The Ricochet Podcast - Cookies and Underwear

Episode Date: May 10, 2013

This week, The Washington Examiner’s Byron York on Benghazi and immigration, Rob correctly ID’s a blintz and assails the lickspittle press, Peter orders some unmentionables online, and James keeps the whole show on track. In other word, a normal week. Music from this week’s show: Underwear by Pulp The Ricochet Podcast opening theme was composed and produced by James Lileks. Boxers or briefs... Source

Activate program. With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? This is nonsense. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Palo Alto, Peter Robinson, and Rob Long in L.A. I'm James Lilinks in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and our guest today from Washington, D.C. is Byron York.

He'll talk about the Benghazi hearings and the immigration bill. Will it make a difference? Well, that's why we have ourselves a podcast, isn't it? There you go again. Yes, indeed. This is the Ricochet Podcast and it's number 167. Like so many others that have gone before, it is brought to you by audible.com, the leading provider of spoken audio information and entertainment.

Listen to audiobooks wherever and whenever you want, because now it's got added WhisperSync. That's right. You can go to audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet and get a free audiobook and a 30-day trial. You know that, but we're going to repeat that later so you can copy down the info and get yours. So that's our only sponsor this week i believe uh oh no we're also and by tiny lies by james lilacs that's tiny lies by

james lilacs our own james lilacs uh it's a book it's a buck and a quarter it's a book you're publishing yourself it is a very very funny uh comp compendium survey of those wonderful little classified ads used to appear in the back of magazines, newspapers, and comic books in the old days, promising all sorts of elixirs and cures and magical potions, etc. Very, very funny. Our own James Lilacs published this. This is a perfect opportunity to cast a vote not only for Ricochet's own James Lilacs and his wonderful work, but also for disrupting the publishing industry in general, which is something every red-blooded conservative should be in favor of. As Ricochet disrupts big media, so James Lilacs disrupts big publishing. And speaking of disrupting things, there's Peter Robinson, the most,

you know, with his temperament, you never know what's going to come next, whether or not it's a pat on the back or a punch in the jaw. Peter, with trepidation, we ask, how are you doing today, man? I don't know, really, to tell you that. First of all, I'm not I'm not trying to disrupt the publishing industry. I'm trying to hit a deadline for a major New York publisher. So thank you very much, Rob. I take I disagree with that. And furthermore, I'm a little testy because I did everything our producer told me to do and my Skype still didn't work for the first five minutes of this program.

And I know, I know I can't see you, but I know you're both just rolling your eyes and shaking your head. I'm telling you, I hit all the right buttons and adjusted all the, okay. This technology doesn't work just for you. Exactly. How did you know? I'm rolling my eyes and shaking my head because I'm having a seizure, but I understand your dissatisfaction with the Skype technology. It's free, yes, but Lord Almighty, the things we have to go through. However, you notice that you're on deadline for major book publisher la-dee-da.

I'm off to play the grand piano, Martin. No scones for me. This book of which you speak – now, this, of course, is the long-awaited Cold War history. And which one of the major New York publishers is publishing it? HarperCollins. Well, grand for you. So when you – have you been major New York publishers is publishing it? HarperCollins. Well, grand for you. So have you been to New York? Have you been fetid, as they say, taken to some place,

plied with wine, drink, meals, meats, the rest of it? I had a couple of experiences of that during the publishing heyday before the industry started to implode, and it was grand fun. I think every author lives for that moment where he's in New York and he's being given liquor and meat products by his publisher and he feels like he's made it, like he's arrived. Have you had that feeling yet? I got sort of a so-so lunch when I was discussing this book proposal with the editor. But, oh, this would be about 18 months ago, maybe two years ago.

A so-so lunch, really? A so-so lunch. That's all I got. That's right. It was a so-so lunch. And then I sent my editor a note saying, hey, by the way, I'll be in town with my buddy Rob Long. And I think Rob probably has another book or two in him. Twin doors opened. Oh, remember that lunch, Rob? That was really pretty lavish. That was a club sandwich at the Yale Club, I think.

Well, by comparison with what I got, the potato. Papaya King or something? The blints on the street from the vendor, yes Well, by comparison with what I got, the potato... The blintz on the street from the vendor, yes, it was pretty fancy. I love that. That's Peter. Such a goy. That's your idea of street food. A blintz on the street. A blintz.

Who says blintz is on the street? They sell them on the street. Those are those potato pancake things. No, is that a blini? What is that? That's a blini. A blintz is like a little kind of things. No, is that a blini? What is that? Nah, that's a blini. A blintz is like a little, kind of a rolled up, almost like a cannoli, but it's soft. That blintz is pretty good. If it's sold on the street, it's generally it. You should be so lucky

to have a blintz on the street. Alright, what do you put on a blintz? There's an object on which you put sour cream. You can fill a blintz with a fruit thing. You can fill a blintz with a fruit thing. You can fill a blintz with a thing. What are we?

We're three. James. You're talking about this, but we could get. He thinks he's on with John Podhoretz again. Step in. I know. You leave that for the Popular Boys show. I remember the one great publishing lunch that I had, and also

was followed by a publishing dinner, made me realize they do absolutely no work in New York publishing, and that's why they're in such trouble. I mean, you'd show up at 10 o'clock, you'd walk around, you'd talk, you'd schmooze, you'd go out at 11, 11.30, you'd hit the place, and you'd be there for two and a half hours. And then you would roll back to the office, everybody

half in the bag, Don Draper style, Mad Men era, Redux in 1993. And then they would roll back to the office, everybody half in the bag, Don Draper style, Mad Men era, Redux in 1993. And then they would look at manuscripts. And I don't mean read them. They just kind of look at them. They'd have a pile of them and they'd look at them and then they'd go home. I don't know where the hell these people did actual work as we understand it. But it was amusing.

We had no blinis on the street, although that is the title, I believe, of my next memoir. Rob, would you like to contribute a forward to it? What do you put in a blini on the street? It's almost lyric. It's almost lyrical. It scans. It scans. It does.

Well, gentlemen, there's been some news this week. Once again, the eternal hopes of the right that the truth will finally be seen and known and the country will turn. What do you think? The Benghazi hearings, have they galvanized public opinion into a demand for accountability or shrugged shoulders en masse business as usual? Let's go alphabetically to Rob Long. Well, you know, I mean, it was really interesting stuff happening the past couple of days. One was, of course, that you have this horrific event, a crime in Cleveland, this kidnapping, these three girls kidnapped for 10 years. And then they're, you know, incredibly heartbreaking and moving return and all sorts of things going on there.

And then wall-to-wall coverage on CNN of, I guess, of the aftermath of that. I wasn't really sure what they were covering because there wasn't that much news after that. But it was a local crime story that the big media decided to cover instead of the Benghazi hearings, which were going on in D.C. And, of course, we remember about a week ago, two weeks ago, our own Molly Hemingway asked a Washington Post reporter why she wasn't covering the Kermit Gosnell trial in Philadelphia, another serial killer trial or another great, incredibly lurid, horrible crime. And the reply was, well, I don't really cover local crime stories. So apparently some local crime stories are more interesting than others.

I guess it depends on what the other story is you don't want to be covering at the time. And if they don't want to cover Benghazi, the Benghazi hearings, I don't see how it's working. It matters if the victim can get out of the chop shop. Then it becomes worthy of a story. I think it's more like I don't want to show a bunch of incredibly incredibly credible dignified career diplomats uh speak quietly and truthfully about what happened uh in uh libya last autumn and i don't want to i i but we covering that will be bad for our side i mean if ever if the past three months have shown anything, they have shown just how ham-fistedly partisan most of the media are and how obviously partisan they are. The coverage of Benghazi pre-election and the coverage of Benghazi now, what we know now, what we were told then, I mean it's really – it's absolutely stunning.

It's absolutely stunning. What I worry of course is that we on our side will become so – or me I should say – become so agitated about the coverage and how the coverage was covered and how the coverage was skewed and all that stuff that we'll forget that in fact this has been the most amazingly amazing piece of foreign policy incompetence all the way to the top from the from the from big desk at the oval office to the big desk at foggy bottom that it's revelry oh it's rock obama and and hillary clinton should cover themselves in abject shame and that if if if we lived in if it was fair to both sides, this would be Barack Obama's Iran-Contra moment at the very least. But instead it's being whitewashed by a lick-spittle press. Peter, do you agree? I want to ask Rob what we learned yesterday.

I'm not skeptical. I just missed the news yesterday. What did we – What, Benghazi? What new came out about Benghazi? I don't think – I'm not sure. I'm sure that a lot of these facts I think we are – our side already thought were true. I think we learned that there was a – that there is credible evidence.

In fact, more than credible evidence. It's almost incontrovertible that there was a cover-up, that there was a cover-up of both of the investigation afterwards and a cover-up of the reasons at the time that the cover-up went to the very, very top. That's important stuff. So with Nixon, he was trying to get himself reelected. With Reagan, the Iran-Contra, he was trying to help the Contras. I mean – You're right. But what's the motivation?

What's the – is there a smoking gun? Do we even know what the administration was trying to do? That's the question. They were just stumbling and fumbling. It was incompetence, wasn't it? Or no? It's two things. There was incompetence before the event, clearly.

And then afterwards there was a political lie. And the lie was? The lie was this was a spontaneous demonstration and it wasn't uh it was not al-qaeda in the maghreb it was not al-qaeda in north africa because because we because because we killed bin laden because because uh we because we're safer now because that there's no such thing as al-qaeda because Obama killed bin Laden because that was the premise of their foreign policy plank in the campaign. And they didn't want – on the anniversary of September 11th, they didn't want to look like they were flat-footed. They didn't want to raise the mission accomplished banner. So what I don't get is if you respond with a muscular fashion to something like Benghazi and you send in the guys, even if there's a cock up once they get there and people die, the American people are generally going to look at what you did and say, well, you tried. That was an aggressive response.

That's what we want when our embassy is attacked and our people are killed. The downside to that, not doing anything and doing what they did seems to indicate that there's a desert. The desert one still haunts them, that it floats in the back of their mind like a specter that would sink them, that all of a sudden you'd be revealed as Carter-esque if you sent in the helicopters and they crashed. I mean why not respond? That's what I can't figure out. What would have been the downside exactly politically at that point in the election to responding? Yeah, I mean I don't know. Whatever Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Whatever it is, probably, I don't know.

Who knows? I mean, I don't think you can get, I don't think you'll ever know the reason for that. I suspect, I mean, if I was speculating, which I think is a mistake to do, but I'll just do it anyway. It was probably a huge excess of caution about doing anything in the middle of a very, very, very what they perceive to be, especially around then, tight presidential race.

Right. And they obviously didn't know how much they'd be covered for by the the compliant supine press. I mean, the very fact that when Mitt Romney started raising questions about what they'd said that did that, everybody piled on about how dare you? How dare you, how dare you, how dare you. Some folks in the chat, specifically Franco, are noting that it's a pleasure to them to see Rob. Oh, stop. I knew that was going to happen. Finally whine about the media. Well, look, I mean, here's the thing is we've got to pick and choose, right? I mean, you're right. I mean, this is so obvious. It's actually fun.

And it has – well, not fun. It has larger implications. And even they are hanging their heads a little bit in shame. It's much easier. The phrase you used was this story has been and I quote Rob Long, who if James or I had said this a month or two or three ago, Rob would have attacked us and said, you're whining again. Stop whining about the press and stand up straight and march on. And Rob said this story has been, quote, whitewashed by a lick spittle press. Yes, well, I've used them. Welcome. Welcome. I have. Excuse me. A Google search will will reveal that I have used the phrase lick spittle press since the very beginning of Ricochet.

It's not new. I mean – Here's what I mean. Here's what I – okay. Here's what I mean. I mean that when we say, oh, our candidates can't win because the NBC News doesn't report. When we whine about our candidates, that's not good. When we complain about big things like this, I feel like we're on more solid ground. We're not saying Mitt Romney never

got a chance. He never got his memes out or they set the narrative or something that all these campaign guys complain about, that Brian Williams isn't fair to their dude. That to me is, I mean, maybe it's a small distinction for everybody else, but for me, it's a big distinction. Well, has the media then been covering subconsciously or overtly because they all desperately pine for the glory days to come of a Hillary Clinton presidency? The way this is unfolding does not help her at all, I think. But why then are they, why have they been the lickers of spittle, as though you suggest?

Is it because there's an active, is it because they want to or is it just because something in the back of their mind says, this isn't helpful to our side. Our side, of course, being truth and justice and objective truth and justice, not the leftist agenda. Well, I don't, you know, I actually feel like, I'm not sure it's the whole leftist agenda

that they like so much. I think they're partisan Democrats. Yeah. I tend to agree. They like the Chicago Bulls or they like the boston red sox and that's that um i i'm i i i'm not sure i i'm not sure that i mean if they're trying to do that i think that's kind of silly because these things don't really connect i mean this is now four years away so i think it's kind of crazy to even think that this matters ultimately um if anything right now um i think it's a race to see who's going to go first um who's going to report this stuff first that i have forgotten her

name there's that cbs news reporter who's been doing that yes you've been doing that great reporting on on bedgazi who now of course is getting flack from her bosses about it. She's going to be fired just like the State Department guy whose name also I forget. I should probably have written these things down before I got on the air. So who knows? I mean maybe – I suspect it's more like – I suspect this is a very good chance,

a very good opportunity and a wonderful, wonderful sort of test run for us to see and our side to see. Can we get a fairly complicated story and a fairly complicated timeline of events out and inform the American people without relying on Brian Williams to do it? Can we do that? Do we have those tools? Some combination, unholy combination of Fox News or Ricochet or Twitter or Facebook or something. Do we have – do we on our side have enough coverage right now to make that story known? I don't know. Repeat that question to Byron the moment he joins us, will you, Rob?

That's a fascinating question. It is. And we're up against the juggernaut of the White House press corps and the White House itself, which on its Tumblr yesterday, the official White House Tumblr, posted a picture of the president of the United States in a Three Stooges Moe-style bowl haircut, just as a larf. Because they're very serious people. And they're dedicated to our welfare.

Dedicated to informing us about the things that are going on in Washington, which may or may not relate to our welfare, but are certainly necessary to know, is Brian York. That's right. Chief Political Correspondent for the Washington Examiner, Byron York is the Fox News contributor, author of The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. You can follow him at Twitter and find out all the stuff that he says, which is invaluable to finding out about things like Benghazi, at Byron York.

So we welcome him back to the podcast. We've got to ask you, tell us yesterday, the basic upshot, what happened in the hearings and what do we do now first of all there is a lot of action going on if you hear any noise behind me it's the Senate Judiciary Committee which is now considering a critical amendment to the immigration bill so there's just a whole lot going on you know I think what we found out in the Ghazi yesterday the yesterday, which first of all, I have to say Republicans on the committee were extremely disciplined. They did an excellent job of asking questions that actually brought forth new information. They did a minimum of grandstanding and just hogging things, as lawmakers sometimes do. And as a result, they got some actual new information,

much very big contrast to what happened in the Senate when they had Hillary Clinton testify, and just a lot of them just kind of gassed on for quite a while. I sent a note to somebody in the Senate yesterday and said, boy, these House guys are doing a much better job than the Senate did. And all they said was, well, it shows the wisdom of the founders creating two houses of congress uh... anyway basically what we learned was

a couple of things really struck me or that uh... one we the question of what could have been done militarily to help americans under attack in libya at the time is still very open we need to know a lot more about what decision-making was like, what resources, military resources, what planes, what other options were nearby, and were they really as impossible as the Obama administration says they were. That's a huge question. I think it's probably the biggest single question, because even more important than finding out about the cover-up afterwards is finding out, could something have been done to save American lives at the time? And then we learned something extraordinary. We learned that when Representative Jason Chaffetz,

Utah Republican, went to Libya to investigate this, that the number one American diplomat there, Mr. Hicks, who had succeeded Ambassador Stevens, who was killed in the raid, he was ordered not to talk to Chaffetz. And we had a really interesting little bit of interplay in which a representative asked this guy, this diplomat, said, well, you've entertained hundreds of congressmen who are visiting in delegations over the years in various countries, haven't you? Yes.

Has the State Department ever ordered you not to talk to one of those? And he said no, not until a Benghazi investigator came. And then the other thing was we found out that this same diplomat had been contacted by Cheryl Mills, who was Secretary Clinton's legal counsel in the State Department and has been a legal fixer for the Clintons for years and years. She was one of the main impeachment lawyers in the White House back in 1999. We learned that she was involved in this process, perhaps trying to make sure that these guys did not speak. So I think that really, really contributed new information about the possibility of a cover-up. Hey, Byron, Peter here. Rob made the point a moment ago before you came on that the press

yesterday was saturation coverage for that grisly, horrible story in Cleveland of the three women who'd been kidnapped and held prisoner for 10 years. I have to say, I was holed up in the library nearly all day yesterday, but my one break took place on the elliptical machine at the gym. And sure enough, on every single one of the televisions in the gym here in California, they were showing that Cleveland story, not the Benghazi hearings. Do you have the feeling that at least in Washington, Benghazi is big news? Is it just the half-dozen conservatives who care about this, you and those of us on this podcast who are paying attention?

Well, I think there's a couple of things going on. I think Benghazi is being taken more seriously now. I think the information that we've gotten, especially about the State Department and White House actually interfering and creating these talking points that Susan Rice said, you know, attributing the violence to this video that had been made, and the fact that the officials, the administration knew from the get-go that it was a terrorist attack. They knew that even that we learned yesterday that Ambassador Stevens, not sure if he was The administration knew from the get-go that it was a terrorist attack.

They knew that even that we learned yesterday that Ambassador Stevens, not sure if he was alive or not at the time, was taken to a hospital controlled by Ansar al-Sharia. So we knew from the very beginning that it was a terrorist act, and this whole thing about the video was just a complete cover. Now, still a lot of coverage here in Washington yesterday was, well, we've learned new details, maybe a little about more incompetence, but we haven't learned anything about a smoking gun or a cover-up or any sort of misdeeds on the part of the administration. Well, I will tell you, we don't know that. There's a lot of questions left, and I would certainly not absolve the administration of anything on the basis of what we know that. There's a lot of questions left, and I would certainly not absolve the administration of anything on the basis of what we know now. I would not convict them yet, but I wouldn't absolve them. As far as the public as a whole is concerned, I used to be a television producer, and I was thinking yesterday, you had Benghazi hearings, you had the Cleveland story,

and you also had, I think, a verdict in the Jody Arias trial. And that's a very tough day for a television, for a cable television news producer. And the hearings went on all day. I think that all of the networks owed it to their listeners, to their viewers, to see the Hicks testimony. It was absolutely riveting, very somber, incredibly interesting, his account of what had happened that night. I think every network should have shown that. I think perhaps Fox was the only one that actually did. As far as the rest of the hearing is concerned,

if the woman had actually come out and spoken in Ohio, I might have cut away to her. I'm sorry, I probably would have. And I certainly would have covered the Arias verdict as well. So there was a lot of news. Maybe it wasn't all as important, equally important in the long run, but it was a lot of news yesterday. So, hey, Byron, it's Rob along. How are you? Hey, Rob.

So do you think this, I mean, what you just laid out was a question about the timeline. Hey, Rob. sort of, you know, for better or for worse, described as conservative media. Do you think that we have the resources and the reach to tell that story ourselves and get that story out? Or do you think we're going to be sitting here nine months from now wondering why no one is, again, why no one is as outraged by Benghazi as we are? No, conservative media does not have the reach to do that. They cannot sort of inject this into the the wider news conversation on their own the key here though is republicans in the house uh... they control the house they have subpoena power

and they can continue to investigate all of this is happening because republicans in the house demanded the information it wasn't because any reporters were particular some of whom worked very hard on it, were particularly fabulous. It's because the House guys got this stuff and then they began to give it to some reporters and then they featured it yesterday in a hearing. It's the House that's moving this and they can continue to move it. And if the story merits, it will eventually have to be considered in the larger press. But it's not a conservative media thing. It wouldn't be happening unless you had one House of Congress controlled by Republicans.

So if you're sitting in there— By the way, you're hearing Chuck Schumer droning on behind me. I knew there was some white noise going on there. He may say something important, but it hasn't happened yet. We used to call that – I'll tell you, when we film, we always have to get what we call room tone, which is the sound the room makes when no one's making any noise. That's what I always think that Chuck Schumer – he's just room tone. The drone of Chuck Schumer.

The drone, right, just the noise it makes. So let me ask you, just if you could put yourself in the position of the president right now, how nervous do you think he is? How nervous should he be? Well, I do think that there's been too much emphasis on the role of Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state at this time, and not enough emphasis on the role of the president. And I will tell you that, for me, you're right. There are three areas of questioning here.

One is, did the administration do enough in light of the warnings that security was problematic in Libya? Did they do enough in the months prior to the attack? Two, what did they do when the attack was underway? And three, did they cover it up afterwards? That key part in the middle is after the attack has begun, it's like seven hours later, there's a second attack that kills two of the four who died. What did the administration do? And that's a military question, and that's a presidential question. Hillary Clinton was not the commander-in-chief at the time. Barack Obama was. And we need to know precisely what the

president and what everybody in the Defense Department did here, how seriously they weighed, what they could have done, and whether the situation was really as impossible as they have said in the past. And you're right, that is a completely a presidential question, and Obama should have to answer that. Byron, Peter here once again. Could I just try an idea out on you? This is sort of a larger picture idea, which means there's a lot of vagueness, and I'm thinking a lot. So just, if I'm wrong, just say so. But here's the way things have begun to look to me out here in California. Barack Obama is sworn in in late January. The press is with him. He's won an election by a large margin. He's carried

the Senate. The House of Representatives is on the defensive. And he just seems once again in his second term an utterly dominant figure. Here we are three months and a week or so later. He lost in public opinion on the sequester. He lost on gun control legislation. Chuck Schumer may be droning on and on and on right now about the new immigration bill, but it seems to me, I believe, you confirm this, or correct me if I'm wrong, it seems to be the case that that legislation in the Senate is moving farther to the right during the hearings and markups, and it'll move farther to the right still if it even has a chance of passing the House. Now the administration is on the defensive because it just looks as though Barack Obama and furthermore, I have friends here who are in the health insurance business and they say just you wait until you see how many Americans find their premiums rising next autumn because of Obamacare. If I'm hearing that, both political parties, this guy is three months and a week after dominating the nation as he's sworn into a second term. He's on the defensive and frankly in some trouble.

Am I losing my mind? Is this wishful thinking? No, I don't think you're wrong at all about that. Some details I would quibble with. But this is the incredible shrinking agenda. Remember that after the president was reelected, pretty decisively, we heard about what's the agenda. The agenda is dealing with fiscal issues.

The agenda is immigration reform. And after Newtown, the agenda was gun control. Well, the gun control thing has just gone nowhere. I mean, the president wanted an assault weapons ban, went nowhere. The president has wanted a ban on high-capacity magazines, went nowhere. And they didn't even get background checks, although they're going to try again. So the gun controlling went absolutely nowhere. The president did succeed and roll back the very top edge of the Bush tax cuts,

although you could probably make an argument that uh... bush is the ultimate winner because democrats essentially accepted fast vast majority of the bush tax cuts and they are now permanent uh... but then again the president lost i think rather significantly in the uh... in the sequestration fight in which he engaged in all sorts of scare tactics uh... that that even the press now recognizes were scare tactics. Now we have immigration. You know, I don't know how it's going to turn out.

I don't think the bill is actually going to go right in the committee. You have to remember the Senate Judiciary Committee is controlled by Democrats. There are ten Democrats on the committee, and there are eight Republicans. You have to remember two of the Republicans are members of the gang of eight so uh... i think moves to toughen the bill will fail in the committee unless democrats decide that they need to make some strategic concession here and there uh... uh... the action in uh... on uh... immigration is increasingly moved to the and it's a question is really are we going to get a quote comprehensive bills

big omnibus bills or are we going to get a series of smaller uh bills and whether that would even count as an obama victory last thing is obama has talked about is his um uh agenda is uh some sort of climate control uh legislation and given the failure of cap and trade in 2009, and if anything, you know, the globe has not warmed in the succeeding years, I think that'd be very, very difficult to do anything. So you're right, it's the incredible shrinking agenda. Byron, James Lallix here in Minneapolis. Some say that the agenda for the first two years was simply to make sure that the House flipped to the Democrats in 2014, and after which he could rule as he pleased. Is there some other arrow in the quiver you can see?

I think that's a complete fantasy. That is a total fantasy, the idea. I mean, something could happen that's really big that changes everything. I'm not suggesting there couldn't be some big news thing that really changes our calculation. The idea that the president is going to pick up a lot of seats to control the House and become all-powerful in the last two years of an eight-year presidency is, I think, historically extremely unlikely, extremely unlikely. And I don't think they even have a good chance of picking up the House. Of course, Republicans have a decent chance of picking up the Senate if they were able to actually find good candidates which they haven't been able to do in the past so uh but i think the idea that obama is somehow going to win the house keep the senate

and have unified government and lots of uh activist achievements in his last two years is nuts i don't know about that enough tornadoes and people might think we need Democrats to save us from additional climate disruption with a five-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax. Rob, you had something. Well, yeah, I think that's a really good idea. So right behind you, Byron, there's an immigration debate going on. And I think, I mean, it's Schumer, right? Is he still talking?

No, actually, Jeff Sessions is talking now. I'm going to warn you guys that there is a kind of a very key amendment that Charles Grassley has offered. I was about to ask you about that. Very early in the process here. It's less than two hours into the hearing, and this is an amendment that would require that border security actually be in place for six months before applications for legalization are taken. This would fix the

problem that so many conservatives have seen in this bill, which it is legalization first, security afterwards, and there's no guarantee of the security. But the legalization will be a fact. Now, I think it's just going to be very interesting to see. Grassley's amendment will fail. There's no doubt about it. I think it'll have the 10 Democrats that I mentioned voting against it. And I'll be very curious to see if any Republicans vote against it.

So I'm looking at this vote kind of strategically. I think the outcome is preordained because it would essentially kill the bill by taking away the legalization first provision. Well, so do you think that's a way to frame the debate going forward, that I'm in favor of citizenship, I'm in favor of citizenship on paper a path to all that stuff but after the grassley amendment in six months you know what i was i mean there's other members who will do there's other amendments will cover this as well but the polls have shown consistently right at uh... americans uh... when they're asked what should be done about the eleven or maybe twelve million uh... immigrants who are in the country

illegally right now, what should be done? Most of them favor, I mean, large majorities favor an ultimate path, at least to legalization. They're divided on citizenship, but it's certainly a path to legalization for those people only after. I mean, the big provision is, though, only after border security measures are in place, not promised, not thought about,

but actually in place. So, I mean, I think that's where the public is now, but that's not where this bill is. But I think in the public, we've seen a fair amount of generosity as far as the American people are concerned. They just want security to stop future waves of immigration, but the ones who are here now, they're not. They don't want to deport them. They don't want to put them in jail. They just want to deal with them after having foreclosed the possibility of another big wave in the future. Right. So, do you think this is, I mean, obviously this amendment's going to fail, but do you think it's going to be one of the things that fails but catches fire, becomes sort of a template to look at the rest of it? Or do you think it's going to

fail and then kind of go back into the mush? No, it's the key to opposition to the bill. I mean, there are really three parts of opposition, three camps of opposition to this bill. They overlap. One is the people who don't like its border security measures because they have no teeth. Two, the people who are worried about the economic effects, feeling that legalizing current illegal immigrants and admitting lots of new unskilled legal immigrants would hurt low-skilled American workers. And there are three, the people who have a problem with what you might call the moral hazard of rewarding people with legalization or citizenship who have come here illegally in the past. This would do a lot to fix the objections of the first and the third camp.

You still there, guys? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, sorry. I think I had someone in the house pick up the phone. No, no worries. Oh. No, I thought that was Chuck Schumer trying to grab your microphone, Byron.

Actually, no. No. Actually, I'm watching this on the Internet. I'm watching the hearing on the Internet. I thought it was him. I advised everyone to do it. Byron, Peter here. Could I ask a little bit of the politics of immigration?

We know that in the House of Representatives, as distinct from the Senate, senators, of course, are elected by entire states. Some Republican senators have large Hispanic populations. Marco Rubio, of course, comes from Florida. In the House, we know that there's a tiny number of Republican members who come from districts in which Hispanics represent an important proportion of the voters, a tiny number. And so the House is going to be less Texas or Ohio, you name it, I could simply say, now, wait a moment. We went through this in 1986. President Reagan, our great hero, signed an amnesty, but also a law that would have gotten control of the borders. And since 1986,

the federal government has failed to do that. When we finally have control of the borders, that's when I will start talking about a path to legalization and citizenship and not before, in other words, the Grassley position. And that's that. I mean, that would seem to me the position toward which Republicans in the House gravitate quickly and easily and make a politically tenable stand for them. In the Senate, you've got Marco Rubio being chewed up by Republican conservative talk radio, while Ted Cruz, who's taking a much stronger stand on immigration, is becoming among on talk radio. And so this is creating an opening for Cruz. He's getting publicity

and becoming. So it just seems to me that among Republicans in the Senate, there's Marco Rubio may be saying to himself already, what did I get myself into? And in the House, the Republicans saying, are you crazy? You're going to try to move this through our chamber? It seems to me that this thing won't go anywhere. But maybe I'm wrong. I'm in California.

Well, the wild card in your analysis that you didn't talk about is the sense of panic that Republicans felt after last year's elections. And the question is, has that sense of panic subsided to some degree in which they can actually consider this issue rationally, or are they still all worked up about it? I cannot tell you how many Republicans have said that, as far as immigration reform is concerned, it's something they need to get behind them. We need to do this and get this behind us, as if passing a bill this big, which invites lots of litigation, changes, controversy for years in which Republicans will be portrayed as the villains, as if passing this legislation would somehow get it behind them. That's what they say. It's as if passing Obamacare got the issue behind the administration. administration will know it did it it's still a big thing but there is that sense of republican panic there's also this belief

among many republicans that this is a gateway issue for appealing to hispanics that it will not guarantee hispanic votes in the future but not passing it would guarantee that hispanic voters won't just will not even pay attention to republicans so they have this Republicans. So there is this political factor that Republicans are considering here. And you have to remember, Democrats want it because they believe that it will increase the number of Democrat voters in the future.

I just think that's pretty obvious. So there's a lot of political calculations going on. Your analysis was admirably substance-based, but there's a lot more going on here. It doesn't happen that often, by the way, Peter, so we should. Thank you. Thank you. That's kind of new. I don't think we should be encouraging that. Byron, just for the record, you're my friend at least, aren't you? I believe I am to be your friend, yes. Thank you.

Hey, Byron, before we go, can I ask you one... You need one on this podcast, right? I do. Yes. Can I ask you two questions, Byron, before we go? One question is, are you going to be on the cruise? Which cruise? The one... Ted Cruz, the bully of the Senate.

Ted Cruz. No, I do not believe that I will be on the Cruz. I've been traveling an enormous amount, and I'm hoping actually to stay in Washington for a while. That makes – well, that's a rare thing for someone to say, actually. You don't often hear people say that who aren't elected. No gorgeous fjords for me. Yes, I want to stay in my little house here inside the Beltway. Stop, stop, stop.

I just have to savor this moment. When Rob and James say to each other, are you going to be on the cruise? They both know what cruise they're talking about. I know, it's horrible. Byron operates at such a transcendent level of cruisedom. True, true. So many cruises, so many requests that he says, what cruise? Which one?

Which one, losers? Put the two of you to shame. All right. I who go on no cruises enjoyed it. Then I have one more question for you. And it's about it's about your fellow reporters. And Jim Garrity wrote today or maybe yesterday that there's a kind of a sense that there's the conservative press and they're off on one side and there's the regular press. Do you feel that way when you're covering stories? You're walking the halls or you're walking through Congress or you're just doing your job. Do you feel like there's a conservative? There's a restated, I feel there's a conservative press and a liberal press. Yeah. Or among your colleagues in the journalist profession, among colleagues who write and report the news, do you feel like there are two camps

and they know which camps you're in? Yeah, I think so. I think, look, I mean, the conservative press is the conservative press. We know that. But a lot of what's called the mainstream press is very liberal. I mean, the liberal press is there too,

and they're kind of out in the open. But it seems obvious to me that a lot of people, not all, who write for mainstream outlets are pretty liberal, and you can sometimes see that in their coverage. That's just a fact. I mean, look at all this stuff about Benghazi yesterday, where before the hearing was over, they were absolutely rushing to say evidence of some incompetence but nothing more. No scandal here. Nothing here.

Let's move on. So my sense is that just normal curiosity, if you watch that hearing with a normal sense of curiosity, you'd have a lot more questions about what went on. Some reporters do not. Does it bug you? Does it bug me? No, it's just the way life is. I have to tell you that – I mean I would – I guess it would bug me if I felt that I was being stifled or I didn't have a voice. I think we have to remember that, you know, go back 35 years, and every major or middle-sized city has three TV stations.

All the news is ABC, NBC, CBS. And they have a newspaper, which reprints a lot of New York Times stories, and they have the network newscast which illustrates New York Times stories. And that was it. That was it. And today we just have this incredible information explosion, which is just great that you can see not only other news outlets, there's the internet, there's talk radio, and there's cable TV. But you can actually look at all the original stuff if you so desire. I'm watching the Senate Judiciary Committee on

the internet. If I want to read any of the amendments that have been offered to this bill, I can. If I want to read any sort of supporting information, I can. It's all available to me now. So, I mean, this is an incredibly better situation than it was in years past. So I don't, you know, really kvetch too much about the bias part. It is great. But on the other hand, out of that small, constrained media environment you described before came the election of Ronald Reagan twice. And out of this explosion of information we have now came the election of Barack Obama twice. Well, more problematic, I think, for Republicans was the election of George W. Bush. What can you say?

Well, he was indeed a great American, and when it comes to great Americans, there are two of them that we think of. One, of course, is Byron York. We thank you for being with us. The other, Byron, I don't know if you've heard this, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies has an award every year, the Lewis E. Martin Great American Award. And on Tuesday night, they delivered it to a U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice. Day before Benghazi hearings, great American Susan Rice. Well, everybody gets a trophy. That's the way it works these days.

Thanks so much. We'll talk to you again. Thank you. Thank you. You know, of course, we were talking before about the cruise. We didn't get to Ted Cruz, but the cruises that Rob was mentioning, Peter was so ably denying. One of the reasons that the cruise industry got its start was because of prohibition.

People wanted to go outside the legal limit and have themselves a drink. And that led to ships and the ships became more ornate, and the ships went to different places. And this entire industry, which is now huge and multibillion and has millions of passengers a year, came about because of the Volstead Act, which I'm sad to say came about because of a Minnesotan. So when you want to talk about prohibition in Minnesota,

you have to go to Volstead, and you have to go, of course, to another Minnesotan, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Now, this month, I believe we're having the latest iteration of the Gatsby movie. And you may say to yourself, you know, I read Gatsby an awful long time ago. I'm probably maybe going to go see the movie. But the question is, I almost would rather hear somebody talk about it than read it again because I remember it from high school. Do I need to read it again? Well, you got two options there. One, you can either listen to somebody read it for you and you can do that at audible.com where there is a whole raft of different versions of Gatsby. That's right.

There's one read by Anthony Held. There's one read by Humphrey Bauer. There's one read by Jake, what? I'm sorry, Tim Robbins, Jake Gyllenhaal. Yeah. Everybody's had a crack at reading Gatsby and you can find it at audible.com for free. Or if you just want to bone up into what it means, there's actually a Radio 360, which is a radio show done by Kurt Anderson, a name you may recall, of course, newspaper magazine editor, came up with Spy. And Studio 360 is a fairly interesting show that he does, and he discusses Gatsby with some other people about what it means.

So all of these things are available for you to get absolutely gratis and what you have to do is go to – oh, you've heard it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Grant. He's a smart fellow. You can find him on Twitter too. So what you do is you go to audiblepodcast.com, one word, audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet. Go there right now. Well, no, not now. One word, audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet. Go there right now.

Well, no, not now. You want to listen to this. But you will be able to pick up your free Audible book. You will be able to sign up for a free 30-day trial. And you will experiment with that thing called WhisperSync, which tells all of your devices, wherever they may be, your pocket, your iPad, your camera, tells them where you are in the book and picks up where you left off.

It's quite astonishing. We advise you to do this to thank them for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, gentlemen, that, uh, but you know, that man is a reporter. There, there's, there's, there's punditries and there's reportering and you need the reportering. The guy's beaming away. And he's like, you have a dashing figure, you know, you see him walking around and he kind of looks like he doesn't really look like a reporter.

He's almost too elegant. But he's exactly one of my – he is one of my favorite reporters because, first of all, he knows the stuff, and he does the reporting, and he knows people. But he also kind of – it's a very calm, logical, laid-out demeanor. It helps that he's from the South. Those people always seem smarter. It does help that he's from the South. Why is that? They don't seem emotional about the thing they're saying.

They seem cool about it. And that to me is reassuring. You feel like you're getting the facts. But could I just actually – I mean while we're on the line here and we're talking about Studio 360, could I also say just – I have found a very short podcast called The Memory Palace that is fantastic. And it's a guy. They're about 20 minutes.

It's just little historical snippets, tidbits, little stories from history. Almost – I mean American history almost always. A lot of them sort of centering on late 19th century, early 20th century stuff. Really great. Really great. And I think it's kind of the thing that Ricochet listeners would really like. And I think actually specifically James Lilacs would like because it is of a piece kind of – it's thematically with – it's thematic with some of your earlier work, James, but also thematic with some of your more current work including Tiny Lies by James Lilacs which is available for a dollar a quarter. Go to lilacs.com, L-I-L-E-K-S.com.

Sponsor of the podcast, host of the podcast, but also a wonderful writer and collector and exhibitor and curator of oddities and amusements and artifacts from the past. Tiny Lies is a collection of those little, tiny little classified ads, illustrated classified ads. You should be here in the back of comic books and magazines and newspapers promising all sorts of cures and fixes for all sorts of ills and ailments. It's great. It's wonderful. Ladies and gentlemen, despite what Peter Robinson says, we should be disrupting the large media businesses, all of them for our side. That's what we should do. That's why we need the Koch brothers to buy LA Times. That's why we need all these things to happen because we need to have a bigger web. That, ladies and gentlemen, that was a segue.

Rob pulled off an exquisite segue. I didn't really mean to. Yeah, but you... See, that's the thing. It has to come naturally. If you force it, then everybody can tell. Everybody amuses themselves in seeing how you're grinding the gears to get to the point.

But that was downright... It just happened. It just happened. Well, when we disrupt these things, when we find ourselves with all these disruptive new models in our hands, yet, as we noted, Peter's going to make publishing. Rob, you are not selling your television show on the internet. You're going straight to the Nance.

I'm trying to go – That's because we're old. That's trying to go – But, you know, that thing, that's still where the money is. That's right. Just – we should all be clear. People have been talking about how the web is this, the web is that. It's a great place to do a lot of things.

It's a great place to reach people. It's not necessarily a great place to run a business as Ricochet is a perfect example. We try, we try, we try, and we try a bunch of different things. We've got Ricochet 2.0 coming out. We're working very hard on it, and we think it's going to be great and it's going to be a little different but it's going to be more of the good stuff and a slightly more focused product on the front page and we hope that's going to be terrific. But we're all trying to do the same thing, which is to get the sustainable business going. We're not – if you go to large sites like Huffington Post or Daily Caller or whatever it is you go to. I like the Daily Caller.

There's a lot of celebrity stuff on there. There's a lot of stuff you have to do because you need eyeballs. You need to sell advertising. And we don't want to do that. This isn't our model. Our model is conversation and interaction and community. And we think this will work. And it seems to be working slowly.

But it seems to be working., but it seems to be working. But we're all trying to do the same thing. Right. Well, the problem is that the Internet is like a great, vast city, and you're trying to charge people for looking in the window. Everyone just wants to walk around and absorb all the glories that are there for them, and getting them to actually part with a shekel now and then is difficult. And, I mean, I'm doing it because I've been there since 1997. I've got an installed base. People are nice. They like the fact that there's not a million ads blaring at

them. I go to some of these sites and it's an appalling aesthetic mishmash of garish ads telling you how to use this one weird tip to cut down on your belly fat. Other things flashing at you, drop downs, banners, reminders that you have to sign up, things that you have. I mean, it's like a television show. It's like watching a television show and you have to actually walk over to the screen, physically touch it to dismiss this ad, pat it on the top to make sure the picture's better.

The internet is not a pleasant experience when monetization comes into it. May I say that I made the mistake about a month ago now, my son said, hey dad, I've

grown out of my Hanes, I need some new underwear. So I went online and bought him a six pack of Hanes two inches bigger because he's grown. And you cannot believe the lurid underwear model style ads I keep getting to this very day every time I go on the stinking internet. As you can tell, I'm still in a crotch.

All I did was buy him some Hanes and you'd have thought I spent some sort of weekend of – well, we won't go into it. But in Las Vegas, it's just – I have to be very careful how I open the internet when I'm in the office. It's just amazing. What did you do? Did you search for boys underwear? Yes, I think I probably did. I have a few. The FBI will be dragging me away at any moment. Yeah, it might be. I would

actually like to take a look at the browser history too where I'm the FBI. Yes, Mr. Robinson at the Hoover Institution. Yeah, I might be interested in that too. Speaking of which, search terms are being embedded in cookies, which is why when you go from site to site to site, the concept

of what you search from follows you. The first time it happens is very unnerving. If I delete my cookies, I can solve this problem? I think so. That's one way. You'll have to reset your password. Ricochet does that every now and then.

I mean, I'm Chrome browser. In fact, I just made a – I just booked – I'm going to Las Vegas with two friends of mine in a couple weeks for the weekend. And now, of course, the Wynn and the Venetian pop up always. They're just always right there. And there was one other one. Oh, and I bought some pants at Bonobos, which is a great online pants store for men. And my god, you'd think – I mean they're trying to sell me – I mean how many pants do you need? They're trying to sell me pants. I mean I'm on the Chrome browser.

It doesn't matter where I am. If there's an ad to be sold, it's going to be for at least two weeks it was Bonobos. And I wanted to say to the Bonobosos people look i i just bought that pants you should be you should be saving this cookie for four months five six months from now but after vegas when you need another size because i need to or just need another pants you know because god knows what's gonna happen there they've talked surveys they survey the young folks and young folk who are a lot more cavalier about privacy say, you know what? Targeted ads, that's fine with me. That's what I want. Why do I want to be deluged by something that isn't in my interest bucket?

Yeah, target your ads at me, garnered and gleaned from all of the data that I leave scattered around the web in my daily pair of donations. Does this bother you? What I love about this, guys, is that somehow, supposedly, we were told that when we had the left in power, the progressives in power, that it would be a matter of great privacy and security. And all of those horrible security overreaches of the Bush administration would be replaced by somebody who was very keen to keep us shielded from prying eyes. And yet now, from what I understand, the Obama administration is set to sign on to a, dare I say, a Bush-era policy when it comes to monitoring just about everything you do on the web. I'm looking for the story here. But why do you think that the voters in the younger bracket are unconcerned when it comes to authority, the man, the establishment, keeping tabs on where they go. Well, wasn't that what he said, what Obama said at his commencement speech?

I think it was at Illinois, was it? One of his commencement speeches, hey, stop being so paranoid about tyranny. And it'll come back. It'll come back. I mean, first of all, I think that it is generationally true that younger people have a little bit more of a freewheeling sense about privacy. You can just go to Facebook and see that. So I think they believe that in the giant firehose of data, there's not that – it's actually kind of hard to pick out specific stuff, which is not true. And part of what the product that big internet behemoths sell to marketers and advertised people like that is this kind of ability to parse all this data, not necessarily to know it's James Lilacs who – not necessarily to know that it's Peter Robinson of Palo Alto,

California at this specific address who is searching for boys' underwear, but that somebody at this IP address is searching for boys' underwear, which means that either the person there has other problems or that there are some young men in that household. And if they're young men in that household, they probably want some other stuff too. And this is highly, highly, highly sophisticated marketing, which actually tends to work. The wedding business is huge for this. It's one of the billion-dollar secrets of the wedding business. They know when you look for wedding dresses, you're going to be looking for wedding cakes

and wedding this and wedding that, and the wedding business kind of all comes together. The Vera Wang – to look at wedding dresses on the Vera Wang website, you have to – you used to anyway. You have to register. And by registering, you get your name. Now they know you're looking for wedding dresses. They know you're going to get – they know you're going to be spending in the next year. Excuse me, it is stranger, I think

I should just note. Did I know this? It is very, you can, you can rib me all you want for buying a pack of Hanes for one of my three sons. Yeah. But what reason do you have to know about the Vera Wang wedding dress site? We've got E.J. Hill, your work is done. I'll tell you because a, Rob and a

bridal, no, I'll tell you why. Because a Ricochet member and friend and very smart web marketer and I, we had lunch with another – with a Ricochet contributor, Adam Friedman, last December. And he – this is his business he was telling me all about. It's fascinating stuff. And it's fascinating stuff. And so they do that. Yeah. I can get you a better deal, right? But this other part of where I get to spy on you while you're aimlessly chasing down weird little things on the internet is kind of strange. But that said, all right, then I know we have to wrap it up. But I just – this weird thing happened to me last night.

I'm on the interwebs and for some reason and I'm supposed to be following my Abu Dhabi column and for some reason you know I'm not doing it and I want to list oh I just want to search

for something and I was I grew up in in in I lived for when I was a kid I lived in Holland

we lived in the Netherlands for three years and I went to a little international school there when I was in elementary school and and I typed in for some reason,

I thought, oh, I wonder if they can still see that or what have they done to that school? And I put it into the Google search box, press search. And I guess they changed the name a little bit. And on the first page, there's a whole bunch of things. And then there was a little Flickr. Somebody had a little Flickr link. And I clicked on the Flickr link to somebody's Flickr page. And there, one click away, is a picture of me in fourth grade. That's the internet. First time I got my father on the internet, we did a search for the ship that he served on in World War II. And in two clicks, up came a picture of my father standing on the deck of this ship in 1944. Unbelievable.

And I looked at him and I said, well, that's pretty much the internet for you, dad. I mean, it doesn't get any better than this. I was talking to his wife and she showed me an old picture that she just found of herself when she was three or four years old, standing in front of their apartment house in Brooklyn. And in back of her was a very distinctive concrete planter that they'd made by the millions and put up and down the street. Well, I took the address that she lived in, and I put it into Google, and we called it up on Street View. And not only did we see where she stood, but the planter in which she stood at the age of five in 1932 was still there. It is extraordinary, and it's wonderful, and it's the coolest thing ever. I mean, as I may have mentioned before, and on the site, I'm right now coordinating a visit and an interview

with a 96-year-old woman who was an absolute genius in radio and television back in the 40s and 50s. And the only way that I would have found her work was through the internet. And the only way that I would have found her and connected was through the internet. It's just incredible. On the other hand, this is what my daughter's growing up with, and that's great. And I'm teaching her how to master it and be safe and wise and all the rest. But when I was trying to buy a camera the other day, the minute I got into that, I got lost in an endless series of options and reviews until I finally just pulled the trigger and said, that one. When it comes to a story, I was hunting down a story, and I went down into a labyrinth of mirrors, and I couldn't hardly tell where I was going to get out at the end of it until finally I said, this is the story that I'm going to use. I'm going to quote, et cetera, and I moved on. What I miss at some points are the punctuations that we had in our

daily life. The punctuation that was provided by the newspaper that said, this was the news, we're done, there'll be more tomorrow. The punctuation that came with a big Sears catalog when they said, this is what we have. We'll have different stuff next season, but this is what we have. And the punctuation that came at the end of the day when I slipped the surly bonds of earth and the television went to the Indian head and then went out to static and the day was over, there were these punctuation marks

that actually let you sort of mileposts in your own little journey through the day that I miss. I wouldn't trade today for anything. I'm just saying there was a time when you had a sense that actually your options weren't infinite and it wasn't really the worst thing in the world to not be able to click and click and

click. But, you know, we've got to wrap it up, guys. No, no, wait a minute. I have a touching story, too. Oh, wait. You have a touching story, too? I thought the boy's underwear was your touching story. This is a sample. The FBI's on the way. Ricochet members will know Roman Gen, who puts up his

brilliant illustrations from time to time. Roman Gen and I are, as I assume all of us are, friends on Facebook. And I noticed a friend that Roman had on Facebook and I clicked on it and thought to myself it can't be.

But it was. And so I sent him a friend request and he has accepted it. And I am now a Facebook friend with Pavel Palashchenko. Pavel Palashchenko was interpreter for Mikhail Gorbachev throughout the 1980s. Amazing, no? That's pretty amazing. Okay. Now wrap it up.

No, no, that's just my... What are you planning to do to that? Well, actually... You're going to exploit that to your own benefit. There the problem arises, because on Pavlo Palashchenko's page, everything is in Russian. And you can click the little C translation button,

but the translations are... I mean they're ridiculous. So anyway, I started out with a warm story and now you're pointing out, Rob, that as a matter of fact, it's not that warm at all. It's slightly silly. Speaking of Roman, one of the items here on the rundown for the Ricochet podcast, the last one is Requiem for the Minibar. And I must have missed that post. I'll have to weigh in on it. I have no love for the mini bar. I want to see them go away as fast as possible.

They are a cruel means of extorting money from people who don't want to put it on their face to go downstairs and get some overpriced hooch at the hotel bar. But you will find things like that at Ricochet, as you well know, because you're a member and you're listening to this podcast. And you're glad that we're here. And you're also glad we're wrapping it up because obviously the second guest didn't show and we're just flapping our gums. But we'll get him next week. Hey, guys, everybody, do not forget to sign up for Hillsdale College's free online course in the Constitution and Western Heritage. Go to Ricochet.com slash Hillsdale and sign up for that today. And, of course, don't forget A podcast.com slash ricochet. If you go there, if you get a book and you get a free free 30 day trial, it'll be one of

the ways that they look at these things and say, Hmm, this is working, and they'll do it more. So you can you can help support without spending a penny. And we know that because you're an internet type person, you're as cheap and tightfisted as the archetypical Stotsman who used to wander around in a kilt and say, aye, thrifty rates for the Imperial 400 motel chain. All right? So go there. Be cheap.

We don't care. And by Tiny Lies. James Lyle's Tiny Lies, a buck and a quarter, less than a penny per page of brilliant hilarity and artifacts and brilliantly and hilariously annotated from the past. You can download it, read it on your Kindle, iPad. However you want to read it, you can read it. Lilix.com, L-I-L-E-K-S.com.

Go there, show your support for our own James Lilix and even your support for the Ricochet community at large. Well, that's a jackdandy spot, and I thank you, Rob, and I thank you, Peter, and we'll see you both at ricochet.com and on the podcast next week. Have a good week, guys. See you soon. He's coming up the stairs And in a moment He'll want to see you underwear I couldn't stop it now

There's no way to get out It's standing fortunate How the hell did you get me here? Send me naked in somebody else's room? I'd give my whole life to see it. But just you stood there. Only in your underwear. If fashion is your trade

Then when you're naked I guess you must be unemployed, yeah But once it's underway There's no escaping The fact that you're a girl and he's a boy I couldn't stop it now. There's no way to get out. He's standing far too near.

How the hell did you get here? Send me naked in somebody else's room. I'd give my whole life to see it. Just you Still there Only in your underwear Ricochet Join the conversation.

I would also like to thank the committee for your continued efforts in investigating all the details and all the decisions related to the attack on our diplomatic facility. Specifically, the committee's labors to uncover what happened prior, during, and it matters to my colleagues at the Department of State.