12-20-24 - 7am - Continuing Resolution

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good morning, Michael and Ragan. Colleen here from North Dakota.
This is a very heartfelt Merry Christmas and a Happy
New Year to you.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
You make my.

Speaker 1 (00:10):
Mornings so much more fun and I appreciate that. And
I'm so grateful that I ended up stumbling upon your show.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Again. I have no idea how, but I'm sure glad
I did so.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
Again, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
You're talking about us, yeah, but and we we we're
both appreciated.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
We're both appreciative of the very heartfelt compliment, and we
think it's wonderful. However, I always find it fascinating that
we seem to be the program that people stumble upon.
Can you remember when radio, Think back when radio, I

(00:53):
mean back when I started, we had a promotions department
and and we had like billboards.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
There used to advertising advertising.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
There used to be you know, advertising on the side
of the bus or you know, or at the RTD
you know, parking ride, or you'd at the bus stop,
or you know, to be in the newspapers or whatever,
you know. But no, now people just stumble upon us,
which is fine. Before we get to the fiasco from

(01:28):
the earlier fiasco, about the budget. Let's skip that and
go back in time for a moment. I don't remember
the name of it, but there was, back from the
eighteen hundreds, a French dictionary of cliches. I think we

(01:50):
need a new dictionary of American cliches or I And
it was a humorous dictionary. It was all about the
stupidity of the cliches. As in the original. The humor
would offer often turn on what would actually be the
contradiction or the subterfuge that was implicit in the word,

(02:12):
the phrase, or the cliche itself. A great example is
affirmative action. Now, I think affirmative action should be in
this new dictionary of American cliches because it is supposed
to be what's the affirmative action supposed to be about?

(02:32):
Battling discrimination? Right? But what does it actually do? It
actually enshrines discrimination in the law. So you may think
of affirmative action as oh, this is this great thing,
But what does affirmative action do. It guarantees that you're
going to discriminate. Now, what you think about a word
that you've probably heard incessantly over the past, say seventy

(02:55):
two hours, continuing resolution or cr you know, if you're
among the cool kids, like you know, obviously we are,
you just refer to the CR. Now, the phrase the
CR carries a stench, kind of the stench of, you know,
legislative diligence. The congressmen are hard at work getting a

(03:19):
continuing resolution, But what we really know is that a
CR operates by subverting legislative responsibility for the sake of
something else. Pork. You know, pork itself should probably be
in that dictionary pork. Now. You know, we all love

(03:44):
bacon right right, well, or sausages or hot dogs, but
you know, pork, pork belly. Oh, get go to a
really good Asian restaurant, have some bows and pork bonds.
Oh baby, that's so good. So continuing resolution becomes kind
of a fig lee for Congress as they try to

(04:05):
stitch together or conceal. What they're really trying to do
is just conceal, or maybe divert from our attention, their
failure to do their job. And then they try to
convince you that what they're doing is they're providing a
physically sound budget in a timely manner. Yet they call
it a continuing resolution. So we're just going to continue

(04:28):
to do what we've been doing, and we're going to
continue to do what we've been doing until a date
certain when we'll do another continuing resolution. It can just
continue doing what we've been doing, continuing what we've been doing,
and continuing what we've been doing again again and again.
Can anybody tell me when the last time was that
we actually had a legitimate, voted upon, congressionally approved, presidentially

(04:53):
signed budget. What year was that? Nineteen? Then we get
anytime the cabal starts talking to us about the CR,
you inevitably get the threat or the specter or the

(05:17):
almost inevitable government shut down, And the government shut down
is somehow supposed to go Congressman into contemplating a defection
from the CR in order to get back in line.
I mean, it is the stupidest thing we've got going on,

(05:39):
and we get a lot of stupid things going on
right now. May it really might not be amiss to
note that the phrase government shut down itself probably belongs
in this new dictionary, since the government what it never
really shuts down, which is kind of a pity. What
do you think about it? Think about if we if

(06:01):
we just shut down? You know, people always use social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,
you know, or you know, your your SNAP benefits. You know,
all that's automated right now, you may need some human
beings to get you started, to get you into the
system for social Security or Medicare, or to get your

(06:26):
SNAP benefits. You may actually need a human being to
you know, like a daily entry person. I mean, now
being realistic, you might need several people because you got
to have somebody to review your application and make sure
it's just not fraudulent, as if there's no fraud in Medicare,
social security or anything else. But you know, you're supposed

(06:46):
to at least pretend you're checking for fraud, and then
you hand it off to somebody else that you know,
is a is a you know, a GS five and
they're plugging all that info into the computer system and
then just boom, everything becomes all to make it. But
they till they till still try to scare you with
the idea that if the government shuts down, you're not

(07:07):
going to get your Social Security, you're not going to
get your welfare benefits, and you're you know, the world's
going to collapse. So in from my perspective, have been
having been inside that behemoth. The only thing I really
want to continue to operate two things, the US military
and the Air Traffic Controllers. And selfishly I want the

(07:31):
ATC to continue to work because I'd like to get
to Phoenix, you know, over the weekend. But beyond that,
I don't really want planes, you know, flying into each other.
I don't want I don't want pilots looking over their shoulder,
AMAI behind me, Amy over there, he may over there.
Can we keep moving it, you know, six hundred miles

(07:52):
an hour before we find somebody coming at us at
six hundred miles an hour. Yeah, I'd like for ATC
to continue to work. When when push comes to shove,
those in favor of a CR always respond to any
criticism of the CR by doing what shutting down stupid stuff. Well,

(08:13):
let's shut down the national parks. That'll show them. Remember
during COVID when they shut down the open air memorials. Yes,
so they put ropes and they put cops all around,
like the World War II Memorial or the Vietnam Memorial
or the Lincoln Memorial, all open air, all where you're

(08:34):
not gonna catch the COVID. No, you're not gonna you're
not gonna catch the COVID, but we're gonna shut those
down because well, we're gonna shut them down because well
we don't have anybody to man them. You ever seen
the people that man the memorials. Occasionally you'll see a
DC cop, but most usually you'll see a park ranger. Yeah,

(08:57):
an unarmed park ranger. But the aircraft and the aircraft carriers,
they continue their patrols. All those really essential checks, like
the congressional checks. You know, they'll get their checks. If
you're on Social Security, you'll get your check, and you'll

(09:18):
continue to get your you know, your EBT card will
automatically be reloaded. All that will continue to happen somehow,
by some process of mystical agglomeration. In original twenty pages
of a continuing resolution blossomed, you know, like springtime blossom

(09:41):
into more than fifteen hundred pages. Just marvel at how,
you know, a little amoeba, just a little single cell amoeba,
in this case, just twenty pages mushrooms into fifteen hundred pages.
It's like watching the tulips bloom in Holland. That embarrassing

(10:06):
pile of verbiage that dropped a few days ago before
the lesser pile of garbage dropped. Congress is supposed to
scrutinize it almost instantly. I noticed somebody on x X
has an AI platform called GROC, and so they took
the fifteen hundred pages and they uploaded it into GROC

(10:29):
to give a summary. And it's one of the accounts
I forget which one it was, but one of the
accounts that I follow had done this, and so they
put the fifteen hundred pages in. And you would expect
what that GROC would be able to within, you know,
I would have thought maybe a minute, maybe, you know,
generously five minutes, seventeen minutes later, they were still waiting

(10:52):
for a summary of what the fifteen hundred pages contained. Now,
part of that is in defense of GROC. Part of
that is because much of the language is section two
thirty seven of Public Law to nineteen. Remove the words
shall and insert the word maybe. Now that doesn't really

(11:14):
tell growk anything because GROC has to know what Public
Law to ninety was. But Congress is supposed to scrutinize
it instantly because they got to take a vote before
you know, they go and break for Quansai. I guess
before they go on break today by the way, today, Yeah,

(11:35):
So why the rush? Why all of a sudden do
we rush up to this point where and you're listening
to a professional procrastinator. Yes, I am known. Not only
do I have a JD, I got a PP professional procrastinator.

(11:56):
But if you PLoP down a fifteen hundred page verbal
turd on everybody's desk a day or two before recess,
like a day or two, it's kind of happened to
Dragon I yesterday. We have to get certain things done,
so when we're off air, certain things still happen. And
suddenly nobody seems to want to tell us. I literally

(12:18):
got one yesterday during yesterday's program about hey, we need
this change before you go on vacation, and we need
this change for and if you look at the response
I got, they need it for today, starting for today.
So Dragon I rushed around and did it for today,

(12:38):
and yet that sponsor is not on air today. So
despite the fact that I looked at Dragon and I
kind of begged him with puppy eyes, and Dragon, can
we just go ahead and do this now, because you know,
the AE needs it and the agency out on the
West coast needs it, and so can we just.

Speaker 2 (12:57):
Do it now, I'm already done for the week. No.

Speaker 1 (13:00):
And so he finally agreed to do it and he
got it all done, and then he goes, how many
of those do you think? How many of those live
spots do you think you have today?

Speaker 2 (13:09):
Big fat, goose, egg, big zero.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
So it's you know, somebody, somebody that runs this company.
One time told me that it's as bureaucratic as the government,
and I told they were full of crap, and I
since went back to them and said, no, you're exactly
right it is. So what do you expect people to do?
You've known about this for months. You pop it down
on their desks, and you want everything done by today,

(13:37):
just before you're going on your little recess. What you're
really hoping is that everybody will just say yes, and
everybody can go from the home for the holidays and
your work is done. Here. The urgency, as the fake
ramas Swamy observed, is one hundred percent manufactured, and it

(13:58):
is designed to avoid serious public debate. BINGO, Now, the
bill did that. I'm talking about the first bill. The
bill did include one hundred and four billion dollars for
disaster relief from those hurricanes this summer. Now, I don't
know whether that number is reasonable or not. I know,

(14:18):
and I know it's been twenty it's been two decades ago.
But we only spent thirty billion dollars on the entire
nine to eleven thing for New York City. So one
hundred billion dollars it seems like a lot, but I'm
not going to judge. But it also includes a lot
of other provisions. One news source noted that the bill
includes a modest race for congressional salaries. We talked about

(14:41):
that yesterday. Remember, immodest would be more accurate since the
sly bookers in DC slipped in a forty percent pay
raise for themselves. Forty percent, you know, which is what
I'm expecting. I'm quite sure iheart's thinking to themselves. You
know what I think this year is sort of getting
Brown of forty percent raise, well to just be really

(15:01):
nice to give him a forty five percent raise. So
I'm hoping that that two percent really comes through.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
Well, you did overperform? You put in what do they
did two hundred and thirty days a year?

Speaker 1 (15:14):
Oh? Yeah, I have overperformed. It was two twenty seven
seven days. Yeah, I've already overperformed. But the bill the
CRS also act as a condom. As a prophylactic. It
not only spends money, it aims to keep outsiders, namely you,

(15:37):
from looking into how the money has been spent in
the past. Accordingly, the bill included provisions that would have
prevented Congress from investigating Liz Cheney and her one eyed
January sixth committee. Now, why why, why would you not
want anybody to know that? Why and why would anybody
want to slip it? Why would the people themselves, who
are so corrupt and incompetent want to put in a

(16:00):
provision that says, hey, you can't investigate somebody who's not
even a member of our club anymore. She's a former
member of the club. She got kicked out. Here's what
it said. The House shall quash or modify any legal
process directed to the provider for a House office if

(16:22):
compliance with the legal process would require the disclosure of
House data. In other words, they don't want you to
know anything about what we did. No, you can't see this.
Now Here are other things in the first bill. The
cr also seems to have gotten a big They got
a big, giant vaccination from big Pharma because it explicitly,

(16:45):
explicitly forbids the Secretary of HHS. Here's looking at u
RFK Jr. From revising the vaccine injury table and continues
the exclusion for compensations for anybody who might be able
to prove that they were harmed by the COVID nineteen vaccine. Yeah,
complete unfettered immunity, continue it. Criminals, they talked about criminals

(17:12):
in that bill no longer called criminal offenders. But are
you ready for this? Or Weellian language? Justice involved individuals?

Speaker 2 (17:22):
Merry Christmas, Michael, Merry Christmas. Dragon. Looks like these lips
have a hard time telling the truth. All they want
to do is lie.

Speaker 1 (17:29):
About this Continued Resolution bill because we all know everybody's
going to get paid, and I'd love to see it
our government shut down. Have a god one, Why do
you have to be such a trouble baker. I'm fascinated

(17:51):
by this entire process. It's disgusting. You have fascinating. It's
watching a car wreck. Let me finish about the old
bill before I jumped to the new bill. As I said,
there were stupid things like you know in the statutes
you can no longer refer to criminal offenders in any

(18:13):
criminal statute, but instead two justice involved individuals. Doesn't that
sound nice? I'm a justice you know, I'm not a criminal.
I'm a justice involved individual. I'm involved in the justice system.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (18:28):
Then, as I think I pointed this out yesterday, it
extends funding for the Global Engagement Center. That's a nice phrase,
global engagement. That's the key note of the censorship industrial complex.
David Sichs notes that the Global Engagement Center was originally

(18:49):
created within the State Department to combat foreign this information
the Twitter files. Remember when those came out revealed that
it was actually censoring Americans. It would set a good
precedent to disband a department that abuses its authority that way. Well,
gal Da, of course. Now, in the past, these continuing

(19:15):
resolutions have eventually prevailed every single time. This time, well,
this is where it gets interesting. Donald Trump is not
yet president, but the current president is totally a wall
on this. I mean completely totally a wall. But Trump's

(19:41):
influence is certainly being felt. DOEGE the Department of Government
Efficiency just an independent initiative. All it is is an
initiative headed by Muskin Ramaswami. The goal is to trim
two trillion dollars per year in government spending. Now we'll

(20:02):
see how that goes. If they can get half that,
I'll be ecstatic. But they've taken the lead in opposing
the original CR. Wrecking Ball Musclone has been posting more
than one hundred items a day on x criticizing different

(20:22):
parts of the CR. The bill floundered, and even after
they reduced it from fifteen hundred pages down to twenty pages,
got rid of everything, the pay raises, the immunity, the

(20:44):
language changes, just did what they needed to do to
keep the existing level of spending through March. They eliminated
the debt ceiling, which Trump wanted and is good. I'll
explain that in a minute. Wife. I agree, that's good,

(21:07):
and did the disaster funding. So they did that now
they needed because they skipped the Rules Committee, and they
skipped the Rules Committee because most conservatives on the Rules
Committee wanted to have, you know, certain times for debate,

(21:29):
wanted to kind of stretch the process out. They wanted
and if the Rules Committee wanted to, they could have
established that just a simple majority could have passed it.
But because they did not go through the Rules Committee,
the rules of the Congress require that now is going
to require two thirds vote, So they shot themselves on
the foot they couldn't get two thirds. In fact, the

(21:52):
number of the number of Republicans that opposed the original
CR when they finally got the CR that Trump said, hey,
this is the bill that I want, the number of
so called conservative Republicans that voted against it actually went up. Now,
explain that one to me. Mike Johnson proved incapable of

(22:17):
herding cats, absolutely incapable of hurting cats. So now here
we are, I haven't I'm just glancing up the TV
to see if that's anything anybody's talking about. They're talking
about the NFL playoffs, and we got a commercial in CNN.

(22:38):
Maybe they I'll start explaining what's really going on here. Now, First,
let's talk about Musk tweeting that if you vote for
the original bill, you're probably gonna lose your job in
two years. Musk was, in my estimation, simply repeating what

(23:00):
he and Trump had talked about, because Trump had made
it clear he was he was against the bill. Musk
sends out his tweet. Then everybody goes Blisty's, well, who's Musk?
Who's president? The very people who campaigned with and for
Donald Trump. Suddenly because Elon Musk, the four five hundred

(23:25):
billion dollar man, decides that he's going to as he
had been, but he put it in stronger language and
said you'll lose your job in two years. And then
everybody started scrambling. Then Trump jumped in and said, what, yes,

(23:47):
I am opposed to this bill. I don't want it.
So they went back to the drawing board, they narrowed
it down, got exactly what Trump wanted in and then
the number of Republicans voting against it went up. Now,
explain that one to me, because as much as I
like Thomas Massey, and I really do, and he really

(24:10):
is for eliminating government spending and reducing or reducing government spending,
sometimes you have to take little battles and win little
battles in order to get to in order to advance
your movement and to get further into the combat zone,

(24:33):
you've got to win a little battle. And maybe you
win the battle in an ugly way. It's like when
NFL coaches come out and you know they won by
one point, where they've won solely on defensive points or
only field goals. Nonetheless, that is a victory. That is
a win, and that's what you're looking for as a W.
In this case, they were looking for a W in

(24:54):
order to get to March, so that between January third
or whatever it is and March twenty eighth or twenty fifth,
whatever date's that, I forget which date it was, they
would then be in the majority in both houses. And
yet they killed the second bill, and then people like

(25:16):
chip Roy come out, and look, I find chip Roy
a fascinating character because I have diehard Conservatives friends. I've
got people on X all of whom I respect, that

(25:37):
are on both sides of Chip Roy. They hate him.
He's a rhino, he's only in it for himself. And
by golly, he on the other hand, he personifies exactly
the kind of congressman that we need. Well, okay, maybe
both things can be true for both people. But here

(25:58):
I think that he and Thomas Massey made a huge mistake,
and that was not voting for the bill that Trump wanted,
because now they will need Democrat votes to get down
what they needed to get done. Whereas if the House
had passed this clean resolution yesterday, that would have gone

(26:21):
to the Senate, where it probably would have failed and
the government was shut down anyway, But then Republicans would
be in the position of blaming the Democrats. The Democrats
didn't do it. So if the government shut down as
the Democrats, can you not see beyond your nose? You
ef an idiot's good grief. And then we got into

(26:42):
the big debate over oh my gosh, Trump wants to
just push off any sort of debt sealing increases for
his entire term. And again chip Roy came out, and
chip Roy tweeted this, the old bill one hundred and

(27:06):
ten billion dollars in deficit spending, unpaid for, zero increase
in the national credit card. New bill one hundred and
ten billion deficits spending unpaid for for a trillion plus
for a debt ceiling increase with zero instructural reforms for cuts. Well,
and he says, of course he'll vote no. Let me

(27:28):
explain why chip Roy was wrong. There's a number of
problems with this mode of thinking, and if you understand them,
you'll understand why Trump and Elon Musk are right and
while and why chip Roy is wrong. Because the analogy
between the debt ceiling and a credit card limit is

(27:50):
a terrible analogy. If you fail to pay off your
credit card debt. Ultimately, what happens? Will you end up
in personal bankrupt see A court will wipe away your debts,
Your credit rating will go down. The bank will write
off some of the debt, if not all of the
debt Chapter seven, maybe all of the debt. No big deal.

(28:11):
You have to start over and it only affects you
nobody else. But what happens if the United States government defaults?
Good morning? The politicians are going to blackmail the people
until they get their perks and their pork. W ft

(28:36):
there's that WTF again? No wa, he's a WFFT. Yeah,
w yeah, well f them? Oh I think that's yeah, yeah,
you think I'm stupid. But sometimes, you know, there's a
little moment of brilliance.

Speaker 2 (28:55):
Blind squirrel finds not exactly.

Speaker 1 (28:58):
So Chip Roy is all worried about you know, we're
going to increase the national debt. Well yeah we are.
Even with cutting there will still be increases and expenses.
It's going to take a while to fix this. But
the analogy to the home credit card is a little different,
because if the government defaults on its debt, that's catastrophic.

(29:21):
That's global US treasuries are the backbone of the global
financial system. The security of treasuries isn't just the backbone
of our economic power, it's the backbone of our military
power too. The debt ceiling always gets raised because it
has to be raised, because no president can just let
the country default, and so Trump rightly wants the debt

(29:45):
ceiling raised. Now, Republicans will have a tiny, unworkable majority
in Trump's first term because there is a small faction
Republicans that effectively will not vote for debt ceiling increases.
So Trump's going to be forced to make concession to
Democrats in order to get their votes, in the same
way that Biden had to make concessions to get Kevin

(30:07):
McCarthy in the last debt ceiling fight a couple of
years ago. That sucks, and I don't want that. Now.
There's a lot of work to be done on the
fiscal front, and Musk and Ramaswami are just getting started,
and I'm confident, based just on this SR debate and
how it got reduced, that they will be able to

(30:29):
force Congress around to their way of thinking. But you
have to be able to take the winds when you
can and you have to realize that in a world
where Republicans have the White House and thin majorities in
the House, in the Senate, debt ceiling brinksmanship helps the
Democrats and hurts Trump, not the other way around. Don't

(30:51):
forget that, Republicans, get your heads out of your ass.
Good grief,