Libs Cry as the Late Night Lights Go Out!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Stephen Colbert is out from his show on CBS, and
the conspiracy theories are abounding. I guess the core of
this conspiracy theory, which is that Stephen Colbert's show was
canceled because he is liberal. And now this is a
sign of dark clouds looming over our democracy, that Donald

(00:23):
Trump is orchestrating the firing of Stephen Colbert. All right,
that this is the narrative that CBS and its parent
corporations are going through some sort of large corporate merger
that the federal government and its anti trust oversight has

(00:45):
to in some way. Okay, whatever that merger is going
to be paramount, which I think is the parent company
that owned CBS, and therefore CBS is firing Stephen Colbert
to appease Donald Trump. Okay, that's the narrative. Now, a

(01:06):
lot of things wrong with that narrative. So again, this
is the CBS's eleven thirty pm late night comedy talk
show hosted by Stephen Colbert, which of the three major
networks and their three big time late night eleven thirty
pm comedy shows ABC with Jimmy Kimmel, NBC The Tonight

(01:31):
Show with Jimmy Fallon, and Stephen Colbert. Colbert was definitely
the most aggressively left wing. Jimmy Kimmel is pretty left wing,
but I feel like he was still more kind of
traditional comedy show host who happened to be very liberal.
Colbert's show was like dedicated to liberal stuff. He basically

(01:54):
like every single week he would have on a just
a straight up politician, and every week it was a
left wing politician. I actually was laughing because Tim Walls
tweeted out a tribute to Stephen Colbert. Oh, kase, he's
so troubling that he's being canceled. He was so important

(02:15):
for speaking truth to power, which was laughable because Colbert
never had conservatives on the show. I mean, who are
the people to whom he would be speaking truth to power?
He never had him on. The only people he talked
to were liberals, whom he, you know, slobbered all over. Now.

(02:37):
It is interesting the way that culture is shifting, and
that's kind of why I'm interested in talking about this
in the first place. Raise your hand. Any of you
in your cars, how many of you watch a late
night comedian? Raise your hand? Okay, any of you stay
up until eleven thirty pm to turn on the Tonight Show,

(03:02):
to turn on Colbert, to turn on Jimmy Kimmel. You
stay up until eleven thirty and then you watch the
show the whole way through four an hour until twelve
thirty in the morning. How many of you do that? Oh,
exactly zero of you. That's the fundamental problem with Colbert
and his show is that they're still operating this show

(03:25):
as if these late night comedy comedy shows are like,
you know, the cornerstone of a network that as if
it's still the era of Johnny Carson, or even like
of Jay Leno and Dave Letterman going up against each other,
with Leno on NBC and Letterman on CBS. It's just

(03:48):
not that era anymore. Nobody is watching that show at
that hour at that way. The way that these shows
work nowadays is you have a bit, the bit is
interesting or funny, and people watch it the next day

(04:08):
on YouTube. That's it. That's pretty much the whole thing.
James Corden's show. James Gordon used to have the CBS
show that went from twelve thirty am to one thirty am.
Cordon's Show. They knew that basically the whole reason the

(04:29):
show existed was to come up with bits like the
car karaoke bit where they would have some celebrity show
up in a car with James Corden and sing a
song and how carpool karaoke? That was it. It basically
only existed for people to watch later on on YouTube,
so people like, how could they cancel the number? After

(04:52):
Colbert Show got canceled, people were saying, how could they
cancel Colbert? His show has the number one rating among
all the eleven thirty late night sh shows. All right,
couple of things to know first, Just in general, Colbert's
show was losing money to the tune of about forty

(05:13):
million dollars a year. Now, there are a lot of
different ways to account to do your accounting to come
to that number, but everyone agrees it was losing money,
and it was losing a lot of money, and it
was losing so much money that it's not the kind
of thing where, Okay, well we're gonna make a couple
of cuts here, We're gonna, you know, get rid of

(05:33):
this element and get rid of that element and do this,
and Colbert takes you know, a thirty Colbert himself, who,
by the way, the show was estimated to be losing
forty million. Colbert alone was making a salary that people
have rumored estimated was around twenty million dollars per year.
So here's one guy eating up an eight figure salary.

(05:58):
There are two hundred people who were for the show,
which that whole element to it astounded me. Why do
you need two hundred employees and a How can a
show be losing forty million dollars and or then costing
like one hundred million dollars a year. I think that

(06:18):
was the number they were estimating that the show costs
one hundred million dollars per year to make. How you've
got a How do you have a staff with two
hundred people a show that costs one hundred million bucks
just to make per year when effectively the format is guest,

(06:40):
the format is comedian gives them, a host gives a monologue.
Guest one guest to musical guests, we're out. I don't
understand how it costs that much to do a show.
Apparently it does. And they pay for the band, and
they pay for this, and they pay for that, and
you got to get the celebrities in. I guess you

(07:01):
got to pay the celebrities to go there, even though
it's a promotional thing for them, and you got to
put up the celebrities. You gotta fly the celebrities. You
got a bubbah. Anyway, it seems like this show is
like a glorified like you could listen to a podcast
and get the same value out of it, probably more
value anyway, the show. The fundamental reality is the show

(07:24):
is losing forty million dollars. And one of the things
people noted is, yes, it has the best ratings for
terrestrial television, like two million people watch it per night,
which is not much, especially when you think back to
you know, the heyday of Carson and guys like that,

(07:47):
who you know, they had way more than that. And
in fairness, back then, there weren't as many cable options.
There weren't as many streaming options. There wasn't YouTube. People
just watched live TV for live TV. His terrestrial TV
numbers were good as far as number of viewers, with

(08:08):
a couple of problems though his audience was really old.
CBS has always dealt with this problem the last ten
fifteen years that they have an older audience than ABC, NBC,
and Fox. The average age of Dave Letterman's viewers was
sixty and now the average age of Colbert's viewers are
sixty eight. It's nothing but old liberal boomers. It's slop

(08:33):
for old liberal boomers. That's what his show became. And
you could see that also based on the fact that
with YouTube traffic YouTube numbers, Kimmel and Fallon's show had
way better YouTube and streaming numbers than Colbert's does, because

(08:57):
people under the age of sixty eight watched those shows occasionally, well,
at the very least, they will watch clips of the
show the next night. Nobody's watching clips of Colbert's show
the next night, because again it's a bunch of sixty
eight year old white liberals all talking to each other.

(09:20):
So that I found was also hilarious, and it's I
guess it's kind of a thing of it's so unprofitable
for paramount CBS. It's so unprofitable that they got to
just cut their bait. Other shows lose money. But the
thing with a lot of other kinds of programming is

(09:43):
you can run it in syndication afterwards, there are ways
you can still make money with it. You can run
it internationally, whereas you can't do something like that with
a show like one of these late night comedy shows.
They're highly highly highly topical, So you can't run him
in syndication. You can't do rerun. I mean you do reruns,

(10:07):
it's it's stale, so you can't really run it in syndication.
You can't run it internationally. It's about localized American issues
and stuff that's just not going to resonate with someone
watching it in the UK or Australia or Ireland or something,

(10:28):
or France or whatever. So basically it's useless. And it's
also a thing with Kimmel and Fallon, like they actually
do other stuff like Jimmy Kimmel's like, hey, I'm hosting
a celebrity who wants to be a millionaire, or Jimmy
Fallon will do some other other kinds of specially whereas
Colbert wasn't doing anything. He's going in he was doing

(10:50):
a show. He was getting twenty million dollars, thank you
very much. Now, all of this, though, is playing into
the sort of grand overriding Ajita anxiety about life that
liberals are undergoing right now. And where we return, I

(11:13):
want to talk about that the way that liberals keep
saying this is not normal things we're living in unprecedented times,
even though we're living in a fairly peaceful, actually not
all that remarkable time during the Trump administration. We're actually no,
there isn't any impending fascism on the rise. That is next.
I'll explain that all concept next here on the John

(11:34):
Girardi Show, Liberals are freaking out about the cancelation of
Stephen Colbert's TV show. Colbert had the best ratings of
any of the network late night talk shows, but sort
of not really. Most people watch it watch clips of
these shows the next day on YouTube, and Colbert had

(11:55):
the worst ratings on YouTube of any of those shows.
You had the worst YouTube following. His audience was older
and therefore less valuable to advertisers, and the show ultimately
was losing forty million dollars a year. However, liberals have
genuinely brainwashed themselves into thinking that this was being done

(12:16):
by CBS paramount to appease President Trump. Paramount's going through
a merger, and that they need the Trump administration to
okay the merger and therefore getting rid of Colbert was
part of the deal that they had to do in
order to appease the President. They are basing this off
of nothing again, though with a show that loses forty
million dollars a year, you have to understand the ongoing

(12:44):
state of left wing ajita. Ajita, which is a great
Italian word just means ah angster. And this constant state
that especially liberal boomers are in, I think was very
aptly described by Charlie Cook, who's writer for National Review,

(13:06):
who had a wonderful little piece Everything That's going On.
It's entitled something has Gone and then in Capital D
and Capitol W deeply wrong in the United States since
November of last year. Presumably if you follow the news,
you've heard about what's going on. You know what I'm

(13:27):
referring to, the situation, our crisis, the threat threat to democracy,
This which is not normal American life circa twenty twenty
five or what's left of it, as is confirmed daily
on repositories of mainstream thoughts such as Reddit, Blue Sky,
and the comments section at the Washington Post, maybe all

(13:50):
places where hyper left wing people reside. Something has gone
deeply wrong Capital D, Capitol W in the United States
since November of last year. The fruits of this problem
Capital P are everywhere. It is the reason that your
local diner was less busy than usual last Thursday morning.
It's why your friend Sandra had to call in sick
to work this week. It's why there was that terrible

(14:12):
flood down in Texas earlier in the month. You can
feel it right good. If you can feel it, it
must be real. On Monday, a writer at the New
York Times became so convinced that the car in front
of her was full of ice agents coming to take
someone that she began to panic. As it turned out,
the vehicle wasn't full of ice agents. It was quote
an airport limo picking up a passenger. Still, the mere

(14:33):
fact that she had incorrectly thought otherwise, the fact that
she had been quote obliged to run through such a
mental triage, as she put it, was extremely telling. Capital
E Capital t She is tired, like the rest of us.
She is just so tired. Nobody, especially not writers for
America's August paper of Record, wants to be forced into hallucinations.

(14:57):
All of my friends feel the same. They literally, literally
they can't do anything right now, not with everything the
way that it is. Capital E Capital w for way
capital that capital is. They can't read the newspaper or
visit Florida, or get married and have a baby. Even
going outside Carrie's untold risks. You're aware of what Fiona's

(15:20):
aunt sister in law's friends said about her cousin up
in Canada at the end of last weekend's anguish brunch. Anyway, Sure,
when it came to it, the cousin was able to
drive his Subaru across the border without incident. And sure,
at no point during his camping trip to Michigan did
he actually come close to being kidnapped by plain closed
agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service, but he'd been
worried about it for weeks. So anyway, this is the

(15:44):
kind of mindset, especially among boomer liberal NPR list Well,
I mean, the NPR cancelation is just another building block
to this whole state of Agida. Boomer liberals have really
have so thoroughly convinced themselves of all the stuff they
were saying for the last you know, prior eight years,

(16:07):
that Donald Trump is a fascist, that Donald Trump is
an authoritarian, that blah blah blah blah blah. They've genuinely
convinced themselves into thinking that America is on the brink America,
that that that this is, this is not normal, that
the society is. And so that's the lens through which

(16:29):
they're reading and viewing literally everything. That's the lens through
which they are viewing things as wildly disparate as you know, uh,
I don't know, Stephen Colbert's show getting canceled to to
even down to local minutia, you know, liberals thinking that

(16:53):
every interaction between a police officer and a Mexican is
an evil actions of authoritarian bootstane, when sometimes things are
just things. Sometimes a television network canceling a show that
loses them forty million dollars a year is just that
it's really not that complex. And maybe a television network realizing, hey,

(17:24):
fifty three percent of the country or whatever it is
forty you know, forty nine. Okay, let's just go buy
who voted for Harris and who voted for Trump. Harris
got forty seven percent of the vote. Trump got forty
nine point something percent of the vote. Well, almost fifty
percent of the vote, more than voted for Kamala Harris
voted for Donald Trump. We have dedicated a huge amount

(17:48):
of our resources to only catering to one half of
the country. We've just accepted that the other half of
the country cannot this show is just not for them.
When the whole idea of late night comedy, the whole
idea of the public broadcasting system, was that it's supposed

(18:11):
to be a kind of monoculture comedy thing. It's supposed
to be something where everyone can tune in and everyone
can laugh, especially with late night comedy, as that format
was canonically established by Johnny Carson. The point of it
is to be a broad appeal, broad based, open to

(18:37):
everyone format that is inclusive, not exclusive, where if you
do make fun of politicians, if you do make fun
of political viewpoints, first of all, it's making fun. It's
not like brow furrowed, weeping condemnations of one side. It's

(18:58):
good natured. It's Johnny Carson making jokes about Reagan, as
he made jokes about Carter, as he made jokes about Clinton,
as he made jokes. You know, everyone taking it, everyone
being the butt end of a joke, and no one
wants that. Clearly, well, I shouldn't say no one wants it.

(19:24):
It just isn't really tried. Actually, I'd say probably more
people want it. I don't think it's a coincidence. That
if you're you know, counting in for like YouTube and
stuff like that, Jimmy Kimmel's probably more popular than excuse me,
Jimmy Fallon rather is more popular than the other two
Kimmel and Colbert. Why well, because Jimmy Fallon is like

(19:48):
the least political, the least politicized of all them. I mean,
he I think he kind of leans liberal on stuff,
but his show is more about playing you know, musical
chairs and you know, doing goofy bits with celebrities then
the other two, because he just wants to be funny.

(20:08):
But this is the lens through which the left is
viewing all of these developments as if the Trump administration
coming in has led to the establishment of horrible fascist authoritarianism.
And that doesn't mean that I that those of us
who don't think we're living under horrible fascist authoritarianism. It
doesn't mean we think every single policy choice that the

(20:31):
Trump administration has ever picked ever, is one hundred percent perfect.
I don't think we're living in any kind of quote
unprecedented times as they're saying. But that is the lens
through which they view the world. It's the lens through
which they view the defunding of PBS and NPR. They're
silencing viewpoints they don't like. Well, yeah, they're silencing highly

(20:54):
partisan viewpoints on publicly funded television. Of course they are.
PBS shouldn't have highly politicized programming geared only towards NPR,
should not have highly politicized programming that's chiefly geared towards
highly wealthy, upper middle class white people driving their subarus

(21:19):
in the DC suburbs. That that shouldn't be what NPR is.
When we turn a couple of Gavin Newsom California e
things about California. Are we going to try an aggressively
redistrict in the middle of a census term? And the
high speed rail system as job creation platform. We'll talk

(21:42):
about those next on the John Growardy Show. Gavin Newsom
is rattling Sabers because of a plan that's developing in Texas.
So apparently Republicans in Texas, and this is a thing
that Trump is kind of pushing. Republicans in Texas are

(22:02):
rattling Sabers about the idea of doing mid stream redistricting
basically instead of waiting until the at this point twenty
thirty census to do their redistricting and have new redistricting

(22:22):
lines kick in for the twenty thirty two elections, to
do it now so that they can come in place sooner,
maybe in twenty twenty six. This is making Gavin Newsom
very mad. Basically, Republicans think that they could do Texas

(22:43):
has experienced so much demographic change, so such an increase
in their population, that they could do redistricting right now,
and they could draw the maps with a bit more
partisan aggression and wind up giving Republicans something like five
more seats in the House of Representatives or or a
lot more seats in the House Representatives, which would be

(23:04):
a huge deal. Okay, Republicans have been operating this current
iteration of Congress since January of this year. Republicans are
operating with this narrow, razor thin majority in the House
of Representatives, and so I think Trump is sort of
quietly backed this, and a lot of Republicans. I think

(23:25):
Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, seems down for doing this. Well.
Newsom is rattling sabers. He saying, well, two can play
at that game. If they do it, then maybe we
can do it. And they will do it either by
a statute or will amend the California Constitution so we
can do it midstream. It's good for the ghost, is
good for the gander, all right. And this leads me

(23:45):
to wanting to talk a little bit about California's redistricting process.
So first, I think what Newsom is saying here might
be a bit of bluster. I don't think Newsom could.
I think it would be quite difficult for Newsom to
pull off this kind of redistricting stunt. And let me

(24:11):
explain why. First, California has more restrictions seemingly than Texas
does as far as redistricting and how to redistrict, and
what the redistricting process is like. Texas's process seems to
be a relatively straightforward American system where the state legislature

(24:32):
draws the redistricting lines for members of the House of
Representatives and members of the Texas Legislature their upper House
and lower House. In California, those tasks drawing those maps
for again members of the House of Representatives, federal representatives

(24:53):
representing us in the House representatives, as well as our
state representatives who represent us insect Primento, members of the
California State Assembly, which is our lower house, kind of
California's version of the House Representatives, which has eighty members,
and then California's State Senate, which has forty members, the
job of drawing those redistricting lines, which again, the redistricting

(25:17):
lines are drawn based on the results of the census.
We have a census every ten years, every year on
the tenth, so in twenty twenty ten, in twenty twenty
and based on those numbers you figure out how many
seats or how many people per seat, and you draw

(25:38):
lines accordingly. So in California, as I said, most states
have adopted the practice of the state legislature draws up
and votes on the redistricting lines. Texas seems to have
a system like that. California system is not that Wayfifornia

(26:00):
thanks to Arnold Arnold Schwarzenegger, who promoted this via a
ballot initiative, who changed the California Constitution to do this.
Arnold was really mad that there was too much bartisanship,
too much botisan bickering. He thought there was too much

(26:20):
partisan bickering in the state legislature, Republicans getting mad over
budgets and stopping budgets. And back in those days you
needed a two thirds majority to pass a budget, and
Republicans had enough that they could at least stop budgets,
and so Schwarzenegger was mad, and he wanted a system
that would result in less of a stark partisan divide.

(26:43):
He wanted a system where basically you that it could
encourage more moderates and more compromise. Now, to a certain extent,
that makes me think who died and made Arnold Schwarzenegger
Pope for saying that that's how you know we should
have we should have that the the makeup of our
state representatives should be different. That seems like a bit

(27:06):
much anyway. Schwarzenegger tried to accomplish this through a couple
of different ballot initiatives to amend the California Constitution that
he backed and that did get passed. One of them
was the jungle primary system, which everyone hates. Basically, our
primaries in California are not Here's the Republican primary. All

(27:27):
the Republicans get together and they vote on whom they
want to represent them as Republicans. And here's the Democrat primary.
All the Democrats to get together, they vote, they choose
the Democrat that they want to run instead everyone is
in one big pot together. All the candidates from all
the parties are in one big pot together, and the
two top vote getters will go against each other in
the runoff election in November. Of course, the problem with

(27:48):
that is you could have two Democrats be the top
two vote getters. You could have two Republicans be the
top two vote getters. You could have two Democrats who
don't represent a majority of the electorate get it. As
happened recently with the state Senate seat that was a
sixty to forty Republican district. Basically, four Republicans ran. They
basically all split the vote between themselves with about fifteen percent,

(28:12):
but two Democrats ran. Two Democrats got the forty percent
of the Democrat vote, each one of them got twenty percent,
And so in a district that was sixty to forty Republican,
the options in November were between two Democrats. So the
jungle primary, which sucks, but also the California Redistricting Commission,

(28:36):
the non partisan Redistricting Commission, basically the ballot initiative that
a majority of Californians voted for. So it's not like
I can only blame Arnold for this, but Arnold proposed it,
and dumb Californians voted for it. Was the California Citizens

(28:58):
Redistricting Commission, where basically it's a commission that's not made
up of politicians, and the idea is that it's supposed
to be a non partisan process to try to create
districts that make natural sense, but which also have to
comply with the California Voting Rights Act and the whole

(29:25):
structure of the California Voting Rights Act. And I believe
certain iterations of a federal Voting Rights Act which I've
never understood how these are constitutional because it involves blatant
decisions made on the basis of race. Is to preserve
and not divide up communities of color, which effectively, so

(29:48):
let's get the context for this. In the South, post
Civil War South, a lot of redistricting shenanigans would take
place to minimize the power or an impact of African
American communities. Basically, you would do stuff. You would gerrymander
the drawing of your district lines in order to minimize

(30:10):
the power of black voters. You would take, okay, if
black people lived in one city center, you would divide
it up like a pizza, so that the one neighborhood
of African Americans was split like a pizza into twenty
different slices part of twenty different districts, so that the
African Americans were a tiny minority in all of the

(30:32):
twenty different districts, completely eviscerating whatever political sway or power
they have. Or you would just shove all of the
black voters into just one seat into one district, and
then none of the other districts would have any Black
representation whatsoever. You can minimize their influence that way. There
were a lot of shenanigans like that that they could do,

(30:53):
and a lot of this was done out of racial motivations,
and this prompted the Federal and California Voting Rights Act,
which basically prevent you from doing that on the basis
of race. Now, the problem is that it's a long standing,
totally reasonable thing for people to draw district lines on

(31:15):
the basis of partisan politics. Yeah, we deliberately want to
make this a more Republican leaning district. And often when
you had state legislatures drawing the lines, it was very
open kind of horse trading. All right, well, look, you
can make this a safe Democrat seat, if you allow
this to be a safe Republican seat, okay, and we'll
just more straight and will allow this to be a
bit more of a competitive seat. Blah blah blah. Whereas

(31:39):
with the influence of the Voting Rights Act, especially in California,
where like I don't know, I think it's the majority
of I don't know if the majority of Californians are minorities,
it has basically resulted in the district lines being drawn
in such a way as to ensure liberal dominance and

(32:00):
a huge aggressively in the name of a non partisan voting,
non partisan redistricting system, the California Redistricting Commission winds up
drawing lines that are aggressively partisan in favor of Democrats,
so much so that of the fifty I believe it's

(32:24):
fifty two House seats in California, over eighty percent of
California's seats that California has in the House of Representatives,
over eighty percent of them are Democrat controlled at this point,

(32:46):
which is obviously disproportionate. Democrats have a majority in California,
they don't have an eighty percent majority in California. If
you're gonna have your congressional representation somewhat match the policeolitical
makeup of the state. Well, it should be, you know,

(33:07):
somewhat proportionate to the makeup of the population. Kamala Harris
won in California. Kamala Harris won the presidential election in
California about fifty eight to thirty eight. So if you
have a sixty forty split, okay, that's reasonable. We don't
have that. Democrats have a jerry mandred advantage among California

(33:31):
House seats at the level of basically eighty to twenty.
So it's allready heavily partisan stact, which is what makes
it so ridiculous what Kavin Newsom is saying, Oh, Texas
is gonna aggressively partisan jerrymander things. We can do the

(33:53):
same thing you already did. California already is massively jerrymandered
in favor of Democrats. What do you gotta do? Have
zero Republican seats, somehow you'll split Clovis. Clovis will be
the proverbial pizza that you split into twenty pieces so
that there's not one single you know, district that Clovis
has any sway over. I mean that the district I

(34:17):
live in right now, Vince Fong's district, which includes Clovis
where I live, Lamore, and a big chunk of Kerrent
County Bakersfield. Is this bizarrely drawn district. It looks kind
of like the number three. It's kind of got a
spine on the right side on the east slash right side,
and then three things jutting out, one to grab Clovis,

(34:39):
one to grab Lamour, one to grab a chunk of
the Bakersfield area. It's a district that makes no sense.
I live in Clovis and Vince Fong is my representation,
and I don't mind Vince Fong. No, this is not
a criticism of him, but I I live in Clovis
and my house member lives in Bakersfield. Why this is

(35:00):
not a natural grouping in any way, shape or form.
Now Newsom is rattling his saber that, oh, well, we
can redistrict midway. He can't because this system was set
up with a constitutional amendment voted on in a ballot
initiative by the people of California. Newsom can't change it

(35:21):
with a normal law. Democrats in the state legislature plus Newsom,
they can't change this with a normal law, and I
don't think they could amend the Constitution in time to
actually update the map, nor do I think he. I
think it's a tough call whether he would actually get
the necessary fifty percent of the vote to reinstate partisan redistricting.

(35:48):
So Newsom is rattling his saber. Oh, Texas can't do that.
Texas is doing this in response to California having already
done it. California already has partisan gerrymander district. It's just
that we do it through an allegedly quote non partisan
redistricting commission, which, of course Democrats have aggressively tried to

(36:09):
stack with as many activist liberals as humanly possible. When
we return, we'll talk about the high speed rail as
a job's creation program, of course, because it's the only
way they can still defend it. Next on the John
Growardy Show, Gavin Newsom is very upset at the Trump
administration for pulling four billion dollars in federal funding for

(36:30):
the high speed rail system, and of course, course how
does he what is the thing he points to first?
That Donald Trump is taking funding away, taking money away
from good, well paying jobs for the San Joaquin Valley.
I'm here to protect the San Joaquin Valley and its

(36:53):
job for the high speed rail is creating jobs. All right,
I'll say I've said this once about high speed rail.
I'll say it again. Yes, we could in California start
a state funded government program where we dig ditches in

(37:15):
the morning and we fill them in the evening, and
the state spends a bunch of money to pay the
workers who dig ditches in the morning and fill them
in the evening, dig ditches in the morning and fill
them in the afternoon. And yes, you can say that
this program has created jobs. You can say, look, here's
you know, We've created ten thousand jobs with our ditch

(37:39):
digging and filling state program. You can do that, and
it can create jobs. But is it a good idea
to do? Is it a good use of public money? No?
The point of public works projects is not their job
creation effect. The point of public works projects is does
the end result bring about some benefit for the state,

(38:03):
for its economy, for its infrastructure, etc. That's how it
has to be judged. And the high speed rail fails
in that measure, that'll do it. John Grolready, show see
you next time on Power Talk.