July 7, 2025 • 35 mins
Hour 2 of A&G features...
- Joey Chestnut is back & vagrants
- The tariff deadline
- The Texas floods & The Supreme Court
- Jack's travels & performance art
Stupid Should Hurt: https://www.armstrongandgetty.com/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio, the George
Washington Broadcast Center.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Jack Armstrong's Joe Ketty arm Strong and Jetty and He
Armstrong and Eddy.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Seventy point five hot dogs and buns in ten minutes.
The Nathan's Famous Fourth of July Champion of the World,
Joey Chestnut.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
How do you feel? I was excited. I love being here, man,
I wish I ate a couple more. I'm sorry, guys,
I'll be back next year.
Speaker 4 (00:43):
That's greatness. That is the voice of greatness. Joey chest
sweat Eat seventy and a half I dogs. I considered going.
So we are in Manhattan and the boys for vacation,
and we want every Fourth of July since they were little.
We watched the hot dog eating contest on ESPN two,
(01:03):
and it's kind of a family tradition.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
To watch that.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
And yeah, and I was right there and could have gone,
but I thought I just did the crowds and fighting
and there and the hot sun, so I didn't go.
But maybe I missed out in a lifetime memory right
there by not watching a guy shove as many hot
dogs in his mouth as he possibly could in a
short amount of time.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
I think, you know that is what well? He absolutely did?
You did?
Speaker 4 (01:27):
You passed on dream memory for your kids. On the
other hand, that's the sort of idea that seems like
a great one. Then you think about how long is
it going to take us to get to Coney Island, right,
and then you knows.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
A day to two thirds of a day of vacation
do I want to.
Speaker 4 (01:45):
Spend that's jam hotdogs into their mows for five minutes.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
AnyWho.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
We just did a story about a woman that was
attacked by a homeless person in California. My only reaction
to that story vagrant. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah you you
you don't like the term homeless person, and I don't
blame you. We need a quick short term for these people.
Crazy person. I'm fine with crazy person or I don't know.
That's not accurate either, because it's not all mental illness.
It's way more drug crazies than anything else. That's why
(02:16):
I like the term vagrant because it kind of lumps everybody.
It covers everybody. I like a transient drug addict, but
it's a little cumbersome, and maybe some of these people
aren't drug addicts, although the vast majority are.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
But the reason I'm on a jot.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
About this is if you make the fundamental focus of
describing that person their lack of a permanent address, then
people think, well, that's that's really unfortunate.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
They don't have a home and we need to solve
that problem. No, the problem is.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
There a drug addict. Yeah, more a vagrant, which kind
of hints at it. The reason I want to bring
it up in conjunction with being in New York City
is I saw I see every single day in the
college town I live in more drug vagrant street people
that frighten me every day. Then I saw in Manhattan
(03:05):
walking around for three days that shouldn't be Yeah, that's nuts.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
On its own, there aren't none in New York.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
But what I mean, if you're from California, from a
big city in California, or even a small city as
I just said, it is refreshingly bum free to be
in New York and it shouldn't be that way. Maybe
if you're from I don't know, Omaha and you go
to New York, you think, oh my god, there's scary
street people around. But for us, it was like, Wow,
it's so nice to be able to walk the streets
without every ten feet you're wondering if this person's gonna
(03:37):
stab me in the eye with a broken bottle. Yeah,
it has been useful as a bicoastal American to observe
the differences in outcomes directly tied to policies. I mean,
it's not mysterious. It's not difficult to understand. There are,
for instance, in South Carolina, there are just not bumps
(03:58):
and junkies. You see a beggar on a street corner
once a week, and they generally get rousted by cops.
Depends where you are. In the super lefty college towns,
it's worse. But that just goes to prove my point.
It's directly tied to incentives and disincentives. And you know,
at risk of belaboring the point that we've made many times,
if you make.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
It as easy and comfortable as.
Speaker 4 (04:18):
Possible to be a jobless drug addict, you will have
more jobless drug addicts. Do you think that's doing those
people a favor on any level? I would argue strenuously
it's not.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
It's the opposite.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
The one thing I did see in New York that
bothered me a lot on the fourth of July, we
were standing in the spot where George Washington took his
first oath of office as the capital of our fine
country was in New York City right there. It's a big, old,
cool federal building basically across from the New York Stock
Exchange in Wall Street. It's still there, and they've got
(04:54):
a big cement platform that they've taken out of the
ground and it is now standing up with an inscription
on it.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
And that's where George Washington.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
Stood to take the first oath, which obviously is a
very very big deal for the world, not just for
the United States, the point Ken Burns is making in
his new documentary, which we'll talk about later. But so,
while we were bumping around the southern tip of Manhattan
on the fourth of July and went over to see
the Statue of Liberty and a variety of different things.
(05:27):
So many of the artifacts of our history of freedom
of independence were surrounded by barriers because there is so
concerned about protests, and I thought, so this is the
way we handle it.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
We handle it on the end of.
Speaker 4 (05:47):
The deal of the protests by putting a barrier around
the statue so I can't look at it. To protect
it from the protesters as opposed to what we're always advocating.
Arrest these people and make it so miserable to get
arrested for defacing you know, a statue like this, that
you don't do it where we're getting it on the
wrong end. You need to catch it on the front end.
(06:09):
So people aren't motivated to do it right now. People
know they can get away with spray painting this statue
of whichever founding father, so they have to cover it
with all kinds of barricades and tape it stuff like
that you can't even see it as a tourist. And
if you just talked out some of these things that
we do that are so nuts these day, say, if
you were to describe, all right, we have a variety
(06:30):
of ways we're proposing to deal with the fact that
angry protesters who've been miseducated and indoctrinated in our government
schools want to tear down the artifacts of our founding.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Here is one plan, and I would spell.
Speaker 4 (06:43):
It out, and that includes covering up the monuments and
statues so no one can see them. That would be
roundly rejected. People will say, I don't care what else
is in your stupid plan. You're missing the whole freaking
point of having this statue. What's your next plan? And
yet that idiotic plan is the one we've gone with.
Come on, America, he can do better than this. I
(07:04):
noticed it was all around immigration, So anything that had
to do with like around Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty,
like the launching point there from Manhattan, they had covered up,
blocked off, whatever. So they must have been expecting some
sort of you know, Trump is evil, anti Ice something,
because they made it very difficult to get close to
(07:27):
or touch anything that had to do with welcoming immigrants
in this country. So I'm assuming, which I thought was
interesting given I had a couple of experiences riding with
lift drivers or Uber drivers that were from another land
you could tell by their accent, but who had great
stories I got to talking about. I got in an
(07:51):
Uber Blacker, Lyft black or whatever. He was driving an
escalade and young guy, thick accent from somewhere and I said,
just chicar and he said yeah. I said how old
are you and he said twenty five? And I said,
well this is pretty impressive. He said yeah, I worked
this to buy this. And then I'm trying to get
another car and then I'm going to have a driver,
and all of a sudden and I.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Thought that here's it here.
Speaker 4 (08:10):
So what is the story on immigrants who do this
as opposed to you're waiving your home country's flag in
the streets attacking cops.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
This land is.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
Awful, right, Well, we should have a better some sort
of conversation around that.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
People who work.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
Hard come up with an idea, think it's great that
they can do whatever they want here versus the you
aren't giving me enough stuff crowd.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Right, Ground zero is the schools.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
It is absolutely the schools, which is one of the
reasons school choice is so important that I'm so enthusiastic
about her. It is for a number of reasons. She's
purely you know, read and write in arithmetic success. The
current government schools, bound up by the unions are just
not doing the job obviously. So yeah, in the raw,
you know, purpose of school existing, I think school choice
(09:00):
is a great thing. But also we've got to end
the systematic indoctrination of the children into this perverse view
of their own country and they don't know a damn
thing about their history. I've got some really interesting stuff
on that too. The recent numbers from Gallup. Gallup does
a poll on civics and education and patriotism, that sort
of thing.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
The current numbers are miserable among the young. Shocking. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:25):
I hit my kids with some various questions about things
or comments about things, and I was disappointed people or
events they've never heard of at this current age in
their lives, which is shocking to me. But then why
don't we penzil that in for hour three of the show.
Let's talk about that. I really I was let LaGuardia Airport,
getting ready to live in New York, and so they
(09:46):
got a bookstore. They're nice bookstore, and they've got a
little display up front with the classics in it, and
it had your you know, year Normal, the Great Gatsby,
and you know, name name all your classic books that
you have to read in high school or college. And
(10:06):
to Kill a Mockingbird, you know, like fifteen of those
kind of books, and Howard Zinn's of People's History of
the United States, which is just a socialist reading of
our nation's histories included with those books. I mean, so
that's what we're fighting, which is just what you're talking about.
No wonder people have those attitudes. If that's what's displayed
as a classic of reading at the books. It's not
(10:28):
the young people's faults. We can't blame them. We've just
got to and it's going to be a hard slog.
We've got to teach them the truth and let some
of that filter in. There are generations that we have
lost a significant number of the kids, and as they
work their way through their lives, when the generation that
was most fiercely steeped in this crap, like the kids
(10:50):
who were in high school or college during the whole
George Floyd COVID madness, when they're in their forties fifties
taking positions the leadership, will they have left behind the
awful indoctrination they received.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
I hope so.
Speaker 4 (11:05):
But oh boy, yeah, no kidding, Well, we gotta take
a break where we ought to hit the big tariff
deadline that's going to hit on Wednesday that could be
disruptive to the world.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
To let you know just a little bit of what's
going on there.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
But also pencil in the characters encountered in Greenwich Village
at Washington Square Park, a performance artist of a couple
of different kinds and my son playing chess with an
old drunk guy. One of those chess things they do
(11:37):
at the park, you know, the speed chest.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah, not chest.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
I just said chest. Michael, think wow, thank you for that.
Michael put it in my head.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Idiot.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
Henry said, that is the best thing I've ever done
in my life. Was his experience coming away from blade
chests with this guy. It was really something to watch.
I can't wait to tell you that story, among other things.
On the way stay here.
Speaker 5 (12:00):
The President Trump said he will fire off letters to
a dozen countries, which he did not name, threatening to
raise tariffs as high as seventy percent, due to go
into effect early next month.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
I signuts they'll go out on Monday, probably twelve. The
different amounts of money, different amounts of tariffs, A board
air force one.
Speaker 5 (12:18):
President Trump explained why he prefers letters.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
To other forms of communication.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
I think that.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Letters are better for us. I've said that all alone,
because you have hundreds of countries. You know, you have
over two hundred cuntries, and you can't sit down with two.
Speaker 4 (12:34):
Hundred country So I got to admit I had completely
forgotten about the ninety day tariff pause that happened well,
ninety days ago Wednesday, when he said I don't worry.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
About it, We'll figure out for the next ninety days.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
Well, time is up now, and those tariffs are going
to kick in Wednesday unless there's some sort of deal made.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
I guess right.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
It reminds me of those dreams that torture many of
us for the rest of our lives. That we wake
up on the day of a final in college or
high school or whatever and realize we haven't studied and
blah blah blah, Like I'm sixty years old. Why am
I having college dreams?
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Anyway? Yeah, I was reminded.
Speaker 4 (13:10):
Oh, that's right, the whole tiff thing, the madness, the
trade deals, the oh my god, the chaos. Wall Street
is concerned, the stock market is plugged. Yeah, that's back again, Jack.
They gave you an entire semester to be ready for
this paper. How are you just getting around to it now?
Dozens and dozens and dozens of countries, more than one
(13:32):
hundred and seventy countries, said Trump the other day. And
the new teriff rates which he announced. You remember back
in the day, those so called reciprocal tariffs, which turned
out to be just a weird creation of numbers they
decided on anyway, They ranged from ten to seventy percent,
with payments due by August first.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
It's you know, it's.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
Coming to the wall negotiation wise, and the rhetoric and
the vows and the threats are going to get more
and more heated. Stock market, all kinds of different indexes
hit all time highs last week, right because of the
concern Jack over the wait what, yeah, I know. It's
the belief among the folks who talk about this sort
(14:14):
of thing for a living is that that sort of
volatility and uncertainty is just kind of People are getting
used to it now, and they think, well, it came
out pretty well the last couple of rounds of terrible
threats and nothing terrible happens, so I guess it probably won't.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Well, we'll have to see. I don't know.
Speaker 4 (14:32):
Oh, he's also he's threatening additional tariffs. I love this
on your bricks. Group of emerging economies. That's your Brazil, Russia, China.
They all got together and met in Rio de Janeiro.
Iran is the eye right in brick. It's funny the
journal left that out. Yeah, anyway, so beunitive terriffs on
(14:56):
them for being No.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Not in brick. That what's the other one we can
that we heard like before we went in a vacation.
Speaker 4 (15:01):
Yeah, what's that other one? It's a it's a bad word.
It's like a negative sounding word. No, brick is a Brazil, Russia?
Speaker 2 (15:10):
India?
Speaker 4 (15:13):
Really, Yeah, India's got to come over here to our side.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
AnyWho, So do you speaking of the tariffs and all
that sort of stuff. I standing in.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
Front of the new and the market's hitting a record,
standing in front of the Stock Exchange on the fourth
of July taking pictures with my kids, and I was
explaining to who I'm on this, this is the most
important thing that mankind has done. This and not the
stock exchange specifically, but just the whole free market. The
reason we're the most powerful country in the history of
(15:46):
the world is democracy in the free market and being
able to generate the revenue to have the military and
the you know, in the the technolog advancement and everything
like that. And you know, if you're a fan of capitalism,
you know this or free markets. It's lifted more people
out of poverty than any other ideas ever had. I mean,
it's the greatest thing that ever happened to mankind. Oh
(16:09):
a million times more man So, it's not even close.
More people should visit the New York Stock Exchange with
reverence for what it represents in a good way, as
opposed to it always being used as like a negative
Wall Street versus Main Street, you know, that whole dumb thing.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Yeah, investing in great ideas.
Speaker 4 (16:28):
And helping them crow to employ more people and sell
great products to people who really want them.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
What could be more evil? All right? Yeah, but the bull.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
So, the giant bull on Wall Street and Manhattan was
more crowded than it's ever been any time I've ever
visited in my life, which I finally figured out was
because of a giant soccer tournament that was going on.
But anyway, the line for the bull was like six
blocks long, and everybody was getting underneath the Wall Street
bull and rubbing its testicles for their pictures. The bull
(16:57):
is intact jack, as we say in the veterinary business.
Lots of college girls with their hands on the bulls
testicles getting their pictures taken for their Instagram. I found
a weird you know, it's a little uncomfortable, but yeah,
I'm glad America can still laugh. Should I be looking
at this? I feel like I shouldn't be looking at this.
We got a lot more on the way stay.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Here, Armstrong and Getty, And for me coming back, it
just I'm overwhelmed with emotion and I'm overwhelmed with memories,
and I can't get over looking at those.
Speaker 6 (17:29):
Cabins right next to the Guadalupe River.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
That river was.
Speaker 6 (17:32):
The source of so much joy and fun for us Erica.
We would spend hours and hours in that river. There
was this thing called the Blob, which was like this
inflated balloon type thing that we would jump on and
then the person at the end would jump off into
the water, and it was so much fun. And we'd
go looking for dinosaur fossils. And that was where we
spent so much of our time at camp.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
That is what we loved.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
And to think that that same.
Speaker 6 (17:55):
River is the source of this devastation, it's just hard
to wrop my head around.
Speaker 4 (18:01):
Yeah, there's a reporter who actually attended that very camp
as a kid, obviously, where so many children and adults
lost their lives. The total number now whatever it is,
fifty some.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
It's horrible.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
Yeah, there are all sorts of different camps for families
and kids.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Along the river there beautiful you know, river.
Speaker 4 (18:19):
Country at Texas, and the rise of the water just horrific, astonishing.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Rising water levels.
Speaker 4 (18:27):
So what was it twenty six feet in forty five
minutes or something like that. Just unimaginable death toll currently
eighty one eighty one. But yeah, I saw a Texas
representative on one of the shows yesterday and he said,
he's basically saying, look, I mean, when you get a
once in a hundred year whether something happened, there's not
(18:49):
much you can do. I mean, you can't be prepared
for every once in a century event.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Yeah, you don't want to be cavalier about it.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
But they called disasters disasters because there asteris, they're rare
and terrible. Well, like I said earlier, it's one of
the worst stories I've ever heard. It's just absolutely horrible.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Oh yeah, but the whole what went wrong with the
warning system?
Speaker 4 (19:12):
He said this Texas Congress and he said, well, we
have we actually have warning systems for hurricanes. You can
see those coming, not like this river rising, which you
couldn't see coming, he said, And we have hundreds of
people die all the time in these disasters, so there's
just not much you can do for preparing for something
like this.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
But man, oh what a terrible story.
Speaker 4 (19:33):
And especially if it happens in the wee hours of
the morning where everybody's sound asleep, when everybody sound asleep,
it was just absolutely terrible, you know. And again I
have no desire to be cavalier about this, because if
there are things that can be done, they should be done.
But it reminds me of, you know, certain political divides
in the country. There are some people who think that
(19:55):
if they just pass enough laws or institute enough systems,
or levy enough tax or whatever, we can remove uncertainty
and danger and you know, the frailty of human life
from the world, whereas those of us, generally on the
right side of the aisle, understand that, no, this is
just sometimes hurricanes hit cities and it's horrible, and you
rebuild and do the best you can. It doesn't mean
(20:18):
we need more government anyway. Yeah, I heard one reporter talking,
or actually was somebody who was at the camp. So
they had gotten to high ground and survived, obviously. So
it's the middle of the night. Word starts getting around. Hey,
the river's rising, Maybe we ought to get out of here,
and you didn't have much time, and people were running
to their cars, and this person was talking about how
(20:39):
there were dozens and dozens of cars that were people
had gotten to the cars, and there was there's one
little dirt road and they're kind of in a line.
People starting to leave, and then pretty soon they all
just started floating. And then you saw a headlights disappearing
under the water and the car's.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Just wow, that's they were gone.
Speaker 4 (20:55):
Oh yeah, yeah, I heard a story. I hadn't intended
on talking about this that much, but it's just so
amazing and terrible and heartbreaking.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
But this guy woke up to the.
Speaker 4 (21:08):
Sounds of the storm lashing their cabin and he decided
to get out of bed and the water.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Was knee high. Oh my god, and.
Speaker 4 (21:15):
So he yelled for his wife, Hey, we got to
get out of there. They ran around, they grabbed their
cell phones and like a bag they hadn't unpacked with
some critical stuff, and before.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
They could hit the door, it was chest hot. Oh
my god. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
Oh I can't imagine the panic. Yeah yeah, yeah, just awful. Anyway,
it's a tragedy. So on a completely different topic, I
heard on vacation. I was trying not to, you know,
check into the news much because it's good for the
soul to check out for a while. But I did
hear that Katangi Brown Jackson and Amy Cony Barrett were
(21:50):
in a bit of a middle aged berobed women cat fight.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
I thought that's too good.
Speaker 4 (21:56):
I just took in some of the headlines on that,
but didn't do a deep vie. But I thought, man,
this is an armstrong and getdy story right here.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (22:04):
Well, so it's so interesting because the New York Times
has this piece about it. Katanji Brown Jackson makes herself
heard prompting a rebuke, so that's their headline. She makes
herself heard up with women up with because she's a
black gal.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Of course, you know they're enthused about that.
Speaker 4 (22:22):
Adam Liptak writing this story, and he mentions that she
wrote five majority opinions. That's the fewest any member of
the court, but her voice resonated nonetheless in an unusually
large number of concurring and dissenting opinions, several of them
warned that the Court was taking lawless shortcuts, et cetera,
et cetera. The final blockbuster case involving birthright citizenship. Actually
(22:46):
it had virtually nothing to do with birthright citizenship, is
about nationwide injunctions, but she called it an existential threat
to the rule of law. Then Liptack goes on to
say Justice Jackson is the Court's newest member, having just
concluded her third t Other justices have said it took
them years to find their footing, but Justice Jackson, the
first black woman to serve on the Court, quickly emerged
(23:07):
as a forceful critic of her conservative colleagues and lately
their approach to the Trump agenda. Her opinions, sometimes joined
by no other justices, have been subject as scornful criticism,
but also criticism from the other two liberal members of
the wing. And he doesn't get into the fact that
she talks more than any other justice on the Court. So, okay,
let's forget ideology and the courts here. I think we're
(23:29):
both going in the same direction. That's an interesting reading
of that. So it's brave of her to not do
what other justices have done, where you show up as
the newbie.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
And kind of, you know, learn the ropes.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
Get your sea legs, figure out how this whole thing works,
and ease into it. The fact that she shows up
and talks like five times as much as any other
justice they see as brave and a good thing.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Who would read it that way?
Speaker 4 (23:57):
Well, and unless she's unless she's these blistering descents in
which the other two liberals are like, oh, too far.
But that's admiral. She's heard prompting a rebuke. Okay, super
But I was gonna say, you know, put that to
I don't know. You're you're in a technology company, you're
you're you're running an auto rental agency or something. And
(24:17):
the new person comes in and and doesn't care about
tradition and talks more than anybody, and and.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Even her allies think that's not admirable. That's dumb, right
and annoying. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:32):
So the National Review surprisingly had a different take on
the whole thing, just as Jackson's misguided attack on written law,
but they mentioned that, oh, I think it's back here.
Amy Cony Barrett was rather.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Direct in saying her.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
Oh my god, I forgot I lost the quote. I apologize.
She said that the scathing descent that everybody's paying it
tention to, there it is here.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
It is sorry.
Speaker 4 (25:06):
We will not dwell on Justice Jackson's argument, which is
at odds with more than two centuries worth of precedent,
not to mention the Constitution itself, which is a little
condescending E. But I like it that the principal dissent
focuses on conventional legal terrain. Justice Jackson, however, chooses a
startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these
(25:27):
sources nor frankly to.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Any doctrine whatsoever. That's really direct.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
Right, That leads me to believe that she's like the
ultimate example of outcomes. I work for the outcomes that
I want, as opposed to looking at the law on
this and deciding what fits the Constitution and what doesn't.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Yeah, saying essentially there's no legal reasoning here.
Speaker 4 (25:56):
The National Review Dan McLoughlin, writing about it, talks about
the fairly mundane, very legalistic, you know, nature of the case.
Yet this case produced an anguished and histrionic descent from
Justice Katanji Brown Jackson that included an assault on textualism
so overwrought that even Justice Sonya Soto Mayor pointedly refused
(26:18):
to join the footnote that included it as a progressive judge.
When Kagan thinks you're wrong, and Soda Mayor thinks you've
gone overboard.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
You should probably rethink your choices.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
So ultimately it was a step toward lower courts can't
constantly jump in and stop things the president's trying to do.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Is that what happened? Yeah, that's correct.
Speaker 4 (26:41):
Yeah, it would take a long time to explain it,
and I'd have to do a fair amount of reading
to explain it.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Well, but yeah, that's the long and short of it.
Speaker 4 (26:48):
Interesting, it did seem like it was happening a lot.
On the other hand, we have presidents, you know, going
several administrations back making law for the entire land with
their pen and their phone a lot more than they
used to. Yeah, and Tim Sanda for interestingly, we talked
about this briefly. He actually agreed substantially with Jackson's conclusion
(27:13):
that if the government is behaving unconstitutionally in District two,
well they're behaving unconstitutionally everywhere because of the nature of
our constitution, and so they ought to be stopped everywhere.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
It's it's a minority opinion.
Speaker 4 (27:28):
But whenever Tim including shouting for liberty, I'm at least
inclined to listen.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
It's a minority opinion, including among the Supreme Court justices.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
Oh yeah, yeah, definitely, yeah, and even among the liberals
at least in terms of her unhinged in histrionic descent.
But unlike you know, like gay marriage or something, this
seems like one of those things that we're going to
wrestle with as a as a country, as a government
for a while. This is one of those big things
that's going to have to get figured out over time.
(27:58):
I would agree, because a lot of the norms of
yesteryear don't apply anymore, and so some of the rules
that were utterly unnecessary about you know, dozens and dozens
and dozens of injunctions limiting what the president is trying
to do. Tim pointed out, well, you've got presidents trying
to do stuff they shouldn't do over and over again
now because that norm has been chucked out. Yeah, it's
(28:20):
uncertain territory and not terribly pleasant either.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Honestly, I didn't.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
Go news blackout on vacation. I never do that for
a couple of reasons. One, I'm just you know, a
guy likes the news and it is curried about the
currius about the news. And two it wouldn't be the
best thing for my job to be completely out of
touch with what's going on for a week and a half,
but definitely less news than I normally do. And I
(28:45):
feel like having a being a little closer to where
most voters are in terms of just like barely knowing
what's going on.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
And it's kind of funny to think.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
That the majority, the vast majority of people vote with
just a little bit of information somewhere between a little
bit and none about most major stories.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Right right.
Speaker 4 (29:08):
You know, I was troubled by a couple of stories
I checked into because, like, for instance, the New York
Times thing, there are a couple of examples I thought,
oh my god, that's misleading. Yeah, like them characterizing the
big beautiful bill the tax reform is benefits mostly the rich,
even though they themselves called that false when.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
It was originally passed.
Speaker 4 (29:28):
And as I pointed out before, yes, tax relief helps
people who pay taxes more than it helps people who
don't pay taxes. But the point being, most voters get
only just a little snippet of information and they base
their judgments on that, which is why political pros would
say to guys like us, hey, I appreciate all your
(29:51):
high falutant ideas and the love of the constitution, blah
blah blah. No, we either scare them or we bribe
them get in the poll to go go to the polls.
It's amazing that this works because obviously you have very
very smart people like the tim Sanderfers of the world,
who do deep dives into the issues in the you know,
(30:12):
all the policy papers and all these different think tanks
out So it occurs at that level for some people.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
But the vote.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
Then comes down to people who are, like I said,
somewhere between having none and a little bit of information
on the vote. So it's amazing this whole thing works
at all. It barely does, and I'm not sure how
long it will. But to pairphrase Charles Krauthammer, as we
often have, if you can scare and or bribe the
herd into voting the right way, then you can.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Do the things that matter.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
And that's why those think tanks exist in those policy papers,
because once you get the keys to the car.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
You got to figure out where to drive it.
Speaker 4 (30:53):
I have got to talk about the performance artist I
saw in one of the most famous hippie parks in
the world, Washington Square Park in New York, among other things,
we get to stay here.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
So I just got back from vacation. I took the
boys to Florida.
Speaker 4 (31:08):
We were gonna spend the entire week plus a couple
of days in Florida, but we got too dang hot.
I had a really really good time while we were there,
saw so many drag queens, flipped our jet ski, I
cut myself, I bled a lot. Luckily I wasn't eaten
by sharks. I'll have to talk about that later. But
so I decided on a spur of the moment, I thought,
what can we do while we're here on the East Coast.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
So we flipped in New York. My kids have never
been to New York. I love New York.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
And Henry wanted to see some of the stuff from
the Dylan movie because he's really into the Bob Dylan movie.
So we went to Greenwich Village. We went to Cafe
a Cafe Wah, which is the first place he goes
in that movie, and just stuff like that. But we
went to Washington Square Park, which is Greenwich Village. And
if you've ever seen a movie about hippies, you've seen
that park. The big arch there. It's like hippie Central.
(31:57):
I mean the hippie Central back in the day was there.
And in San Francisco, those are your two spots. All
your favorite hippies have been to Washington Square Park and
it's still full of all kinds of college kids. NYU's
right there and all kinds of interesting stuff and h
We get there and it's it's beautiful evening, crowded, very festive.
(32:20):
My son was oldest son was really digging the vibe,
very very artsy, fartsy. We probably all got high, it
was so thick with marijuana smoke. But there was this
chick doing some performance art. She had a big piece
of paper spread out on the sidewalk and a bowl
of black paint, and she would dip her really really
(32:42):
long hair into the paint and then she would swing
around making all these body movements to this wacky music
she was playing, and then she would paint with her
bare feet and hands and her hair on this big
piece of paper. And my kids are not really into
(33:03):
that sort of thing, and they were, they were mocking
it under their.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Breath, as was their father.
Speaker 4 (33:08):
A lot of h that symbolizes mans and humanity to man, obviously,
you know that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
Oh how was she clad? Just out of curious?
Speaker 4 (33:14):
The human soul wrestling with its id clearly is what's
going on here. She was wearing like a black loose
dress of course, sort of hippie looking thing.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4 (33:26):
And what I couldn't figure out while this woman was
dancing around making this is because I reading people's faces
gathered around it. It seemed like there were way more
people closer to our point of view than her point
of view.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
I mean, it.
Speaker 4 (33:42):
Seemed like a lot of more of what the hell
is this? Or does she think this is actually art?
Or is there anybody here that's buying this? I mean,
it seemed like there was a lot more of that
going on even in Washington Square Park than people who
were really touched by her deep emotional expression.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
I'd want to ask her.
Speaker 4 (34:01):
Just for the same arguing, what if you indeed were
dancing out the struggle of mankind against the cosmos?
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Whipping your hair about, but.
Speaker 4 (34:11):
The result was kind of random nonsense with that still
be good art?
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Quick question?
Speaker 4 (34:18):
If I was bad at this, would anybody be able
to tell the difference? Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, How long
did it take you to get this good at this
or like, was it the first time I feel like
I could do this having never done it before? Would
be yeah, Wow, that's got to be a standard for art,
(34:39):
doesn't it. If you were as good as you'll ever
get the first time you did it.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
I'm not sure. I don't know.
Speaker 4 (34:44):
We were over at the Met. I mean in the
modern art wing. I mean, it really looks like you
could do that the first time, and it's in the Met.
I mean, that's one of the most famous museums in
the world. So I don't know, I'm the wrong, gotta ask.
I guess, yeah, google emperors who have no close So
discipline is returning to schools.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Certain red states have said.
Speaker 4 (35:07):
Yeah, this whole restorative justice nonsense is crap. So the
tide is turning on that issue as well. We've got
a long way to go, but that's good news. Tough
times for Elon Musk, but he's starting a new political party.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
All next hour, stay
Speaker 4 (35:21):
With us, Armstrong and Getty
Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio, the George
Washington Broadcast Center.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Jack Armstrong's Joe Ketty arm Strong and Jetty and He
Armstrong and Eddy.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Seventy point five hot dogs and buns in ten minutes.
The Nathan's Famous Fourth of July Champion of the World,
Joey Chestnut.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
How do you feel? I was excited. I love being here, man,
I wish I ate a couple more. I'm sorry, guys,
I'll be back next year.
Speaker 4 (00:43):
That's greatness. That is the voice of greatness. Joey chest
sweat Eat seventy and a half I dogs. I considered going.
So we are in Manhattan and the boys for vacation,
and we want every Fourth of July since they were little.
We watched the hot dog eating contest on ESPN two,
(01:03):
and it's kind of a family tradition.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
To watch that.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
And yeah, and I was right there and could have gone,
but I thought I just did the crowds and fighting
and there and the hot sun, so I didn't go.
But maybe I missed out in a lifetime memory right
there by not watching a guy shove as many hot
dogs in his mouth as he possibly could in a
short amount of time.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
I think, you know that is what well? He absolutely did?
You did?
Speaker 4 (01:27):
You passed on dream memory for your kids. On the
other hand, that's the sort of idea that seems like
a great one. Then you think about how long is
it going to take us to get to Coney Island, right,
and then you knows.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
A day to two thirds of a day of vacation
do I want to.
Speaker 4 (01:45):
Spend that's jam hotdogs into their mows for five minutes.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
AnyWho.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
We just did a story about a woman that was
attacked by a homeless person in California. My only reaction
to that story vagrant. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah you you
you don't like the term homeless person, and I don't
blame you. We need a quick short term for these people.
Crazy person. I'm fine with crazy person or I don't know.
That's not accurate either, because it's not all mental illness.
It's way more drug crazies than anything else. That's why
(02:16):
I like the term vagrant because it kind of lumps everybody.
It covers everybody. I like a transient drug addict, but
it's a little cumbersome, and maybe some of these people
aren't drug addicts, although the vast majority are.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
But the reason I'm on a jot.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
About this is if you make the fundamental focus of
describing that person their lack of a permanent address, then
people think, well, that's that's really unfortunate.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
They don't have a home and we need to solve
that problem. No, the problem is.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
There a drug addict. Yeah, more a vagrant, which kind
of hints at it. The reason I want to bring
it up in conjunction with being in New York City
is I saw I see every single day in the
college town I live in more drug vagrant street people
that frighten me every day. Then I saw in Manhattan
(03:05):
walking around for three days that shouldn't be Yeah, that's nuts.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
On its own, there aren't none in New York.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
But what I mean, if you're from California, from a
big city in California, or even a small city as
I just said, it is refreshingly bum free to be
in New York and it shouldn't be that way. Maybe
if you're from I don't know, Omaha and you go
to New York, you think, oh my god, there's scary
street people around. But for us, it was like, Wow,
it's so nice to be able to walk the streets
without every ten feet you're wondering if this person's gonna
(03:37):
stab me in the eye with a broken bottle. Yeah,
it has been useful as a bicoastal American to observe
the differences in outcomes directly tied to policies. I mean,
it's not mysterious. It's not difficult to understand. There are,
for instance, in South Carolina, there are just not bumps
(03:58):
and junkies. You see a beggar on a street corner
once a week, and they generally get rousted by cops.
Depends where you are. In the super lefty college towns,
it's worse. But that just goes to prove my point.
It's directly tied to incentives and disincentives. And you know,
at risk of belaboring the point that we've made many times,
if you make.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
It as easy and comfortable as.
Speaker 4 (04:18):
Possible to be a jobless drug addict, you will have
more jobless drug addicts. Do you think that's doing those
people a favor on any level? I would argue strenuously
it's not.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
It's the opposite.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
The one thing I did see in New York that
bothered me a lot on the fourth of July, we
were standing in the spot where George Washington took his
first oath of office as the capital of our fine
country was in New York City right there. It's a big, old,
cool federal building basically across from the New York Stock
Exchange in Wall Street. It's still there, and they've got
(04:54):
a big cement platform that they've taken out of the
ground and it is now standing up with an inscription
on it.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
And that's where George Washington.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
Stood to take the first oath, which obviously is a
very very big deal for the world, not just for
the United States, the point Ken Burns is making in
his new documentary, which we'll talk about later. But so,
while we were bumping around the southern tip of Manhattan
on the fourth of July and went over to see
the Statue of Liberty and a variety of different things.
(05:27):
So many of the artifacts of our history of freedom
of independence were surrounded by barriers because there is so
concerned about protests, and I thought, so this is the
way we handle it.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
We handle it on the end of.
Speaker 4 (05:47):
The deal of the protests by putting a barrier around
the statue so I can't look at it. To protect
it from the protesters as opposed to what we're always advocating.
Arrest these people and make it so miserable to get
arrested for defacing you know, a statue like this, that
you don't do it where we're getting it on the
wrong end. You need to catch it on the front end.
(06:09):
So people aren't motivated to do it right now. People
know they can get away with spray painting this statue
of whichever founding father, so they have to cover it
with all kinds of barricades and tape it stuff like
that you can't even see it as a tourist. And
if you just talked out some of these things that
we do that are so nuts these day, say, if
you were to describe, all right, we have a variety
(06:30):
of ways we're proposing to deal with the fact that
angry protesters who've been miseducated and indoctrinated in our government
schools want to tear down the artifacts of our founding.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Here is one plan, and I would spell.
Speaker 4 (06:43):
It out, and that includes covering up the monuments and
statues so no one can see them. That would be
roundly rejected. People will say, I don't care what else
is in your stupid plan. You're missing the whole freaking
point of having this statue. What's your next plan? And
yet that idiotic plan is the one we've gone with.
Come on, America, he can do better than this. I
(07:04):
noticed it was all around immigration, So anything that had
to do with like around Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty,
like the launching point there from Manhattan, they had covered up,
blocked off, whatever. So they must have been expecting some
sort of you know, Trump is evil, anti Ice something,
because they made it very difficult to get close to
(07:27):
or touch anything that had to do with welcoming immigrants
in this country. So I'm assuming, which I thought was
interesting given I had a couple of experiences riding with
lift drivers or Uber drivers that were from another land
you could tell by their accent, but who had great
stories I got to talking about. I got in an
(07:51):
Uber Blacker, Lyft black or whatever. He was driving an
escalade and young guy, thick accent from somewhere and I said,
just chicar and he said yeah. I said how old
are you and he said twenty five? And I said,
well this is pretty impressive. He said yeah, I worked
this to buy this. And then I'm trying to get
another car and then I'm going to have a driver,
and all of a sudden and I.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Thought that here's it here.
Speaker 4 (08:10):
So what is the story on immigrants who do this
as opposed to you're waiving your home country's flag in
the streets attacking cops.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
This land is.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
Awful, right, Well, we should have a better some sort
of conversation around that.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
People who work.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
Hard come up with an idea, think it's great that
they can do whatever they want here versus the you
aren't giving me enough stuff crowd.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Right, Ground zero is the schools.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
It is absolutely the schools, which is one of the
reasons school choice is so important that I'm so enthusiastic
about her. It is for a number of reasons. She's
purely you know, read and write in arithmetic success. The
current government schools, bound up by the unions are just
not doing the job obviously. So yeah, in the raw,
you know, purpose of school existing, I think school choice
(09:00):
is a great thing. But also we've got to end
the systematic indoctrination of the children into this perverse view
of their own country and they don't know a damn
thing about their history. I've got some really interesting stuff
on that too. The recent numbers from Gallup. Gallup does
a poll on civics and education and patriotism, that sort
of thing.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
The current numbers are miserable among the young. Shocking. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:25):
I hit my kids with some various questions about things
or comments about things, and I was disappointed people or
events they've never heard of at this current age in
their lives, which is shocking to me. But then why
don't we penzil that in for hour three of the show.
Let's talk about that. I really I was let LaGuardia Airport,
getting ready to live in New York, and so they
(09:46):
got a bookstore. They're nice bookstore, and they've got a
little display up front with the classics in it, and
it had your you know, year Normal, the Great Gatsby,
and you know, name name all your classic books that
you have to read in high school or college. And
(10:06):
to Kill a Mockingbird, you know, like fifteen of those
kind of books, and Howard Zinn's of People's History of
the United States, which is just a socialist reading of
our nation's histories included with those books. I mean, so
that's what we're fighting, which is just what you're talking about.
No wonder people have those attitudes. If that's what's displayed
as a classic of reading at the books. It's not
(10:28):
the young people's faults. We can't blame them. We've just
got to and it's going to be a hard slog.
We've got to teach them the truth and let some
of that filter in. There are generations that we have
lost a significant number of the kids, and as they
work their way through their lives, when the generation that
was most fiercely steeped in this crap, like the kids
(10:50):
who were in high school or college during the whole
George Floyd COVID madness, when they're in their forties fifties
taking positions the leadership, will they have left behind the
awful indoctrination they received.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
I hope so.
Speaker 4 (11:05):
But oh boy, yeah, no kidding, Well, we gotta take
a break where we ought to hit the big tariff
deadline that's going to hit on Wednesday that could be
disruptive to the world.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
To let you know just a little bit of what's
going on there.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
But also pencil in the characters encountered in Greenwich Village
at Washington Square Park, a performance artist of a couple
of different kinds and my son playing chess with an
old drunk guy. One of those chess things they do
(11:37):
at the park, you know, the speed chest.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah, not chest.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
I just said chest. Michael, think wow, thank you for that.
Michael put it in my head.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Idiot.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
Henry said, that is the best thing I've ever done
in my life. Was his experience coming away from blade
chests with this guy. It was really something to watch.
I can't wait to tell you that story, among other things.
On the way stay here.
Speaker 5 (12:00):
The President Trump said he will fire off letters to
a dozen countries, which he did not name, threatening to
raise tariffs as high as seventy percent, due to go
into effect early next month.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
I signuts they'll go out on Monday, probably twelve. The
different amounts of money, different amounts of tariffs, A board
air force one.
Speaker 5 (12:18):
President Trump explained why he prefers letters.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
To other forms of communication.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
I think that.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Letters are better for us. I've said that all alone,
because you have hundreds of countries. You know, you have
over two hundred cuntries, and you can't sit down with two.
Speaker 4 (12:34):
Hundred country So I got to admit I had completely
forgotten about the ninety day tariff pause that happened well,
ninety days ago Wednesday, when he said I don't worry.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
About it, We'll figure out for the next ninety days.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
Well, time is up now, and those tariffs are going
to kick in Wednesday unless there's some sort of deal made.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
I guess right.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
It reminds me of those dreams that torture many of
us for the rest of our lives. That we wake
up on the day of a final in college or
high school or whatever and realize we haven't studied and
blah blah blah, Like I'm sixty years old. Why am
I having college dreams?
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Anyway? Yeah, I was reminded.
Speaker 4 (13:10):
Oh, that's right, the whole tiff thing, the madness, the
trade deals, the oh my god, the chaos. Wall Street
is concerned, the stock market is plugged. Yeah, that's back again, Jack.
They gave you an entire semester to be ready for
this paper. How are you just getting around to it now?
Dozens and dozens and dozens of countries, more than one
(13:32):
hundred and seventy countries, said Trump the other day. And
the new teriff rates which he announced. You remember back
in the day, those so called reciprocal tariffs, which turned
out to be just a weird creation of numbers they
decided on anyway, They ranged from ten to seventy percent,
with payments due by August first.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
It's you know, it's.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
Coming to the wall negotiation wise, and the rhetoric and
the vows and the threats are going to get more
and more heated. Stock market, all kinds of different indexes
hit all time highs last week, right because of the
concern Jack over the wait what, yeah, I know. It's
the belief among the folks who talk about this sort
(14:14):
of thing for a living is that that sort of
volatility and uncertainty is just kind of People are getting
used to it now, and they think, well, it came
out pretty well the last couple of rounds of terrible
threats and nothing terrible happens, so I guess it probably won't.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Well, we'll have to see. I don't know.
Speaker 4 (14:32):
Oh, he's also he's threatening additional tariffs. I love this
on your bricks. Group of emerging economies. That's your Brazil, Russia, China.
They all got together and met in Rio de Janeiro.
Iran is the eye right in brick. It's funny the
journal left that out. Yeah, anyway, so beunitive terriffs on
(14:56):
them for being No.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Not in brick. That what's the other one we can
that we heard like before we went in a vacation.
Speaker 4 (15:01):
Yeah, what's that other one? It's a it's a bad word.
It's like a negative sounding word. No, brick is a Brazil, Russia?
Speaker 2 (15:10):
India?
Speaker 4 (15:13):
Really, Yeah, India's got to come over here to our side.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
AnyWho, So do you speaking of the tariffs and all
that sort of stuff. I standing in.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
Front of the new and the market's hitting a record,
standing in front of the Stock Exchange on the fourth
of July taking pictures with my kids, and I was
explaining to who I'm on this, this is the most
important thing that mankind has done. This and not the
stock exchange specifically, but just the whole free market. The
reason we're the most powerful country in the history of
(15:46):
the world is democracy in the free market and being
able to generate the revenue to have the military and
the you know, in the the technolog advancement and everything
like that. And you know, if you're a fan of capitalism,
you know this or free markets. It's lifted more people
out of poverty than any other ideas ever had. I mean,
it's the greatest thing that ever happened to mankind. Oh
(16:09):
a million times more man So, it's not even close.
More people should visit the New York Stock Exchange with
reverence for what it represents in a good way, as
opposed to it always being used as like a negative
Wall Street versus Main Street, you know, that whole dumb thing.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Yeah, investing in great ideas.
Speaker 4 (16:28):
And helping them crow to employ more people and sell
great products to people who really want them.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
What could be more evil? All right? Yeah, but the bull.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
So, the giant bull on Wall Street and Manhattan was
more crowded than it's ever been any time I've ever
visited in my life, which I finally figured out was
because of a giant soccer tournament that was going on.
But anyway, the line for the bull was like six
blocks long, and everybody was getting underneath the Wall Street
bull and rubbing its testicles for their pictures. The bull
(16:57):
is intact jack, as we say in the veterinary business.
Lots of college girls with their hands on the bulls
testicles getting their pictures taken for their Instagram. I found
a weird you know, it's a little uncomfortable, but yeah,
I'm glad America can still laugh. Should I be looking
at this? I feel like I shouldn't be looking at this.
We got a lot more on the way stay.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Here, Armstrong and Getty, And for me coming back, it
just I'm overwhelmed with emotion and I'm overwhelmed with memories,
and I can't get over looking at those.
Speaker 6 (17:29):
Cabins right next to the Guadalupe River.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
That river was.
Speaker 6 (17:32):
The source of so much joy and fun for us Erica.
We would spend hours and hours in that river. There
was this thing called the Blob, which was like this
inflated balloon type thing that we would jump on and
then the person at the end would jump off into
the water, and it was so much fun. And we'd
go looking for dinosaur fossils. And that was where we
spent so much of our time at camp.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
That is what we loved.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
And to think that that same.
Speaker 6 (17:55):
River is the source of this devastation, it's just hard
to wrop my head around.
Speaker 4 (18:01):
Yeah, there's a reporter who actually attended that very camp
as a kid, obviously, where so many children and adults
lost their lives. The total number now whatever it is,
fifty some.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
It's horrible.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
Yeah, there are all sorts of different camps for families
and kids.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Along the river there beautiful you know, river.
Speaker 4 (18:19):
Country at Texas, and the rise of the water just horrific, astonishing.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Rising water levels.
Speaker 4 (18:27):
So what was it twenty six feet in forty five
minutes or something like that. Just unimaginable death toll currently
eighty one eighty one. But yeah, I saw a Texas
representative on one of the shows yesterday and he said,
he's basically saying, look, I mean, when you get a
once in a hundred year whether something happened, there's not
(18:49):
much you can do. I mean, you can't be prepared
for every once in a century event.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Yeah, you don't want to be cavalier about it.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
But they called disasters disasters because there asteris, they're rare
and terrible. Well, like I said earlier, it's one of
the worst stories I've ever heard. It's just absolutely horrible.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Oh yeah, but the whole what went wrong with the
warning system?
Speaker 4 (19:12):
He said this Texas Congress and he said, well, we
have we actually have warning systems for hurricanes. You can
see those coming, not like this river rising, which you
couldn't see coming, he said, And we have hundreds of
people die all the time in these disasters, so there's
just not much you can do for preparing for something
like this.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
But man, oh what a terrible story.
Speaker 4 (19:33):
And especially if it happens in the wee hours of
the morning where everybody's sound asleep, when everybody sound asleep,
it was just absolutely terrible, you know. And again I
have no desire to be cavalier about this, because if
there are things that can be done, they should be done.
But it reminds me of, you know, certain political divides
in the country. There are some people who think that
(19:55):
if they just pass enough laws or institute enough systems,
or levy enough tax or whatever, we can remove uncertainty
and danger and you know, the frailty of human life
from the world, whereas those of us, generally on the
right side of the aisle, understand that, no, this is
just sometimes hurricanes hit cities and it's horrible, and you
rebuild and do the best you can. It doesn't mean
(20:18):
we need more government anyway. Yeah, I heard one reporter talking,
or actually was somebody who was at the camp. So
they had gotten to high ground and survived, obviously. So
it's the middle of the night. Word starts getting around. Hey,
the river's rising, Maybe we ought to get out of here,
and you didn't have much time, and people were running
to their cars, and this person was talking about how
(20:39):
there were dozens and dozens of cars that were people
had gotten to the cars, and there was there's one
little dirt road and they're kind of in a line.
People starting to leave, and then pretty soon they all
just started floating. And then you saw a headlights disappearing
under the water and the car's.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Just wow, that's they were gone.
Speaker 4 (20:55):
Oh yeah, yeah, I heard a story. I hadn't intended
on talking about this that much, but it's just so
amazing and terrible and heartbreaking.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
But this guy woke up to the.
Speaker 4 (21:08):
Sounds of the storm lashing their cabin and he decided
to get out of bed and the water.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Was knee high. Oh my god, and.
Speaker 4 (21:15):
So he yelled for his wife, Hey, we got to
get out of there. They ran around, they grabbed their
cell phones and like a bag they hadn't unpacked with
some critical stuff, and before.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
They could hit the door, it was chest hot. Oh
my god. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
Oh I can't imagine the panic. Yeah yeah, yeah, just awful. Anyway,
it's a tragedy. So on a completely different topic, I
heard on vacation. I was trying not to, you know,
check into the news much because it's good for the
soul to check out for a while. But I did
hear that Katangi Brown Jackson and Amy Cony Barrett were
(21:50):
in a bit of a middle aged berobed women cat fight.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
I thought that's too good.
Speaker 4 (21:56):
I just took in some of the headlines on that,
but didn't do a deep vie. But I thought, man,
this is an armstrong and getdy story right here.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (22:04):
Well, so it's so interesting because the New York Times
has this piece about it. Katanji Brown Jackson makes herself
heard prompting a rebuke, so that's their headline. She makes
herself heard up with women up with because she's a
black gal.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Of course, you know they're enthused about that.
Speaker 4 (22:22):
Adam Liptak writing this story, and he mentions that she
wrote five majority opinions. That's the fewest any member of
the court, but her voice resonated nonetheless in an unusually
large number of concurring and dissenting opinions, several of them
warned that the Court was taking lawless shortcuts, et cetera,
et cetera. The final blockbuster case involving birthright citizenship. Actually
(22:46):
it had virtually nothing to do with birthright citizenship, is
about nationwide injunctions, but she called it an existential threat
to the rule of law. Then Liptack goes on to
say Justice Jackson is the Court's newest member, having just
concluded her third t Other justices have said it took
them years to find their footing, but Justice Jackson, the
first black woman to serve on the Court, quickly emerged
(23:07):
as a forceful critic of her conservative colleagues and lately
their approach to the Trump agenda. Her opinions, sometimes joined
by no other justices, have been subject as scornful criticism,
but also criticism from the other two liberal members of
the wing. And he doesn't get into the fact that
she talks more than any other justice on the Court. So, okay,
let's forget ideology and the courts here. I think we're
(23:29):
both going in the same direction. That's an interesting reading
of that. So it's brave of her to not do
what other justices have done, where you show up as
the newbie.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
And kind of, you know, learn the ropes.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
Get your sea legs, figure out how this whole thing works,
and ease into it. The fact that she shows up
and talks like five times as much as any other
justice they see as brave and a good thing.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Who would read it that way?
Speaker 4 (23:57):
Well, and unless she's unless she's these blistering descents in
which the other two liberals are like, oh, too far.
But that's admiral. She's heard prompting a rebuke. Okay, super
But I was gonna say, you know, put that to
I don't know. You're you're in a technology company, you're
you're you're running an auto rental agency or something. And
(24:17):
the new person comes in and and doesn't care about
tradition and talks more than anybody, and and.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Even her allies think that's not admirable. That's dumb, right
and annoying. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:32):
So the National Review surprisingly had a different take on
the whole thing, just as Jackson's misguided attack on written law,
but they mentioned that, oh, I think it's back here.
Amy Cony Barrett was rather.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Direct in saying her.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
Oh my god, I forgot I lost the quote. I apologize.
She said that the scathing descent that everybody's paying it
tention to, there it is here.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
It is sorry.
Speaker 4 (25:06):
We will not dwell on Justice Jackson's argument, which is
at odds with more than two centuries worth of precedent,
not to mention the Constitution itself, which is a little
condescending E. But I like it that the principal dissent
focuses on conventional legal terrain. Justice Jackson, however, chooses a
startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these
(25:27):
sources nor frankly to.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Any doctrine whatsoever. That's really direct.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
Right, That leads me to believe that she's like the
ultimate example of outcomes. I work for the outcomes that
I want, as opposed to looking at the law on
this and deciding what fits the Constitution and what doesn't.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Yeah, saying essentially there's no legal reasoning here.
Speaker 4 (25:56):
The National Review Dan McLoughlin, writing about it, talks about
the fairly mundane, very legalistic, you know, nature of the case.
Yet this case produced an anguished and histrionic descent from
Justice Katanji Brown Jackson that included an assault on textualism
so overwrought that even Justice Sonya Soto Mayor pointedly refused
(26:18):
to join the footnote that included it as a progressive judge.
When Kagan thinks you're wrong, and Soda Mayor thinks you've
gone overboard.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
You should probably rethink your choices.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
So ultimately it was a step toward lower courts can't
constantly jump in and stop things the president's trying to do.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Is that what happened? Yeah, that's correct.
Speaker 4 (26:41):
Yeah, it would take a long time to explain it,
and I'd have to do a fair amount of reading
to explain it.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Well, but yeah, that's the long and short of it.
Speaker 4 (26:48):
Interesting, it did seem like it was happening a lot.
On the other hand, we have presidents, you know, going
several administrations back making law for the entire land with
their pen and their phone a lot more than they
used to. Yeah, and Tim Sanda for interestingly, we talked
about this briefly. He actually agreed substantially with Jackson's conclusion
(27:13):
that if the government is behaving unconstitutionally in District two,
well they're behaving unconstitutionally everywhere because of the nature of
our constitution, and so they ought to be stopped everywhere.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
It's it's a minority opinion.
Speaker 4 (27:28):
But whenever Tim including shouting for liberty, I'm at least
inclined to listen.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
It's a minority opinion, including among the Supreme Court justices.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
Oh yeah, yeah, definitely, yeah, and even among the liberals
at least in terms of her unhinged in histrionic descent.
But unlike you know, like gay marriage or something, this
seems like one of those things that we're going to
wrestle with as a as a country, as a government
for a while. This is one of those big things
that's going to have to get figured out over time.
(27:58):
I would agree, because a lot of the norms of
yesteryear don't apply anymore, and so some of the rules
that were utterly unnecessary about you know, dozens and dozens
and dozens of injunctions limiting what the president is trying
to do. Tim pointed out, well, you've got presidents trying
to do stuff they shouldn't do over and over again
now because that norm has been chucked out. Yeah, it's
(28:20):
uncertain territory and not terribly pleasant either.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Honestly, I didn't.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
Go news blackout on vacation. I never do that for
a couple of reasons. One, I'm just you know, a
guy likes the news and it is curried about the
currius about the news. And two it wouldn't be the
best thing for my job to be completely out of
touch with what's going on for a week and a half,
but definitely less news than I normally do. And I
(28:45):
feel like having a being a little closer to where
most voters are in terms of just like barely knowing
what's going on.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
And it's kind of funny to think.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
That the majority, the vast majority of people vote with
just a little bit of information somewhere between a little
bit and none about most major stories.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Right right.
Speaker 4 (29:08):
You know, I was troubled by a couple of stories
I checked into because, like, for instance, the New York
Times thing, there are a couple of examples I thought,
oh my god, that's misleading. Yeah, like them characterizing the
big beautiful bill the tax reform is benefits mostly the rich,
even though they themselves called that false when.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
It was originally passed.
Speaker 4 (29:28):
And as I pointed out before, yes, tax relief helps
people who pay taxes more than it helps people who
don't pay taxes. But the point being, most voters get
only just a little snippet of information and they base
their judgments on that, which is why political pros would
say to guys like us, hey, I appreciate all your
(29:51):
high falutant ideas and the love of the constitution, blah
blah blah. No, we either scare them or we bribe
them get in the poll to go go to the polls.
It's amazing that this works because obviously you have very
very smart people like the tim Sanderfers of the world,
who do deep dives into the issues in the you know,
(30:12):
all the policy papers and all these different think tanks
out So it occurs at that level for some people.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
But the vote.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
Then comes down to people who are, like I said,
somewhere between having none and a little bit of information
on the vote. So it's amazing this whole thing works
at all. It barely does, and I'm not sure how
long it will. But to pairphrase Charles Krauthammer, as we
often have, if you can scare and or bribe the
herd into voting the right way, then you can.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Do the things that matter.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
And that's why those think tanks exist in those policy papers,
because once you get the keys to the car.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
You got to figure out where to drive it.
Speaker 4 (30:53):
I have got to talk about the performance artist I
saw in one of the most famous hippie parks in
the world, Washington Square Park in New York, among other things,
we get to stay here.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
So I just got back from vacation. I took the
boys to Florida.
Speaker 4 (31:08):
We were gonna spend the entire week plus a couple
of days in Florida, but we got too dang hot.
I had a really really good time while we were there,
saw so many drag queens, flipped our jet ski, I
cut myself, I bled a lot. Luckily I wasn't eaten
by sharks. I'll have to talk about that later. But
so I decided on a spur of the moment, I thought,
what can we do while we're here on the East Coast.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
So we flipped in New York. My kids have never
been to New York. I love New York.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
And Henry wanted to see some of the stuff from
the Dylan movie because he's really into the Bob Dylan movie.
So we went to Greenwich Village. We went to Cafe
a Cafe Wah, which is the first place he goes
in that movie, and just stuff like that. But we
went to Washington Square Park, which is Greenwich Village. And
if you've ever seen a movie about hippies, you've seen
that park. The big arch there. It's like hippie Central.
(31:57):
I mean the hippie Central back in the day was there.
And in San Francisco, those are your two spots. All
your favorite hippies have been to Washington Square Park and
it's still full of all kinds of college kids. NYU's
right there and all kinds of interesting stuff and h
We get there and it's it's beautiful evening, crowded, very festive.
(32:20):
My son was oldest son was really digging the vibe,
very very artsy, fartsy. We probably all got high, it
was so thick with marijuana smoke. But there was this
chick doing some performance art. She had a big piece
of paper spread out on the sidewalk and a bowl
of black paint, and she would dip her really really
(32:42):
long hair into the paint and then she would swing
around making all these body movements to this wacky music
she was playing, and then she would paint with her
bare feet and hands and her hair on this big
piece of paper. And my kids are not really into
(33:03):
that sort of thing, and they were, they were mocking
it under their.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Breath, as was their father.
Speaker 4 (33:08):
A lot of h that symbolizes mans and humanity to man, obviously,
you know that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
Oh how was she clad? Just out of curious?
Speaker 4 (33:14):
The human soul wrestling with its id clearly is what's
going on here. She was wearing like a black loose
dress of course, sort of hippie looking thing.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4 (33:26):
And what I couldn't figure out while this woman was
dancing around making this is because I reading people's faces
gathered around it. It seemed like there were way more
people closer to our point of view than her point
of view.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
I mean, it.
Speaker 4 (33:42):
Seemed like a lot of more of what the hell
is this? Or does she think this is actually art?
Or is there anybody here that's buying this? I mean,
it seemed like there was a lot more of that
going on even in Washington Square Park than people who
were really touched by her deep emotional expression.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
I'd want to ask her.
Speaker 4 (34:01):
Just for the same arguing, what if you indeed were
dancing out the struggle of mankind against the cosmos?
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Whipping your hair about, but.
Speaker 4 (34:11):
The result was kind of random nonsense with that still
be good art?
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Quick question?
Speaker 4 (34:18):
If I was bad at this, would anybody be able
to tell the difference? Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, How long
did it take you to get this good at this
or like, was it the first time I feel like
I could do this having never done it before? Would
be yeah, Wow, that's got to be a standard for art,
(34:39):
doesn't it. If you were as good as you'll ever
get the first time you did it.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
I'm not sure. I don't know.
Speaker 4 (34:44):
We were over at the Met. I mean in the
modern art wing. I mean, it really looks like you
could do that the first time, and it's in the Met.
I mean, that's one of the most famous museums in
the world. So I don't know, I'm the wrong, gotta ask.
I guess, yeah, google emperors who have no close So
discipline is returning to schools.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Certain red states have said.
Speaker 4 (35:07):
Yeah, this whole restorative justice nonsense is crap. So the
tide is turning on that issue as well. We've got
a long way to go, but that's good news. Tough
times for Elon Musk, but he's starting a new political party.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
All next hour, stay
Speaker 4 (35:21):
With us, Armstrong and Getty
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