The Daily Signal - Mega Church Shooter May Be Transgender, Most Americans Think Biden Too Old for Second Term, GOP Will Try to Impeach Mayorkas Again | Feb. 12

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

TOP NEWS | On today’s Daily Signal Top News, we break down: Over 80% of Americans think President Joe Biden is too old to be president.  Why are companies shrinking the size of products?  House Republicans will try a second time to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Questions loom over the sexual identity of a Texas church shooter.  Chiefs clinch Super Bowl for back to back wins.  Listen to other podcasts from The Daily Signal: https://www.dailysignal.com/podcasts/ Get daily conservative news you can trust from our Morning Bell newsletter: DailySignal.com/morningbellsubscription Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm Virginia Allen, and this is the Daily Signal Top News for Monday, February 12th. Here are today's headlines. 86% of Americans think President Joe Biden is too old to serve as president. That's according to a new ABC News and Ipsos poll reported on by the Hill. The poll also found that 62% of Americans think that former President Donald Trump is too old to serve another term as president. Only 11 out of every 100 Americans think that neither Trump or Biden are too old and could serve another term. The poll was conducted after special counsel Robert Hur released his report on President Joe Biden's classified documents last Thursday. You'll remember that in that report, Her called Biden an elderly man with a poor memory.

Biden responded to those claims from her during a press conference on Thursday night. but the president did not succeed in assuring the American people of his mental sharpness. Biden appeared to misspeak or forget things a couple times during that press conference, including when he appeared to be talking about the president of Egypt, but got his title mixed up with the president of Mexico. Biden is 81 right now and Trump is 77. Vice President Kamala Harris has continued to speak out in support of President Biden, but has said if the situation should require it, she is ready to serve.

On Super Bowl Sunday, Biden released a video on X discussing shrinkflation. Biden said companies are trying to pull a fast one on the American people and are shrinking the size of products while keeping the price the same. Companies may, for example, put fewer chips in the chip bag or shrink the carton of the ice cream. Biden said that this needs a lot of. to end. Take a listen. I'm calling on companies to put a stop to this. Let's make sure businesses do the right thing now.

So are businesses trying to pull a fast one on the American people by keeping prices the same while shrinking the size of their products? Here with us to answer that question is the Heritage Foundation's research fellow, E.J. and Tony. E.J., thanks so much for being with us today. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me, Virginia. So explain what is going on here.

Why are some big-name companies shrinking their products but keeping the price the same? Well, these businesses are essentially doing the exact same thing that the American people are doing, which is they're trying to cut costs wherever they can because prices have gone up so much in the last three years. And what's interesting is that if you look at prices is that prices that businesses pay, and you compare that with the prices that you and I and other consumers pay, they've all gone up about 18% on average. So businesses are not gouging consumers here. They're simply passing along all of the cost increases that they themselves are facing.

And these are all cost increases, by the way, which were created from the government spending, borrowing and printing too much money. So before the president goes and blames corporations, he needs to take a good, long, hard look in the mirror. Is this a strategy that companies have used in the past when the cost of goods go up and they decide, all right, we don't want to increase the cost to the consumer, so we're just going to make the product smaller, aka putting fewer chips in the chip bag? Absolutely. It's something we've seen before and it's something we've seen during periods of high inflation before, which we haven't had in a while in this country, which is part of the reason why it hasn't been very wide. spread until recently when we saw the return of 40-year high inflation. You lay the blame at President Biden and you say that it's his policies that have caused this. Explain that. What specifically are you looking at when you say that that have been so crippling to inflation

and the rise that's now specifically trickled all the way down to companies? Well, the first thing that this president did was go on a massive spending spree. You know, if he had literally done nothing but allowed COVID, era spending to expire, that emergency one-time spending, let it expire, and not replace it with other spending, we literally would have eliminated the budget deficit. That's not an exaggeration. We'd have a balanced budget today. The problem is that this president simply replaced all of that spending with new spending, a lot of left-wing boondoggles. So he essentially institutionalized multi-trillion dollar deficits, the result of which has been an explosion,

in not just the deficit, but the debt. And to finance all of that, the Federal Reserve simply printed the money to pay for it all. That devalued the dollar. And when your dollar buys less, you need more dollars in order to get exactly what you got before. That's why people's paychecks, even though they've gotten larger today, don't go nearly as far as they used to. But the second big thing that this president did was declare war on American energy. And because energy affects the price of everything we do and everything, we buy, including food, don't forget those farmers are using diesel tractors all day long.

What happens? You drive up costs throughout the economy by driving up the price of energy. And this president has done that in spades. And where does inflation stand right now compared to last year? Are we at least starting to maybe move in the right direction? I mean, Virginia, that's a very good question. And we're moving in the right direction in the sense that inflation is slowing. But that doesn't mean prices are coming down. This is a slight of hand that the White House loves to use. They say, I think it was the White House press secretary said this the other day from the podium reading a statement. She said, inflation has come down and we are working to continue. We are working to make sure prices

continue coming down. But you started with saying inflation coming down and then went to saying prices coming down. That's not the same thing. Inflation is the rate of increase. It's like if you're driving along on the highway and you look at your speedometer and it says 60 miles an hour. And then you look out the window and you see a mile marker on the side of the road. That's your position. Well, if you slow down the car to 30 miles an hour, the mile markers will keep going up. You don't all of a sudden start going backwards because you reduced your speed. You'd have to go in reverse to do that.

So prices are still rising. They're just not rising quite as fast as they were before. Unfortunately, that means Americans are continuing. to become poorer. The Heritage Foundation's E.J. and Tony want to direct all of our listeners to check out his work at the Heritage Foundation website. That's heritage.org. E.J., thanks so much for your expertise. Virginia, thank you for having me. It is impeachment round number two in Congress tomorrow. Republicans are going to try again on

Tuesday to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejira Mayorkas. They tried to impeach him last Tuesday, but the vote failed. They were only one vote short. During last week's vote, Republican Representative Steve Scalise was out for cancer treatments, but he's back this week and has indicated that he will vote in favor of impeaching Mayorkas. So if everyone votes as they did last week, the Republicans will have exactly enough votes to successfully impeach Mayorkas. But even if the House does impeach Mayorkas, it's highly unlikely that the Senate will remove him since Democrats control the Senate. Still, the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Mark Green, says he considers it his duty to act to impeach Mayorkas, regardless of what the Senate does or does not choose to do. During an interview on Sunday with NBC's Meet the Press, Mayorkas acknowledged that there is a crisis at the border, but said the Department of Homeland Security does not bear responsibility for a broken system. Mayorkas says it is up to Congress to fix it.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson says President Biden can use executive action to address the crisis at the southern border and can also use executive action to restart construction on the border wall. Stay tuned. We're learning more today about a tragic shooting at a mega church in Texas that happened yesterday. The shooting took place at Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church in Houston. The shooter was originally believed to be a woman in her 30s, but today we have learned that the shooting. shooter has used male aliases in the past, and it appears that the shooter may have been a male who identified as a female, but this has not been confirmed yet. We do know that the shooter went by a male name in the past, but that now had female as their identity on their license.

The shooter reportedly walked into the church shortly before the 2 p.m. Spanish service and had a long rifle and was wearing a trench coat and a backpack. The shooter also had a five-year-old child with them. The child is believed to have been the son of the shooter. Two of the off-duty officers returned fire at the shooter, who was pronounced dead at the scene. Two other individuals were shot, a 57-year-old man, and the five-year-old child that remains in critical condition.

Olstein spoke during a news conference yesterday and thanked first responders for their quick action and said that he is thankful that more life was not lost, per the local news station, KPRC. We're going to stay strong, we're going to continue to move forward, and there are forces of evil, but the forces that are for us, the forces of God, are stronger than that.

So we're going to keep going strong and just, you know, doing what God's called us to do, lift people up and get hope to the world. The shooter's motive is still being investigated. Well, let's end this Monday show on a little bit of a happier note, at least happier if you are a Kansas City Chiefs fan. The Chiefs won the Super Bowl in overtime last night. The final score was 22 to 25. The game started off a little bit slow, but got more and more exciting as it went on. This was the Chief's third Super Bowl win in five years and their first ever back-to-back win since they won last year as well. This brings the Chiefs into a select dynasty of teams that have been talented enough to clinch Super Bowl trophies two years in a row. Other teams that have done so are the New England Patriots, the Denver Broncos, Dallas Cowboys, San Francisco 49ers who lost last night.

The Pittsburgh Steelers, the Miami Dolphins, and the Green Bay Packers are the only other teams that have won those back-to-back Super Bowl trophies. Chief's quarterback Patrick Mahomes was named Super Bowl 58 MVP. With that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Thanks for joining us here on the Daily Signal Top News. If you have not had the chance, make sure that you check out our morning show. Every weekday morning, we bring you interviews with experts, lawmakers, leading conservative voices. And tomorrow morning, I'm really honored to be sitting down with an expert on Iran. I talk with Simone Ledeen.

She's a senior fellow at the Strauss Center and formerly served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East. She's testifying before Congress later this week to talk about Iran, and we get into what her message to Congress is going to be and dive into the true threat that Iran and its militants actually pose to the U.S. Make sure to catch that conversation tomorrow morning. And if you have not done so, take a minute to subscribe to the Daily Signal podcast. Wherever you like to listen, we are across all podcast platforms, and we greatly appreciate you taking a minute to leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks again for being with us today.

We'll see you right back here tomorrow morning for my conversation with Simone Ladeen on Iran. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. Executive producers are Rob Luey and Kate Trinko. Producers are Virginia Allen and Samantha Asheras. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. To learn more, please visit DailySignal.com.