, and he was behind enemy lines in Norway, working with special forces in Norway.

I have photographs of him in 45 and 44, in the middle of winter, doing all kinds of crap against the Nazis. I mean, these guys, Helms and Colby, I wrote a lot of bad stories about them. And to their credit, I mean, Helms before he died, he was the head of the CIA for many years and was involved in the Castro stuff

and a lot of stuff for the president that he couldn't tell the Congress about. He called me in and we had a long talk before he died about what really was going on that I couldn't use. But, you know, the CIA doesn't work for the Congress or for the Constitution, it works for the Crown. It works for the President. Why does the President keep a CIA around?

You got a guy, you know, Obama, particularly this guy now, Biden, he's not gonna get his way in Congress, but he can take a walk in the Rose Garden with the head of the CIA and somebody can be hurt 8,000 miles away. That makes you feel pretty good. And so it's all just, we're in a mess. That's all there is to it. And we need a president that has more integrity than this guy does. And not that I'm all for his domestic program, but not to go

piss on the head of the Chinese and quite as much as he did on Putin. Speaking of that, go ahead. Go ahead. I was just going to say, Putin couldn't have started that war three years ago. I was in Moscow four or five years ago. Nobody liked him. You had drinks with some businessmen, which I did. I did a lot of, I was doing something interesting there. And you see somebody in a power program. They all, nobody liked the guy.

We often don't like our presidents. But Moscow was doing trade with America. Americans on the street, if they knew you were American, they said, hello, thank you for being our friend. And so by being there, and I don't think he could have sold a war against Ukraine. Ukraine was always seen as a subculture by Russia. In 1932, there was a famine and Stalin took all of the wheat from Ukraine and 20 or 22 million Ukrainians starved in 1932. It was a great moment of history, what brutes they were. And always they viewed the Ukrainians, but they were also a buffer between them and the rest of Europe.

Anyway, what can I tell you? It's just, we're in a real crisis. And I don't know why the Post and the Times want to keep on playing the game that everything's going to be okay, maybe in Ukraine, and that whatever the White House tells them in briefings is true. And to that point. Well, excuse me, go ahead. No, I was going to say to that point about us just being in a mess and a crisis, and maybe to borrow a phrase, a quagmire, I wanted to ask about this wonderful piece you have reflecting on your relationship with

Daniel Ellsberg. It's up on your sub stack right now. You talk about how some reporting that you did in The New York Times led to the establishment of the Senate's Church Committee back in 1975. And one of the interesting things about that is Republicans, for obviously partisan reasons that stem from what I would argue were partisan FISA abuses in the last 10 years, have sought to recreate, let's say, the magic, to recapture the magic of the original church committee. And it looks like that's just not going to work. It looks like the country is not capable of hosting another church committee because the divisions are so strong in Congress right now. And I wanted to get your thoughts on that as you've been reflecting,

not only on your relationship with Ellsberg, but on some of the reporting you were doing at the time. Do you think we're capable of recapturing the magic of the church committee or of hosting anything like the church committee right now in 2023? You know, that's such a good question because that's exactly what I've been thinking

about a lot because the church committee has popped up quite a bit recently as sort of a model. It was the first time the CIA was ever investigated. And in the piece I wrote about Ellsberg, it plays a big role with my relationship with him in a way too. One thing that came out of the church committee, Frank Church was a liberal. He wasn't very popular. Guess what? Like a lot of the guys in the Senate, he got up every morning, looked in the mirror and said, why not me? His ambition was pretty much overbearing. But he was very bright.

And I actually got to know him obviously very well and his staff. And the investigation was amazing because one of the recommendations was for the House and Senate to have intelligence committees. And they were taken very seriously. They set up staffs. And in the particularly in the 70s and 80s, we had people like Ben Bradley, the basketball player. He lived down the street around the corner of Ben Bradley for years when he was in the Senate. The kids used to play basketball outside. He'd walk by in the morning, on summer mornings, and they would beg him, shoot, take one, take one, you know, take a shot. And he would walk, and finally he'd turn around and maybe from 30 feet just jump up and flip it right through the middle. Never missed.

Unbelievable. What a neighbor. And Gary Hart, when they ran those committees, madmen like me running around chasing stories, they would only talk to me on the record, which I thought was admirable. They really respected the boundaries. And they had meetings and they had intelligence and they had, between the Democrats and Republicans, there was a sense of unity. And just think of that now.

Think how it's been destroyed. We've seen the last years, particularly in the House Committee, with Adam Schiff on one side and the Republicans on the other side screaming and yelling about everything. There's no comedy anymore. There's no need, the committees are useless. Under the rules that were set up, anytime the special operations are put into effect,

there has to be a finding, has to go to the Congress. There's a secret committee I know about in the House. I don't know how it works in the Senate. There's a secret four-man group in the House Appropriations Subcommittee, one of them, that meets with the clerk, and they monitor and they take records. Can you believe that this White House had something they wanted to do, like blowing up a pipeline? Would they brief it to Speaker McCarthy?

Are you kidding? And by the way, when I was dealing with Vietnam in the 70s at the New York Times and writing a lot then, the Democrats were supporting getting out of the war, along with many Republicans. There were a dozen moderate centrist Republicans. The War Powers Act of 1973 that forbid any more troops to be on the ground or air, even air in the war was written by a moderate Republican and his staff. And now it's such a,

can you imagine Chuck Sumner now, speaking of runs the Senate, calling for an investigation of this, of a Democratic president? Not a chance. And in the Senate, calling for an investigation of this, of a Democratic president? Not a chance. And in the House, which has now Republicans in control, they're much more interested in chasing Hunter Biden than they are investigating anything seriously. I just don't imagine why. This guy, Jordan, I watched him in a hearing on financial matters. He actually does his homework. Why somebody isn't, even on the Republican side, doesn't seem to want to jump on this.

So there you are. We're in a quagmire. We're in a mess. And this White House is making it worse. Well, I encourage everybody to read the latest piece, My 50 Years with Dan Ellsberg, as well as of course all the previous reporting. Now thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. We have an update from Germany on the pipeline explosion over the Nord Stream. So if we could put this first element up. So a coalition of German papers, and you can just go ahead,

you can Google this and just click English on the translation. It's so nice. We have to acknowledge the things that have gotten better. You can now just read German papers. It's not going to be perfect, but you're going to very much get the gist of it. And so let's start connecting some dots here. So the other day you have the New York Times come out with its extraordinarily thinly sourced article that says, we don't really know anything, and we can't say how we know anything, but we definitely know that there were no Americans or British, which is also quite specific. No Americans or British who participated in this pipeline bombing, but there's new intelligence, which leads us to a pro-Ukrainian

group. Now, there were zero details. The German press is out with what appear to be a bunch of the details that the U.S. Security Service were referring to when they said, we have new intelligence. It seems like this is what they're talking about. Would you say that that is a fair two dots to connect? That was absolutely my interpretation of all of it. And remember, this conversation had basically gone away until the Seymour Hersh story. And if you're watching this, you probably see Seymour Hersh down on the lower bar. He is slated to come on the show. We're hoping everything goes all right with that. He said, I'm running around this morning. I'm going to try to make it. So we'll see if he makes it. But all of this was just cracked wide open. Nobody was talking about this.

None of those reports were coming out until the American government was implicated in Hershey's Substack Post, basically, which renewed conversation about it. And that's where, again, I think you start seeing these reports from the New York Times, reports from the German press. It seems like that created the momentum to get the intelligence community to respond. Right. And so where the New York Times article was lacking in details, the German press is kind of overflowing in details. And so we can read out a couple of fun ones. So first of all, they said that it's so it's a it was allegedly a yacht rented from a company based in Poland owned by two Ukrainians. So that's their that's their first clue that they say is pointing to a pro-Ukrainian group.

They say there were six people, five men and one woman. Now we're talking like a rather incredible level of detail. Very specific. Not just it wasn't us. carefully read each one of these articles for overlap between CIA-U.S. involvement and what they're saying. So far, none of this actually contradicts it. Could the CIA or some other U.S. security apparatus rent a yacht from a Polish company that's owned by two Ukrainians? Like, absolutely. Does the CIA have access to five men and one woman?

Yes. Presumably. Presumably. They could do this. We've seen their videos. They're all about diversity. They certainly have women who can do diving. They said one of the six was a doctor. CIA has doctors, for sure.

But more seriously, they say that the equipment for the secret operation was transported to the port in a delivery truck. So again, like more specifics, like we don't, they don't, they don't have much about the sourcing here. They're sourcing it back to kind of German investigators. But that level of detail is interesting. I mean, how else are the explosives going to get there other than a truck? So perhaps that's just deduction. Like, I mean, you're not going to, you're not going to have a drone fly them over and drop them into the yacht. Like, otherwise, you're not going to have a wheelbarrow either, probably, right? Probably.

Truck. So the yacht was then returned to the owner in an unclean condition. For more details here, investigators found traces of explosives on the table in the cabin. Now, some German observers have raised the possibility that some of this was done to kind of bait people into thinking that this, to throw breadcrumbs in a different direction. Yeah.

Because if it's the CIA, they probably either know how to clean up the explosives or if that's difficult, they just sink the boat. Or they blow it up. They don't really, they're not that concerned about getting their deposit back on the rented yacht. That's not the top 10 mission list action item. They can shake the piggy bank over at the Pentagon. Yeah, yeah. Figure that one out. As Kramer says, that's a write-off. Yeah. That's just a write-off. And so, interestingly, some of this obviously conflicts with what Seymour Hersh reported.

On the other hand, a lot of it could align with it. And it is interesting. It does seem like Hersh's reporting kind of shook the trees. Yes. And got some of this out. Yeah, absolutely. And this creates, I think, new conversations between, well, I'm curious, and maybe if we back up a bit, how do you think

Putin is going to start responding if he does start responding to this reporting? So interestingly, you know, Putin's claim was never that it was Ukraine that did this. And, you know, Putin can say whatever he wants. He can say whatever he thinks is most advantageous to him. The Russians were blaming British operatives. And Hersh's article said, no, it was actually the US. To have alleged kind of pro-Ukrainian group involvement in this, I think it makes it for very interesting politics, particularly in Germany. Because if all

of a sudden you have a German public that says, wait a minute, so we're paying these high electricity prices, high energy prices because the Ukrainians blew up the pipeline that we had been invested in building for all of these years so that they would force us to then continue cooperating with their defense of the Russian invasion. You know, if this catches hold in Germany and if it becomes kind of a settled fact that it was actually this pro-Ukrainian group, although the CIA could also be described as a pro-Ukrainian group, then yeah, that I think plays into the geopolitics and could sour European public opinion on support for this war. So the fact that the U.S., by leaking this to The New York Times and the German investigators playing with the German press in this way,

suggests they're kind of really playing with public opinion fire a little bit. And somebody brought that information to Hirsch as well. So at some point, yeah, public information fire, that's absolutely what's happening here. So I think you're right. This is a huge development. And again, this is from German public prosecutors. It's a huge development geopolitically. So you can't really understate what we're learning day to day on this massively expensive pipeline. I was going to say that was geopolitically important for years before the war even broke out. And still is. And so, latest update of the AP reporting this morning, Germany's defense minister voiced caution Wednesday over media reports that a pro-Ukraine group was involved in blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea last year. So you're running into one of these situations again where you have some elements of the German investigators kind of leaking information.

Then you have official elements saying, well, well, well, let's be cautious. We don't actually, you know, our investigation remains incomplete. And so that you wind up with the public just kind of sorting into its own groups of who and what they're going to believe. Yeah, and I think that's going to be the case for decades to come. I don't think anyone's ever going to get to the real fact here. I don't think you can make educated guesses based on the reporting that continues to come out. And by the way, I expect this information will continue to kind of drip out over the course of like when people start writing books about the war in Ukraine. It's like the details we get to CIA's behavior during the Cold War that either come out during a church committee hearing or are fleshed out in someone's really well-reported book. I don't think we're ever going to know.

Some diver wants to write that memoir, right? They want the credit, yeah. In the near future, I don't expect we'll have any confirmation from anybody's government or anybody involved about what actually factually happened. Right. And so moving on, the big economic news came out of the Federal Reserve yesterday, if we can put up a one here. This is Fed Chair Jerome Powell saying that he's actually going to be ramping up interest

rate increases much more significantly than he had planned in the past. He came to Congress yesterday and was grilled by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren on what the implications would be for unemployment. Let's roll Warren here. Chair Powell, if you hit your projections, do you know how many people who are currently working, going about their lives, will lose their jobs? I don't have that number in front of me. I will say it's not an intended consequence. But it is, and it's in your report, and that would be about 2 million people who would lose their jobs, people who are working right now, making their mortgages. So, Chair Powell, if you could speak directly to the 2 million hardworking people who have decent jobs today, who you're

planning to get fired over the next year, what would you say to them? How would you explain your view that they need to lose their jobs? I would explain to people more broadly that inflation is extremely high and it's hurting the working people of this country badly. All of them, not just 2 million of them, but all of them are suffering under high inflation and we are taking the only measures we have to bring inflation down. And putting 2 million people out of work is just part of the cost. Let me ask you about what happens if you do this. Since the end of World War II, there have been 12 times in which the unemployment rate has increased by one percentage point within one year, exactly what you're aiming to do

right now. How many of those times did the U.S. economy avoid falling into a recession? You know, it's not as black and white as... Just look at the numbers. It actually is pretty black and white. Alan Blain has written a book on this. There have been 12 times that we've seen a one-point increase in the unemployment rate in a year. That's exactly what your Fed report has put out as the projection and the plan,

based on how you're going to keep raising these interest rates. How many times did the economy fail to fall into a recession after doing that? Out of 12 times. I think the number is zero. I think the number is zero. That's exactly right. What I like about this is that it's a clash of real conflicting values. That's a good point. On the one hand, Elizabeth Warren talking about the millions,

you know, 2 million unemployed people that Powell's policy will produce. Like that's, not only is that 2 million people who are now paying, able to pay their bills, you know, finding dignity in their work that no longer can and no longer do, but then you then, you know, push fear all the way through the workforce and you discipline the workforce. And a militant worker who might want to have wanted to organize the, you know, into a union or push for a raise or push back against sexual harassment or other abuse in the workplace. Now all of a sudden, I'm not going to be able to get another job if I lose this one. And so everybody's life gets worse versus the other

value of prices are rising too fast and that sucks for people. What was your response to that? Well, that's exactly what I was going to say. It's hard for me to give Elizabeth Warren the moral high ground in that question. And obviously, that generally applies to conversations about politicians. But when you're saying, you know, how much spending, for instance, did Elizabeth Warren support that has been making working people's bank accounts bleed because the price of eggs is exploding? And it's not just eggs, of course, it's the entire consumer price index. If you look at your basket of groceries over the last several months, the last year and a half, basically, how much of the spending that contributed to those price hikes has Elizabeth Warren supported? And so part of this is putting everyone between a rock and a hard place, either Jerome Powell and Elizabeth Warren, like both of them between a rock and a hard place, because from Elizabeth Warren's perspective, and sometimes I think correctly, we need to spend more on X, Y, and Z package. But we also know that we'll contribute in some ways to a rise in inflation.

We're nowhere near a hike that looks like Volcker, right? Like we're not exactly back to that time period yet. We're not suffering under anything quite to that point. Hopefully it doesn't get to that. But the point is letting inflation get out of control and supporting measures that let inflation get out of control, I don't think gives you the moral high ground then to go to Jerome Powell and say, basically, you're intentionally putting people out of work because that's part of the story. It might be true, but it's part of the story. To me, the problem here is that it's not necessarily the case that the treatment is going to cure the disease. And I worry that 20 years from now, if we have some more sophisticated

economic modeling capacity, maybe ChatGPT can do that for us. We'll look back and be like, what were these economists thinking? Well, I mean, you'll have left-wing economists saying, well, we know what they were thinking. They were serving the interests of the elite. But the ones who were saying, let's pretend and take for granted they're actually trying to kind of manage the economy in the most effective way possible. It's almost as if these are doctors who are bleeding a patient because they have a fever. You know, the way that George Washington had like eight different doctors, you know, that each individually bled him. And then because you would have some people who recovered after they were bled, you had

the medical profession be like, well, you know, bleeding actually works. Look here, this happens. And so the question then becomes, how does kind of raising the unemployment rate affect prices if prices are either related to ecological or virological crises or to corporate greed? that up to 50% of the price increases that we've seen have come from corporations who have opportunistically raised prices and didn't have to because wholesale prices were rising. So that's half. We also note, and you mentioned the eggs, well, the bird flu has wiped out millions, approaching billions of birds around the world. And there's no interest rate move. And I think that makes us kind of sad as humans, as economists, because we want to be able to control everything.

We want to think, well, if we do something about our quantitative easing policy, then we're not— We'll prevent the avian flu. The avian flu. With 75 percent confidence, we can predict that the avian flu will be mitigated by our interest rate measures. That's right. I think some pro-Iranian militias launched some strike on a chicken farm in Syria. Maybe that'll do it. Maybe that'll do something about bird flu. That happened pretty recently. And the same is true when it comes to kind of ecological crises, that if the planet is not able just to function in the way that it does at this carbon concentration for this 8, 9 billion people as it was for 6 billion people at lower carbon concentrations, what does that do to our economic models? And how does moving the interest rate and moving the unemployment rate

actually help there? Well, yeah. And there's the two million number, which he didn't even have off the top of his head. I think that was a pretty bad look, first and foremost, that it was in his own report, as Elizabeth Warren pointed out and Jerome Powell couldn't mention. Maybe he didn't want to say the number, but it seemed like perhaps he was just entirely ignorant of it, which I think is telling in and of itself because it treats people or it contributes this idea that the mentality among people sitting at the Fed is that people are numbers and numbers can be massaged. And we can take care of this with a formula, which may or may not be the case for everybody over at the Fed. But when you don't have that number from your own report and you're unwilling to say it, then, yeah, that's a problem. So but the question then also, I think, becomes what does all of this do to wages? What does all of that do to corporate profits? To your point,

I think that's one area where the right has totally missed an opportunity over the course of the last year. There is good reporting on how corporate greed has contributed to all of that. And obviously, Elizabeth Warren would be on the right side of that conversation. But I mean, their models can't really account for a lot of that stuff. Right. And just to underline the point about worker power, you'll often see a lot of people who will say, well, look, I'm sorry that one or two million people are going to lose their job, but 330 million people are suffering through higher prices.

But the reason that unemployment drives down wages is because it spreads fear throughout the entire economy. They're not just going to fire these one or two million people and then magically wages go down and prices go down. It's because they're firing those people as a warning to you. So every single person in the workforce and every single person who depends on someone in the workforce, which almost gets to 300 some million people, is actually going to suffer from higher unemployment rates. So I think, and perhaps we've had low unemployment now for so long that people forget what that fear and what that pain is like, and they might regret getting what they asked for. Yeah. And there's not going to be some sort of like patriotic hug from corporate America to workers as a reaction to the organizing, which like the numbers on the increase in organizing

over the year to year have been really, really like staggering jumps in organizing. And that is a direct consequence of full unemployment. And that goes away when you lose full unemployment, which is why somebody like Jerome Powell would like to see the numbers go up a little bit. And he's not wrong that there are tradeoffs. And I think Elizabeth Warren is maybe glossing over that for the sake of asking those questions in a way, in a very particular way. But to your point, there's a broader aperture to make those trade-offs with them. And speaking of trade-offs, let's put up B1 here. Joe Biden has put forward his plan both for deficit reduction and for shoring up Medicare, challenging Republicans to come up with their own plan. This flows from that kind of iconic

moment in his State of the Union where Marjorie Taylor Greene and others were saying, you're a liar. We don't want to cut Medicare and Social Security. And Biden kind of paused the conversation and said, OK, so let me make sure everybody's on board here. So what you're saying is cuts to Social Security and Medicare are off the table. And they all said, are off the table. And so he's like, okay, so here's how I'm going to sure up Medicare. And basically he has two planks. Very simple. One, he's going to allow Medicare to further negotiate drug prices, save some $200 billion over 10 years, and all of that money goes to the Medicare trust fund to extend it. And then secondly, the ACA put in, and if you're rich,

you know this and you're angry about it, 3.8% kind of basically investment tax over $400,000. If you make more than $400,000 a year, you pay this 3.8% hit. And he wants to raise that from 3.8% to 5%. Now, when they initially passed this 3.8% thing, it was one of the most significant kind of class war things that was actually in the ACA. And it became the thing that Republicans worked to repeal incessantly and actually failed, said that the sky was going to fall, the markets are going to tank, like, you know, we're not going to have a free market, and the kind of free people will cease to exist because of this 3.8% little fee that you're tacking on top of people making $400,000 on their investments. Here we are, most people don't even know it exists. Markets have, you know, done fine and not done fine, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with that. So these are his two plans. This is it. The rich pay a little bit more and we're going to negotiate with big pharma.

And with that, the Medicare trust fund rolls out to 2050. So now the shoe is on the foot of Republicans. Yeah, exactly. The balls in the court of Republicans use a better cliche. Sure. It's not a bad place for negotiations to begin. And that's what this looks like. It looks like he's using the New York Times op-ed to kick off and say this is point A. And negotiations obviously always are going to go from A to Z.

And his starting point here, it's really not bad. You highlighted, and I think we have this element, a Washington Post article on the advisor to Kevin McCarthy, who's formerly an advisor to Newt Gingrich. There's some great quotes from John Boehner in this article, basically saying, you know, he, this particular advisor, Kevin McCarthy doesn't like to tell people, no, this isn't the piece, but he will, Dan Meyer will. Yeah. And I think that's actually probably accurate. But to your point, Ryan, there's this question about how Republicans can kind of make the math work on their end. I should have brought the monopoly money in.

And a lighter. But Republicans could possibly make this math work if they don't want to touch entitlements, period. They've said it's off the table. They don't want to do that if they don't want to, I'm sorry, strengthen entitlements. Our favorite euphemism here in counterpoints, they don't want to strengthen entitlements. How do they make the math work? Now, what was interesting to me about this article is that Russ Vote, the OMB under Donald Trump, has a plan on how Republicans can make that math work without touching entitlements. It's a really interesting plan. You can go and read it on the internet. And basically what it does is look for a bunch of fat that can be trimmed bureaucratically around these sort of cultural leftist priorities.

Some people may call them woke priorities. And he makes the math work that way. He was in charge of the budget during the Trump administration, knows his way around OMB, obviously, as a former head of it. What was interesting to me about the Washington Post article that you just saw on the screen by Jeff Stein basically is that Dan Meyer, I can only imagine, is not paying attention to that paper. And does he run that veterans group now? I'm not sure. The conservative veterans group?

Yeah, I'm not sure. Which would suggest that maybe he'll check out the Pentagon, look under that hood, see if there's a couple trillion that could come out of there. I would think that Meyer will be looking wherever he can, because if he's going to make a good faith effort, which I think that's all he's going to do, and by good faith, I mean Clinton's old phrase where he used to say, I want to get caught trying, which meant you're actually not going to succeed, but you want to look like, you're at least like, look, I'm doing the best that I can just to prove to you that my best is not good enough. Because like you said, if you're not cutting the Pentagon and if you're not cutting Social Security and Medicare, then there isn't the money out there to do what Republicans want to do. Now, there is the money if you're willing to do what Biden is willing to do. And we can put this

other one up there. This came out this morning in The New York Times. This is Biden previewing what his deficit reduction plan is going to be. And it's annoying that Biden is focusing on deficit reduction rather than actual investment priorities. But whatever, this is who Joe Biden is and this is the world we're in. If he's got to do it, I do like the way he's doing it. He suggests basically a wealth tax on everybody making more than a hundred million dollars or worth more than a hundred million dollars a year. I think it is rather than making more. Uh, you would, and you, for those people, they have to pay on their asset

growth, including like in their stock growth. So if you're Elon Musk and you're stuck, you know, you're, you're the value of your portfolio increased by, you know, 50% in a year, you have to figure out ways to pay on that. And so that plus some other kind of corporate taxes and, you know, other like basic progressive stuff that just hits the rich and major corporations, he ends up reducing the deficit by $2 trillion over like 10 years, which is a big number. And which is a number that Republicans, unless you can think of some way they can do it, just simply can't meet because they're unwilling to raise taxes, unwilling to go after the Pentagon, and unwilling to, and they have, they'd love to go after Medicare and Social

Security, but they've taken it off the table. Well, I was going to say, yeah, they may be willing to go after the Pentagon. We've seen even the president of the Heritage Foundation at this point calling for things to that extent. Go for it. There's a real appetite for going after the Pentagon, at least in the conservative movement, if not in the Republican Party. I think it's basically impossible to take even something the president of the Heritage

Foundation wants to do. And then when it comes to the Pentagon, push that through and the Republican party. So, yes, I agree with that point. But it's also a matter of what Russ Vogt proposes is cutting the size of the federal bureaucracy and not just purely for the making the numbers all work out and just balancing, getting the balance sheet in order, but also for the sake of like, well, hey, how did they justify the COVID vaccine mandate in an obscure provision of the act that established OSHA? There's some of these things that are very real extra constitutional encroachments on the everyday American's freedom that can be pared back and that can make some of this math start to work without touching entitlements. And maybe with, you know, minor cuts to the Pentagon or

something to that extent, I just don't have a lot of faith that that's what's on the table as Kevin McCarthy's office and his advisors are looking to make these balance sheets check out. Meanwhile, Republicans seem to be notching some winds on immigration. And I'm curious how the right is viewing this. So recently, the Biden administration floated basically a trial balloon suggesting, and this appears to be coming from Susan Rice, who people might forget, bizarrely, is running domestic policy for the administration. Foreign policy expert her entire career in Biden's like, yeah, you'll do domestic policy. She has been one of the most hawkish internally when it comes to, you know, cracking down on the border. And so it is assumed that that's where this is, that this trial balloon is coming from, saying that the Biden administration is considering returning to family detention.

Now, I know how a lot of progressives respond to this. They just kind of want to not think about it because it's just kind of too painful because it reminds them of all of the things that they said about Trump when he was doing things like this. Things they didn't say about Obama. Things they didn't say about Obama and then things that they would be forced to say about Biden if they focused on the issue. So they kind of just keep it moving and hope that maybe nobody presses them on it and they don't have to think about it. But I'm curious what the reaction among Republicans is, if it's some sense of vindication or if there's a, ha-ha, we told you so, or this is actually cynical and we don't believe you're going to do it. So how did Republicans respond to this trial balloon? Yeah, I don't think anybody on the right considers what's been coming out of the Biden administration or anything like this a win.

And I'm not saying that because I believe that they're just like heroes. I'm saying that because the numbers I don't think are going to be affected so long as the Biden administration. Child separation is awful and one thing. But so long as the Biden administration continues its program of humanitarian parole right now, and humanitarian parole sounds like a really good thing. What it is basically is passage into the United States. If you can turn yourself in at a border crossing. They took these steps basically to say people from certain countries,

and this is all over the last couple of months, will not be eligible for asylum if they are caught crossing illegally. What that is is like sort of a math trick to get it to look like the illegal crossings are lower while they're granting humanitarian parole to more and more people. It sounds again like a great thing. What it does is set people up for this tragic existence in the shadows of America's civil society and is going to continue being a pull factor for millions of people coming up through Central America and Mexico. We've talked about this many times before. Everybody pays a cartel to get up there. The cartels then turn around and terrorize these countries,

overrun these countries. Many people are sexually assaulted, kidnapped along the journey. So I don't think if you're not going to pair child separation with like a real closure of the border so that people don't believe what happens is people, you know, WhatsApp everyone down the line back home and say, you have to turn yourself in and you get a court date two years from now. But other than that, you can sort of exist in a sanctuary city, et cetera, et cetera. Even if you don't turn yourself in, you can exist in a sanctuary city. So unless it's paired, I think, with some really serious uniform legal policy in terms of what's happening when people do turn themselves in, I don't even think... That's what's even more

sad, is that they would be doing, if they brought this back, which I doubt they will, they would be doing child separation with this other inhumane policy. And that is just the worst of both worlds. And maybe it's hard to figure out what's driving these types of decisions coming from this White House. But maybe they're doing that Trump thing where they try to kind of express toughness. Yeah, yeah. And say like, look. I think they are. Like it's a deterrent. Like it's trying to act as a deterrent to people, even if they're not

going to do it. I think that's totally right. And that is actually an important part of immigration policy. One pastor at a shelter that I talked to in Matamoros last year said he begs people in the American government to put out a message in plain Spanish, that was his quote, saying, don't come. And he said, we tell them that month after month in our meetings, and they never do it. It's obviously a very important part of immigration policy, the posture. If you talk to migrants, they'll look to Joe Biden and say, no estrastica como Trump. He's not the same level of, you can expect perhaps something almost like DACA, right, under a Joe Biden administration. Migrants have agency, they know exactly what they're doing. And so they do pick up on that kind of posturing and signaling.

So it is an element of that. But I think that's the same thing that he was doing with saying, if you come from Venezuela or Cuba and you don't come in and apply for asylum, turn yourself in, you're not eligible for asylum. If you cross illegally, you're not eligible for asylum. It is part of a posture. But again, it's also to make those numbers look different. And they also have implemented this new policy that you can't cross other countries and get asylum, which to me seems entirely counterintuitive. Like if you're, let's say you're in Guatemalaatemala yeah and you and you're trying to get asylum in the united states how do you do that you can't go to the embassy like that's basic that base that path is basically shut off the only way is to go through mexico right and

then apply for asylum there unless what do you like do you charter a private plane and yeah that's right um fly and that's like really go to And that's really the one. Go to Martha's Vineyard. And it has happened. I mean, there are flights that you can get from A to B without actually paying to go through Mexico on a bus or by foot some part of the way. But yeah, I mean, it's this patchwork policy that's the problem. It's just completely inhumane to have such a patchwork policy that, again, when we're talking about Cuban refugees, Venezuelan refugees, a lot of the Venezuelan migrants have lived in other countries for a long time before they're applying for asylum. I get it. It's the same thing with the Haitians. But what you end up doing is just closing the door to people.

Our asylum policy exists to help. And going back to the J-PAL point about unemployment, there's an irony that there seem to be a lot of people who will say, yes, we need to raise interest rates because we need a higher unemployment rate because inflation is out of control. We need to get that down. But those same people will not say, all right, well, then how about we bring in two million more workers? When the effect, if you believe, I don't think it, I don't actually think it would have the effect on wages that people think it would because those workers produce economic activity. They increase GDP and that increased GDP then results in higher wages out of that more economic activity. But obviously, if you have – there's some level at which you get so much immigration, so much competition for jobs that you would see wages come down.

But it's curious, why are people okay with wages coming down because you've disciplined the American workforce and fired millions of people and you know stoked fear you know in workplaces across the country, but they're deeply hostile to producing you know more labor through immigration policy like what like What's it? Why are you okay with one but not another it's a serious problem? I mean it's a huge problem and it goes to even like what people refer to as high-skilled labor.

When we talk about semiconductors here, one of the biggest problems is that who are you going to get to manage the semiconductor facility seriously? Because our— It takes three years to get somebody from India to get in. Yeah, exactly. And our so-called best and brightest now all work for Met meta, right? Like all the people that could be doing this were funneled into Silicon Valley for years and years and are just working on making us worse people instead of making us more secure as a country. And just to round out the block, I think that's probably why Susan Rice is on this issue. One thing, the media doesn't report a lot. And believe me, I understand the terrorist watch list has plenty of its own problems, but there are dozens of

people that crossed just last year that are on the terrorist watch list. There are reports every single month of people who we should be able to screen better. There's something like 51,000 known gotaways last month alone, somewhere around there, which is higher than about 50,000 from the previous January. These are huge numbers. And when you're seeing the people who we're actually able to apprehend at the border, dozens of people on the terrorist watch list that were actually apprehended, your mind can sort of extend how many people might be in this country that we should at least be aware of them being in this country, let alone maybe have turned away from getting into this country. So it does make sense that Susan Rice is looking at the Biden policy and thinking,

what the hell are we doing here as a kind of hawkish person? But in general, our immigration policy is just not serving anyone well. I would agree with that, except for the fact that it makes sense that Susan Rice is looking at any domestic policy. What is she doing in the domestic policy role? Absurd from the beginning. Makes no sense. Let's move on to China because I think this is a story that's playing out this week, getting not enough attention in the press. Here's NPR. Chinese leader Xi Jinping name-checked the United States in remarks during the annual session of parliament

underway in Beijing this week, saying it was leading Western countries in an effort to encircle and suppress China. This is a quote from Xi Jinping. Western countries led by the U.S. have implemented comprehensive containment, encirclement, and suppression against us, bringing unprecedented severe challenges to our country's development. Now, on Tuesday, the foreign minister also criticized the United States by name. Here's a quote from him. The U.S. claims it wants to compete to win with China

and does not seek conflict, but in fact the so-called competition by the U.S. is all around containment and suppression, a zero-sum game of life and death. Why does the U.S. ask China not to provide weapons to Russia? Well, it keeps selling arms to Taiwan. One more quote to hit you with here. When the U.S. says it wants to install guardrails

and have no conflict in China-U.S. relations, it really means that the U.S. requires China not to fight back when hit or scolded. But this cannot be done. Now, China, you have two high-ranking officials, including Xi Jinping himself, calling out the United States by name this week, by the way, as they continue to basically support Putin's invasion of Ukraine. This is a really big development. The Wall Street Journal has a long, long story out this week probing whether America is prepared in any capacity for a potential battle over Taiwan and what that could escalate into between, in terms of a war between the United States and China, a hot war between the United States and China. So very, very, very, very big deal that Xi Jinping himself called the United States out by name, including the, and the foreign minister as well. I've been reading actually a bunch of Xi

Jinping speeches this week, actually really over the last couple of weeks. The fact that he used the name, the United States, obviously a lot of China observers picked up on that right away. Ryan, what do you make of it? The argument that the Chinese are making is that the U.S. says it has put up guardrails around its kind of China confrontation that will prevent a Cold War from developing into a hot war. And they're saying that, no, if you are barreling down the road out of control at this speed, there are no amount of guardrails that are going to prevent an accident. And I do think that the people of the United States need to be deeply worried about that. And at the same time, we shouldn't forget that the Chinese government around 2007, 2008, in the wake of the financial

crisis, seeing the United States weakening, really embarked aggressively on a policy, an intentional policy of confronting the United States and undermining the United States in a significant way, helping to – ouranyl in this in this context But you know it an authoritarian Country like like China which is able to you know, so, you know effectively kind of monitor social media You know keep control of their economy isn't going to have a multi-billion dollar fentanyl export industry operating without kind of the approval of the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party.

Absolutely. They know exactly how much of those precursor chemicals are being shipped to Mexico. Right. Similarly to the United States, having some awareness, some involvement that, oh, our allies are the ones that are actually shipping this in. Well, it's important for our allies to have this funding source. So we're going to kind of look the other way. On the Chinese side, it's like, well, this is actually – this is weakening our trade rival. It's helping to hollow out a manufacturing base. It's really eviscerating an entire generation of people. So all of those things tied in make me look a little cynically at some of the complaints, the crocodile tears from the Chinese there.

Well, the flirting with Vladimir Putin makes me look at all of it very cynically as well when we're talking about an actual invasion. Now, what the Chinese see in that is a rebuke to NATO. It is a rebuke to the West. It is a rebuke to what they see as Western expansionism. And so obviously it makes sense that they come in and look at Putin's invasion of Ukraine as a sort of strength, a powerful rebuke, something that can genuinely very much weaken the West. I want to ask about reports, which I've seen some interesting debate over that China may be considering supplying weapons to Vladimir Putin. I've seen skepticism of those reports as basically saying this is unsubstantiated warmongering. And I'm entirely prepared to believe that's the case. It also wouldn't surprise me

if it was true in some capacity as well. So all of this coming on the heels of that, I think is relevant too. Yeah. And what we can know for sure, thanks to the Chinese diplomats here, is that the U.S. is fact, pressuring China not to supply weapons to Russia because the Chinese just complained that the U.S. is pressuring China not to supply weapons to Russia. So how seriously China is actually considering doing that, I think, is an open question. I think it's clear that Russia has asked for that support. I think that reporting is pretty solid. And it's also completely intuitive, like the manufacturing base of the Russian economy with under sanctions is able to create

only so many missiles, only so many tanks, only so much material for its invasion. So it would stand to reason that they would go to China. And so China this week complaining that it's unfair. Like, how come, you know, sounds like seven-year-olds on both sides. Wait, how come you get to fund Ukraine and you get to supply Ukraine with weapons, but we can't supply Russia with weapons? And there's actually no good answer to that other than because we're the empire and we say so. No, and the Chinese economy is another thing to keep in mind here. Obviously, not where Xi Jinping would want it to be at this moment post-COVID. But I would say when you look at the Wall Street Journal reporting and other

reporting that we've covered here for a long time, one thing that worries me is this is coming, this could be coming faster than people realize. And I'm not talking about, you know, at the nuclear scale, just some level of conflict over Taiwan, which could get, which could escalate very quickly in the same sense that we are now dealing with those concerns in Ukraine. Any hot confrontation over Taiwan, obviously you have the same type of risk. And that could be coming more quickly than people realize, specifically because China understands we have a limited timeframe or they have a limited timeframe before we are able to rebuild our defense capacity to meet some of what would be needed in an amphibious situation,

hot war situation over those islands in the South China Sea over Taiwan. That's a huge huge huge concern they know that that narrows every single month that they have in front of them because the more that we're resupplying ourselves some of these weapons that have actually gone to Ukraine that would be useful in a hot confrontation over Taiwan the semiconductors that we're able to reshore again that can happen in about three years is the estimate, and it started about six months ago. So these are things that genuinely keep me up at night. And one amendment to what I said earlier, you can make a plausible argument

for why it's okay to fund, obviously, the defense of Ukraine versus the offense of Russia, because Russia invaded Ukraine. Ukraine did not invade Russia, but from the Chinese perspective, and I think this is what's important, they don't see in any circumstance the United States acting as just merely defensive, in merely a defensive posture. Like they see US offensive presence all over the world, and so every action that they see the United States taking,

they see as a projection of American power, not a defense of just ideals of liberty and democracy. Well, yeah. And this is world history in perpetuity for the future, by the way, because it's what happens in high-tech nuclear order. No matter what, you're going to continue trying to untangle and get to the bottom of who started what. But Belt and Road is like a euphemism for Chinese expansionism. And euphemism, I say that it's just the language itself, but the policy. It's a friendly face for exactly.

And again, when you read speeches from Xi Jinping, it's very clear how they see Chinese expansionism, socialism with Chinese characteristics, sort of undermining the West, not just, they talk about mankind and humankind a lot, not just undermining the United States, but spreading outside just China. And so when you have nuclear technology, everybody shares a border. The great powers share a border. If you have a nuke, you share a border with every single other country in the world. So we will, if it feels like echoes of the Cold War, as people say over and over again, yes, but that's only because we are 100 years into nuclear history. Human history looks like this. Nuclear technology changes and it's just a straight line up. And we are in the very early

stages of that era. So these echoes of the Cold War, get used to it. Yeah. And I wish Belt and Road was the way that the U.S. would express its power instead of just blowing up belts and roads. And we showed it worked with the Marshall Plan. Well, you mean it. That was one of our most effective kind of diplomatic forays of the entire second half of the 20th century, rebuilding Europe. And then we pivoted to, we're going to break unions, we're going to break social democracies, we're going to keep wages low so that our corporations can continue funneling cheap goods into the country so that we can then suppress our own discontent within the country by making sure that the price of TVs continues to go down.

I mean, Belt and Road is debt trap diplomacy based. We talked about the World Bank last week. I mean, it's debt trap diplomacy that is used to blackmail developing countries. Not great, but better than death squad diplomacy is what I would argue. You got to have one form or the other. Well, now in local news,

we're going to be talking about the DC crime bill that's grabbed national headlines for interesting reasons because the District of Columbia, where we are right now, is a federal district, is the federal district that is entrenched in the Constitution. Ryan and I almost certainly disagree, although I don't know that we've ever talked about this before, over the question of home rule and D.C. statehood.

But the bill itself grabbed a lot of headlines because Republicans in Congress latched onto it after it looked as though—and this is where I take issue with some of the media coverage, including from DCist, which had a pretty good write-up of it, WAMU DCist, that said the bill got scuttled by Republican backlash. Well, Muriel Bowser did not want to sign this bill. Joe Biden himself tweeted that while he supports home rule and D.C. statehood, I have the exact quote right here, while he supports home rule and D.C. statehood. He was also, yeah, here he said, I support D.C. statehood and home rule, but I don't support some of the changes D.C. Council put forward over the mayor's objections,

such as lowering penalties for carjackings if the Senate votes to overturn what D.C. Council did. I'll sign it. The carjacking provision of this very complicated bill that attempts to make some modifications to a 1901 criminal code. By the way, that's before people had cars to jack. It's a car jack. Yeah, right. It's totally been massaged. Like any nuance has been out the window in this national conversation. Brian, you have a good point

to make, though, about the maximum penalty for carjackings being changed. Oh, yeah. And maybe we have that element here. But what's amazing is the way that this reduction in maximum penalties from, what, 40 years to something like 24 years is getting talked about as this lowering of penalties, yes, like technically it's a lowering of penalties, as if it's gonna spur some soft on crime explosion of carjackings around Washington, D.C. Something like 99% of the sentences that are doled out for carjacking now

are significantly under what is the maximum. Like the current maximum allows, I think for like 40 years for an armed carjacking. And so they lowered that to like 20 something. The mandatory minimums for carjackings in DC currently, and even in the new criminal code, if it were enacted, would still be higher. And we were pointing this out then in say Tennessee, where Bill Hagerty is leading the charge against this thing. Tennessee's law is more liberal when it comes to carjackings and armed carjackings. More liberal, even though it's basically just a normal penalty.

Yeah, it's a gigantic mandatory minimum that, like, 60 years ago, people would be like, you're going to, that's insane. Like, how on earth are you going to put people in prison for that long? Now we just, like, oh, 15 years for this. Yeah, you're going to do you're going to do 15 years. So they're barely loosening the penalties. And it's in a rewrite of an entire code. And to have Joe Biden say, I support a thing in principle, but not when it might cause me some short term political cost, potential political cost. And he may now have brought more cost on himself because now everything the D.C. council does, reporters are going to get to say, hey, Joe Biden, what do you think of this? Because there's a D.C. council provision that is allowing non-U.S. citizens, would allow non-U.S. citizens to vote in local elections. To me, I think if you are subject to the laws of an area

where you live, then principle says you should have some say, no matter what. Even if you're in prison, you should have some say over what those laws are. But you can disagree with that. But now all of a sudden, that's going to be something Joe Biden's going to have to, he's going to have to answer for everything that the D.C. Council does. Yesterday, I heard reporters on Capitol Hill asking Republican senators, what do you think of allowing noncitizens to vote? And me, a D.C. resident, I'm thinking, oh, really? That's interesting. How about citizens who can't actually vote for senators or members of the House of Representatives? All of a sudden, you know, you're so concerned about the right to vote.

And they're like and they're shaking their head like, yeah, we don't approve of this. It's like we shouldn't have to ask you. Like it's one thing that we don't get to vote for House, for Senate. They have a workaround so we can vote for president. But then you're going to come in and you're going to kind of line edit our criminal code and say actually 24 years for carjacking, I think it should be 40. Get out of here. Okay, so we are hitting on where we disagree with this because here's a National Review article actually cited a Madison quote from Federalist 43. Now I sound

like a real loser. He says, the indispensable necessity of complete authority at the seat of government carries its own evidence. With it, Without it, not only the public authority might be insulted and its proceedings interrupted with impunity, but a dependence of the members of the general government on the state comprehending the seat of government for protection in the exercise of their duty might bring on the national councils an imputation of awe or influence equally dishonorable to the government and dissatisfactory to the other members. So I would just say, of the Confederacy, because this was in the era of the Federalist Papers, so I think we could have a whole debate one day

about home rule and D.C. statehood, but I do think the federal city should be subject to federal rule and by a wide scope. And this is in the broader context. And I think to your point, actually, about why this is such a ridiculous thing for Bill Hagerty from Tennessee to be swooping in and line item vetoing DC City Council crime overhauls, is that it is obvious if you walk around the District of Columbia post-pandemic that there's a lot of recovery that needs to happen. It is obvious that we are dealing

with particular crime surges, not across the board. Actually, violent crime did decrease from 2021 to 2022. According to Axios, though, for the second year in a row, D.C. exceeded 200 murders in 2022, and some crimes did see... We have that chart. Yeah, we also have a chart, but that's where we are so far in 2023 here in the district. So in 2022, robberies were up 2%,

car thefts were up 8%, like in a lot of cities, and carjackings were up 14%. If you look at the chart that's on the screen right now, you can see, for instance, between 2022 to 2023, the same day in March, March 7th, we're from 29 to 39 homicides. That's a 34% increase three months into the year, 120% increase in sex abuse.

Theft in general. We're up to, I can't read the number on the screen, but it is up, it looks like 18 percent. Car theft from auto, 22 percent. Two of those were mine. Oh, that's right. Leave Ryan alone. Motor vehicle theft up 110 percent%. So again, these are early numbers, but it's obvious to everybody why there is no appetite, even from the Washington Post, which editorialized that the bill would make D.C., quote, a more dangerous city by decreasing, quote, punishments for violent crimes such as carjackings, home invasion, burglaries, robberies, and even homicides, and tying, quote, the hands of police and prosecutors while overwhelming courts. That's other stuff in this bill. It's a very big bill that can be debated as what this would do to the court system. There are arguments, I think serious arguments, that it would overwhelm the court system because of changes there.

And so when you even have The Washington Post, Muriel Bowser coming out against a bill like this, I do think it signals, despite this weird conversation about carjackings we've had, and especially when Republicans insert themselves, national Republicans, into this local conversation, there's just no appetite in so many big cities right now for criminal justice reform, even if some of it, by the way, would reduce crime and would make cities safer. Nobody wants to talk about it, period, because our cities do feel dirtier to a lot of people. They feel less safer to a lot of people.

And I think national Democrats have a lot to answer for, not just in terms of the criminal code, but really just in terms of the way they govern these cities. And a significant bump in the crime wave came out of the pandemic. People frustrated, fewer people on the street, allowing people to commit more crimes of opportunity. But also arguably undercutting of police, both with rhetoric and legally. Well, undercutting of police. Police having

their feelings hurt and deciding that they're not going to do their job anymore, I think, is a serious thing. Or having their power curtailed. In neighborhoods, by the way, where black residents said they wanted more police and not less police as the national movement pushed a lot of people in places like San Francisco, even London Breed walked back some of those policies. I don't think there's necessarily been any evidence yet that places that did criminal justice reform

and police reform have had different crime increases than places that didn't so if like if you look at you know if you look at like red states around the country you see the same crime bump even in places that never had you know never got much police reform traction uh what you what you did see is it did see a slowdown in call response and like baltimore being like the most egregious response where they were like, cool, you don't like the way we do our jobs. How about we just don't do our jobs at all?

Or a lot of police departments are now severely hampered because nobody wants to work in them given how demonized they feel. No, recruiting is big. Right, recruiting for any job anywhere has become a problem. And it's acute within within the police force. But, yeah. Now, Ryan, I'm excited for this next block because this is a Ryan Grimm question in the White House press briefing to Karine Jean-Pierre.

A question that I don't think anybody else or topic I don't think anybody else has asked about so far. You want to see up there and you can see why based on her answer. So, yeah, this is from this week. In the press briefing, you might recognize this voice. Last week, the Department of Justice acknowledged that in 2020, the FBI had used 702 authorities to illegally spy on a member of Congress. Can you tell us who that member of Congress was? Has that member of Congress been briefed by the White House? I would refer you to Department of Justice. Just not going to speak to that from here. Go ahead. Thanks. And then she so effectively calls on the next person. Right away. And then the next person has a question. So there's no room for a follow-up.

It was very smooth. Yeah. Yeah. She's like, I'm not going to answer that question. You go ahead. Please ask a different one. And I feel like the White House press corps needs just so much better coordination and willingness to kind of work collectively. And you see this occasionally from the White House press corps. You'll see it on the Hill for sure. And you'll see it with foreign press corps where a reporter asks a question. The person that they're asking the question to refuses to answer it. And then the next reporter, rather than the question that they had scripted ready for the German chancellor or whatever, they will go back and they'll say, I would actually like first to ask you to answer that last question. You didn't answer that question.

Yep. Because, you know, if nobody can get a follow-up in, then all somebody has to do to dodge a question is just dodge the question once and they move on. And then there becomes a political cost to not answering the question like eight times. And the press corps knows how to do this. If you remember a year ago when the war drums were being beaten for fighter jets to be sent to Ukraine, when the White House press secretary said, no, we're not going to do that, then the next person would be like, so you said you're not going to send fighter jets over to Ukraine. How about sending fighter jets? What do you think about doing that? I'm going to give time for my colleague to beat the war drums. Yes. What if Estonia asked to send war drums? That was one of the, that was one of the, they were looking for every single way to ask a follow-up. And while the substance of that, I thought was deeply disturbing, the, the cohesion of it was impressive.

It was like it was getting the press corps to really push the administration on a question that they were actually happy to answer. Like she kept giving an answer. Of course. It just wasn't the answer that they wanted. In this case, she's just not answering. And I didn't ask if the Department of Justice had briefed Congress. I asked if the White House has briefed Congress. I asked if she would tell us who the White House spied on. And this could be a situation where she just throws the Trump administration under the

bus because this was 2020. This was the FBI under the Trump administration. But maybe it was a Democrat and maybe it was a Democrat that was illegally spied on and you could then kind of spin something up about that but then you might not want to necessarily talk about it. So the speculation out there, all we can do is guess but we know that kind of Eric Swalwell was in the news around that time for some liaison with the woman who turned out to be perhaps connected to Chinese intelligence. And so was it that? But we don't know. That's

absolutely pure speculation. We do know, based on Wired reporting that's based on an internal audit of FBI 702 practices, that they did spy on some unnamed member of Congress. We don't know the party. We don't know the name. The White House is declining to say who or why. If they felt confident in their substantiation, I think they would say it. Because especially if it was a Republican and they felt confident in their substantiation, I think that they know the Democratic base at this point isn't going to be upset about exercising 702 power to, and we saw this over the course of the Russian Collusion Hub. You're not doing anything wrong. You've got nothing to worry about.

Yeah. How much criticism did Carter Page get on MSNBC and CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, for years until they stopped talking about it, basically? I mean, if they felt confident in their substantiation. But I think you're touching on a really important point here, which is there is no cohesion on this question. And this is why I still like that the press briefings are televised, even though it feels like theater. I still like that they're televised, specifically because they show where the priorities of the White House press corps are, and you get answers to questions like this one. Every once in a while, someone asks a really good question that the White House just doesn't want to answer. And you see, not only does she say the

White House doesn't have a comment on that, she says, I'm going to refer you to the DOJ. When you didn't ask about the DOJ, you asked about the White House. And there's a reason nobody else in the press corps wants to talk about 702 powers. It's because either they don't care or they love that 702 powers exist because everybody that they talk to in the intelligence community is chirping in their ear about all of these false stories on how the country was saved from destruction by 702. And that is, I think, very much worth televising these briefings. I love that we get to reflect on that when Ryan goes and asks a damn good question about 702 that nobody else wants to talk about. I did reach out to the Department of Justice and say, hey, Karine says you should answer this question. And what did they say? Nothing yet. I'll report

back when I get something out to the Department of Justice and say, hey, Corrine says you should answer this question. And what did they say? Nothing yet. I'll report back when I get something out of that. Turning to the House of Representatives, actually, while we were producing this show, very strange development in the world of kind of cross-ideological coalitions. Matt Gaetz shared my intercept story this morning on Twitter. Basically, and he said, he says, contact your representative today and ask them to support my legislation to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria voting today with a link to an article that I have up in the intercept today, which is responsible statecraft, wrote about this Matt Gates effort recently. So essentially, there are still almost roughly 900 American troops helping to occupy

central Syria, along with an unknown number of contractors and other kind of associated allies in the area backing up the Syrian Defense Forces, mostly Kurdish element of what remains kind of of the opposition that isn't ISIS. Yesterday evening, as I reported, the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent out a note to its membership urging a yes vote and noting that his legislation is similar to legislation that had been put forward on the NDAA by Jamal Bowman previously, which had set a one-year timeline. I also reported that Ambassador Robert Ford, who was the Obama administration's ambassador to Syria and who had previously been a staunch advocate of more and more kind of U.S. intervention in the area, more support for the opposition in an attempt to get Assad to the negotiating table that would lead, they would hope, to Assad stepping down. So one of the—and he eventually resigned in 2014 because he felt like the Obama administration wasn't being aggressive enough to accomplish its goals.

He's now supporting this Gates measure. And I interviewed him yesterday. I said, sounds like what you're basically saying is go big or go home. And if you're not going big, you might as well go home. And he said, yes, he said, except I would add that you have to remember that going big is no guarantee of success either. If you look at the Iraq war, we went pretty big and we got what he called mixed results. So the vote is going to be held this evening. When this came to the floor under Jamal Bowman, 60% of the Democratic caucus voted for it. It'll be interesting to see if they

pick some up because the CPC is officially calling for them to vote for it, or if they lose some because it's associated with Gates and that Biden is in the White House, although Biden was in the White House for the last one. But I'm also curious on the Republican side, there were 25 Republicans last time, 21 the first time in 2021, then 25 in 2022, who voted to end the occupation of Syria. Do you think Gates gets more than 25? Or is he so toxic in the Republican Party that he's not gonna be able to pull it off? What's your sense of how effective he'll be at doing kind of his part of this? Yeah, I think you get at some of that in your reporting, which is, it's just the process, even itself, on how Matt Gaetz cobbled together the legislation and then was able to work with

Ilhan Omar and cobbling together some coalition, some support. Right, His first version of this a couple of weeks ago allowed 15 days for all troops to get out, which, you know, just isn't going to happen because nobody's going to support that. And he immediately jumped to six months, right? And interestingly, yeah, Ilhan Omar worked directly with him and said, look, you got it. These are rookie numbers, man. You got to bump these numbers up. And he's like, OK, fine. Well, let's let's let's do it to six months because she's like, you're just not you're not going to get any Democratic support for this. So what's the point of doing this? You're going to you're able to get a floor vote. Like why blow it on something that everybody's just going to vote against? And so they so they came up with this six month

threshold. So does that signal that Matt Gaetz thinks there's no chance of getting significant support, either from Republicans or centrist Democrats, so you might as well just put the 15 days in? Or does it signal that someone on his policy team just, and he just did something really dumb with the timeline? The question, the jury's still out on that question, but I would actually predict a slight increase in that number. I think that would probably tick up from 25, especially amidst problems in Europe, amidst problems in the South China Sea. I think, you know, there's a real even among people who are more hawkish in the Republican Party. that we're expending military power in places that are draining military power that should be reprioritized, in places that should be reprioritized.

So I actually would predict, you know, it's not a solid prediction. I don't have any particular intelligence right now on this, but I would expect that number to be higher. All right. Well, that'll be nice to see. It's unlikely to get to 218. Yeah, I don't think so. At this point. But, you know, a serious show of force, I think, at least puts pressure. And Mark Milley was just there.

I don't think that's a coincidence at all. You know, he went, that's the first time he's been there in a very long time. And I think it was, he was there to kind of, to kind of show confidence in the U.S. presence there, which also, we should note, is illegal. Like, so there was – and it's crazy. I covered the vote or the whipping for the vote in 2013 around this precise issue. It's 10 years ago. I've been doing this for too long. And Obama eventually pulled it off the floor

after our whip count showed 243 no's and leaning no's. So he was going to lose the vote. He wasn't going to get authorization for this use of force. HuffPost's whip count? Yeah, HuffPost. And even like Daily Kos was doing its own kind of separate whip count back in the days when there was a little bit more skeptical of U.S. interventions. And so there is not that authority.

So therefore, they're relying on the 2001 AUMF, the Authorization of Use of Military Force, which allows the U.S. to go to war anywhere at once as long as it's against al-Qaeda. And the Taliban was thrown in there as well. And they've since said, OK, well, al-Qaeda, anybody kind of similar to al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda was hiding under the Nord Stream. Well, that was a pro-Ukrainian group. And so the but the administration in the press has been saying that the purpose of this deployment of troops overseas is to counter Iran and pro-Iranian militias in Syria. And there's just – now, if you were going to say, well, they're there to fight ISIS only, then you could maybe say, OK, well, ISIS is derivative enough of al-Qaeda that you're not going to win a court case over this. But there's just no interpretation of the 2001 AUMF that authorizes a president to go to war against Iran or pro-Iran militias.

You just can't do that. And so then the question is, does that matter? No, clearly it doesn't. What about the rules-based order? It clearly does not matter to the people who lecture us constantly about the rules-based order and lecture other countries about the rules-based order. I know we're suckers to even take it seriously, but yeah, why not? What are we supposed to do? Just for the hell of it. Pretend the rules-based order matters. What's your point today? All right. Well, we're going to be talking about Tucker Carlson and new Fox News reporting.

Before Tucker started releasing new footage from the Capitol on January 6th, just this Monday, he actually prefaced his show with an interesting admission. As he covers the video this week, Carlson said, many mysteries will remain unsolved. And in fact, there were many examples of behavior we saw in those tapes that didn't seem to make sense. Men in civilian clothes holding doors open for protesters, escorting others through the Capitol, etc. We would love to know who these people were, but as of tonight, we don't know. And because we don't know, we're not going to put their faces on the screen and suggest they were federal agents. So video of men in civilian clothing

holding doors open for protesters and escorting others to the Capitol should have been explained by the special committee House Democrats impaneled to investigate January 6th. In new video, for instance, Carlson showed nearly 10 officers calmly escorting the so-called QAnon shaman around the Capitol building on January 6th.

Maybe this was a crowd control technique. I actually have no idea. But I was there as a reporter reporter and right away it was clear to me that different parts of the building were experiencing very different versions of events. To be clear, I think the bottom line about January 6th is that a group of Trump supporters, not Antifa or the FBI, were so persuaded by the former president and so furious at the political establishment that they gave into mob mentality and violence, thinking it was their last chance to save the country. You could feel it snowballing.

But that doesn't mean the FBI didn't have informants involved. We now know definitively they did. And it doesn't mean the media's coverage was true. We now know definitively it wasn't. For instance, here are some questions the media should be wondering. Why does Tucker have video the January 6th committee seems to have contradicted, even though they had it in their possession? Why did attorneys for the January 6th defendants, as one said on Laura Ingraham's show last night,

not get that video? And why is the media more upset? And why are some establishment Republicans, from Tom Tillis to Kevin Cramer to Mitch McConnell, who trotted out a prop yesterday, why are they more upset with Tucker Carlson than with the January 6th committee or with the media that just completely swallowed the January 6th committee's narrative whole cloth? So to pivot just slightly here, hundreds of pages of new documents in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News dropped yesterday, and there is surely plenty to dive into over the coming days. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, as I just mentioned, Republican senators from Tillis to Kramer to

McConnell have been whining about Tucker Carlson's coverage of the January 6th tapes. Chuck Schumer actually called on Rupert Murdoch to yank Tucker Carlson off the air recently. You can see this tweet from Republican Senator J.D. Vance, who said, Today I was asked by multiple reporters about Tucker's show last night. I was asked zero times about one of the most powerful figures in government actively promoting corporate censorship. J.D. said censorship, but you can add the word corporate censorship of a media figure. The assault on, quote, our democracy is this. Again, he's asking questions about where Republican senators,

from Mitch McConnell to Kevin Cramer, to Tom Tillis and Mitt Romney, are placing their priorities, and that is a useful question to apply to the media as well. And here's where it's useful to think about the balance overall in American media. Every single corporate media institution regularly attacks Fox News, sometimes with reason, but other times without it. Plus, nearly every single reporter now feasting on these Dominion documents has helped spread destructive false narratives in recent years, and many of them have done it while deceiving their audience by pretending to be neutral and apolitical. So you don't have to shed any tears for Fox News to recognize that while

the network is powerful, the combined powers of their enemies is beyond Rupert Murdoch's wildest imagination. And those enemies are much more powerful and much more guilty because they feign superiority. So let's pivot for a minute again and enjoy this delightful clip of Russell Brand calmly making NBC analyst John Holloman look foolish from last Friday's edition of Real Time. John, I've not known you long, but I love you already. But I have to say that it's disingenuous to claim that the biases that are exhibited on Fox News are any different from the biases exhibited on MSNBC. It's difficult to suggest that these corporations operate as anything

other than mouthpieces for their affiliate owners in BlackRock and Vanguard. And unless we start to embrace... And also, mate, like, just spiritually, if I may use that word in your great country, we have to take responsibility for our own perspective. I've been on that MSNBC, mate. It was propagandist nutcrackery on there. I went on a show called Morning Joe.

It was absurd the way they carried on. Good morning, Joe. Yeah, I don't know what it was. It wasn't morning. There was no-one called Joe there. No-one could concentrate. They didn't understand the basic tenets of journalism. No one was willing to stick up for genuine American heroes like Edward Snowden, no one was willing to talk about Julian Assange and what he's suffered trying to bring real journalism to the American people. And I think to sit within

the castle of MSNBC throwing rocks at Fox News is ludicrous. Make MSNBC better. Make MSNBC throwing rocks at Fox News is ludicrous. My friends. Make MSNBC better. My friend. Make MSNBC great again. My friend. Make MSNBC great again.

Make the entire media great again, maybe. Brian's point came amid a discussion on the show of recent legal disclosures that are showing certain hosts and executives at Fox News were unhappy with other people at the network's coverage of genuine disinformation about the 2020 election. Since I've written this script that I'm reading now, we're getting even more from the Dominion documents. But as he was being criticized for misrepresenting facts, John Heilman then misrepresented the facts about the Fox lawsuit. But that's neither here than there. My only quibble with Brand's point is that Fox News

recognizes there's money to be made by being the only corporate media outlet willing to air anti-establishment voices. Unlike on MSNBC or CNN these days, on Fox News, you will actually hear Glenn Greenwald and Tulsi Gabbard's perspectives. You'll hear absolutely forbidden critiques of the left's excesses like censorship and puberty blockers and neo-racism. These are closer to the perspectives you'd hear in a bar in my Wisconsin hometown than anything on MSNBC or CNN, where questioning the dogma of rich, educated liberals is uncouth and bigoted and intolerable. Again, I'm sure Rupert Murdoch understands this fundamentally as a business strategy, not an altruistic one. Still, over on MSNBC and CNN

and in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post and even Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, it's rare to hear serious critiques of the military-industrial complex or corporate power, unless those critiques are about the military being racist or corporations needing bigger HR departments. Fox platforms warmongers too, that's true, but they know it's more entertaining then to air other perspectives alongside of them. So while corporate media whines about Kevin McCarthy granting Tucker Carlson access to the January 6th tapes, it's possible to question the decision but recognize that corporate media itself is the problem. That Tucker seeing the J6 footage after a purportedly bipartisan select committee

left relevant video out of their hearings and reports, and that media never questioned them. If you're talking about Fox and Tucker and not talking about the broader universe of other networks and journalists who've made a habit of lying and deceiving for partisan purposes, you're getting sucked into a stupid game. Just like all those Republican senators now choosing to waste breath on Tucker, they would never use to critique the entire corporate press and intelligence community

for exploiting the tragedy. Ryan, again, there's a lot coming out of the Dominion lawsuit. All right, well, thank you for joining us. You may have noticed if you're watching this on YouTube, we're doing something different, posting just a couple of the clips. You can find the rest of them, as you know, on the podcast version. Also on the premium version, you know, you get a part with

10 of your dollars every month to hear that, but then you get it ad free. That's right. And you get it emailed into your inbox an hour early. I don't know. It's been a good show, though. Another typical Wednesday, meaning we are bursting at the seams with breaking news. There you go. Exactly. All right.

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