Trump Silences Another Regulator Daring to Question Him, David Cay Johnston Joins 11/4/25

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
And welcome everyone. Please please remain standing. Yes, it is
a pleasure to be bullied by your recorded applause. You know.
It is Tuesday, which brings David K. Johnston into our midst.
The Pullter Prize winner joins us an hour two today
will a visit with one of my old friends for
just a minute or two. She's got a special event

(00:22):
going out in the Bay Area, and a lot of
our listeners and viewers are in the Bay Area, so
we mentioned at least our origin story goes back to
the Bay Area, so we like a tip of the
cap to the Bay Area once in a while. Kim
is here everyone and I get a lot of email
going is she going to be with you every day?
And the answer is yes, she is. And I love

(00:42):
that my Kim is which is with me every day
and keeps us honest Tony here most of the He
is as you know, the he is the man who works,
I don't know realistically, like nine jobs. You know, depending
on if the baseball season is on. You got to

(01:03):
make that money for that. David Busters you're building in
your garage, baby kills man. Yeah, he's got all the time,
new slot machine. It's all there. At Tony's house. So
right on, I've got new polling numbers. Bad news for
all of you Trump fans. Donald Trump people are now

(01:24):
trying to remember, Oh yeah, I remember, this guy is trouble,
and uh, the polling numbers reflect that. I also have
some update, an update or two along the election wires

(01:45):
that Kim will keep us posted on. I mean, there's
a lot of attention on this New York election. I
don't think. I mean, I get it. There could be
a surprise, but I think Mum Donnie's got this. I mean,
if Sliwo wasn't in it, then you could understand how
it will be a tighter race and Cuomo might get
those sleeve of votes. But I don't see it.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
That last minute endorsement from Trump of Cuomo isn't going
to make a difference in New Yorkers.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
I do hug and kiss that last people, the last
minute hug from Trump hugged. Yeah. I don't think. I
don't think it's particularly going to be effective. I am
reminded of who I am always where I'm wearing this shirt.
This is from our merch line. Get mark merch dot com.

(02:34):
You can find maybe the the thing that works for you.
This is just a T shirt that was there's no message.
Apart from that, we have also, as you know, T
shirts and merch with message. In fact, I'm drinking from
the Peacefully Resist coffee mug, which I love.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
So I want to tell you Mark mail in from
Steven Ironmonger who's in Japan, and.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
Yeah, that's right. This is pretty cool. Yeah, his merch
has made it all across Asia and here it is
at an Asian religious monument the Mark Thompson Show. Is
that a beanie? Would you call that?

Speaker 2 (03:22):
Uh?

Speaker 1 (03:23):
Yeah, very very cool. Thank you Steven. He's been very
good about sending us pictures, not only bringing the merch everywhere,
but then photographing it and sending us photographic evidence of it.
Very impressive, sir. So thank you Steven. If you have
our merch and you show up anywhere with it, take
a pick. We'll share it here on the air. Uh.

(03:46):
By the way, I wanted to mention, just because I
said share it here on the air, that I got
into the lot of positive letters. I got into the
home office a check yesterday and I'll share it with
you tomorrow. It was for ninety dollars and it really
makes a difference because a lot of the time we

(04:09):
don't make a big deal out of this most of
the time, but a lot of the time, something happens
on the show, we'll be sharing some video with you,
and we don't get monetization because we decide that it's
more important to share with you the video because of
the news story, because of the personality involved. Let's say
the Trump interview is a great example from sixty minutes.

(04:31):
We couldn't get any monetization from that show, but we
felt it was too important. To another word, CBS and
Paramount they get that they get the all monetization from
yesterday's show, but we felt that it was too important
and the information and also the subject matter was way

(04:53):
too important for us just to pass on it because
we weren't going to get monetization. So we let that go,
and so it's out there. And our point is in
mentioning this, we feel as though the show and the
integrity of the show and what we want to include
in the show is more important than always making money

(05:14):
from the show. The problem with that is you begin
to not have any money if you do that too long.
So it was quite beautiful that we got this ninety
dollars check in yesterday, and I just wanted to thank
everyone who finds a way to support this show Patreon,
PayPal and even old school check. If you want to

(05:36):
just send a check you don't trust the world of
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It's the Mark Thompson Show at gmail dot com. That's
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have a comment on the show or you want to

(05:56):
have a suggestion, people send me articles to read, et cetera.
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send a check. So anyway, thank you all of you
who support to your Patreon and PayPal. You help offset some
of the decisions that we make on this show that

(06:18):
just you know, lead to lack of monetization. And as
long as I'm at it, smash it, mash it with
your iron rod thumbs up. Please helps us in this
world of of YouTube. And let's want to use Mark Tomson.
Let's give Mark Tompson, Mark got a uh look at

(06:39):
this a super chat from Lucy McAllister my favorite McAllister.
Kim is number two, Kim McAllister, Lucy is number one.
Thank you, Mark, Kim, Tony Albert and listeners, Thank you,
big shout out to you. Thank you. Can we send

(07:01):
a fruit basket there too, says Tom. You know you cannot,
but what a great, great thought. Tom. The keeper of
the ding is Tom Dusenberry. And happy birthday to Shadow Stevens.
That was yesterday. Thank you Dan. Yes, indeed, now I

(07:21):
am looking. Should I bring Ruth on now or should
I quickly Let me just quickly touch on the fact
that Diane lah Lad passed away. She's eighty nine years old,
the mother of Laura Dern. She was I mean, this
is an Oscar winning actress or MADDI nominated and director
Thank you. Yeah. She was nominated for was It Alice

(07:49):
Doesn't Live here Anymore? Yeah? And she was in Wild
at Heart from David Lynch and Rambling Rose. She was
a real old stage actress as well as a film actress. Obviously.
In other words, her chops were serious. Sixty years on

(08:12):
the screen and Scorsese cast her as a fiery, sharp
tongued Arizona diner waitress and Alice doesn't live her anymore.
It was a nineteen seventy four film and it got
her Best Supporting Actress nomination. Yeah, she was in Chinatown.

(08:37):
And of course her her daughter, Laura Dern, is a
brilliant actress in her own right. Yeah, she was a
kid at a Mississippi. Her dad was a veterinarian and
I remember she I had her on my old podcast,

(09:01):
Oh Wow, and she talked about it. She Actually it
was kind of cool because she came to the studio
and she were kind of hanging out waiting for the
studio to open up, and so we're kind of just
talking and she has great stories about you know, she
knew Tennessee Williams and she helped rewrite some of Tennessee
Williams' stuff. I mean, she's really one of those lives
that's just amazing. She got into movies in a Roger

(09:28):
Corman b movie called The Wild Angels in nineteen sixty six,
and then just tons of work followed. So later in life,
she was in the lamp National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation Ghosts
of Mississippi Primary Colors and Rave Reviews apparently for and

(09:53):
I didn't see this Enlightened, which was the Mike White
HB dramedy. She played a troubled sales executive who've moves
back in with her mom after a nervous breakdown at
the office. Didn't see it, but she was married three times.
That's the way to do it. Actor Bruce Dern, William Shay,

(10:18):
and then Robert Hunter. There she is two. There is
a Bruce Dern, a young Bruce Dern with her anyway.
The brilliantly talented and wonderfully deep Diane Ladd passes away
at eighty nine. The other passing, of course, is Dick Cheney.

(10:43):
Dick Cheney, the guy who was responsible for so much
of the post nine to eleven policy and strategy for
handling terrorism. He under George Bush the Younger, was responsible

(11:03):
for okaying and assuming policy control for a lot of
the dark ops that he even spoke of in various
ways publicly. He said, this is kind of going to
get dirty. We're going to have to do some dark
things to go after these people. And he was an

(11:25):
architect of the war in Iraq. Many would say he
was the architect of the war in Iraq. It should
also be mentioned that he had immense holdings in Halliburton.
Halliburton the great beneficiary from a corporate standpoint of the
war in Iraq. You know the amount of money that

(11:48):
poured into the coffers at Halliburton, It's incalculable. And the
whole idea that we have to do whatever we have
to do in America. You may not like it, but
this is what has to be done to protect our shores.
That became sort of his calling card. In fact, he

(12:12):
said that the Bush administration had an obligation to do
whatever it took to defend America. That's a direct quote.
The number of people killed in Iraq eight hundred thousand people,
and that's from the direct war and violence there, and

(12:37):
the prisoners taken. The degree to which prisoners taken were
actually responsible for anything in Iraq that became a question
that didn't get enough focus. He was a White House
aid under Nixon, the youngest ever White House Chief of
Staff to Ford, a member of Congress under Ronald Reagan,
Secretary of Defense to George H. W. Bush, and of

(12:58):
course Vice President to George W. Bush the younger and
again he was at Haliburton before Bush said hey, come
be my vice president. And then of course his daughter
Liz Cheney followed him into politics as a US House member,
and then she went on to be well. Perhaps the

(13:25):
Cheney that had in the end some degree of moral compass,
But Dick Cheney was someone who I would suggest represents
the darkness of America, and his complete peace with all

(13:49):
that he perpetrated is even more disturbing. He said, I
would do it all again. I would go back into
Iraq again if we had to do it again. He
made these commentsblic So that's kind of a page what
we're enduring now and experiencing. Now. You know that we
know better, but better to stand by your decision, flawed

(14:14):
as it is, which is a ridiculous, ridiculous idea somehow
that in the history of looking back at Iraq, you
can't clearly see the horror that was perpetrated, also the
fraud that was perpetrated. Now, I don't expect him to
agree to what is clearly the case that there was

(14:35):
fraud involved in getting into Iraq, but the folly of it,
the loss of life, the loss of money, the loss
of reputation of America. Yet again, America involved in an unholy
military conflict that we couldn't get out of. I mean,
how many of these things do we have to do

(14:58):
before we stop? And Cheney again part of that war machine,
but with greater darkness associated with the black ops that
existed all around the world. The torture regime was something
that he was very much part of.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
He had, if I recall correctly, a series of heart events,
and you have a heart problems for a long time.
He died at the age of eighty four, but that
seems like he lived a long time with those ailments.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
Yeah, no, you're right. I mean he had all this
problem with his heart, and it was you know, a
lot of people say, oh, you can't kill evil, you know,
that's it. I mean, he's at all these he's in
the hospital all the time, but he's never gone anywhere.
But I do think that and I get this, and
I'm seeing it in the chat that in the end,

(16:00):
Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris for president said Trump should never
be allowed anywhere near the White House. Blue Spark says
the same thing. He wasn't one hundred percent bad. He
hated Trump too. I get it. I mean, all right,
I give him credit for some clarity of thought on that,
but I don't know that that offsets the real horror
that was perpetrated by this guy. In any case, how

(16:23):
old was he king?

Speaker 2 (16:24):
Eighty four?

Speaker 1 (16:25):
Dick Cheney dead at eighty four, Thomson. I have polling
numbers on Donald Trump that you must hear. You should
hear them. I don't think Trump wants to hear them.
I'll share them with you in just a bit. I
did want to touch base with my old friend. This

(16:47):
is sort of a look back to my old home
in the San Francisco Bay Area. I love San Francisco,
I love the Bay Area, and I loved working with
this person. Back at the NBC's station in San Francisco,
which is a was a big newsroom, award winning every award,
Peabody Awards and Emmy Awards and you know awards like

(17:12):
Burrow Awards. What I'm thinking of. I mean, all of
this stuff was going on, and in the middle of
all of that was this brilliant writer and she was
the bell of the ball. She joins us because she's
part of a big event coming up in San Francisco,
and I just want to spend literally just a couple
of minutes chatting with the Great Ruth Carlson. Hi, Ruth,

(17:33):
look at you. Nice to see you. Please unmute for
the boys and girls to be able to hear you.
And I do want to ask you, Ruth. You've been
you're quite a prolific author since the days that you
were at kron and you've been writing about, you know,
all these treasures of California and San Francisco and the
Bay Area. I mean, it's really become kind of a

(17:55):
an area of expertise for you. Give me the titles
of your books, really tell tell it all. Can Ruth
hear us or not? No? Can you hear us? That's bad?
Well this will be a much shorter conversation if she

(18:16):
can't hear us. Tony, any thoughts as to why she
can't hear us?

Speaker 3 (18:20):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (18:20):
No, there you go.

Speaker 4 (18:21):
Can hear us? Now?

Speaker 3 (18:22):
Okay?

Speaker 1 (18:23):
I can?

Speaker 3 (18:24):
Sorry?

Speaker 1 (18:25):
Uh give us give us the titles of your books
about Mark? I did, I did, But I'm afraid that's
all the time we have here. Thank you Ruth for
being here. No, uh, you do. One of your books
is a secret guide, a secret San Francisco.

Speaker 3 (18:43):
Right?

Speaker 1 (18:43):
Is that what it's called. Can you hear me now? Yes?
Are you able to hear now? Or no? Is that better?
Can you hear us?

Speaker 5 (18:53):
I can hear you. I can't hear Mark.

Speaker 4 (18:55):
Oh you can hear Mark?

Speaker 1 (18:57):
No. Well this is.

Speaker 5 (18:59):
A very uh I thought maybe that was the problem.

Speaker 1 (19:02):
Mmmm interesting. Huh. Well, let's just let's all just sit here.
I'm going to have another cup of coffee and uh, tony,
any thoughts the fact that she can hear me?

Speaker 2 (19:16):
You can hear me, right, I can hear you. Can
you hear me?

Speaker 6 (19:19):
Yep?

Speaker 2 (19:21):
But not Mark her?

Speaker 1 (19:23):
Well, if you guys could quickly do the interview with
her and I'll just sit here, Ruth.

Speaker 2 (19:28):
You can hear me, right?

Speaker 5 (19:30):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (19:30):
Okay, great men, I will mention her event. So you've
got two books, first of all, author of Secret San Francisco,
A Guy to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure and Secret California,
same title, great books. I am in possession of both.
And now you've got an exciting event coming up as well.
You're a part of the Royal Speaker series. Can you

(19:52):
tell me about it?

Speaker 5 (19:53):
Yes? I always knew I was royal, just finally they've
acknowledged it.

Speaker 3 (19:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (19:57):
The Royal Sinesta took over the Cliff Hotel recently, and
before that, the Philip Stark had done a lot of
things in the Redwood Room that many locals were not
happy with. He had these weird paintings that moved the
eyes moved when he walked, and put all this glass
in and they had these gorgeous I'm gonna pronounce it wrong.

(20:17):
I'm sure Gustav climped paintings and he hid them up
in some attic. So the new owners came in, found them,
they put those up, They put in the original light fixtures,
they got the redwood bar back to where it used
to be, and most people know the whole room was
built with reportedly one tree from the seventy one redwood tree.
So they're trying to bring that old glamour back. It

(20:40):
was built in nineteen fifteen. And so they said, let's
have a speaker series where we make history fun again
and bring people in to talk about the history of
San Francisco and also what's going on today fun.

Speaker 2 (20:51):
So when after this event.

Speaker 5 (20:53):
It's November fourteenth and fifteenth, it is now I'm gonna
forget five pm one night, six pm the other night.
It's on the Redwood Room site. Here it is, let's see,
it's six pm Friday and then five pm Saturday.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
Okay, And the website we can find the more information.

Speaker 5 (21:13):
And tickets the Redwood Room. Yes, and it's free, so
oh wow. They're going to have specialty cocktails, the Pisco punch,
which supposedly was invented here, the Martini after it may
have been invented in Martinez, We're not sure. A few
other ones like that.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
What a fun event that is the Royal Speakers series,
and what an honor that you get to be included
and be part of that great.

Speaker 5 (21:37):
I know that Redwood Room is so historic. I'm really flattered. Yeah,
and then beautiful I have also oldest San Francisco and
lost Treasures they're going to speak so and also a
survivor of Alcatraz, the prisoner who he didn't escape but
he managed to leave. He's going to speak one night
as well.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
Well, we're gonna have alcohol Alcatraz back again. I heard, so,
you know how timely.

Speaker 5 (22:05):
Interesting?

Speaker 3 (22:06):
Yeah, thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
We're so excited to have you on the show. It's
be wonderful to see your face and I'm so excited
this free speaker series at the Redwood Room. Sounds wonderful.
Thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 5 (22:19):
I just want to know what Mark was saying about
me when I couldn't hear.

Speaker 2 (22:22):
He sings your praises. He says you work together and
you're just so wonderful, and we all agree.

Speaker 5 (22:27):
I'm going to stamping around Crown next. I'm sure he
remembers Krin.

Speaker 2 (22:31):
Oh, wonderful.

Speaker 1 (22:33):
That's the whole thing.

Speaker 5 (22:34):
And I'm only tell him, I'm only I've only got
five guys. I'm juggling right now.

Speaker 1 (22:39):
Yeah, she always has a lot of men in her life.

Speaker 5 (22:41):
Kim, Oh, it's only five right now. You'll have to
tell him.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
Oh, only he can hear you. Okay, you thinks you're
very fancy. All right, thank you bye, Thanks for coming
on the show. Ruth Carlton, everybody.

Speaker 1 (23:00):
Show. That was weird. I don't even know how to
explain how that might make Tony. I don't understand that
one either at all at all. Yeah, I really didn't
get it, but I'm glad we got the information now.
And it was my attempt to visit with an old
friend and in the end, it just was Kim visiting

(23:21):
with one of my old friends, which is fine. So
it worked out, Yeah, it did work out indeed, all right,
So I really did want to get to some poll
numbers and a little bit of what's happening today in
some other news. As mentioned, this is election day in America.

(23:44):
There are some elections going on. Will keep you posted
on that does look as though Democrats may make a
pretty good showing. And I say this because even if
you looked at no other information than sort of what's
being said out of the White House, you would respect
that Republicans GOP interests are a bit embattled at the

(24:05):
moment because Trump is saying already that this election is fixed,
and you know that's generally the dance he does when
things don't seem to be going so well. Although he
made that comment even before he thought he was, of
course going to lose to Hillary Clinton, and even before
that election was concluded, he was saying, oh, it's fixed,

(24:25):
and you know all these film. Then once he won,
he had a sort of backpedal but still do an investigation,
saying that two million people had voted illegally, et cetera.
But onto the Trump approval rating, which is something else
that has been released alongside all the information on elections
and all of the world of politics, which is of

(24:48):
course filled with activity today. The polling here is not
the polling that you find in an election. It's the
polling that comes with asking Americans to rest approval or
disapproval of this president. And Donald Trump's approval rating has
fallen to one of its lowest points, only thirty seven

(25:12):
percent of Americans expressing approval of his performance as president.
Here is yeah, that's not that's not good, New hopes. Well,
at the beginning of his presidency, he had that kind
of honeymoon period in February. February thirteenth through seventeenth, he
enjoyed a forty seven percent approval rating and forty eight

(25:33):
percent for the latter part of February, and then even
in March he was still in the forties, although it
started to dip forty five percent. Then in April forty
one percent. What's that, Kim.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
He hadn't turned the National Guard against citizens yet, so
you know that, yeah, things are still okay.

Speaker 1 (25:49):
It was more talk than action at that point, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Then in July, as Kim has noted, April dropped to
forty one percent. It actually went up to forty two percent,
but then things really fell off the shelf. I think
with the summer and tariffs, I'm reading into these numbers,
but tariffs ice activities which are widely decried by Americans.

(26:16):
They're not popular. Even as Trump leans in and was
even saying, we posted yesterday we had the video from
sixty minutes during what she said, it's actually going to
get more aggressive. It's not aggressive enough. She said, aren't
you disturbed by some of these pictures of you know,
people being pulled out of cars while they're taking their

(26:38):
kids to school, or some of these mothers being thrown
to the pavement and zip touch she said. He said, no,
these people have to be removed from society, these people
are criminal, etc. Anyway, now that that's really in high gear,
look at the October numbers. His approval writing is thirty
seven percent. Disapproval of the job he's doing sixty three percent.

(27:05):
This was a survey conducted by CNN and SSRs. And
this is really a trend line that should be concerning.
And even as Trump isn't concerned because he's busy with
self enrichment. He's busy having finished a new Lincoln bedroom bathroom,

(27:28):
he's building a ballroom which is filled with grift and
hundreds of millions of dollars that will clearly go into
his pocket.

Speaker 2 (27:35):
I know what happened in October. Maybe America was really
upset with the tearing down of the East Wing. Maybe
that accounts for the October numbers.

Speaker 1 (27:45):
It's interesting that that was a big visual, and I
think it did disturb Americans overwhelmingly. It polls badly, and
they've been polls on it. But I think it's the collective,
you know, I think it's in the aggregate, right, I mean,
I don't know. This country surprises me, and it only
surprises me in the weirdest and most depressing ways. So

(28:07):
maybe you're right. Kind of the thing associated with imagery
that punched through is the thing that you said, that's enough.
You can deny. You can deny poor people, you can write,
you can terrorist in motion, can you can begin this
inflationary spiral? You can deport people who are totally innocent,
all right, But when you tore down that East Wing,

(28:29):
now you've really done it. Yeah, the current polls reflect inhumanity,
lack of morality, the threat and grift that fill the
air every day, says Vilma, thank you for the super chat.
And I think you're right. I mean think those policies
do reflect these things. Now, I would say also, and
you know where I am, and I'm going to keep

(28:50):
hammering this, so prepare for hearing it in different ways.
But the policies that he has, the extra judicial killings
in Venezuela off the coast there, and the saber rattling
of Canada, of Mexico, getting into trade wars with countries
that have been traditionally allied and dependable trading partners, kicking

(29:15):
up more sand into the faces of weaker countries in
the bullying that is Donald Trump. I'm thinking of Vietnam,
other countries in Asia, even big countries like India. I mean,
you're an idiot to take on India. You can find
all kinds of ways to do business with the and
by the way, the leader of India is kind of Trumpian.

(29:37):
You guys should be able to sit down and sort
of you know, compare bullying notes and I'd say that
all those things are pretty awful. His ice policies as well.
But again, this is the thing I will underscore, the
thing that's really going to win you an election, and

(29:58):
The thing that's easy to understand and Democrats should get
some handle on how to frame it is corruption. This
is a corrupt administration, more corrupt than any other administration
in the history of the US. And you should Democrats
figure out a way to tell the story. It's not
hard because it's so blatantly corrupt. Even the tariffs and

(30:22):
tariff policy is corrupt. So they've taken public policy and
they put it out for sale. And that is everything
that this administration is doing. Even the ballroom funded by Palateer,
funded by Apple, funded by Google, funded by Meta and
funded by other high profile donors, some of whom will

(30:45):
know about, some of whom we won't. What do you
think they're funding that ballroom for. You think twenty five
million dollars is just donated to the ballroom because Google
feels or Palateer feels that, Yeah, a ballroom would look
good alongside the White House. No, they want something for that.

(31:06):
Why did paramount cancel Stephen Colbert to get something from
the president? Approval of the sky Dance merger. These are
things that are right out there. This is a transactional administration,
and you can say politics has always been corrupt. Biden
was corrupt, Kabala Harris was corrupt. The Democrats are corrupt,

(31:29):
The Republicans are corrupt. Of course, there is truth to that,
but there are degrees of everything, and the degree of
corruption here is insane. They have cranked corruption up to
eleven and it's on full display, and that is something
that Democrats should make something out of. Now. When we

(31:51):
talk about the poll numbers, I don't know how much
of that is corruption, but I'm just saying, when we're
trying to read into them, on some level, you are
seeing an insane amount of career option.

Speaker 2 (32:01):
Randy says, it's not corruption if it's right out in
the open, is it? At least that's the opinion he
read in the San Jose Mercury today. Trump supporters don't
have an issue with what Trump is doing out in
the I guess light of day.

Speaker 1 (32:13):
Well, I mean, it's true that it's a new sort
of take on corruption that brings it way out in
front and sort of suggests, you know, if it's corrupt,
why would I be doing it right in front of you?

Speaker 7 (32:29):
Right?

Speaker 1 (32:30):
I mean, there their ice head, the guy who's leading
up all the policy. He took fifty thousand dollars in
a bag fifty thousand dollars cash from FBI agents. He
was part of a sting. Was he was in a
sting because there had been many reports of his corruption

(32:52):
and sure enough he was corrupt and it is corrupt,
and he hung onto the fifty k and they made
the investigation go away. Hey, I mean, I'd remind people
of that. To me, it's just so nakedly awful. But
in any case, this approval rating thing. You can play

(33:16):
this game all day, and I know it's a little
bit of kind of political porn for many because like see,
he's not popular. If the election were held tomorrow, he
would lose. First of all, I don't know that he
would lose if the election were hell tomorrow. I mean,
this guy's got a you know, he's got a fervent
area of support. I'd suggest he probably would lose. And again,

(33:36):
it all depends you know who he's running against. But
I do emphasize in this context the poll numbers that
stink will spill over onto the GOP and they know it.
And I'll talk to David K. Johnston about this as well.
But I'd say that might be a big takeaway. We

(33:58):
all get it are sort of now going, Oh, I forgot.
He's really bad at everything. He doesn't know anything. He's
smack talking, and he just deported my maid and my
kid's arithmetic teacher and people who've been in this country
for three decades. But I'm on it now now I understand.

(34:25):
I would say that Republicans are going to pay a
price for this, and so Republicans at some point have
to even though he says he's getting great polling numbers
and he says the economy is great, Republicans have to
confront the fact that that's just not the case. And
there are going to be more and more of these

(34:46):
ice interdictions and more and more imagery, I guess, is
what I would say that's going to be disturbing. We
have some in a second that I'll share to you.
The clear violation of the Emolument's claw. Yeah, well, I
mean the moluments law has left the building. Why back
when like an hour after he not even before he
came into office. You know, the millions and millions he

(35:08):
got for the inaugural and then of course, yeah, he's
just taken more in the way of every kind of
gift and grift and I mean, you know this is
for us who follow this stuff. But the idea somehow
that Hunter Biden was this awful essence of corruption in

(35:31):
Washington because he traded off of his dad's name. And
you know, I agree, I mean I think that it
shouldn't be legal, but it is. But the Trump brothers
make that look like mister Rogers neighborhood. It's like, hold
my beer, I'll show you how to really trade off
your dad's name. We're going to set up World Liberty Financial,

(35:51):
a platform on which you buy crypto, and we're going
to put out meme coins. In other words, you're going
to buy them on that platform, and it's our mean
coin that we own, and so you're buying the meme coin,
so we make money that way, and you're buying it
on our platform, and we make money that way. And
by the way, if you sell the coin, we make
money because you sold it on my platform. They have

(36:13):
figured out a way to funnel billions of dollars into
the Trump callers, not only their money, but also Donald
Trump's money, and then into worlds Liberty Financial. You have
huge amounts of money going in billions of dollars. Look
at the guy from Binance the guy from Binance who
was just pardoned. He was one of these huge donors

(36:36):
almost a billion dollars.

Speaker 2 (36:38):
Some didn't really know who he was, right, I mean,
Whoopsie's yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:42):
I mean, this is the other arithmetic that's done. Vilma says,
we impeach Trump and then we get Well, first of all,
you're not gonna be able to impeach Trump. You don't
have the votes to you know, you don't know the
votes to impeach Trump. You're the votes. Well, first of all,
you don't have the votes to actually impeach him. But
what you mean is remove When you say impeach, of
course is just the beginning of the process. But you
don't have the votes to remove him. We impeach Vance,

(37:04):
and I see, and then we get Advance. We impeach
Vance and we get Johnson. How does that help us?
I mean, we're not gonna impeach anybody. They're just not
you know, you can. But I take your point that
the pipeline is filled with you know, a rogues gallery
of bad So there is that too. I would say though,
that the more it's going to be a power grab,

(37:25):
and it's going to be and it's ongoing. But it's
going to be a little harder for them if they
were to lose Trump. Because Trump is charismatic. I've said this,
and I always get a hard time about it. He's
a generational political figure. And his ability to cut through
and say stuff and have all of these morons like
Mike Johnson fall into line, have an entire house and

(37:47):
Senate fall into line. He's intimidated all of them. They
are scared. They're scared both politically. They're scared physically, they're
scared reputationally, like how he might call them out on
social I mean, they've just never seen a bully like this,
and so they're gonna have some decisions to make. But
that's about the harm, the reputational harm to them because

(38:10):
he is getting increasingly unpopular. But more to your point,
Vilma and to others, I think when Trump goes it's
gonna be a body blow to the GOP because they
don't have someone with that kind of charisma right now anyway,
like waiting on the bench. So I wanted to quickly

(38:37):
look at because I mentioned Ice and Ice video. What
was is that? The video I have today I wanted
to share Tony, is that the one I think let
me show you this ice car. Yeah right, I mean
that's this is this is one of those what's the

(38:58):
other video? I found the full length? Okay, we were
looking at this before the show. I have to tell
you that there is some ice video out there of
these takedowns and of these arrests and detentions, and some
of it is so bad. I just can't even share
it with you. It's heartbreaking, all of it. But it's

(39:20):
a little like how I feel about animal cruelty. You know,
the pedas of the world and other animal activist to
outposts of the world. They post on social some stuff
and I can't even watch it. It's so horrible. The factory farming,
all of this is so horrible, and I hate to
put it in the same category, but I mean, I'm

(39:42):
trying to describe how moved I am by it and
how repulsed I am by it, and it's so bad.
So I was going to send something to Tony last time.
I said I don't think I can send it. I
just can't show this on the air. It's too much.
So we're going to show you this, which again is
its own, and it also has some kind of weird
thing we were arguing about like who's cutting off who

(40:04):
and whatever? But this is an ICE in addiction, This
is in Chicago, right, Tony, Yeah, yeah. So take a look,
and this is again we'll let it run. I'll try
to describe a little bit of for the people who
are just listening on podcasts. But it's a it's taking

(40:25):
place in it looks like what is that a parking lot?
I think it's an intersection? Okay, intersection. That white car
you see pulling back looks white silver. That is ICE.
They've arrested a couple already. You can see them leading

(40:45):
leading a guy down the street just out of the
screen on the left. There he is, you can see
him in the white T shirt. And then the honking
of the horn is something that is done by a
lot of bystanders. You can see ICE blocking the street

(41:06):
with that truck. Now there, This is an suv is
what they're driving. Now they turn now they cut off
or crash into a black suv. And in the black suv,

(41:32):
that's what he's yelling. You can hear hit and run,
Hit and run. They stop in front of the black
suv and they get out. They're fully Yeah, they do
have those assault rifle type things. I don't know, Tony,
you probably know what the weapon is. It's like that,
you know, it's like a shorty semi automatic. You hit it.

(42:00):
You hear her. Everybody's saying you hit her. And now
they're pulling this lady out of the car with three
of them and then one standing guard. Here comes another show.
I hear her. She's trying to hang onto the steering wheel.

(42:24):
It's large, and then they're pulling her out, two huge dudes.
They're pulling on her legs.

Speaker 3 (42:28):
I got no heart, no heart, no heart.

Speaker 2 (42:35):
She's a female.

Speaker 3 (42:39):
You guys, you guys hear her, get arrested.

Speaker 1 (42:47):
Brand you hit her. You guys hit her.

Speaker 2 (43:03):
You guys hit her whole lot through right there.

Speaker 3 (43:10):
She don't believe that telling you don't get tell you.

Speaker 1 (43:12):
She keep fighting around the Chicago, keep fucking around the Chicago.

Speaker 2 (43:17):
Hey, baby girl, you're good.

Speaker 3 (43:18):
Don't worry about it.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
Stober sisting we need information. Bro Ah, bogus as fucked.

Speaker 1 (43:27):
They end up taking her away, Tony, So what I'm
s Yeah, you look like you guys are bogus as fugged.
So get into a white suv. Looks like a residential
kind of suv like just a civilian suv. They got
out with the markings on their uniforms.

Speaker 4 (43:46):
Yeah, they hit her.

Speaker 2 (43:47):
Card, they bogus chad motherfuck.

Speaker 3 (43:54):
Hey make sure she got all a personal information on
it too.

Speaker 1 (43:57):
Bro, you you hit her.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
You guys hit Chicago citizens are really ballsy yelling at
all those people with guns. I have to give it
to them.

Speaker 1 (44:08):
Yeah, it's a question as to whether or not this
stuff makes a difference, but I think these images do matter,
you know, and are there at the beginning, so right.
The the reality is that it was threatened by the

(44:31):
Governor of Illinois, JB. Pritsker. It was threatened that you
ICE agents and you border patrol people should know if
you come to Chicago and you pull this stuff, this
illegal stuff with tear gas and some of these detentions
that you've perpetrated and that you're performing here on the

(44:54):
streets of Chicago, we will prosecute you because you're violating
state law. I haven't seen that happen yet. I loved it.
It was a real great moment when Pritzker said, Hey,
this is a note to all of you ICE guys
and customs and Border patrol people. Donald Trump can pardon

(45:17):
you for the crap you're doing, but you will be
prosecuted in the state of Illinois. And Donald Trump cannot
pardon you for that, and we will prosecute you. Now
here's the problem with that. I mean, again, it's a
great thing to say, but you'd need cops there in
that particular situation we've just seen to arrest those federal officers.

(45:43):
I mean, if they're federal officers, I don't know. I
mean again, I think there's vigilanteism. I think there are
a lot of these guys in these uniforms. They're all
armed up, but let's assume they are. You'd need cops
to try to detain and arrest these guys. And as
you said, they're all carrying assault weapons. So I don't

(46:04):
know where that goes, but it's really ugly right now
in Chicago. I was just reading a piece from The Economist.
Actually it was a couple of days ago about Halloween.
I mentioned this on the show the other night.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
Did you see that man?

Speaker 1 (46:20):
Remember that's that guy Bovino, Greg Bovino, the senior official
Customs and Border Patrol. He was ordered to actually go
to court every day because he was violating the basic
court orders on what you could do and couldn't do that,
Judge Ellis. The incident that Ellis talked about was when
federal agents, confronted with the threat of middle aged dads

(46:44):
shouting at them, loved tear gas grenades just as a
crowd of children in costumes were gathering on the street
for Halloween. Quote. These kids were tear gas on their
way to celebrate Halloween and a local school parking lot.
I can only imagine how terrified they were at that hearing.

(47:05):
Neither Bovino nor the lawyers representing the government disputed any
of these specific facts. This is an event in Old
Irving Park, a quiet neighborhood in Chicago's northwest side, just
one of at least five where officials from Customs and
Border Patrol through tear gas at seemingly peaceful crowds. This

(47:29):
is Operation Midway Blitz, that's what they call. It started
in early September, and again Judge Ellis was then overruled
to the point that this Bovino guy didn't have to
go to court every day. But Bovino's a thug, straight
up thug. According to court documents submitted to Judge Ellis

(47:54):
by the plaintiffs. One agent also pointed his rifle at
a protester and told him, bang, bang, you're dead, liberal nice.
I never expected to be tear gased on a street
of multimillion dollar houses, said one woman. Remarkably, even mister

(48:16):
Bovino himself. On October twenty third was caught on camera
at the front of a phalanx of heavily armed officers
throwing a tear gas grenade in Little Village, the heart
of Chicago's Mexican District. As Judge Ellis noted, he did
not appear to issue a warning as required by the

(48:36):
restraining order. He also lobbed the grenade over the heads
of the crowd, which the order also forbade. A DHS
spokeswoman said that he did so only after somebody threw
a stone that hit his head. But the department has

(48:59):
provided no evidence of this. It is and by the way,
there was no evidence in they because of that accusation.
They went to professional photographery were there people filming on phones.
They couldn't find any evidence of a stone being thrown.
This is pure intimidation by show of force. These are

(49:20):
federal agents trying to intimidate a local population, and I
will say that I think that's him, Greg Bovino, and
he is a thug straight up. I think these photographs,
I think these pictures. I think all of the ways
in which these things are documented in the same way

(49:41):
that we got pictures in documentation of what was going
on in Vietnam in the sixties, and that changed public sentiment.
In this case, you don't need public centiment changed. Already
public sentiment is against these ICE rates. But I think
this will only serve this documentation to amplify what is
already a public that sour on this. So it will

(50:02):
amplify the degree to which people are disgusted by this
and repulsed by this and angered by this.

Speaker 2 (50:11):
Did you see on Halloween? Since you mentioned the attack
on Halloween, the pictures of ICE agents allegedly wearing Halloween costumes?

Speaker 1 (50:23):
Yeah, didn't we have that? We were going to run it,
I thought, I mean, it's kind of you talk about
it trolling. Yeah, you talk about trolling these guys supposedly
ICE agents. Again, who knows what the you know? I
don't know what everybody's official status is, if they're actual
federal employees or if they're just contractors or what But
as they were driving around, they were wearing the mask.

(50:44):
Look at that. That is the mask. It's a chucky mask, right,
is that it, Tony? Is that a chucky mask? I
don't know. I can't really tell. I can't really tell
what it is. But it's a Halloween mask. It's like
a it's like a demon mask.

Speaker 2 (50:59):
You zoom in on that, Tony, imagine that guy coming
at you.

Speaker 1 (51:05):
I mean it's all just yeah, look at that. That's
just fed up, man, that's really effed up.

Speaker 2 (51:11):
So this is caught in LA by local news crews
in LA and they they reach out to the Department
of Homeland Security saying why are you you know your
are your people wearing these masks? And the response from
the Department of Homeland Security is happy Halloween.

Speaker 1 (51:28):
Wow. That is just yeah. That is just about as
nakedly awful as you can imagine. But well, the US
citizen shot from behind, he was shot from behind us
he warned ICE agents about children gathering at a bus stop.

(51:52):
Is just the latest this happened. Where did this happen?
And Kim, it's.

Speaker 2 (52:03):
This guy.

Speaker 1 (52:05):
Let me just see it was I think he's in Ontario,
which is like just east of San Francis of Los Angeles.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
Right, yeah, This guy pulls over to warn a group
of federal agents that they need to kind of wrap
up and end their stop of a car quickly because
there's a bunch of school age kids that are gathering
at this area to take the bus. So they want
they wanted the officers to know, listen, whatever you're doing,
just let you know, there's a bunch of kids coming

(52:33):
up here, so just you know, to because that's disturbing
when kids are seeing all this stuff. So you know,
if you can finish it up, because you got a
bunch of kids headed your way. And apparently they didn't
like that, And the following moments, the attorneys for this
man said, an ice officer shot this man who was
offering the warning, who is a US citizen and a

(52:55):
father of three from behind. Looks like he was maybe
hit in the leg. He was saying, excuse me, can
you guys please wrap this up, and a masked agent,
according to this man's attorney, pulls out a gun and
exchanges some words. The agent is also shaking his pepper spray.
The guy is in fear, trying to get out of

(53:16):
the situation. The agents in their cars had blocked one
southern lane and jutted into a second lane. He had
to try to reverse to get away. There was a
shot from the side back passenger window to the car.
This is all what happened to this man so allegibly.

Speaker 1 (53:33):
Yeah, I mean this is interesting because you know, he
he did pull over. He's in a car. Okay, he
pulled over to warn these Home Land Security people that
the kids were coming, as Kim says. But the reason
that's important is they are characterizing the fact that he
was in a car as he was trying to run

(53:54):
them over. And so you know, now that they've shot
the guy, they need to come up with the store, right.
And so I mean it just seems clearly that I say,
clearly to me, I just don't buy the idea somehow
that you know you needed to use deadly force in
some way to handle the situation. I just don't buy it.

(54:16):
I don't buy it. He lives nearby on the same road,
and he approached these officers just to say, hey, these
kids are coming and they're coming out to wait for
the bus. So and this is it. He was telling them.
This is a quote, excuse me, can you guys, please,
you know, please wrap this up. And immediately, apparently the
master agent pulls out a gun and exchanges some words

(54:38):
according to the lawyer, and also shaking a pepper spray
him according to the lawyer's account, and I guess he
was unable to get away, and then it turned into
a situation in which there was shooting.

Speaker 2 (54:57):
Yeah, I said, shot on the leg, but it doesn't
note what body part he was shot in. We know
he survived. This guy was on his way to work
at a food bank.

Speaker 1 (55:07):
Yeah, I mean, it's just, you know, this is like
a you know, it feels almost like a made up story.
I mean, he's so a force of good and they
are such a dark force of evil. It's an incredible juxtaposition,
to the point that you'd think it's almost like it's
scripted out of a movie. You know, he's on his

(55:27):
way to work at a food bank, and you guys
are there to hassle people who you know, lawfully pursued
life in this country and fled horror in their own country.
I get it. There are legitimate violations of visa stays,
there are legitimate reasons that ICE agents can operate, but

(55:49):
this is absolutely off the scale ridiculously horrible. I mean,
it really has a quality of utter ridiculousness to it.
You're pulling people out of cars who have been in
this country for twenty thirty forty years. You're grabbing landscapers
and car wash employees, people making nothing, maids and hospital

(56:13):
workers and daycare employees. Absolutely awful, and it will continue
and it will become even more aggressive. So all of
that is on the radar, and it will affect not
only the fabric of America, but will affect America's dispositions

(56:34):
to the ruling party, and that is the GOP. So
if you are politically active and you are interested in
how these things have some sort of political ripple effect,
I'd suggest it's the lack of humanity and the impact
that this makes on real people and real communities. That's

(56:59):
obviously the top price already, but the political calculus is
important too for the future, and I think it does
reputational harm to all of those who permitted and you know,
by extension, that's Stephen Miller and Donald Trump and this crew,
you know the world of Christy Nome and this sort

(57:19):
of murderer's row of horrible. They will all be affected
I think politically as well. So smash the like button.
In the world of YouTube, you've got to smash it
like a boss, and with your iron rod give us
the thumbs up. It helps us, it costs you nothing,
and it does help us stay in feeds that we
otherwise wouldn't be in. And nowt'll talk to a Pulletrer
Prize Mark Thompson show. This guy is the winner of

(57:41):
the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. He's a best selling author,
many books on Trump, many books on the wealthy and
how society has really been set up American society to
a favor in many ways from tax codes and other
methodologies the wealthiest Americans. Has gone on to found dcreport

(58:02):
dot org and now he's a professor at rit in Rochester.
How about it for the great David K. Johnston. Everyone, No, Mark, Hello, sir.
I have a question that I'll get to. I'll just
kind of tease it out, which is a question about
taxing the rich and how that might actually be. I
mentioned this because there was a big proposal, as you know,

(58:24):
in France to do this and it just went down.
But it seems as though in Europe that conversation is
getting louder and louder. So I'm going to revisit that
with you in a moment. But first I want to
talk about what's happening with this administration and the shutdown
and the way in which Trump seems to just be
singing the same refrain over and over. It's the Democrats,

(58:47):
the Democrats, the Democrats. He literally said, the Democrats are
responsible for it all. Polling suggests that that's not quite
getting through to the American people in that increasingly the
GOP is going to bear some political responsibility on this issue.

Speaker 3 (59:02):
Well, given that the Republicans control the White House, the House,
and the Senate, it's a little hard to make that argument.
And I would point out that the Inflation Reduction Act,
the most significant piece of legislation in the Biden administration,
Nancy Pelosi got through the House when she had a
majority of I believe three votes. The most of the

(59:25):
period this year, the Democrats were behind I think it's
by five votes, but it was a three or more
throughout that period, and it's their inability in the Republican
side to be unified. And you're seeing bit by bit
parts of the magaverse come apart. For example, Marjorie Taylor Green,

(59:47):
a wealthy woman who represents a really poor district, recognizes
that since more than forty percent of the people in
her district depend on Medicare and I suspect an even
larger number than that at least now, and then on
food banks and snap, that there's a real threat to

(01:00:07):
her and getting reelected if she were to be tarred
with these enormous increases in premiums for the Affordable Care Act.
I suspect, although they have never said this publicly, that
the people around Trump, particularly Russell Vote, who runs the
Office of Management and Budget, a very powerful federal agency,

(01:00:31):
that they have looked upon closing the government and raising
and taking away the tax credits for the poor and
the working poor as a way to kill the Affordable
Care Act. The problem with killing the Affordable Care Act
is that if you narrow the number of people who
have access to medical care, your cost per person goes up,

(01:00:57):
and that means that those people who have health insurance
like you and me, we're going to pay more to
make up for this. Unless we get rid of excess capacity,
remove doctors and stuff. We don't have an excess capacity problem.
The bizarre thing the Democrats seem utterly incapable of doing

(01:01:17):
is explain to the American public that universal care is
cheaper and give you my favoritable number here. If we
had the French healthcare system, which is every study I've
ever read on the quality of health care says the
French had the best system in the world. I've used
it once. I was very impressed. I have friends who've
used it for various reasons. First, rate care get seen

(01:01:38):
quicker than here. Nobody goes bankrupt because of medical bills.
Nobody is forced into premature retirement because they get an
injury and they don't have the money to get their
injury properly repaired. If we had the French medical system,
it would save an amount of money equal to all
the income taxes paid by everyone who makes under six

(01:02:00):
hundred thousand dollars a year. So unless you make over
six hundred thousand dollars a year, at least on paper, statistically,
you could stop paying income taxes. Now is a practical matter,
it probably set the threshold for income taxes, which for
a married couple right now is rad around thirty thousand dollars.
We could probably raise it to somewhere between one hundred
and two hundred thousand. But that's how much waste there is.

(01:02:23):
Moving to the French system would cause some problems. An
awful lot of people who were employed as clerks, you know,
all that paperwork you have to fill out and fight
with just to get paid for routine things. Those people
would be gone, and we would have to find a
way to create new jobs for them or support them
in some way. But we are ridiculously overspending in healthcare.

(01:02:46):
And I literally had one of Ronald Reagan's advisors from
Toure who's dead now, some years ago, when he and
I were on a panel in Washington, d C. And
I recommended this idea, and he went, oh, you want
to put all of those inner city mothers who work
at insurance companies out of work, And of course that
was code for black, and I said, yeah, Norman. In

(01:03:08):
the same way that I'm not in favor of eliminating
mechanized earth moving equipment and saying we're going to construct
buildings by digging the basements with shovels, But if you
want to create jobs that way, you know, we could
do that, and we could maybe if that doesn't create
enough jobs. We could go from shovels to garden trials
and keep going till we get down to moving earth

(01:03:29):
with demotast spoons. I mean, if you approach thoughtfully and
follow the logic of the Republican opposition to universal health care.
We don't want colored people to have healthcare, and that's
their word, colored, not mine. Then that's where you end up.
You end up with absurdities and ridiculousness and excess costs

(01:03:53):
and worse health and shorter lives and the rest of
the modern world life expended life longevity is increasing. We've
been increasing slower than the rest of the world. And
now for some demographic groups, including white, middle aged blue
collar men, we're going backwards. Lies you're getting shorter.

Speaker 1 (01:04:12):
You know, it's so true that the American system is
so broken. And even Obamacare ACA I had an issue
with because it keeps the insurance companies in the game.
Now I understand why, because you have to make in
this setup, you have to make a deal with the
insurance companies because there's so much money and they have

(01:04:33):
really bought a lot of American politics. But the idea
that there even exists this middleman, I'll just use it
kind of generally. The insurance companies are just taking a piece.
I mean, they are an added part of the American
healthcare system, David. That need not exist in the system

(01:04:55):
that you're describing, they wouldn't exist.

Speaker 3 (01:04:57):
Health insurance is an absolutely superfluous business. So by the way,
is land title insurance. We can talk about that another
day because instead of paying a thousand dollars as about
to pay for a land title insurance, literally banks would
give it away if we change the system. And this
is a health insurance. An insurance company's business is to

(01:05:18):
try and not pay claims. That's how they make a profit.
That teach my students the inner student a bank and
an insurance company. As you make a deposit, we call
it a deposit of the bank, a premium at the
insurance company. At the bank, you get your money back
whenever you ask, unless you sign some agreement to tie
your money up. Maybe you get a higher interest rate.
At the insurance company, it's on event, and the issue

(01:05:42):
is that insurance company decides what the event is, not you.
And you know, we had a doctor Linpino, a Kentucky
physician who testified under oath to Congress it's g thirty
years ago now almost that every time she killed someone
by finding a way to deny the healthcare they needed,
she got a bonus. And she testified about how she

(01:06:05):
denied a heart transplant to a man in California, where,
by the way, she was not licensed to practice medicine,
and her insurance company paid her a bonus. This got
almost no coverage at the time. It's in my book
Free Lunch, But this was a Remember the Republicans used
to say, well, if you have socialized medicine, you'll have

(01:06:26):
death panels. We have death panels, corporate death panels. And
if we're going to have somebody decide who's going to
live and die, I think I'd rather have the government
decide that than a corporation motivated by profit. But beyond that,
it is just nutty to say we're going to deny
health care to people. I wrote years ago about a

(01:06:46):
man I remember who put me onto it. There was
a man in Idaho's hand got smashed in a machine
at work, and workers comp in Idaho took the position
that their only obligation was to sort of patch him
up and make sure that he wouldn't lose his hand.
To infection. They would not pay the fifteen thousand dollars
surgical fees, so there would have been other fees on

(01:07:07):
top of that for surgery so he could go back
to work. Well, it means that the good conservative Republican
citizens of Idaho had decided to turn this man from
a tax payer into a tax eater because he went
on disability and denying healthcare to people for profit is

(01:07:29):
should be is a morally impossible situation to justify. I mean,
Adam Smith told us about this in seventeen fifty five
his first book, The Theory of Our Moral Sentiments, and
it's essentially about this curious thing about the human condition.
We honor and admire wealthy people just for having money,

(01:07:55):
and we despise poor people for what he called their
mean condition. He's not talking about the numerical mean. He
means nasty, horrible lives and at the bottom. At the
end of the day, this is a moral issue, and
the ACA was a political reasonable way to deal with

(01:08:15):
what could be done, because politics is the art of
the possible. But things have gotten so bad. Maybe we
can finally get universal, no out of pocket healthcare, and
if we did, it would help bring costs down. Uh,
there are lots of doctors who would have been against
this not many years ago, but who are all fed
up now with They have the same paperwork problem you have,

(01:08:37):
but instead of, you know, once a month for something,
it's every single.

Speaker 1 (01:08:42):
Day now they've had to put it.

Speaker 3 (01:08:44):
They've how much do you like dealing with the insurance
company doc?

Speaker 1 (01:08:48):
Yeah, it's it's they've had to build in bureaucracies to
their own practices, and many just aren't doing it anymore.
That's exactly right. And so we get to, uh, the
SNAP benefits which are adjacent to this, in addition to
the ACA subsidies, and the SNAP benefits seemed to reflect
in the resistance to pay snap of bend of benefits,
the resistance to even break the reserve fund to stop

(01:09:11):
the bleeding during this period of the government shutdown. That
resistance is so consistent with the narrative that you're describing,
which it seems so it's cool, to the point it's
like out of an old Charles Dickens story. You know,
it's so villainous. I don't quite understand how they can
even are. It seems like an odd argument to make.

Speaker 3 (01:09:31):
Well, and it's part of a larger theme that's been missed.
Donald Trump said again and again in his campaign in
twenty fifteen and sixteen, wages are too high. Seriously, wages
are too high. That should tell you a lot of
what you know. And yet people who have miserable wages

(01:09:51):
and will tell you their wages aren't so good. A
lot of them support Donald Trump, and that goes to
his argument I love the poorly educated because they don't
understand what I'm up to. In the case of snamp benefits,
the question we ought to be asking first and foremost
is why do we have forty two million Americans on
supplemental nutrition assistance and another five or six million on women, infants,

(01:10:16):
and children, So almost fifty million people in total in
a country of three hundred and forty million people. That's
one in seven. Well, the reason is the minimum wage
has been fixed at seven twenty five an hour since
January one of two thousand and nine, when George Bush
was still president. If you're a weight staff person, a bartender,

(01:10:38):
a waitress, or a waiter, anybody who gets tips, your
minimum wage unless you live in a place like California
or New York with a separate state law is two
dollars and thirteen cents an hour, and the inflation effect
of that is compared to nineteen ninety three, it's ninety
four cents an hour today ninety four cent minimum wage,

(01:10:59):
and Donald Trump's as that's too high. And by the way,
the way it gets made up is from two thirteen
to seven twenty five. That's five bucks an hour. Roughly
the first five dollars an hour you get in tips
go to meet the seven to twenty five an hour minimum.
And the idea that raising the minimum wage will ruin
jobs has been disproven in numerous ways, but one is

(01:11:20):
a great one is San Jose. San Jose spreads out
like a cancer cell across the Santa Clara Valley, with
all these little towns Las Galtos and Campbell and Santa
Clair rubbing up against it in various ways. And San
Jose imposed a higher minimum wage than the state of California.
So how many people going out to dinner for waiters

(01:11:41):
and waitresses and bartenders. So how many people going out
to dinner said, Oh, we don't want to pay more
for the workers, so we're going to drive out past
the city boundary and we'll go to dinner in Saratoga
or in Sunnyvale. Nobody. Nobody. The data is very clear, nobody.
So why why are we are so many people of

(01:12:02):
modest means listening to a party and a president who
want to take away their healthcare, want to take away
any food benefits, want their wages to go down or
at least not rise. This tells you how much Americans
are failing in their duty to be citizens and to

(01:12:23):
understand our democracy so that we can govern ourselves.

Speaker 1 (01:12:29):
Well. Sadly, I think it's even more just even understanding
basic policy on issues that directly affect them, you know.
But I would also say that, you know, it's interesting
as you're talking about the way in which these moneies
are spread throughout across communities. You know, Walmart, for example,
takes a huge hit with these SNAP benefits lapsing. Walmart

(01:12:53):
is a huge beneficiar. They get twenty five percent of
all SNAP beneficiaries money, so right.

Speaker 3 (01:13:00):
Of their employees are on SNAP right get benefits because
Walmart is not required to pay a living wage. And
when some people say, well, my business would fail if
I had to pay a living wage, well, then you
know I would argue your business should fail. I mean
if you carry down the argument that I can't afford
to pay my workers, then bring back slavery and lo

(01:13:20):
and behold, what do we find out? There are various
Republicans out there in the background, through chat rooms and
other things, who were saying, yeah, let's have slavery. The
Republican Party ran as its candidate for governor of North
Carolina a man who said, yeah, I want to own
a few slaves.

Speaker 1 (01:13:37):
He's black, by the way, Yeah, that's right, and that
was an extraordinary thing. I'd forgotten about that moment.

Speaker 3 (01:13:43):
By the way, there were some black people prior to
the Civil War who owned slaves. That's it's not historically
unprecedented in the United States.

Speaker 1 (01:13:53):
So this brings me now to a question I can
just digress to. It's not America yet, but it's been
talked about and in Europe, the momentum behind a tax
on the wealthiest is really something that seems to have
brought them to the point that it may happen. It

(01:14:13):
was just voted down in France by by a close margin.
And the idea would be that you tax the wealthiest
who have benefited the most. Is the thinking. I think
it's a reasonable kind of thinking and in so doing
at even a very small rate. And this is stuff
you've written chapter in verse on literally, and you can

(01:14:34):
tell us the rate. You can offset so much of
these weights on society, and you can permit so much,
including a kind of socialized medicine or kind of a
medicine that we could all enjoy at either widely discounted
or for free. So my question to you is has
that time come? And might that be something that we

(01:14:59):
could see in America? As you kind of see the
way in which public sentiment is shifting.

Speaker 3 (01:15:04):
If you're a non tax bang billionaire, you're going to
love this idea and it may shock you to hear that,
But the reason is it won't work. It won't work.
And first of all, I'll encourage your audience to read
the book review I have at the Washington Monthly magazine
that went up yesterday. It's on my Facebook page, Facebook
dot com slash David k. One word the Washington Monthly

(01:15:27):
has it. I mean, it's easy to find do a
Google search with my name in Washington Monthly in quotes
the way the tax laws are written, Jeff Bezos qualified
for Bill Clinton's child tax credit because under the tax law,
he is a pauper. How do gazillionaires poses poppers to

(01:15:47):
the government's the way the laws written. You can't cure this, however,
for a wealth tax, because if you own your wealth
in as Bezos does publicly traded shares of Amazon, we
know how much the worth. We can calculate that. But
most very wealthy people don't hold their money that way.
They are in partnerships that are layered upon layered upon layered.

(01:16:11):
So when the head of Ernst and Young, one of
the big four accounting firms, came home and told his wife,
I'm leaving you and tried to told hers that all
he could afford was five thousand dollars a month for
her and an extraor neighbor setter straight about her husband
has to be rich. They end up in court and
records are introduced into this court proceeding showing that he's

(01:16:36):
actually worth fifty million dollars. The judge, by the way,
gave the wife sixty percent of it because of his
bad conduct, but he's probably worth even much more than that.
Very wealthy people organize their wealth so that they don't
appear to be as wealthy as they are. There are
many more billionaires in this country than Forbes magazine imagines.

(01:16:56):
It's hard to value things. If you are invested in
an invest pool that you can't cash out of for
seven years, how much the worth today, It won't work.

Speaker 1 (01:17:08):
Here the valuations I saw as a problem that they
want to also, David, it's kind of what you're talking about.
They want to tax assets that are not yet liquidated,
so you're taxing value, not.

Speaker 3 (01:17:20):
Non realized assets. But here's the way to solve this problem.
And my next book will go into this and show
how it's actually very simple. You and I and almost
everybody listening to this show gets a wage or a
pension check, and the government takes the taxes out of
it before you get paid. Wealthy people just borrow against themselves.

(01:17:42):
You can borrow against yourself right now for four point
five three percent. That's the government set minimum standard. The
lowest tax you would pay if you're a super wealthy
person is twenty three point eight percent. Why in the
world would you pay twenty four percent when you could
pay less than five You just borrow against your own money,
and because your wealth is growing faster than you could

(01:18:02):
ever spend it, you have this tax free source of money.
The solution to this is you can't borrow against your
assets for your lifestyle. Every time you want a dollar,
you have to have the taxes with health. America has
two tax systems, separate and unequal. One is for wagejourners

(01:18:22):
and their like, and the others for business owners, particularly
real estate owners. And so what you want to do
is make sure that any income you take. You want
to buy a corporate jet, here it is, you got
to pay the taxes on it. You want to buy
your ninth mansion. The average billionaire owns twelve mansions. You're
going to have to pay taxes before you can acquire

(01:18:43):
your next mansion. And these are solvable problems, but unfortunately
a lot of people who don't understand tax or accounting
or valuation, which you know, they're not easy. I've spent
decades learning these things, and I learned new things all
the time. By the way, still we need a system

(01:19:04):
that recognizes and how recognizes how this works. Then the
other thing we have to end is this practice that
if you want to make a charitable gift. First of all,
for ninety five percent of Americans under Trump's tax law,
you won't get a tax deduction for it. You've been
made ineligible for it ninety five percent of Americans. Secondly,

(01:19:28):
if you do qualify, you can only give away a
share of your income a certain amount if it's to
a private foundation. Another does a little bit more to
a public charity. But when you die, you can give
all of it away to a private foundation. Never pay
any taxes, which means we, the rest of us, whose

(01:19:48):
society made your well possible, never get a dime, and
your heirs get to decide how your money will be spent.
You should be able to give away all your money
when you die. I don't have any problem with that,
but you should only get a tax production for ten
percent of the gift. You go back one on your
gains when you die.

Speaker 1 (01:20:06):
Sure, and the idea, or the argument from those who
have a lot is hey, I already paid taxes on that.

Speaker 3 (01:20:15):
But which is nonsense, absolutely nonsense, simply not true. I've
shot that down in books and articles, and there's studies
about it. There are pieces by academic economists tax economists
that this is just nonsense. Bill Gate's the perfect example.
Bill Gates started Microsoft with a loan from his parents
of fifty thousand dollars a tax free loan, so his

(01:20:38):
basis in Microsoft stock for all practical purposes is zero.
And Bill Gates, by the way, says, if we had
a properly designed tax system, my fortune would be one
third the size that it is. At one third the size,
he'd still have somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred
billion dollars, So you know, you don't need to worry
about him.

Speaker 1 (01:20:57):
Wow, that's just wild. By the way, that the billionaire
has twelve residences, that's a wild statistics that.

Speaker 3 (01:21:04):
Yeah, it's from one of the companies that issues reports
every year on billionaires, and they keep reporting this year
after year when they survey people, it's twelve houses.

Speaker 1 (01:21:12):
I want to quickly pivot to what's happening at the
White House in sort of a superficial way. But I think,
and I'm wondering if you agree with me, that there's
a grift going on, and there's certainly a pay to
play going on. There's certainly the shingle is has been
hung out since hour one at the White House. But
the building of the ballroom, the redesign of that bathroom,

(01:21:32):
I mean, that's that's just a you know, typical crap.
We don't even hear who where that money came from.
Presumably it's taxpayer money, et cetera. But more to the point,
the ballroom two hundred million, two hundred and fifty million,
three hundred million, three hundred fifty million. I don't know
they're building this ballroom out of, but it it feels
like it's cocaine, bricks or something something that is just
insanely inflating the number. And which is why I think

(01:21:55):
there are a couple of things going on that I
want your reaction to. One is just the that Trump
can hatch this and he can just power it through,
which he's done. He's completely demolished the east wing to
allow for this, breaking the promise he made that he
wasn't going to touch the original structure. But also, and
this is the point that I think is sort of
the darker one, there's something going on here with that money.

(01:22:18):
There's way more money, as I say, than should be
allocated for something this size. I think maybe you can
speak to this.

Speaker 3 (01:22:26):
Well, there's no building I know of that costs three
thousand dollars of square foot to build, particularly when most
of it's a wide open space for dancing a ballroom.
It's just absurd and so one, don't believe the numbers here. Two. Yes,
Donald Trump is selling pardons. I mean he's pardoned sexual predators.

(01:22:49):
He just pardoned a guy who was involved in terrorist financing.
And when Nora O'donnald asked him about it in sixty minutes,
he went, I don't know anything about it. I don't
know the guy you pardoned him, and you don't know anything.
First of all, I don't believe you don't know anything.
But secondly, you shouldn't be partnering people if you don't
know what the case is.

Speaker 1 (01:23:08):
Well, it was the thing that he accused Biden of,
which is that Biden didn't even know who he was pardoning.
He was doing it with an autopen he was out
of it. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:23:16):
And at the same time, by the way, Trump claimed
when he was in his first term, he didn't even
have to issue a written pardon if he just said,
your pardons, your pardoned. So Donald Trump's whole presidency is
a grift. His family is raking in enormous sums of money.
I mean, we're not talking about the kind of money

(01:23:36):
that Don Rostenkowski when he headed the House Ways and
means committee went to prison for it was either eight
or sixteen thousand dollars. You know, we've had all sorts
of members of Congress. Look at the Senator Bob Menendez,
the Democrat from New Jersey. We're talking about a couple
hundred thousand dollars. We're talking here about literally billions of

(01:23:56):
dollars to the Trump family, and the Republicans just go,
I don't know anything about that, Mike Johnson. I don't
know thing about that. The level of corruption, and it's
worse than I ever imagined it would be. And I
was writing stories in the New York Times twenty five
years ago quoting people saying, we have a fundamental moral

(01:24:18):
breakdown going on at the top of our society that
you can see best in the law and accounting professions,
and lots of evidence of that. And now you know,
so the president is selling pardons to vicious criminals, people
who've attacked police officers, child rapists, people who arrange financing

(01:24:40):
for drug lords and terrorist organizations. Where's the moral outrage
from John Q citizen. Where are the pastors and the
rabbis and the emoms saying to their congregations, this is immoral.
This is wrong. We've really fundamentally lost something that you

(01:25:02):
have to have to have a democracy. You have to
have a sense of right and wrong and decency. We
need to recognize, you know, the genius of Mohamma Gandhi
in you know, he didn't he didn't take guns up
against the British, which the Indians could have done, pushed
the British out. He defeated them. Took a long time,

(01:25:23):
but he defeated them with a moral campaign. And the
Democrats have got to find a way, I think to
sell this. I mean, there's they're searching around. And the
elections are going on today in a number of places.
Pay close attention to the margins by which people win.

(01:25:44):
Pay close attention to how well Abigail Spamberger does in Virginia,
a state that's purplish turning blue a little bit, but purplish.
Pay attention to by how big the margin is for
or Mom Donnie in New York City. And then after
the election, by the way, the thing with Mom Donnie

(01:26:05):
will be can you deliver on what you said? He's
limited himself to items where the mayor actually has power
to do things, but he has to have money. He'll
have to redistribute budgets to do it. But if he delivers,
I think there's an important message for the Democrats. If
you just run on Donald is bad, Donald is corrupt,

(01:26:25):
Donald is incompetent, you're not going to turn people. What
you want to run on is that's true, and here's
what we're gonna do for you. We're going to improve wages,
we're going to lower costs, we're gonna get rid of
the superfluous healthcare industry, and you're still going to get
to see the doctor of your choice.

Speaker 1 (01:26:42):
Yeah, there have to be some populist notions in there,
and even some of Mom Donnie's stuff is he's going
to need a little help from Albany, you know, he's
going to need a little help in the state, maybe
on taxis or the sort of thing to help pay
for someone.

Speaker 3 (01:26:56):
To have Donald Trump do everything he can to time
up and make life difficulty.

Speaker 1 (01:27:00):
That is so true. I wanted to play David real quick,
we're out of time, but I wanted him to be
because he referenced the Mike Johnson Maga Mike doing his
I don't know anything about it, Gosh, I just heard
about that. Wow, you'll have to ask, can you you
have that super cut? This is it. This is what
David is talking about. When when I asked about the
pardon of the Binance head, you know it was completely

(01:27:21):
corrupt and any number of other things. Here is what
Mike Johnson had to say, over and over.

Speaker 7 (01:27:26):
I don't know anything about that. I didn't see the interview.
You have to ask the president about that. I don't
know any of the details of that yet. I just
heard about that, literally I was walking in. I don't
know the details about that. I've just read it. I
didn't talk with him about that. I don't know the
latest developments AT's first I've heard of that. Do anything
about it. I don't know what you're talking about with
the children. I haven't seen that, so I'm not going
to comment on it.

Speaker 3 (01:27:48):
Yeah, that's the the question to ask him after so
many of these would be to say, Speaker Johnson, you
have now said X number of times about issues.

Speaker 1 (01:27:57):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:27:59):
Why should you be in that job you apparently aren't working.

Speaker 1 (01:28:05):
There is that? David, thank you for your time every week,
such a pleasure. Will link to this piece.

Speaker 3 (01:28:14):
It's just a book review. It's not very long. But
it will teach you a great deal about taxes in
America and what's really going on. And I'm going to
just point out one thing to intrigue people. You might
think that because of all the talk in America about
taxes are bad, you know, taxes are too high. I
was on overseas TV today with the Republican strategists. You know,
we have to lower taxes. That's the number one most
important thing. We founded this country for the very purpose,

(01:28:39):
the constitution of this country, the Second American Republic. The
reason we establish the constitution is first and foremost so
we could tax ourselves. That's the primary purpose of this
country's creation was to tax ourselves. And once you understand
that and why, boy, you start to see the world
in a very different way.

Speaker 1 (01:29:01):
Very cool. All right, we'll link to the piece. Thanks David,
see you next week. David K. Johnston, Thank you, my friend.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm your shadow of ste This is
the Mark Thompson Show. Give it to yourself, don't keep

(01:29:26):
it to yourself. Share it across the universe. Help us
with sharing, for example, the conversation with David K. Johnston.
You can share it on your substack YouTube page. Everybody's
got a what is that other stuff? The ex platform, Tony,

(01:29:47):
what is the other stuff they've got? The kids have
the twitch and rumble twitch.

Speaker 2 (01:29:54):
Man Instagram.

Speaker 1 (01:29:56):
Yeah, your Instagram. Gramm it man, I G it's not Facebook.
No one needs is that anymore? TikTok. You can talk
it and you can take it, share it. Yeah. I
could listen to David all day. Thanks David. I agree,
it's such a I mean, for me to lay out
like I do and just let him speak is so

(01:30:17):
difficult because I want to quickly follow up on stuff.
But you know, I'm from Denmark, says Hanna Jefferson, who's
a an og of the show. Believe it or not.
Hana has been with us for I think since the
radio station. I'm from Denmark. We have a social democracy.
Maw Donnie wants too much away. We don't have free

(01:30:40):
child care, but it is more reasonable than the US.
We have free medical care and education. Yeah, I mean,
I don't know what his list of wishes will bring.
I think they bring attention, and I think he gets
some of it done, you know, but I know nothing.
I see nothing, Sergeant Schultz. That's right from the old

(01:31:03):
Hogan Zerros. Mike Johnson is very Sergeant Schultz. That's a
very good read. Nullifidian show a Republican how millionaires and
billionaires are flourishing under GOP regimes and corporations just fine,
they just do stock buy backs. Where is the pain
on the right. Scott Jennings, Yeah, somebody was telling me

(01:31:25):
something about Scott Jennings. Is he getting his own What
is the story with that? Did you see that, Tony,
Scott Jennings is doing something, Kim, did you see it?
There's new Yeah, look it up, there's some new plan.
I think he may get his own show or late
night show or something. This from Richard Delamator, Mark is
a genius from the future. No really, yes, thank you.

(01:31:48):
I am a genius and it takes a futurist like
Richard Delamator to see that I am geniusing all the time.

Speaker 2 (01:31:58):
There is a what is the Scott press release from
Salem Media Group. They're announcing the launch of the Scott
Jennings Show with a new daily program.

Speaker 1 (01:32:09):
That's it.

Speaker 2 (01:32:09):
Yeah, what started in July over the summer and it
is on the Salem Radio Network. So it's another conservative
talk show that you can.

Speaker 1 (01:32:18):
Know that's it, the Scott Jennings Show. Yeah. Yeah, I
think I don't know much about Scott Jennings. I only
see him on the CNN stuff. But I think he's
best when he's on those panels.

Speaker 2 (01:32:33):
Like he's just as a Jennings known to millions as
the rare conservative who wins debates inside the lions Den
of CNN, will bring his signature fire and facts to
the Salem lineup. Wow, God, just constantly win debates.

Speaker 1 (01:32:49):
No, it's a one hour show too. Wow, that's a
lot of Scott Jennings. That's a lot of smug. He
really does smug like nobody else. He sits there and
just he lays on smug. I wish I had that.
It's not it's not easy. He lays on that smugness
while other people are talking, and then while he's talking,
it's snide smugness and so uh. In fact, they should

(01:33:14):
call the show the snide Smugness Show. Yeah, Scott Jennings,
it's the snid Smugness Show. What Scott Jennings quick a
cup of coffee before I talked to Jefferson ran Tony's

(01:33:35):
called up his podcast too. I don't need to know
too much about Scott Chennings. Sorry just seeing no, I know,
I love that you've called it and our show with guests,
so yeah, yeah, there you go.

Speaker 2 (01:33:50):
Of him. It's done.

Speaker 4 (01:33:52):
Someone did this spoil our Christmas?

Speaker 1 (01:33:54):
It spoiled my Christmas. Maybe he has a special Christmas
uh smugness of stocking stuff or peacefully? Is the mug
that I'm using today. It's at Getmarkmerch dot com. The
new mug line is out. There's our logo on the back.
I do like the new big handle which is and
there it is pet approved. People have sent us pictures
of their pets with the with the T shirt, cats

(01:34:18):
and dogs, and we told you some of our merches
made it into Asia too. But there's the Peacefully Resisted mug.
You can have one just like the one I'm drinking
from that coffee down all right, one second? Really really cool,
all right, and you can get the coffee at Cochello
Valley Coffee dot com. It's the best coffee on Earth.

(01:34:40):
I'll just mention this quickly. Truly, this is the best
coffee on Earth. It is a boutique grocery, so this
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(01:35:02):
anything they have. Wonderful teas, wonderful spices also, so check
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MARKT for ten percent off. Mark Thompson. I saw his
latest episode on his YouTube channel, which is photo Walks TV.

(01:35:30):
Jefferson Graham was at the Golden gate Bridge. But it
was a great historical thing. He had multiples experts. I
really enjoyed it, so I encourage you to check it
out here. He is Jefferson Graham, everyone, the host of
that show. Kind of our tech voice. We do kind
of a Tech Tuesday thing. You know a lot of
consumer stuff. You wrote for USA Today for many years

(01:35:51):
on technology and consumer technologies. But you did a great
job with that latest Photo Walks TV thing. Man congratulates
yous my favorites.

Speaker 4 (01:36:01):
If everybody who's watching today would tune in, I would
make me the happiest guy in the world. I spent
a lot of time on it, and you know, I
just don't think we really think enough about what an
incredible bridge this is and how they built this thing.
And the beyond the bridge is third law, the whole
park area around there, eight hundred acres of just one

(01:36:26):
of the greatest, most beautiful parks in the world. So
you could really spend a wonderful day there and if
you're really up for it, walk across the bridge, climb
up in the morin, so many fun things to do,
and then of course ride in the seaplane over the
Golden Gate Bridge, which.

Speaker 1 (01:36:40):
Yeah, that's what I tell you what you did. And
you asked the question to this dude that's the seaplane operator. Yeah,
you asked the question I wanted to ask, which is
have there ever been any accidents with the seaplane? Have
there ever been any? Isn't it a little dangerous? And
his view was one hundred percent safety record. And he says,
anything goes wrong, we just land it right on the water.

Speaker 4 (01:36:59):
I mean, it's not a problem, right if the motor
falls out, we go, eh, whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:37:04):
And then right before September eleventh, we used to be
able to take the Kgo jet copter underneath the Golden
Gate bridge. That was pretty fun.

Speaker 4 (01:37:13):
Oh wow, Okay, the best I've done is going a
boat under the bridge.

Speaker 1 (01:37:18):
Yeah. I used to drive that bridge multiple times every day,
lived in Marin and worked in the city. Beautiful. I
think it's the most beautiful commute in America. I mean,
I haven't taken every commute, but pretty damn gorgeous. Yeah. Anyway,
congratulations on that. Give me some news I can use.

Speaker 3 (01:37:34):
Okay, Well, I want to tell you.

Speaker 4 (01:37:35):
You know, I last saw you four weeks ago before
I started my big Sammy Quin Centennial East Coast tour
for Photo Walks. I produced five episodes from Boston to DC,
and I had some tech issues, starting with when I
got to lax and I went through TSA and I

(01:37:56):
reached into my pocket and there were no keys.

Speaker 1 (01:37:58):
There were no keys.

Speaker 3 (01:38:00):
What happened to my keys?

Speaker 4 (01:38:01):
Well, I had left them in the lyft car the
lift as in the lyft and Uber, and once I
got through the gate, there was a text message from
the lift guy saying I found your keys. May I
bring them over to you?

Speaker 1 (01:38:14):
Wow?

Speaker 4 (01:38:15):
Well, you know that was really nice of you to say,
But here at the airport, I don't think that's going
to work so well. So I arranged for him to
go take them to our neighbor's house and drop them
in the mailbox. I only got charged twenty five dollars
for the service, which is fine. I was more than
happy to pay sure, of course. So that was the
first staph who then the second one? The second one?

Speaker 1 (01:38:38):
What went wrong? This is great? Okay?

Speaker 4 (01:38:40):
So I went to Philadelphia. What did people do when
they go to Philadelphia? Mark Liberty Bell? Rocky steps? What?

Speaker 1 (01:38:48):
Yeah, rocky stairs. I ran up the steps and that
was great. And then when I d it up all
the steps without without stopping. Yeah, you ran all the
way up those steps with that. It's not a lot
of steps. How many steps is it?

Speaker 4 (01:39:02):
I think it's seventy. It's not that bad, all right,
particularly when you got in your brain you're going don.

Speaker 1 (01:39:09):
Okay.

Speaker 4 (01:39:10):
So I got to the top and I wanted to
get a second shot to be rising to the top.
So I put the phone into into my tripod and
it got me coming up. But it was a windy day,
and so I felt like a champ. But then I
felt like a chump when the tripod right on the
ground and cracked this little thing into smithereens there's so many,

(01:39:32):
so many cracks in this iPhone, and Apple it said
stronger than ever gorilla glass, four times, four times stronger.

Speaker 1 (01:39:42):
Not for me, not so much. What happened to you?

Speaker 6 (01:39:44):
Do you have it insured or whatever that is? You
can go back and exchange it. No, but also just
do know it's a loaner from Apple, so it doesn't
come with insurance.

Speaker 1 (01:39:56):
It's a loner. But because you're a tech guru. M hmm, wow, yeah,
pretty sweet. So did you contact them?

Speaker 4 (01:40:04):
But if other people had bought it and paid for
Apple Care, it would cost twenty nine dollars to get
it fixed. If you don't get Apple Care, it's three
hundred and seventy nine dollars.

Speaker 1 (01:40:16):
Uh, it's seventy nine dollars. Say three hundred and seventy
You dropped that, okay, so wow wow, Yeah, it's a.

Speaker 4 (01:40:24):
Lot of money. But but I haven't cracked the phone
in a lot of years. So if they did, had
I thought they did get a lot better. And I
don't know what's going on with this one, but lady
had seen it, who reports for them. She just did
an article about how it fell out of her pocket
and smashed up as well.

Speaker 1 (01:40:41):
Wow, I'm concerned though, excuse throwing the rocky steps, Tony,
let's see that he's seventy steps. I think it's still
pretty impressive that Jefferson Graham made it. You know, I've
spent time with Jefferson Graham. He doesn't look like he
could make it to the first landing to me. But
I just what have you to say? What else can

(01:41:02):
tell me?

Speaker 7 (01:41:03):
Uh?

Speaker 4 (01:41:03):
So?

Speaker 3 (01:41:03):
Then?

Speaker 4 (01:41:04):
So then I'm in Boston and I'm doing a time
lapse of Samuel Adams outside Faniel Hall, and I get
a text message from my wife saying, your wife lost
her phone. I have her phone. I said, huh, what's
this all about? And it says I'm in Faniel Hall,

(01:41:26):
come inside and get the phone. Sounded like a scam
to me, but I said, okay. I went in and
I walked to this booth and the lady hands me
Ruth's phone. He hands me Rus's phone, and I said
to her, how did you contact me? How did any
of this happen? Well, she said, my wife forgot to

(01:41:47):
lock her phone, had left it on so that everything
was there, and she went into the chat history and
I was at the top of the page, and so
she sent me Anupe.

Speaker 1 (01:41:58):
I am telling you. First of all, you people sound
like an absolute mash to travel with. Secondly, what I
can't believe your wife left the phone open, Like, I mean,
that could have been incredibly vulnerable, right, she went to
the gift.

Speaker 4 (01:42:13):
Shop, she's looking around and she puts it down or whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:42:18):
And yeah, I mean, any of us could have done it.
I'm kind of teaching any of us could have made
I've made that mistake before.

Speaker 4 (01:42:23):
It happens to her all the time. So I said, okay,
now I'm buying you the little thing that goes around
your neck, and you're gonna wear the phone every day.

Speaker 1 (01:42:31):
So now I like that.

Speaker 4 (01:42:32):
I said, you're gonna wear it's the last week.

Speaker 1 (01:42:35):
Strapped to you. Do you understand that I never want
to hear it that you've lost your phone again.

Speaker 4 (01:42:39):
So now we're in New York and we're outside the
Metropolitan Museum of Art and we're walking away from the
museum and she goes, can't find my phone. Oh no,
Now I don't want to hear this. I don't want
to hear this, and says, no, I can't find my phone.
So okay, so we went back to the museum. We've
figured out that she we got a hot dog. We
sat down in the hot dog. She put it down

(01:43:02):
and somebody had picked up the phone, took it inside
the Metropolitan Museum and gave it to lost in Toime.

Speaker 1 (01:43:10):
Wow, and we guys, you guys lose a lot of stuff,
but you're very lucky, good people who returned.

Speaker 4 (01:43:17):
So then, so then, I don't know how many of
your viewers and listeners have experienced with Amtrak trains. So
the Amtrak train is incredible on the East Coast. It
just flies and you don't have to get to the air,
you don't have to give the train station two hours
ahead of time, and you don't have to go through TSA.
You just get on the train. The only snag is

(01:43:39):
that when they stop at your stop, they say, hurry,
get up, get off.

Speaker 1 (01:43:43):
You only have a minute. Get off, get off, get
off now.

Speaker 3 (01:43:46):
And if you don't get I.

Speaker 4 (01:43:47):
Guess your wife left her phone behind. No, no, no,
if you don't get off, you're going to end up
in Delaware. So now we're in Washington, d C. Washington, DC,
and I picked up my suitcase, her suitcase, my backpack,
her backpack, a tote bag, three coats that I left
my tripod below behind my seven hundred dollars beloved tripod.

Speaker 1 (01:44:12):
You're not getting that back promptly.

Speaker 5 (01:44:13):
No.

Speaker 4 (01:44:14):
I went to Lost and Found at the Amtrak station.
I couldn't even get the lady to look up at me.
She said, you know, go to lostonfound dot com or
some crazy website and you start going in there.

Speaker 3 (01:44:28):
And it wouldn't even let you type in.

Speaker 4 (01:44:31):
That it was a tripod.

Speaker 3 (01:44:32):
They give you like a dropped out.

Speaker 1 (01:44:34):
Oh, I see, you has to be one of these options.
I see. Yeah, so that's my trip. I think we
lost a lot of money on this trip. Well, I'll
look forward to the video of it.

Speaker 4 (01:44:45):
But there'll be several of them. There's going to be
five of them. Let me just say, really interesting, what
do they talk about back there? The founding fathers, freedom
of speech, freedom of religion, a tyrant, tyrannical king that
they said enough enough, enough enough. So that's what we're celebrating.

Speaker 1 (01:45:06):
Yeah, I mean, you can celebrate it again. It seems
to be increasingly just conversation and not reflected in the
government we have. But we'll see, I mean, perhaps things will.

Speaker 4 (01:45:16):
Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party.

Speaker 1 (01:45:18):
Okay, we'll look forward to all of those shows that
we will be birthed from that visit. But now the
episode of Photo Walks TV is brilliant. So I encourage
people to go over there to photo x TV and
check out the Golden Gay Bridge and ways to photograph it,
ways to visit it. Just like great vantage points. There
are all kinds of different vantage points from the on

(01:45:40):
the Golden Gay Bridge, and he talks to experts and
he himself, Jefferson Graham, is an expert on it. But
also what you're seeing is black and white archival footage
are the way it was built, and they built it
down to the millimeter without any kind of calculator. Everything
was done with manual calculations and it's done to perfection.
A remarkable feat of a human achievement, and it is

(01:46:05):
a spectacularly visual monument to all of that achievement. Great
job on that, Jeff.

Speaker 4 (01:46:12):
Just one last thing. Remember that you said you commuted
from Rinn. So what was life like there before the bridge,
when you lived in Sacelito and Tiberan and Napa and
all that stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:46:23):
How did you get to the city. Yeah, it must
have been pretty intense.

Speaker 1 (01:46:28):
Yeah, you know after the quake. The after the quake,
the Bay Bridge was closed. You couldn't go over because
a portion of the Bay Bridge had collapsed. The Bay
Bridge connects San Francisco to Oakland to the East Bay. Yeah.

(01:46:50):
So I had a therapist that come as no surprise
to most people. I had a therapist appointment. He was
in Berkeley, and so I had to drive up to
the Richmond San Rafel Bridge. There's another bridge that links
Marin to the East Bay and then back down and
then back over that way. But the answer is here

(01:47:11):
in the chat. My grandfather took a train from San
Rafel to Scelito and then took a boat to San Francisco.
Imagine that. Wow.

Speaker 4 (01:47:24):
Yeah, well you know those boats are still running.

Speaker 1 (01:47:26):
Yeah, they sure are. In fact, those boats are subsidized
by the Golden Gate Bridge toll because I don't think
they quite make enough to you know, make it happen.

Speaker 2 (01:47:35):
My grandparents were there on opening day of the Golden
gate Bridge and among the first to walk across it.

Speaker 1 (01:47:41):
Wow, a pretty cool brag. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:47:46):
Yeah, yeah, they are they still around now, they've gone
their past. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:47:53):
Eleven men died while building the Golden gate Bridge, something
which you do note in your episode all right, amount
of time love speaking with you, find them, photo walks, TV,
subscribe all that stuff and until next time, my friend. Okay,
thank you, Jefferson Graham, everybody right on.

Speaker 4 (01:48:14):
It is.

Speaker 1 (01:48:16):
Getting to that time, but we're not there yet.

Speaker 2 (01:48:21):
It's good because we haven't really talked about the the
thumbnail of the show, so we need to really hit
that one, I think before we go.

Speaker 1 (01:48:31):
We sure do. And there is a degree of evil
that's growing in this administration. Corruption, recrimination, revenge and one
of the clever ways. And when I say clever, I
mean evil clever that the administration has found a kind

(01:48:55):
of retribution, revenge, a method of attack act on the
president's critics as they see his adversaries lining up in
any way, there is a new area of exploitation when

(01:49:16):
it comes to exploiting a part of the law that
can be turned on Trump's adversaries and GOP adversaries. And
here after that lengthy preamble is what I mean. There
is a housing mortgage regulator, and you know we've reported
on him. He's this guy, Bill PALTI I think is

(01:49:37):
how he says his last name, and he is this
outspoken voice in support of Trump. And more to the point,
he is there at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, so
he has access to all this mortgage information and he's
looking for any way in which any American who is

(01:49:59):
a critic of President Trump exists with a mortgage and
mortgage applications that might not be legally kosher. So he's
looking for any little thing on any of these mortgage
applications that don't work, and then he will prosecute and

(01:50:21):
persecute based on this information. So this guy Bill Poulti again,
he's found this way to go after a lot of
President Trump's critics and high profile critics too. Latista James
Adam shiff you claim this as a vacation home, or
you claim this is a primary residence, it's actually a

(01:50:42):
vacation home. It's that sort of thing. Okay. So, as
you know, alongside this, the Trump administration has purged many watchdogs,
many inspectors general across the board. So whenever you're getting
rid of inspectors general, I think that bears a little
bit of focus because it means you're getting rid of

(01:51:05):
the regulatory, objective structure of government that is keeping an
eye on corruption. That's keeping an eye on all sorts
of stuff happening at the government level that is illegal
or openly corrupt or both. So the internal watchdog for
the US Federal Housing Finance Agency is one of these

(01:51:28):
watchdogs that is getting anybody fired exactly removed from his
role at a time when this housing regulator who I
mentioned to you, Bill Poulti, is playing this role in
President Trump's targeting of enemies or perceived of political enemies.

Speaker 2 (01:51:50):
I wonder what he did to get fired, Like what
did he say, you know, did they just not want
him there generally or did he.

Speaker 1 (01:51:57):
Do something right? I mean, did he speak up? Is
what you're saying, right, the uh there's a lot of this,
you know, as you know, the uh squeezing out of
prosecutors from the Justice Department who wouldn't bring the case
against Letitia James. And then they bring up this lawyer

(01:52:22):
who is an insurance lawyer for Trump, who'd never prosecuted
a case in her life. She's the one who offered
to the court papers of prosecution that had so many
mistakes and flaws that the judge had to like send
it back and say, hey, you know you forgot this
and this you can't sign yourself, it has to be
signed by somebody else. It was crazy. It was like

(01:52:42):
a you know, like a first year law student's submission
to the court. So I don't know what happened here,
but there was a termination and apparently this ouster did
fall or precede what was to have been a uh

(01:53:08):
a resistance on the part of this office, his office
to some of the stuff that was going on. So
again I don't know what he was actually blowing the
whistle on, but the idea that he's being purged is
the takeaway because there's really no one now to restrain

(01:53:31):
this Pulty and Paulty is out of control, so look
for more of these kinds of mortgage issues. It's been
an instrument that they've used effectively against many of the
political adversaries of Trump. So that continues, pretty crazy, and

(01:53:51):
it's it's of the moment, you know, the inspectors generals
offices are being purged of people who just by virtue
of the fact that they sit in the office pose
a threat to Trump because so much is being done
in a corrupt, illegal way, and so that continues. That's

(01:54:12):
the latest on that Mark Thompson show. I want to
get a quick cut note on many of you who
generously jump in on the chat. Ola Hanson points out
something that we didn't get to, which is you know
yet another I said, we didn't get to it. I
didn't get to Kim's news. Apologies. Sixty four people taken

(01:54:34):
out in the hexat Trump rampage. This is the elimination
of a lot of these boats, vessels that supposedly are
carrying drugs. Ola Hanson says one boat had motor problems
and was drifting waiting for help.

Speaker 2 (01:54:51):
Wow, there was a story I was reading earlier where
Trump had said that they were full the boats were
full of of fentanyl and that when they blew them up,
the ventanyl was floating all over the ocean. And someone
else in the government said, no, it wasn't fentanyl. They're
full of cocaine. Star it was cocaine, Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:55:13):
Oh, they were foot of something.

Speaker 2 (01:55:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:55:17):
Yeah, I've never seen anything like it. I've never seen
anything like it. Yeah, it was crazy. No, Lafidion says, So,
if we lie to the government, it's felony, but if
they lie to us, it's politics. That's according to Bill Murray,
who apparently said that was that's pretty great. It's a
great quote. Shout out to Lucy mccallistory again for a
twenty dollars super chat Thank you. Also want to give

(01:55:40):
a shout out to Gloria Brown for a couple of
bucks thrown in with a super es Thank you, Gloria.
Joe and Hollywood with a ten dollars super chat says,
what a horrible halloween to have ice show up. Yeah,
the worst that happened in our neighborhood was a kid
got run over by a deer. Oh gosh, that could
be painful, But glad that was the only incident west

(01:56:05):
Ther He says, I'm not exaggerating, but the furor started somewhere.
Google won't allow his name in a super chat and
slowly took his power. The people read this from me, Kim,
I must be reading it wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:56:21):
I'm not exaggerating, but the furor started somewhere. Google won't
allow his name in a super chat, so he said
the furor instead of Trump because they won't allow his
name and slowly took his power, and the people let him.

Speaker 1 (01:56:34):
I don't understand the Google won't allow his name in
a super chat party. He can't put Hitler in a
super chat. Oh you know, thank you obviously.

Speaker 2 (01:56:44):
Yeah, well I wasn't allus to be I thought he
was talking about Trump.

Speaker 4 (01:56:48):
Oh no, not you, but just the reason why those
words get blocked god obviously.

Speaker 1 (01:56:53):
Yeah. Yeah, it's a uh, depressed Canadian says, uh, does
David K. Johnston think the Democrats are putting too much
faith in the midterms being run fairly? I'll ask him
that next week. Actually, Moe Kelly will be here to
ask him that depressed Canadian with a twenty dollars super chat.

(01:57:13):
It's a good question. I mean, David hasn't traditionally been
on board the I think it's indisputably the case that
there's been a lot of voter suppression. But when it
comes to the manipulation of the vote, I don't know
to what extent David is a signatory to those conspiracy

(01:57:34):
theories or theories at all. But let's ask him, you know,
next week, Kim, will you make sure that Mo knows
to ask him. The Press Canadian also makes this point
with a twenty dollars super chat. Thank you to Press
Canadian for being so generous in your superchats. It's a
sad reality that Marjorie Taylor Green being somewhat responsive to
her constituents concern is seen as a sign of moderation

(01:57:55):
in the GOP and quote breaking away from Trump. It's
a bar that keeps getting lowered. Yeah, I mean she's
still this loathsome figure, but she is representing her constituents,
as David had noted, in questions about what's going on,
and even in the government closure, I mean she's pretty

(01:58:16):
much saying, hey, we've got control of everything. How come
we can't get this past.

Speaker 2 (01:58:20):
It's affecting her personally, the healthcare issue. So that's why
she's you know, reasonable about it.

Speaker 1 (01:58:25):
Yeah, she noted that she was helped she was being
affected personally, as Kim says, Redpa says, of course, Mark
is one of those Marin County hot tubbers. I did
live in Marin I did not have a hot tub though,
and I actually never I've never been a never been

(01:58:46):
in a hot tub in Marin County. After all those years,
I just reflected, I never really realized it until just now.
Thank you. Cc Ryder says to Jefferson Graun, this is
why I still have a BlackBerry through Horizon. I've only
used a BlackBerry phone for the last seventeen years never
had a crack phone due to their gorilla glass dropped
it from high places too. CC Rider, where they have

(01:59:08):
you seen the BlackBerry movie?

Speaker 2 (01:59:10):
Like?

Speaker 1 (01:59:10):
What happened to the BlackBerry? BlackBerry was the you know
they were the Remember Obama had a BlackBerry? Everybody had
a BlackBerry. That's a great movie, the BlackBerry movie. What
happened to them? I mean, it's incredible when you think
about it. They owned the market and BlackBerry saw it
all completely evaporate. I just I don't remember much about

(01:59:35):
it there. It is BlackBerry, a film by Matt Johnson.
You must see this movie. It's really good. I have
to see it again. That's one of the beauties of
having a crappy memory the way I do. I can
just go watch it again and it'll be like seeing
it for the first time. So anyway, you should and
you sec Rider, you should definitely see it since you

(01:59:56):
still got a BlackBerry. Yeah, great, Anything else Kim that
I need to address?

Speaker 2 (02:00:03):
Yeah, two big of the biggest headlines that since the
show started. You know, yesterday the snap benefits were going
to be paid at fifty percent and then there were
then there was news that they would be all paid,
and then Trump said, We're not paying anything until the
Democrats capitulate. And now the White Houses had to come

(02:00:23):
back and say, wait a minute, no, that's not true
when we are paying the snap benefits. So the White
House had to go around him.

Speaker 1 (02:00:30):
But also, yeah, he was. He was saying, I don't
care what the court says, I'm not going to pay him,
right yeah, and then.

Speaker 2 (02:00:35):
White House is like, yeah, no, we can't do that.
So another interesting story is the sexiest Man of the
Year has come out today with People Magazine. He hasn't
come out, but the People magazines put him out.

Speaker 1 (02:00:51):
It was good chaining. He just sadly didn't live long
enough to see himself become.

Speaker 2 (02:00:56):
Sexist man k Johnston. It was not Mark Thompson. Instead,
it was actor Jonathan Bailey. Do you know who he is?

Speaker 1 (02:01:05):
I do not tell me about Jonathan Bailey.

Speaker 2 (02:01:07):
Jonathan Bailey has been named People Magazine's twenty twenty five
Sexiest Man Alive. He was, Uh, he was. He's the
first openly gay man, so I guess to hold this
the title fake real Wow. He was in Wicked. Oh.
I'm not sure what else he's been. I know him

(02:01:29):
from Wicked, and I know Tony's looking for a picture
to put up.

Speaker 1 (02:01:33):
Well, we definitely need a picture. I mean they should.

Speaker 2 (02:01:36):
Yeah, it's crazy and I think if you see his
face you may recognize him from Wicked. Oh yeah, he
has some guns going on there.

Speaker 1 (02:01:43):
So yeah, I don't know. I mean that whole thing
about man alive who was second? Tom wants to know
is there a second? Did they probably wish their list what?
I was? Second? Seconist sexiest man again this year? Rigged
says Tom. Uh, yeah, I don't. I don't know. I
can't tough to argue with it, you know, but I'm Oh,

(02:02:05):
is he in Bridgerton too?

Speaker 2 (02:02:07):
Oh yeah, Bridgerton, that's right, Bridgerton Wicked.

Speaker 1 (02:02:10):
Yeah, Mella Fitting says, just some guy guy.

Speaker 2 (02:02:16):
His quote, as Bailey says, obviously, I'm incredibly flattered and
it's completely absurd.

Speaker 1 (02:02:21):
Ah, that is the right attitude to have. I'm completely
I'm completely flattered and it's all you know, Well, we
must wrap up. I am going to do an interview
I think in a moment that I'll leave behind when
I leave later this week. Still looking forward to bringing

(02:02:46):
on mo from Thursday for ten days or something like that. Anyway, Hey, Tony,
thank you for being here. You'll be with us tomorrow though, right,
you've got to hear market. Yeah, okay, and Keim you'll
be here right, uh, how are you all right? And
everybody watching, you'll all be here right. So if you're

(02:03:07):
watching or listening, we're hoping that you'll continue to watch
and listen tomorrow tomorrow, John Rothman and more. And now
if you would please a moment for I'm sad of
Stevens for the Mark Johnson Show. Bye bye, we get
a lot by time, Bye bye all the time, Thank

(02:03:28):
you all, Bye bye,

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