The Ricochet Podcast - The Democrats Pounce

Episode Date: March 9, 2019

This week, we cover Liz Warren’s plan to break up the big tech companies, Ilhan Omar’s latent (or maybe not so latent) anti-Semitism from the perspective of an actual member of her district, and chat about the Democrats boycotting of Fox News for one of their upcoming debates. Oh, yeah — we’ve also got the great Andy McCarthy on Manafort, Cohen, and what to expect on seemingly perpetual soon-to... Source

I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. As government expands, liberty contracts. It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That's a good thing. First of all, I think you missed his time. Please clap. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lalex, and today we talk to Andy McCarthy about Manafort et al.

Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody, to the Ricochet Podcast number 438. I'm James Lalex. You're with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. Hi, guys. Hi, guys, as the guy in the bathroom cabinet said in those old commercials. You don't remember those, do you? I do.

You open up the thing, and there you are, right? Right. There's a guy. Hi, guy. That's what I am now in your podcast world um here we are on this big technical thing called the internet and it is supplied and uh and in many parts you know there's facebook there's amazon there's google and then there's elizabeth warren she wants to break them up quote senator elizabeth warren the massachusetts democrat who was bidding to be the policy base setter in the Democratic presidential primary,

announced another expansive idea on Friday, a regulatory plan aimed at breaking up some of America's largest tech companies, including Amazon, Google,

and Facebook. So if this is like the old Standard Oil model, we'll have seven different Amazons around the country with their own logos and mascots. Google will be severed.

How exactly? Facebook, not a lot of love out there, I think, for Facebook. But let's talk about this. How exactly would this work? And this really isn't that good of an idea, is it, guys? There's no way to know how it works. It's probably how it would work. It probably is a terrible idea, and none of that matters.

Elizabeth Warren is just trying to demonstrate that she's angry about Google and Facebook and Amazon. And so are a lot of people on the left. And I'll toss this out before we go to Mr. Long. This past Monday, I interviewed Josh Hawley, new senator from Missouri. Josh Hawley was very rough on Google and Facebook and said that the people of Missouri, by the way, Donald Trump carried Missouri by 20 points. The people of Missouri are angry with Google and Facebook. So here we have something where the left and the right, the progressives and the populists agree. How you break it up, what the law – all complicated, but the whole country is sick of these people. Why? Why are the people that you spoke of sick of Facebook?

Well, I suppose – I think I understand. I don't want to put words in Josh Hawley's mouth and he doesn't need me to he's as smart as he can be and extremely eloquent 39 years old and a member of the Senate the youngest member of the Senate now but if I understood his argument correctly it's because

conservatives feel that they're being censored and the old is it populist? Is that the correct this is a bipartisan impulse in the country that goes back at least a century. Teddy Roosevelt, the old feeling that there's just too much power in too few hands. Both of those, I believe, is what Josh Hawley is saying, exercises his constituents back home in Missouri against Google and Facebook. They're anti-conservative, and they're just too big, and they're just too powerful, and they just don't comport with the idea of diffuse power across the country in

American life. Rob, when we talk about the power of Facebook, mean i get what you're saying there are a lot of people who think it deplatforms conservatives that the algorithms are screwed against the right etc but it is entirely possible to opt entirely out of the facebook world whereas you have monopolistic control of the you know of copper for example you kind of had to go to one place to get copper uh same with rails same with oil you can very easily live your life without having any interaction with facebook at all right and i do yeah i mean i me too uh basically i'm not on it either and i don't go to it um no that's a very good point i mean i i think it's always worrisome when conservatives start acting like liberals which is what this is this is a this is a phenomenally dumb really dumb

policy suggestion but it may be good politics but it's dumb uh elizabeth warren sounds like an old lady who doesn't understand the internet you know i remember once years ago uh an agent telling me this is like when the beginning of the internet that you know pretty soon you know or somebody came to the agent how would you would you put your client's tv show on the internet and he said well yeah but i mean it would happen what time though what day and what time like he didn't get that you know the whole point of unlimited bandwidth only the story with this you get to watch anything you want whenever you want it just didn't compute through his head and the same thing with elizabeth warren the idea that you would break you can it's very hard to break up a platform, right?

And these things are becoming more and more platforms. And the idea that they are – look, if you want to say you're squashing Republican voices, I think that's a hard thing to prove. Please, anecdotally, you can probably prove it every now and then, but it's also irrelevant. It's a private company. It can do whatever it wants. The idea that the government should be in there also irrelevant. It's a private company. It can do whatever it wants. The idea that the government should be in there regulating it is simply not a conservative principle. But on

the other hand, this is what government does, right? Twitter and Facebook and these behemoths like Google have for years thought they were above the idea, the grubby idea of hiring lobbyists in Washington and hiring message guys in Washington and jumping into the swamp like everybody else, like the aluminum producers and the National Association of Manicurists, which exists, right? I mean I was in an office on last week.

That was – in the office building was the National Association of Chicken Farmers. All right, so everybody's got a little presence in D.C. because they want to fight for their little sinecure. And the tech companies for years have decided they don't want to. They don't want to play that game. And government, big government has come back and said to them, oh, no, you need to play that game. I want to meet your representative, and your representative, it would be wise for you if your representative once served in Congress with me. That is essentially what they're saying. And they're going to get there. You know, it's going to be somebody in a very, very fancy suit. It's going to get paid $50,000 a month to make sure that the new senators from wherever they

come from don't make trouble for Facebook or Google. And trust me, they won't. So this is partly a shakedown. That's the only justification for it, I can see. And it's partly just a saber-rattling so that your ardent conservative voters or your ardent liberal voters, your Elizabeth Warren supporters or your conservative Republican supporters can feel like you're going to battle against the behemoth. Each one of these is different, though. supporters or your conservative Republican supporters can feel like you're going to battle against the behemoth. Each one of these is different, though. I mean, Amazon, Google and Facebook are three different separate entities.

Yes. And Facebook people are, I think maybe what Warren is trying to appeal to are the people who believe that Facebook is spying on them or using their information in ways that they didn't agree to. Of course, everybody did because you clicked accept on the EULA. So you said they could. Google, there it seems to be that they're behind the scenes accumulating all of this information on us, the main purpose of which is to sell us something who wants to tell us where to live, how to drive, how many gallons of toilet can have, how long our showers can flush, whether or not we can take a plane, all of these things. That's for the better good of everybody, of course. If they had all the power that they fear Google is going to get someday, we would be reported to the central assembly because we'd ordered too much hamburger from Amazon.

Now, Peter, when it comes to Amazon though yes yes yes what is it exactly that you think the left's beef against amazon is is it that they don't pay people enough and they get sweetheart deals which they then walk away from is that why they got lumped into this or is there something else they're doing that's nefarious the left's beef against Amazon as far as like it's that, and then the old sense that you ought to break up anything that's just too big. Elizabeth Warren stands in the progressive tradition. In some ways, I'm sorry to say it, goes back to the Republican Theodore Roosevelt. By the way, I grant the whole argument that Rob just made that we conservatives ought not to be trying to break up these companies or regulate

them in minute detail. To be fair to Josh hawley and several others who make his argument including lately ted cruz they're they're not calling for breaking up the companies there this gets a little bit technical but not terribly they are calling for amending section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. What is that? Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act exempts companies that merely present information from the usual liability and responsibility that falls upon companies that are considered under the law, publishers. Illegal exposure to libel, for example, or legal requirements to certain kinds of pornography is actually illegal. Publishers labor under those kinds of restraints. Facebook, Amazon is a separate matter. Facebook, Google are carved out as mere platforms under the Communications Decency Act, Section section 230 section 230 is something

we're going to be hearing a lot more about right and i had money and it's a less rigorous regulatory regime and they don't need to be saved money and they ought to be behaving according to the same standards as publishers so says josh hawley so says ted cruz that's a pretty good argument but i think no i think it's crazy it's ridiculous argument the idea it doesn't even he doesn't even encompass the giant scale of google and what Google delivers and what it doesn't. It doesn't scale make to whether it's a publisher or not. Because a publisher presumably has responsibility for what appears in its pages. I beg your pardon?

A publisher presumably has responsibility for what appears in its pages. The Wall Street Journal knows everything and every day what appears in his pages that's very easy to do but google is in fact google encompasses every newspaper and every magazine and every printed blog and every facebook post and every tweet and this blog this podcast and everything we say on it and the idea that they should be responsible and they should be the end um they should at the end be responsible for what we say and what we do on here. It's disingenuous. They don't mean it.

What they mean is come to heel. But the argument would be that Google, through its secret sauce of algorithms, is privileging some kinds of information over others. Now, that would come out in discovery. You'd have to prove that. But absence any exact proof of it, no, I don't think the carve-out should remain. The Amazon thing fascinates me, though, because I read a story this weekend about the death

of the dash button. Do either of you have a dash button? Not that I recall. I never had it, but I know what it is. A little device that Amazon sold to people that sold one product and one product only. If you wanted Tide detergent, you would stick a dash up in your laundry room, and when you were running low, you would push the button, and it would automatically be delivered. This was regarded – to me, I thought, this is fantastic.

This is the Jetsons. But people were worried about it because, well, what if people abuse it? What if kids use it? You really don't know what you're paying. I was like, oh, God, all right, fine. So I didn't use it myself because once I pushed it twice and got 36 bales of toilet paper that I didn't really need. But still, eventually, I did.

But I just found that it didn't have the utility that they thought. And Amazon realized it itself. So the article was saying that the real peril to the consumer is now going to come in smart appliances that have embedded in them inventory systems that are able to say, you're running low on this. We're automatically just going to sum it from you from the ether. This article, all of this chin pulling and scratching and frowning and saying, again, this is horrible for the consumer because the price could change it anymore. They don't know what they're paying. And I'm thinking, well, how about if you go to the damn website and look up what you're paying for?

How about if you just do a little bit of due diligence on your own part to enable this magic that we have? But everything is a crisis, and every innovation that they do is now scowled upon. The miserablism and the Luddite-ism of the left is just stunning to me.

That's true. That's true. I mean if JFK had – if he were alive today and saying we're going to go to the moon by the end of this decade, they'd be talking about all the ozone pollution that would be caused by a Saturn V boosting through the troposphere. Isn't the idea of a rocket a very sort of cis, het male thing? Well, you're right. The other thing about Amazon is that they have an extraordinary number of third party sellers that work through their system. Yes,

yes, yes. I mean, so if you want to crack them up and break them up, you, then you get a lot of people who are making money and getting their products. And it also, I mean,

I know we want to get out of this, but there also are robust competitors. There's, yes, there are. Yes. And, and,

and competitors to all these things that are, seem, seem to be doing okay. I mean, yes, there are. And, and, and, and competitors to all these things that are, seem, seem to be doing okay. I mean, the largest company in the world on earth by capital value is Apple and Apple's one of Apple's singular and, and signature, uh, uh, attributes is, and, and, and values is we do not collect or sell your information ever. That seems like we have a robust system now where people are competing and the consumers can make a choice. What is interesting, though, is before, I know we want to jump out of this,

before we do, Mark Zuckerberg this week announced that he was what they called a pivot to privacy for Facebook, where he's thinking of redirecting Facebook, whether he's successful or not, or not, it remains to be seen, to more point-to-point, person-to-person interactions. So more messaging, probably, and more transactional, more financial transactions. I think that Facebook's going to get into cryptocurrency in a very, very big way. And so even he is sort of like retreating from the idea of large-scale publishing, massive publishing of your thoughts and your status updates

and your arguments about AOC and more towards how are you going to pay your dry cleaner, how are you going to pay your friends, how are you going to talk to each other. I suspect that he's going to make one a major acquisition in coming up in point to point payment at some point uh you know person to person payment payment at some point um and we're going to start seeing some of these uh large scale communication platforms like facebook become more like we're all linked like the telethon you know um that's what i that's what i think it's going to have because what we just just just anecdotally what do people say about facebook they're exhausted by it it's horrible what i say they're exhausted by it it's horrible correct correct

by the way so further to your argument i'm god i'm giving you i'm not disagreeing with you i'm further and then i know we want to get out of this but i had thought and i have friends around here in the tech world who say Amazon is unbeatable. They're so big. They're able to drive prices down from there. So blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I thought, what do I know? It does look as though they're eating the entire world.

And then we bought a puppy. And you know what? Chewy.com gives you better prices on dog food than Amazon. Are you transitioning? Are you segwaying into a bit there? That would be great. No, no, no. I'm giving Amazon. Are you transitioning? Are you segwaying into a bit there? That would be great. No, no, no. I'm giving it.

If you can use it, take it. No, I can't. But I know exactly what you mean. Go right ahead. I know what you mean. I used Amazon to have automatic food sent for my dog, too. It was very convenient. On the other hand, sometimes I'd go to Amazon and try to find a filter for my air filter that my wife had.

And I would just type in air filter. Did I have the FX95B94GRT or did I have the FX96B40? I mean, it just drives you absolutely crazy. It's like, could somebody please make this simpler? Somebody has, and that somebody is molecule. Molecule is a complete reinvention of the air purifier. It's not just an improvement on an existing, outdating technology. No, no, no. The last major innovation in air purification was in the 40s with the invention of the HEPA filter. That was during the Second World War. Molecule introduces

a breakthrough science that is finally capable of destroying air pollutants at a molecular level. In a study of 49 allergy sufferers presented at the American College of Asthma, Allergy, and Immunology, Molecule's technology provided dramatic, statistically significant, sustained symptom reduction within a week of use. A week.

One customer even said she was able to, quote, breathe through her nose for the first time in 15 years, end quote. Breathing clean air transforms the way you sleep, particularly for those who are asthmatic or allergy sufferers. And with Molecule, customers have reported feeling energized after the best sleep they've had in years. Molecule has been extensively tested by third parties and verified. Molecule's claims on its technology have been tested and verified

by the third party labs like the University of Minnesota, our particle calibration laboratory, and the University of South Florida Center for Biological Defense. And all of that plus, Molecule has a clean design with a high quality experience. The apple of that plus, Molecule has a clean design with a high-quality experience.

The apple of air purifiers, you could say. From the materials used on the device, like its sleek, solid aluminum shell, to the streamlined filter subscription. That's my thing here, where replacement filters arrive at your doorstep right when you need them.

Molecule ensures breathing clean air is easy and seamless. So here's a special offer for you, the listener of Ricochet. For $75 off your first order, visit Molecule.com and at the checkout, enter promo code Ricochet. That's spelled M-O-L-E-K-U-L-E.com. Use the promo code Ricochet for $75 off your first order. And our thanks to Molecule for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast our friend Andy McCarthy, former assistant U.S. attorney

for the Southern District of New York, contributing editor to National Review, and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. You can follow him on Twitter, at Andrew C. McCarthy. Andy, 47 months was the meme yesterday, was the big running joke on Twitter, when people were saying, at 47 months, I've seen longer sentences in a Raymond Chandler novel, et cetera.

And somebody that I used to know in the business said that the judge was compromised. They must have got to him, sort of Omar-like remark that Russia had yanked a string. 47 months, too lenient, right on the nose. Tell me what you think about that sentence. I think in the greater scheme of things, you have to let this play out because it's going to play out in two parts. My sense is that if this judge was the only judge who was going to sentence Manafort, the sentence would have been considerably longer. It was really driven by the federal sentencing guidelines, at least the predicted sentence, which was somewhere between, I think, 19 and 24 years. And that's really a function of the high dollar amount of the tax fraud counts and the money laundering,

which are just federal offenses that really drive the sentencing guidelines high because they're usually associated with things like money laundering, in particular with narcotics trafficking. But what happened in this case is Manafort objected to being tried for the tax counts against him in Washington, where he expected to get a more hostile hearing than his resident state in Virginia. So they had to break off the tax and some other counts, and they tried him on those before this judge, T.S. Ellis, in the Eastern District of Virginia. And he did indeed give the Mueller team a harder time. But the bottom line is he's being sentenced in two different places. I think this judge knows that the next judge is going to really whack him next week. He would prefer Ellis would have, I think,

to have gone second so that he could have given a bigger sentence, but run it concurrently so it would effectively be zero. But I think in the end, everybody should just calm down and wait because the next judge is going to bang them. And calm down. Everybody should wait because he deserves bigger pun. Hey, and by the way, Andy, it's Rob Long. Hey, Rob. So we should all take a chill pill because Manafort is going to go to jail for more than 47 months, no matter what. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean look he's i get the sense he's a 70 year old guy who's not in good shape yeah he's been in uh solitary confinement is he really like you think i mean what i he was in the wheelchair i was like oh give me a break a little bit like

maybe i mean well just be me rob i always thought that when I was a prosecutor, you know, because they turn on the theatrics for sentencing. On the other hand, I one time had a terrible situation where I had a guy who had been a cooper these situations where he had to be in jail, but you couldn't put him in general population. By the time I saw him, like six months after all that happened, the guy had withered away and I felt like I was killing him. You know, I actually felt like I needed to do something to intervene, even though the guy's straights were his own fault. It's not an easy thing to be in in solitary no that's right you know this guy's in solitary so white collar crime yeah you know i mean i'm wait i just go just i would finish up one day i mean i'm old enough to remember um a lot of people in the first term of the Clinton administration, during the Whitewater investigation, a lot of people go into prison and getting indicted for stuff that they did when they were just like – they didn't know they were going to be scrutinized. The billing problems at the Rose Law Firm and all that stuff, that was all kind of ancillary – those are casualties that were not planned. It was almost friendly fire in a way.

Isn't that the case here with Manafort? That's my first question. It's like he's going to – this has nothing to do with Trump. sign to almost everybody in the world of potentially in the world of politics that you have to keep your nose clean all the time, because if you are even a peripherally involved figure, they're going to find something. Well, on one hand, I think this doesn't have anything to do with Trump, but it has everything to do with Trump in the sense that the crimes that he was convicted of don't have anything to do with Trump. But, you know, Rob, this guy has been, you know, in the international political consultancy underworld for close to 20 years. What he was doing in Ukraine goes back to like 2003, 2004. It wasn't a

secret to anyone. I don't think he would ever have been prosecuted if he hadn't been on their radar screen because of Trump. That's not to say that that's a defense to his crimes. He got caught and it is what it is. And as far as the fact that everybody is on warning now, I really think that's okay. Well, people shouldn't, if this Foreign Agency Registration Act has been on the books for a long time. The Justice Department hasn't really enforced it. What I object to is I think you should put people on notice if you're going to change the enforcement practice. This thing was not treated as a felony until Mueller's investigation, and they needed to come up with something to make a conspiracy out of this thing. That's what I object to.

I know Peter wants to jump in, just so I know. So if just taking Trump out of the taking Trump out of the equation here, do you think that in the back of his mind, when Manafort was committing these crimes, which he committed, you know, money laundering and all the influence peddling and all that stuff, do you think he thought in the back of his mind, if I get caught, it's going to be a huge fine, but I'm not going to do time. Yes. I mean, I recently looked into this. I think I may be like a little bit off, but in the 50 years prior to his indictment, I believe there were six prosecutions under the Foreign Agent Registry Act and maybe three successful ones or two. I mean, it's that small. So, yes, I don't think he had any thought that, you know, that the hammer was going to come down on him. Andy, Peter here.

Do we feel sorry for Paul Manafort? I don't. Done. Okay, that's it. You don't even need to elaborate. I don't either. Just wanted to check that out. Paul Manafort was just not – if the message to this is children of America, do not grow up to become like Paul Manafort, no harm in that.

As a legal matter, does this touch the president? Does Manafort touch the president? Not as a legal matter in the sense of prosecution in court. Okay. As a legal matter, does the indictment of Roger Stone touch the president? No. I feel as though you're Michael Cohen and I'm AOC here just whipping through the questions. Except Peter, you're supposed to start these questions with yes or no. It's my time, McCarthy, not yours. Right. Okay. And then let me ask you one question about Michael Cohen, and that is this. I have

come to the conclusion, but I submit all conclusions to my friend, Annie McCarthy, who knows about 3000 times as much about this as I do. My tentative conclusion on the Cohen hearing is that it made the character case against Donald Trump stronger, but it made the legal case weaker. Cohen begins by saying Donald Trump never wanted to be or expected to be president. Well, that just cuts the legs out from under any accusation of collusion. If you don't want to be president, you don't collude with the Russians to become president. And on and on it goes. At a number of points, Cohen said things that, as far as I could tell, weakened the legal case against Trump. Correct me. There really is not a collusion case against Trump. We've known that for a long time because Mueller, if there had been one, would have pled these people in a position to be accomplices to

a conspiracy count, and he would have had them say here's what i did here's what trump did uh he never did that so i don't think there was a legal there's been a legal collusion case against trump there are cases being investigated in the southern district of new york one of them is this campaign finance case if they're relying on cohen for that, I think that case is never going to happen. But, you know, that investigation is still unfolding. So here's my last. Let me just make this last point about what Peter said. The biggest problem for Trump with respect to Cohen is if you believe Cohen, that's bad for Trump. And whether you believe him or not, he's Trump's guy.

You know, he's the guy Trump picked to have at the ready for 10 years. Right. This is I mean, that's that's why I say it strengthens the care. Look at these guys, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, Roger. So I actually feel some affection for I knew Roger Stone in the old days. But good lord, these are the kinds of people with whom Donald Trump surrounded himself. The character case is pretty devastating. Okay.

Now, you have a cover story. This is my last big question. James Lilacs comes in, counselor, and you have a cover story on the current issue of the Washington Examiner magazine, the new magazine being edited by our friend Seth Mandel, in which you argue that no matter what the Mueller report says, and you've just told us you don't think it's going to make a collusion case against the president, no matter what the Mueller report says, Washington will freak out. Explain that, Andy. Well, I think we're seeing it already, Peter. I mean, we had these flood of, I got in trouble for calling them subpoenas the other day. So information demands by Jerry Nadler, who's now the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, where all impeachment matters start. So they're already talking about bringing Mueller in, bringing Mueller's witnesses in, issuing a subpoena to the Justice Department for the report. So I think that no matter what happens, yes, people are going to freak out. And I also expect for what it's worth, I don't think there's going to be a collusion case against the president. I think Mueller's report will probably try to justify the FBI and the Justice Department in launching the investigation,

which means you would dwell on these colorful characters that we've been talking about. And I don't think he's given up on obstruction. I think the obstruction angle of the investigation is beset with legal problems. Right. But when you heard Nadler talk about a sort of a framework for this array of information demands that he sent out. He talked about it in terms of obstruction. And I think that's going to be the sort of the thread that he pulls from Mueller's investigation to try to make it seamless into his own investigation. You know, Andy, unlike these geezers here reading off the Denny's senior menu we call the newspapers, I got something ripped straight from Twitter. Wow.

This came up this morning, and I saw it because you retweeted it. It was just an interesting note. Kyle Chaney, Politico reporter, tweeted out, Bruce Ohr told lawmakers he shared Christopher Steele's info with Andy McCarthy. And the quote is, they asked Bruce Ohr, okay, who did you share the information with? And Ohr replied, as I mentioned earlier, my first move was to reach out for Andrew McCarthy. And the questioner says, or Andrew McCabe, is what you mean?

And he said, McCabe, yes, not McCarthy. I'm sorry, Andrew McCarthy will be angry. I know him too. And so I didn't know that you didn't know that you knew didn't know that you knew Bruce or. Yeah. James, it all goes back to the sovereign district of New York. It always does. And actually, Bruce worked for my wife in the senior narcotic unit for a number of years.

I I knew him a little bit. I always thought he was a you know, he's a number of years. I, I knew him a little bit. I always thought he was a, you know, he's a perfectly fine guy, but, um, and he didn't make me angry. Well,

here was my, here's my question. Here's my question about this, because people who've been following this and the people who tend to fall on the deep state, deep plot side of the narrative, look at or, and then also look at his wife and her strange,

sudden accumulation of a ham radio license. and their eyebrows are arched with curiosity. Is this a side of the inquiry that you believe is groundless, a rabbit hole, or is this not an implausible line of inquiry that we might pursue in the future? Oh, no. I think it absolutely should be pursued. I think what happened here is you would never have heard anything about Russia if Hillary Clinton had won the election. And once she lost the election, they knew that it was going to be controversial, that they had used foreign intelligence surveillance powers essentially to monitor the opposition campaign. So a lot of energy, I think, has gone into trying to justify why that was an OK thing to do.

And I think it is absolutely something that ought to be looked at. And I expect a new attorney general is going to look at it. Andy, Peter here once again, you mentioned just a moment ago, the not subpoenas requests for information that Nadler and his committee has not oversight, but this is the, no, Schiff is intelligence. What is Nadler's committee? He's the judiciary committee and that's where impeachment always starts. Okay. Thank you. So the new chairman of the Judiciary Committee, that committee sent out requests for information to 80 Trump members, Trump family members, rather, and associates.

Now, we know that as a constitutional matter, so here's what I know from civics, from high school civics, let's say, or college constitutional law. We know that as a constitutional matter, Congress has a right and a duty to engage in oversight, granted. But we also know that the executive branch is a separated and delineated power from Congress, and it has rights. And I mean, there are all kinds of arguments here that that was a hugely overbroad request that there's no specific, they're not stating the crime that they intend to be investigating because that it's a fishing expedition. Now, who adjudicates that? Who said, Richard Benvenista was on TV the other day saying that as far as he's concerned,

all 80 of the people from whom this information has been requested should get together and should is a block refused to to to offer up any of the information requested. And as far as he's concerned, they would be in the legal right to do so. Who adjudicates this? How does this get sorted out? Peter, you actually hit on my favorite topic as a lawyer, which is that this is not a rule of law society. It's a body politic. The way the framers set the system up, we like to think that there's a legal answer to everything. The way the framers set the system up, the executive branch has certain authorities. The Congress has other authorities.

They often fight. And the way this gets worked out is not by the courts. It gets worked out by the political back and forth. And usually sometimes these guys go to the mattresses, but most of the time, there's an accommodation that gets arrived at. I think it's a good thing for Trump at this point to have Bill Barr at the Justice Department, because I think he'll, in an orderly way, sort out, here's the things that Congress is entitled to look at in the manner of oversight. Congress is not supposed to be conducting criminal investigations, by the way.

They're supposed to do oversight, right? Right. profound legal argument over whether you can impeach a president based on past conduct when he wasn't in office that wasn't part of a campaign to acquire the office. So there's that bucket. There's executive privilege, which the courts have recognized. So, you know, Barr will have to enforce that where it's appropriate. You know, there's, with respect to the Mueller report, there's Justice Department policy about how much you disclose in a case where the person doesn't get charged. It's supposed to be a counterintelligence investigation. So there's a big question about how much of it is classified. So I think it's a good thing that we have a seasoned

attorney general who's got some, who I think will have credibility with Congress and the public and will set this out. secretary of defense by a vote of, as I recall, it was 98 to one. And Kirsten Gillibrand said in voting against him that she just thought he was coming back. He was taking a military, I beg your pardon, he was taking a civilian position too soon after having been in the military that she voted against him on principle, but gave a big speech about what a wonderful man he was. So really it was a kind, it was almost unanimous. This guy has total credibility in this town. Is Bill Barr a 10 as well? Well, to me, he's a 10. I think if you're going to go by the sort of metric that you just laid out, he didn't get I think he got confirmed, you know a legal aspect of the obstruction analysis, that he's, you know, in the tank for Trump, and he's got it in for Mueller. In fact, when Barr was attorney general the last time under the first President Bush, Mueller was chief of the criminal division. You know, these are two guys who know each other for 30 years. They get on very well. They respect

each other. I actually think this is going to go fine. In my mind, he's a 10, and I think he'll perform like a 10. Gentlemen, usually when I think of a 10, I think of Bo Derek, and now you've just made me think of Jim Madison, Bill Barr, and a gold lame one piece with a corn roll as they're running slow-mo towards the camera. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Andy. We'll talk to you later. Take care. Thanks, Andy. Who'll talk to you later. Take care. Thanks, Andy.

Who needs law school when you've got Andy? I know. It's amazing. What I want to ask him about is like he dropped it. My wife knew him when she was prosecuting drug cases. It's a very interesting marriage. Exactly. I bet you they can't – I bet you it's a very good relationship because they can't talk about work, right?

I mean you have to talk about something else because you're probably enjoined, I think, from talking about half the things they are doing during the day. Probably so, but I imagine they would come up with a series of interesting euphemisms to be able to describe these things. My friend from New Jersey. Yes, that's right. Exactly. My wife's in healthcare, you know, and because of patient confidentiality and the rest of it,

she can't exactly come home and say, boy, you wouldn't believe who wandered in today with a bleed. Not, you know, I mean, you just, it doesn't happen.

So we have to talk about, we have to talk about ideas and the news and the rest of it. I found a great gambit for, for your daughter's gone now. So we can't sit there and talk to her about her day, is simply for me to ask my wife what she listened to on National Public Radio on the way home from work. And it's very interesting because what they do

say and what they don't talk about and what she does hear and the rest of it leads to interesting conversations. I'm going to do a commercial now. I'm not even going to try to segue. I am. I'm simply going to do a commercial. And it goes like this.

It's about cap terra. And I won't interrupt it. And you just did. You may be wondering what cap terra is. It's one of those words. Does it mean anything? Yes, it means, well, for one thing, a lot of work that you used to have to do, you don't have to do anymore. Okay, online reviews.

Now, you know you've gone to iTunes and you've written some spectacular reviews for this podcast, and we appreciate that. And you probably read some surprising ones, right? Well, whether you're trying to get a sweet deal on something you've been saving for or you're trying to find the best happy hour in town, it's generally a good idea to read the reviews first, right? So why should finding the right software for your business be any different? You can read thousands of real software reviews and find the right software for your business

at capterra.com slash ricochet. Now, Capterra is the leading free online resource to help you find the best software solution for your business. With over 750,000, three quarters of a million reviews of products from real software users, real people who use this stuff.

You can discover everything you need to make an informed decision. Search more than 700 specific categories of software. That's everything from project management to email marketing to yoga studio management software. It's all there. No matter what kind of software your business needs, Capterra makes it easy to discover the right solution fast. Join the millions of people who use Capterra each month to find the right tools for their business. Special offer for you who is smart enough to listen to this podcast. Visit capterra.com slash ricochet for free, for free today,

to find the tools to make an informed software decision for your business. That's capterra.com slash ricochet. Capterra, that's C-A-P-T-E-R-R-A dot com slash Ricochet. Capterra. Software selection simplified. And our thanks to Capterra for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, gentlemen, oh, do we really want to – should we? Must we? I think we have to ask about your congresswoman. I guess we do, don't we?

I thought that we were going to do something. Were you going to – the member pitch thing. Oh, yeah. Well, I could do that. But let's talk about your congresswoman for a little bit. Why did you vote for her? She's an anti-Semite. I didn't vote for her. Oh, I'm sorry.

That is my district here though. I know. That's great. Yeah, there's a lot. Now you finally know what it feels like to be from California and have a lunatic in Congress representing you. Oh, finally, Rob says. What do you mean finally? For the longest time I've been in this state, actually, this is sort of – yeah, I mean my vote.

I just might as well go in there and not do it. Just make an X, spoil my ballot as they say. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack here. As people say, one of the things that I keep hearing an awful lot of, and Dennis Prager repeated it this morning, were the numbers of Somalis in Minneapolis and Minnesota. I think Prager may have said that Obama settled 43,000 Somali refugees in Minnesota. That's not true. It's just not true. When Obama was president between 2009, 2017 or so, there were about 6,000 who settled in Minnesota.

And George Bush, when he was president, settled about almost 10,000 or so. So you had about 55,000 Somali refugees settled nationally during Obama and during Bush. It was about 46,000. So Minnesota has a small portion of these. There aren't 80,000 Somalis living in Minneapolis. Minnesota is just not the case. So the idea that somehow they imported these people and put them in Minnesota and that was the block that elected Omar is nonsense. Right.

It is nonsense. The idea that there's this little Mogadishu no-go zone is nonsense. Yes, you will read that there's been some gang violence lately. It happened. Yeah, it did. It's not good. It's not great. The community isn't happy about it either.

But I can drive right over to that place where I used to live, by the way, which is where the Mary Tyler Moore show used to be shot. I can park my car and walk out and go to a bar and drink alcohol and come out, and it's not going to be – So if I could just interlocute this a little bit. As I think certainly politically Republicans are going to do, we're going to say that it isn't that she's an exotic Ilhan Omar, your congresswoman, who's now in trouble for just a series of anti-Semitic remarks. The argument they're making for her or sort of in defense of her is that she is – she's from another culture. She was a Somali refugee. She's been here for 22 years. She was in Moorhead, Minnesota before that, for heaven's sakes. Either way, the argument against it is, is that actually she's not an exotic character. And her anti-Semitic views among her constituents and among her voters and maybe among a portion of the Democratic Party, they are not exotic views either.

Yes and no i mean when you say that she's from another culture so she doesn't really quite understand uh how to use the terms here that is in essence is admitting the fact that there is a cultural bias against jews i'm sorry israel in that culture which seems to me to be a strange thing for them to want to say it's also insulting to her that in 22 years of living in minnesota that she's not realized these things so that whole cultural argument i'm astonished that they made it they can standard fall on its own the important thing to remember about her is that she's primarily a leftist she's a progressive and she was plugged into that spot because that's what you put into that spot i just want to i want to nail this point. You are saying that she was not elected by Somalis, by Somalis who had been resettled.

She was elected by the good liberals of Minnesota who are and always have been your neighbors. Yes, absolutely. Got it. So anybody who was getting plugged into that seat is going to win. Republican doesn't have a chance. And she's very, very, very, very progressive. So she gets everybody's support, very, very, very progressive. So she gets everybody's support and they're happy about it. What's interesting is that nobody ever took

a look at how her progressive policies match up with her other identity, which is Islamic. I mean, you never see anybody going to the mosque to which they go and putting a mic in front of the imam's face and saying, how do you feel about gay marriage, intersectionality, transsexuals, et cetera. It doesn't come up, but she is, is is Muslim, and that's gravy. That's not why people voted for her, but it's gravy because it's a sign, oddly enough in these days, that you're progressive. How Islam managed to make this transition is astonishing to me, but it's a way for people to say, I'm not like George Bush, who after 9-11 demonized Muslims, right? I mean, that's what we're supposed to believe. I'm not like the wave of Islamophobia that has overtaken the country since 9-11.

I'm the good person who sees past all that, and I embrace this person who is of an interesting different cult. I'm a good person because I vote for this. It's less an evaluation of them, but more an evaluation of one's self. It also insulates your doubts because, you know, the really bad people out there, the Islamophobes, are the ones who hate her, and you're better than those people too. So there's a whole bunch of internal and external virtue cycling going on here. It doesn't really examine the particulars of the faith.

What counts is that she's predictably progressive, and that's why the people are going to stand behind her. James, do you see in your – are you aware – But I'm not done. But you're not done. No. But hold on. Let me interlocute as well.

I'm going to interlocute as well. All the news reports said that there was a Donnybrook within the Democratic Party in the House, that there were a number of who wanted the resolution to be strictly about anti-Semitic speech and behavior, and we ended up with this thing which is against all hate, and it was the progressives versus, do you see that in Minnesota? Do you see that in Minneapolis? Well, it's coming, and that's the problem. Minnesota, this is something that people forget,

has a history of anti-Semitism. It was called by Harper's Magazine back in the 20s one of the most anti-, if not the most anti-Semitic city in America, which is unusual. Right. Klan was big here. Klan was really big. Hubert H. Humphrey made his bones fighting the Klan. I mean, we forget the Klan wars and the Democratic Party in the 20s, but they were there. And the reasons are odd because there's a very small Jewish population in Minnesota, but you had all these people who came from Northern Europe, who came here with the prejudices that they had. And I mean, I've got relatives, friends, older people, I know who aren't really anti-Semitic in any sense that I can see. But if they're talking

about somebody, they'll say, well, you know, Marvin, he's a Jew, you know, they'll, they'll mention that it's because it needs to be, you know, he's a Jew, you know, so it needs to be said. So that's the old style stuff that was supposedly stifled and done away with. And now Minneapolis is facing a different, Minnesota is facing what the democratic party is, which is a different kind of anti, a differently presented antisemitism. It's presented as anti-Zionism and it's wrapped up in BDS,

which has all of the accolades and all of the approval of the left because it doesn't have anything to do with the Jews. It's simply anti-colonial, don't you know? So they're able to take this long, festering, miserable sickness in humanity and slap a new coat of paint on it, which comports to their – the flags, the colors of the progressive flags. So, I mean, they're going to have this fight, and we're going to have it here locally, too. But so far, I think people are just sort of wincing and saying, well, it'll probably all work out in the best. And, you know, really, to be honest, Israel does do some bad stuff, and Minnesota Knights are their way through the muddle of it until their party is Corbynized. Until Jeremy Corbyn, whoever his American analog is, is a prime force in the Democratic Party. I think it's definitely Bernie. I mean, if Bernie Sanders is modeling himself after Jeremy Corbyn, whoever his American analog is, is a prime force in the Democratic Party.

I think it's definitely Bernie. I mean if Bernie Sanders is modeling himself after Jeremy Corbyn, I think he's said as much and is trying very hard to maintain the coalition. By the way, Bernie Sanders has defended Ilhan Omar many, many times. Oh, he has. You know who else defended her? David Duke, the white supremacist former Klansman. I guess he may be current Klansman. I can't keep track of his Klan membership. He also has defended her. specific bigotry like in charlottesville uh the president united states who is you know has is problematic on these in these issues said some kind of bland bromide like aren't we all brothers where i hate bigotry hatred of all kinds and they tore it apart in the media that that was considered almost worse than not saying anything was saying something bland and uh you know

ecumenical well it wasn't no that that's not what they attack him for they attack him for the statement there are there were good people on both sides right right but which i think i believe he intended that to be bland we're all brothers which in general it was exactly the response of the democratic uh leadership in congress faced with very specific uh statements by one of their members. They instead decided to have a resolution blandly asserting how much we hate hate and bigotry, and we're all sort of – the idea that when one guy does it – I know this is whataboutism, and I hate it, but when one guy does it, it's proof that he's a racist.

And when an entire party does it, it's proof that they're not. It's really the same action. Well, the fact that they would leap on it that's right i too found the they're good people on both sides thing a little jarring because i'm singing it well you know you're talking about antifa i don't think so but the reason i think that they came down on him so hard on that was a they thought that he was saying that the nazis were good people and i thought no i think that they were saying that anybody who showed up for whatever reason to protest the removal of a Confederate statue

is basically a Nazi. You can't have good people on the side that is so morally wrong. And anybody who said, I think the statue should stay is now a garbage person and is to be relegated over the other side. That's how you get Trump, he said to Kony Koshy. No no that's right and i just the only other thing is that we heard and we

have heard over and over again every time a richard spencer who's one of those sort of white nationalists or david duke for that reason uh for that matter whenever they say something mildly uh complimentary about trump or even effusively complimentary about Trump, that it's always pointed to see who his friends are, see who supports him. That's how you know he's bad news. And no one's saying that about Ilhan Omar. No one's saying, oh, see who supports her. That's how you know she's bad news.

David Duke supports. No one's saying that. We are now sort of in the zone where none of this really matters. It's all an incredibly disingenuous argument. Nobody really cares except people who actually do care about the things like the rise of anti-Semitism, especially on the left, which seems like – So what this – this is – Kim Strassel has, I think, a terrific piece in today's – well, no, I can't remember whether it's today's or yesterday's – in the Wall Street Journal. And she notes that what's going on in the Democratic Party is not a tussle over priorities. The old Democratic Party wanted to – with regard to capitalism, for example.

The old Democratic Party wanted to squeeze the golden goose a little harder. The new Democrats want to kill it. They want to abolish capitalism. That is not a difference of degree. That is a difference of degree. That is a difference of kind. Here we see it all over again. The old democratic party, the moderates, the old timers, the Steny Hoyers, Nancy Pelosi, the participation, the disproportionate participation, the support of Jews of the democratic party was something, a matter of pride. And everyone understood that the Holocaust,

6 million people being put in ovens was singular, a singular event in human history, and that it must never, ever happen again. And saying anything that created any kind of opening to anti-Semitism was to be condemned immediately. And now we have a new force in the democratic party says oh yeah well holocaust i don't know is it really any worse than this or that this is entirely new and it is breathtaking and i think you're right at the heart of it is this i mean It's ironic in the sense this jugular attack on capitalism.

In 2019, when it is absolutely inarguable that capitalism has worked miracles in places where people were very recently starving. Capitalism is so incredibly effective it even works in communist countries like china where almost 500 million people are now not starving i mean it's a it's a it's a it's a staggering staggering accomplishment rob you don't that accomplishment isn't isn't at one person's feet right so if you're kind of a statist and you want to know who the leader was who led you out of the out of uh out of um you know penury and poverty you can't identify it because capitalism is a networked system capitalism is a platform and you cannot regulate it it matters very much why people are not starving those people are not starving for the wrong reason you know the change up in the comment about i don't care what a cat is as long you care what color the cat is as long as it catches mice.

Well, these people believe that's very much of an issue because the catching of the mouse is wrong and the whole intersectional species arrangement. I would say this, is that if you find this conversation interesting, you should be a member of Ricochet. You should go to ricochet.com slash join and join. If you like this conversation the three of us had, if you want to chime in and add your own two cents or even if you don't and you just want to support this incredible project that we're trying to do, and we're trying to do it on a free market basis. We don't have donors. We have customers. We have investors. We do not have anybody giving us money.

We're trying to prove that this thing would work on its own as a free market system because we believe in capitalism. If you do too and you've been putting it off, we really, really need you to become a paying customer. Please go to ricochet.com slash join and join today, like right now. And the thing is, if you don't do this, you might think that Rob Long and Peter Robinson and everybody else, me, we're all going to toss and turn at night worrying about the fate of Ricochet. Well, no, we don't because we're sensible people, but also because we have something that keeps us able to sleep through the night. And I'm sure Rob and Peter agree,

the calming comfort blanket. And you think, what? You're shilling blankets now? Oh, no, no, no. This is no ordinary blanket. The calming comfort by sharper image. It's a luxurious weighted blanket that helps you relax

so you can fall asleep and stay asleep naturally. Calming comfort is designed with high density comfort fill to provide exactly the right amount of weight to help relax your body. It mimics the soothing feeling of being hugged for less stress and a restful night's sleep. It's made with super soft velveteen material and designed to promote a sense of calmness and relaxation for more restful sleep, and you wake up feeling refreshed. When you're under the blanket, you experience that great feeling of being hugged, cuddled, swaddled, which is as soothing for adults as it is for children.

Calming comfort even applies an even amount of pressure all over your body to help the production of serotonin and melanin, simulating deep touch pressure stimulation. When I first got one of these things, I thought, first of all, sharper image. Yes, I'm a guy of the 80s, so that brought back some good feelings. And then two, I thought, what exactly is going to be sleeping under a heavy blanket going to be like? Because I'm not one of those people who likes to bake at night. It's not that at all. It's just this great feeling of presence. And when I get under the covers now, it's hard to describe. But everybody who's ever used one of these things knows what a remarkably calming and wonderful sensation it is to go to bed under a calming, comfort-weighted blanket. 90-day,

anxiety-free, stress-free, best night's sleep of your life, guaranteed from Sharper Image. Right now, just for our listeners here, you can go to calmingcomfortblanket.com, calmingcomfortblanket.com, use the promo code RICOSHET at the checkout, and receive 15% off the display price. Again, that's calmingcomfortblanket.com, promo code RICOSHET to check out and receive 15% off the display price. Again, that's calmingcomfortblanket.com, promo code RICOSHET. And because you can't put a price on a great night's sleep, go online now at calmingcomfortblanket.com and use that promo code RICOSHET for your special discount right now. And our thanks to Calming Comfort Blanket for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, one of the things that's always fun to watch are the debates, of course, but I guess Fox isn't going to be participating.

What do you think about this? Is it finally somebody standing up for the fact that Fox News is not a legitimate news organization? It's simply a provident for the president? Or should we worry that we're hardening the bubbles around which people...

If you are one of the Democrats in charge of planning the debates and you know, apart from anything else, that you're going to have something like 20 different candidates and you don't want those candidates to go up against Chris Wallace, Chris Wallace, who is known simply for being tough, not partisan. If you don't if you somehow or other want, and you don't want your candidates to have a chance to talk to the Fox News audience, you're crazy. You're just plain crazy. That's the kind of winnowing process that you want your field to go through, and you want someone who's tough but fair, like Chris Wallace, to take them on. I think it's just tactically stupid. I see the point they're trying to make. Oh, Fox News, that's a Murdoch property. It airs Hannity.

They're just making a terrible tactical mistake. Chris Wallace is not Sean Hannity. Rob, would you go if you were asked? I mean, you've been on Fox. you're tainted with a murdoch yeah i'm actually gonna i'm actually going today i'm gonna be on it later today i'll be on gutfeld this weekend um yeah look i um the the the the problem really is is that everybody every party including the democratic party wants to have the fight in the family. Yes, that's right.

If they could have a fight, if they could have a primary that was in just – they lock everybody in the Thunderdome and close the doors and confiscate the phones. Everybody fight it out, and then the person who emerges is the nominee, and you never hear the negative ads. You never hear the opposition research. You never watch somebody crumble in the primary debates. Every party would love that. So what they don't want is they don't want this to be aired out, which they also don't necessarily know whether they want to move left or move center. And moving center, if you want to capture the center, if you think that there are some votes, some Fox News voters or viewers who will vote for you, which by the way you don't need if you're a Democrat but would be an interesting experiment, maybe you'd want to be on Fox.

But the truth is that all of these – none of these channels is really crucial to winning a general. I mean nobody watching Fox News is going to vote for the Democrat, and nobody msnbc is going to vote the republican and the numbers themselves are so so small and insignificant the trivial the fox viewer the fox viewership is trivial when you compare it to who votes for the president united states by almost like 15 you know 15 times so um it's probably smart politics for them to do it this way. But it seems chicken. Well, if they are to go through the entire process without having a hard question thrown at them from somebody who doesn't share their intellectual precepts,

that's great because they'll botch it all the more when it actually comes to the big show and they realize that they can't phrase the argument and the ideas that the other side apprehends them. But what you said about them not wanting to know, not knowing if they want to go left or center, I don't think there's any doubt that they don't want to go center. And they probably resent the idea that they're going to have to be a little centrist in order to – I mean that's the thing that's dogging Biden's chances.

He's got all this centrist rhetoric from the 90s that they're going to drape around his neck. And the rest of the country is going to look at that and say i don't think that's really as much of a that's a liability right as i think you do that's true but there are people in the democratic party right now who are terrified that they are not going that they're moving too far left one of them by the way is bill clinton i mean you know bill clinton for all his liabilities is in fact a very successful politician who ran one of the most flawless presidential campaigns ever. A small point on the centrist and the Democratic Party. Forty-eight hours ago, there were three likely candidates who would have run in the center of the Democratic Party.

Today, there is one. Michael Bloomberg said, I'm not doing it. And Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio said, nope, I'm not running either. It's Joe Biden and Joe Biden alone, and he's still thinking it over. I'm not sure that's true. I think Hickenlooper has a very, very strong case to make that he's saying. Has Hickenlooper declared? Yeah.

Oh, he has. Okay. All right. I stand corrected in a small way. I think he's made a recognition. I mean, his recognition is about 1% in polls with a margin of error of 2 percent. Well, it's just 5 percent. Wait until people realize how many loopers out there that need to be hickened or something like that.

But then again, as I would say, it's like in primary campaigns on both – in both parties, the trouble aren't – is tough questions from a reporter or tough questions from a debate moderator. It's what happens with the candidates due to each other. Yes. It's not wanting Chris Wallace to ask you questions. My god, Chris Wallace is probably a port in a storm for you if you're in one of those giant debates. Like you can't wait for Chris Wallace to ask you a tough question because it means one of your opponents isn't screaming at you about something you said 22 years ago. Last question. First, I have to tell you this podcast was brought to you by Molecule, Captera, and Call Me Comfort Blanket.

Support them and you support us and vice versa. Here's the last question. When you say that there are people, Rob, who are in the Democratic Party who are terrified of parties lurched to the left, are they having their version of the old guard, the ahoy, the cruise ship types? Is it because they fear what the country will become or is it just because they fear that they're going to lose access and power? I think they fear they're going to lose. I think they fear that this – the 2020 general election seems incredibly winnable for Democrats, incredibly winnable for a democratic president. And they're going to blow it. I think that's what they feel. Yes. winnable for Democrats, incredibly winnable for a Democratic president. And they're going to blow it, I think is what they

feel. And nobody wants to, I mean, this is like you don't, I mean, this is an organizational catastrophic failure. Of course, it happens naturally in American politics when you have one person and then you have an opposition. The opposition is much more strident than necessary. But,

you know, I mean,'re everybody's doing the same math that everybody's saying well okay trump is president because of 72 000 votes spread across three states right so maybe we'll get those back maybe you will and maybe i mean it's where i have very very liberal democrat i would be running right now because you get it i mean look at the things that we're talking about actually openly now, and really a lot of that is because Trump has created this enormous space to his left and to the center. So we're talking about socialism now and Medicare for all and all these sort of unthinkable things 10, 15, 20 years ago. So it is a great opportunity for the far left to get its message across. It may lose in 2020, but, you know, unless the Democrats find a more palatable and centrist candidate, and I say the same thing for the Republicans, you know, we're going to be

ping-ponging back and forth a lot. Under the grave. You're right. Peter, you might recall Ronald Reagan made some speeches, some radio speeches coming out against socialized medicine, which was very much brooded about in the 50s. So I think – I mean so some of these are news. Some of these aren't. A lot of this just seems like a very lurid, neon-hued exaggeration of the general fissures that have been under our feet for the last 20 years. But the next one – but we'll solve it all by the next election, the most important election in our lifetime, right? Will we solve it all in the next election? the most important election in our lifetime, right? Will we solve it all in the next election? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Flight 94 election. You know, one observation, then I leave it to you, and we can close happily and see each other next week. I do think it's shaping up in this weird way. Rob is exactly right. This is the way it's already starting to shape up. It's already simplifying in some weird way. And this will drive the Democrats to gnashing of teeth and wailing in outer darkness. It's shaping up this way. I, Donald Trump, may be a man of low character and disreputable past, but ladies and gentlemen, I am all that stands between you and them and they are worse and you know what that could get him re-elected yeah i

think you're right um but it's not like we won't find out down the road about our predictions which is why we sort of shy away from making them from oscars to football to politics no nobody's getting on all them here in the ricochet podcast or maybe. Rob, Peter, it's been a pleasure, and we'll see you everybody at the Ricochet 3.0 thing where there's comments for those who want to pony up. See you there, guys. Next week, boys. Thanks, guys. Never took a paper or a learning degree The son of your friends think they're stupid or me

But it's nothing that I care about Well, I don't know I've been to the weights of the sun And a man of magic's been what I want done And I may be the man on the magic's Well I won't know And I may be the man In a simple tongue But I know What I'm saying

That's I love you When the logic Was stolen I'm thinking It's done You'll be warning me Of the man In a simple tongue

I can't. I'm not One thing and that's how love begins. I'm not proud of the fact that I never learned much. Just feel I should say. What you get is all real. I can't put on an attitude. You take breaks with the thought anyway. And I can't unravel riddles, problems, and funds. I'm a homegrown future and beyond the run And I may be the man of sin

But I know one thing and that's I love you I love you And that thought feeling is a currency It makes me a family man of sin Thank you. And that's how they all stay Well, I don't know how many might make up a ton Of all the Nobel Prizes that I've never won And I may be the man of simple terms But I don't want them That's not love

When all our children's clothing all think he gets done You'll be wanting me all I arms of the man of simple terms You'll be warming the arms of the man of simple terms You'll be warming the arms of the man Ricochet. Join the conversation.