Speaker 1: And Hi, how are you welcome to the Big Podcast.
It is Tuesday. Today is the ninth day of the
ninth month year of our war, twenty twenty five. My
name is Tom Sullivan. And I mentioned it. I didn't
more than mentioned. I talked about the stabbing on the
light rail train in Charlotte, which actually was a few
weeks ago. The video came out over the weekend. That
was the first I ever heard about it. A lot
of people are blaming the media for not covering this,
but I'm not trying to I wasn't trying to cover
it up. I never saw anything about it. But we've
got that. We've also got Israel hitting making an attack
in Doha, the capital of Qatar, So that's raising all
kinds of questions. Students, they're just dumber than ever they
are scoring. I mean, you have to go back to
like if you were in cool in nineteen ninety two.
Nobody's done better than you did back in nineteen ninety two.
This course have been coming down and down, and it's
just pathetic how bad our education system is. Apple's unveiling
a bunch of new products today, and yeah, the payroll
numbers the biggest revision ever in the history of payroll
revision numbers. So a lot to get started with here today.
Let me start with the North Carolina stabbit. This is
the young lady who came to this country a couple
of years ago with some members of her family twenty
three I think twenty three year old escaped Ukraine the
war in Ukraine and came as a refugee, like I said,
with some of her family. She got a job at
a pizza place in Charlotte, and after work, at ten
thirty at night a couple of weeks ago, she jumped
on the light rail train that was going to take
her home, and there was a guy that she sat
in front of, who obviously is not right in the head,
has a rap sheet a mile long, and he just
jumped up and from behind stabbed her three times in
the neck, killing her almost instantly. I mean she's bled
out within seconds. So it's another story about the fact
that we are soft on crime. And the narrative about
this is that the Democrats are soft on crime, and
I think there's a lot of truth to that. But
there's also another story. I don't North Carolina's making all
the headlines, but I saw a story in the Seattle
Times this morning, and headline is man stabbed in seemingly
unprovoked attack. That's the headline says. A man was stabbed
in a seemingly unprovoked attack from behind in the Chinatown
International District on Monday. The attacker, identified as a forty
four year old man, rode away on a bike before
arrested by Seattle police. The forty year old victim. They
found him with stab wounds in the abdomen after they
responded to reports of a stabbing around five thirty pm
five point thirty it's still daylight out. The police said
that the man had stabbed another man ran up from
behind and stabbed him. The victim chased the assailant but
could not catch him. Suspect fled on a bike. The
man was given medical aid at Harbor View Medical Center
in serious condition. So it's not the first time. And
the guy apparently took the knife from his waistband and
now we've got this young lady. The reason why that
is now getting all the publicity, in my humble opinion,
is because there's video of it, and it's absolutely horrendous video,
but it's getting video, and that is what's making it
go viral. Why some stories go viral and others don't,
I don't know. And like I said, this story happened
a couple of weeks back. It was in August. President
was even talking about it earlier.
Speaker 2: Today, there are evil people and we have to confront that.
I just give my love and hope to the family
of the young woman who was stabbed this morning or
last night in Charlotte by a madman. A lunatic just
got up and started. It's right on the tape, not
really watchable because it's so horrible, but just viciously stabs
she's just sitting there. So they are evil people. We
have to be able to handle that. If we don't
handle that, we don't have a country.
Speaker 1: Well he's right, and there's evil people out there, and
you and I are walking around by them, and what
sparks them is just by the roll of the dice
that you're not a victim from this. You maybe though
you never know. So this is stranger danger, which most
people that are murdered are murdered by somebody that they know.
But in the meantime, what do we do with these
mentally ill people. This guy was arrested thirteen times previously,
the judges let him out. He had the last time
he was arrested, he had to write on a piece
of paper that he promised to return to the court.
So he yes, he's been charged with assault before, so
this isn't he's he's not a good guy. Included felony
assault on a woman one of his third team charges.
City councilman. Oh, by the way, in Charlotte today is
it's election day and they're going to vote on who
will be their next mayor. The mayor got a lot
of guf on this because when this happened a couple
of weeks ago, she put out a statement basically talking
about how the system let down the murderer. And so
this time, now that it's gone wildly viral, she put
out a statement talking about how sad she was about
the young lady that got killed. So we're soft on crime,
long rap sheet judges keep letting them out. The same
thing we had in d C was the city council
passed all these laws basically being soft on crime, cashless bail.
The judges will let people out in d C without
posting bail. It's the same thing going on in Charlotte
I bet you it's going on in your city.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: I'm not quite sure how how Sean Duffy, the Transportation Secretary,
got into this. I know why, but listen to what
he had to say.
Speaker 4: I can't pull money today from their transit system. I
actually have to do an investigation. That's what the law requires.
We start that investigation tomorrow, and I guarantee all your
viewers that if I find what I think I'm going
to find, they're not going to have your federal tax
dollars going to their public transportation system.
Speaker 5: Zero not up.
Speaker 1: Well, I got news for I like Sean Duffy. I
think he seems like a pretty good guy. But the
fact that he's going to pull federal funds from the
public transport funds in Charlotte, is he going to do
that for every city? Because I guarantee you that you'll go,
I'll bet you it's better than ninety percent of public
transportation systems in this country have the same problem, especially
light rail. Every light rail system I know of, the
people complain and they lose business because there's nobody to
stand there and collect their fare when they get on.
You just step on the train, and that's where if
you're homeless or you're mentally ill, it's perfect. You get
to get on nobody bothers you, you don't have to
pay anything, You're right around all day, you can sleep
in there. That's what a lot of light rail systems are.
And if Sean Duffy doesn't know that, he's going to
I presume he's going to find that out. So if
he's pulling funds because there's homeless and mentally ill people
on the light rail system in Charlotte, stand by for
your light rail system to also have a problem. City
councilman in Charlotte. He's upset.
Speaker 6: We have a court system that's overwhelmed.
Speaker 7: We have a North Carolina system that is deinstitutionalized individuals
that really should have hospitalization and permanent around the clock care.
I hope this wakes up a conversation not just around
the mental health topic, which has certainly been talked about
a lot, but we have to actually follow that with actions.
And as sad as this tragedy is, I hope that
it will shine a bright light on it.
Speaker 1: Well, he's a city kilsim until what are they doing
about it? He has the power to do something about it.
So I think it's just meaningless pablem. I think he's
just talking out of a haul on his head, just
like so many government officials. Elected government officials, they say
all the right things, but they don't do anything. Andy
McCarthy talks about the fact that this is not a
federal crime. This is a state crime.
Speaker 5: It's a staatecase. Just why I think you heard the
Transportation Secretary Sean Casey talk about pulling money if they
actually had a statute. I appreciate what cash Patel said
about how the Bureau has been investigating from the start.
It's a good thing for the Bureau to do to
lend us an investigative resources to state investigations. But if
they had a good federal crime here, like a murder kill,
a murder that happened on a transit system that was
an interstate commerce as opposed to this one, which is
wholly in North Carolina, they'd obviously bring the federal charge.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it doesn't. It's just it's the light rail system.
It just gets people around the city of Charlotte, doesn't
go I don't even think it goes out of the city,
let alone out of state. A former prosecutor Trey Goudi
also his observation.
Speaker 8: Well, it sounds like a lot of cities need to
It's been a bad couple of weeks and months for
the Carolinas. We just highlighted the young Ukrainian refugee who
lost her life long. I mean, she could survive Vladimir Putin,
but she could not survive a train ride in Charlotte,
North Carolina. And then Sunday night I profiled a young
woman named Logan Federico, twenty two years old, the prime
of life, executed on her knees, begging for her life
by yet someone else who should have been in prison.
So the President's point's pretty clear, whether you're here lawfully,
whether you were born in the United States and your
family's been here for five generations. There's certain people that
need to be separated from society. And a really good
indicator is whether or not you've committed crimes in the past.
And both the assailant and Charlotte, and the assailant in Colombia,
and so many of the ones in Chicago have raft
sheets that will stretch across my front yard and it
takes murder for us to take it seriously. Burlary is
not taken seriously. Robbery is not larceny. Everybody gets excited
about murders here, but the goal is to prevent the murder,
keep the young women alive, and the only way to
do that is with good prosecutors and good judges.
Speaker 1: So I don't mean to reach out in beatten myself
on the back, but I have been screaming from the
rafters about this. I find time flies. I don't know,
five years, ten years, once various states started saying we
want to close our prisons, we were going to let
people out, not five or ten thousands. Tens of thousands
of people have been let out of prison for some
soft reason about they feel bad for these people, and
so they turned them out into society. And I've been
yelling about, how do you think this is going to
work out? This is how it happens. They don't lock
up and keep locked up people that are violent. I
don't understand it, but they've been doing it for a
long time right here in New York. The communist guy
that's running for mayor, ma'am Donnie, that's his whole goal.
Listen to this.
Speaker 6: My commitment will be to do everything in my power
from the very beginning to follow that law and to
ensure that we are reducing the jail population and following
the example we've seen in the past where you can
do so while also reducing crime.
Speaker 1: I don't know how he's going to reduce the jail
population and also reduce crime. NYPD also has a database
of gang members, who they are, where they live, and
all that, and they keep they try to keep track
of them. Ma'am Donnie says, oh, no, you will elect
me mayor. I'm getting rid of that gang database immediately.
So here's more from Paul Morrow talking about the situation
in Charlotte and the ideas that zorin. Ma'm Donnie has
up his leave. Yeah, it really does.
Speaker 9: And it shows you how many cascading failures there were.
And there's a nuance here is one of his recent
arrests was for abuse of the nine one one system
after the police went there to do a welfare check. Now,
the police don't make that arrest ninety nine times out
of one hundred, I can guarantee you the only reason
that cops made that arrest was they went to do
a welfare check and they saw that he was acting out,
that he was having some kind of a psychotic episode.
They only did that to take him, to get him
into this system. I was an attempt by them to say,
you know what, this is a guy that we can't
leave out here. I can guarantee you that's what happened.
So when they go there, they take them, they get
him in, and what happens the same revolving door. And
then you have to make saying we need more of
a safety that you're the mayor. Isn't that your job?
He makes eye contact if to doing what he just
did with another person, probably a woman. That's always the
dirty little secret of this thing. Remember Jordan Neely was
going for a woman and her baby when Daniel Penny
jumped up and interfered. Very often it's women, especially on
these common carrier situations. And to expand the story beyond
the mayor justin Charlotte, we're about to get a mayor
here in New York City. Now, not only Cotton's on
to all of this is firmly in place for all
of this kind of an approach, but is saying that
we're gonna have the buses and the trains to be free.
You know what happens when the buses and trains are free.
People who are mentally ill live on them because there's
obviously no way to keep them off. Everybody can go on.
So if you think the New York City subway system
is a rolling psyche ward, now wait, unt do we
get mum Daddy, which it looks like we're going to.
Unfortunately it should be sleeve. But there's no way that
they'll come to common sense in this town to put
in somebody who will actually enforce. And so as a result,
expect a lot more stories that are not that dissimilar
from this one. Look, you can't lock up everybody, I
get that, but all the studies in all of history
relative to people with severe psychiatric problems demonstrates that you're
doing them a favor while putting them someplacecarceral.
Speaker 1: That's a word the left loves. They don't love it.
Speaker 9: However, when it comes to anybody who's looking to hurt
other people, if nothing else, nothing else, it'll just to
keep the rest of us safe with them someplace safe,
three hots and a cot, someplace green, nice and bucolic.
That calms them down.
Speaker 1: They're hearing voices. That's all.
Speaker 9: We can't count and say anymore. But Unfortunately, that seems
to be the line that the left just won't cross.
Speaker 1: So crime is getting the headlines. It's people have had it,
and the pendulum on crime swings right now. The pendulum
is pushing way over on the aside where people are
paying attention to it at the very least you want
to pay attention to education. Are the kids in our
schools being educated? Apparently hot? And this is we just
keep ignoring this as well. They just came out with
the high school scores on math and science. The scores,
this is a national number. Thirty one percent of our
sixth graders can do science at the sixth grade level,
only thirty one percent. That means, yeah, just about seventy
percent are not able to do a coursework at a
level of a sixth grader. Move to math, twelfth grade math.
How many twelfth graders can do twelfth grade math? Only
twenty two percent. That's it. Now we're talking almost eighty
percent who cannot. And reading the numbers are slightly higher here.
But if you can't read, how can you read the
math book? How can you read the science book? You can't?
So the twelfth grade reading, thirty five percent are able
to do twelfth grade reading. Lenda McMahon, Education Secretary, ways in.
Speaker 10: When I look at these scores, and I've made literacy
my number one priority during my term as Secretary of
Education because I do believe that if our students cannot read,
they're not going to be successful in anywhere. And I
think the underlying reason that math scores and science scores
are down so far is because first and foremost, reading
scores are so low.
Speaker 6: I think in.
Speaker 10: Senior's twelfth grade, if I believe, if I remember the
stat correctly, I think that's the lowest we've seen since
the NAPE scores were first done in two thousand and five.
And that's just an incredibly devastating trend to look at
in our country. So we're we're spending a ton of
money on education. We've spent three trillion dollars since the
Department of Education was established, only to see scores continuing
to decline. And that's just a you know, that's a
trend we have to stop. And I think the money's
not being spent where it needs to be spent, and
that's at the States. And that's why the President and
I are certainly on a path and a mission to
return education to the states. Well, I do think that
parents have already started to be up in arms about this,
and I think that's one of the reasons when you
talk about returning educations to states, you see parents who
are now going to school board meetings, They're more involved
in school board elections, They're paying more attention to the
curriculum that their children are being taught because they're looking
at these courts and they're saying, we have to improve this.
And when states are in control, states are innovative. Where
we've seen the greatest improvements are in states like in
Louisiana and Mississippi that have adopted the science of reading.
It's a little bit more back to the basics of
teaching reading. I think we have to focus on our
math scores as well and have some of the same
programs in place to do that. Because the national level,
I think so many people think that the Department of
Education controls curriculum and buys books and highers teachers. We
do none of that.
Speaker 8: That's all done at.
Speaker 6: The state level.
Speaker 10: The Department of Education is kind of a pass through
of appropriated funds through Congress. We do oversee some competitive
grants getting that money out, But we are not in
charge of curriculum and what's being taught. And I think
when times before that's been tried on a national basis
with a new child left behind and core curriculum and
race to the top, it was with the best of intentions,
but it has never worked. States are inventive, they're innovative.
They put their money behind their programs. And if we
can provide best practices and tool kids to those states
for what's working and other state and what other states
are doing to be successful and getting those scores up,
then I think that's our job and that's what that's
my mission out.
Speaker 1: So here's another example of obviously we are not paying
attention to the basics. Education is the basics. Crime is
the basics. Why we're spending time on all these other
silly business things instead of taking care of the basics.
I mean, if we don't have an educated population, this
country is toast. I agree, President's right. We don't have
a country if we don't have well educated kids. In
the international news headlines today, big shocker about Israel. Israel
has targeted senior Hamas leaders in Doha. Yeah, in Qatar,
that's where they have been living that's where they have
been having the new negotiaters. They're not in Gaza, They're
over in Doha, living large, and Israel decided to try
to take them out. The bottom line is they got
They didn't get the guy they wanted, but they got
his son and one of his top aides. Here's an
international correspondent giving as the first brush on this new well.
Speaker 11: President Trump had just said something about giving the last
warning in the next forty eight hours, so this could
have been coordinated with Washington, but we don't know. But
it is shocking that the Israelis would attack inside a
Gulf capital where there's no combat activity whatsoever. The last
time they did something like this was an assassination that
allegedly targeted a Hamas leader in the United Arab Emirates
in twenty ten in a hotel, and those agents were
caught on camera. That's how that attack was revealed. But
to do an air strike in the middle of a
very busy capital, Doha is a very modern city in
the time of day, there would have been a lot
of traffic around. So I've been trying to reach Katari
contacts to ask if any civilians were killed or injured
in this attack. I think that will depend that will
determine what a lot of the reaction is going to be,
just how precise this was. But you know, these were
the people that Cutter was negotiating through. And historically the
Hamas officials in Doha were the ones more likely to
say yes to negotiations, to compromises than the more hardline
Hamas leaders inside Gaza.
Speaker 1: Yes, but bottom line is they kept turning down everything
deals that President Biden brought, President Trump brought that Benjamin
Nett and Yahoo brought, and they kept doing They don't
want to stop this war. Hamas wants to keep it going.
They don't want to let the forty eight hostages that
some are dead, some are alive. They don't want to
let go of them because that's their protection. But this
is keeping them in business and if they stop this war,
they're going to be killed. So they want to keep
this going and that's why they keep saying no to
all these peace deals. And Lady was talking about how
they were more prone to negotiate, Well, yeah, that's great,
but they still have consistently said no to every single deal.
So the yes. President Trump said over the weekend that
this last deal that we put on the table for them,
this was your last and final offer. And apparently they
didn't pay attention. And with benjaminett Ya, who has been
overly patient, and one of the things about israelis you
don't want to push them. They will come get you,
they will take you out. So the word that we
have this afternoon is the main guy was not killed,
but his son was and so was one of his
top aids. So they came close. Let me put it
that way. Looking at the business wires today, this one
is a doozy. It's an absolute doozy. Remember last year
they came up with the annual revision to the numbers
from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Now every month we
get these revisions, and then the last couple it came
down to where the revisions were getting huge the last
couple of months and President Trump fired the person in
charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Something was drastically well,
listen to this. This is the annual revision. It comes
out in September, and this is the preliminary annual revision.
They're going to fine tune it and come out with
the final final numbers in February. But the numbers today,
they revised the payroll numbers down nine hundred eleven thousand,
almost a million jobs they said were created that were not.
It's the biggest revision in the history of the BLS.
And FED is going to meet next week, next Tuesday
and Wednesday. And with this they're starting to get worried
about the labor market softening. Well, a million jobs that
we thought we had don't exist. Here's the reason for it.
The biggest revision is weaker inferred job creation at new companies.
So somebody he started a new company and they the government,
somebody in the government, some bureaucrat just makes a wild
guess about how many people you're hiring for your new company.
They had sampling errors from declining response rates. Okay, let's
change the way we do this to be more modern.
Let's not do the same sort of sampling that you've
done for fifty years. And the other item is they
apparently adjusted for illegals who are not supposed to be counted.
Oh they're out there, they're working, but they're not supposed
to be part of the labor numbers that are coming out.
So here's Steve Lisman over at CNBC as the news
came in, I see.
Speaker 12: The biggest revision we've had. I've go back twenty five
years here, it's maybe the biggest revision ever. Sarah, minus
nine hundred and eleven thousand. Payroll growth from April of
twenty twenty four through March twenty twenty five is nine
hundred and eleven thousand less than previously reported. What has
happened now to the month over month or the monthly
growth rate has gone from what we thought was one
hundred and forty seven thousand a month to now just
seventy thousand a month. So one point seven million jobs
is now eight hundred and forty seven thousand jobs created
over that period. So over that time period, payrolls were
quite a bit weak. Remember this is the period ending
five months ago. This is the annual benchmark revisions that's
done every year. This is a preliminary number. Over time,
it tends to actually be revised a little bit higher.
The revision to the revision ends up being a little
bit higher, But right now it's suggesting much weaker payroll growth.
I will point out that this is high side of
what I've seen from Wall Street analysts. And now you
have to plug in your you have to start thinking
about what does this say about today? In other words,
just data is five months all. We won't know until
the final revisions in February which month each of the
weekness belongs to. But we do know a bit about
which industries it belongs to, and we have a chart here.
Eight hundred and eighty thousand from the private sector. The
biggest revision came from trade, transportation and utilities of two
hundred and twenty six thousand, one hundred and twenty six
thousand off in retail, leisure, in hospitality one hundred and
seventy six thousand, Professional services down one hundred and fifty
eight thousand, so widespread in the I don't see it here.
Not a lot. In private education and health services was
a big You can see the recent revisions there. The
second biggest revision that I have, Sarah in my records
is two thousand and nine, in the wake of the
Great Financial Crisis, and what had happened in that situation
was some of the modeling was wrong, some of the
birth death of businesses was wrong. This may be the
case right now. We might have come into this year
with much more weakness than we thought we had in
the job market, it was okay. It seemed to be
like the unemployment rate remained relatively stable. So whatever we
were doing was okay to keep the unemployment rate a
separate survey, relatively low. But we were not creating as
many jobs as we thought.
Speaker 1: Got no kidding, like nine hundred and eleven thousand fewer
jobs than we thought. And this is obviously going to
weigh on the Federal Reserves. They make their decision about
rates next week. Everybody in their brother best that they
will be dropping rates by a quarter of a percent
with this kind of report. Now the buzz on Wall
Street is, do you think they'll do double that, maybe
drop rates by a half a percent. I think I
don't think they're going to. I think they're going to
stay with their quarter point drop because they're very, very conservative.
That's why they've been called too late on so many occasions.
But they could drop by a half a percent and
the economy would be able to handle it. One of
the two mandates for the Federal Reserve Board is to
make sure that jobs and job creation healthy, and so
they were thrown this will throw their numbers off dramatically.
All right, One more story about the business world today.
Apple today with the big unveiling of their iPhone seventeen
and also a new version of their watch, in a
new version of their AirPods that on the on the iPhone,
they've got a variety of Then one of them is
the thin iPhone. Apparently it's much much thinner, but it
has a weaker battery, and that's something that most people.
If there's a complaint about your phone, usually it's about
the battery on your phone. Sometimes broken screens, people don't
fix them. They go buy they go buy a new one.
But again, there's nothing earth shattering about this. It's kind
of like the way they sell cars is okay. They
add a few little tricks in the in the new
cars every year, but basically they're kind of like last
year's and the year before and the year before, And
that's what the iPhone is. Is in the air pods
and the watches. They make little tweaks to them, but
essentially probably about the same. Here's a guy who's from
ever source, who's a big tech analyst on Wall Street.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I mean, so the big change you're
going to have this year is gonna be the iPhone
seventeen Air. It's almost a kick back to the days
when they launched MacBook Care if you remember that one.
It's gonna be a much tenor slimmer phone. That is
really the big chain, right. I think the other products
in the lineup iPhone, seventeen Pro, Promax, unless you're a
big selfie taker, you want to find a big change
in it. But the seventeen Air is the one that
physically will look a much different product than the ones
that we've had in the market so long.
Speaker 1: Oh Christmas isn't all that far away. This is unveiled today.
They'll probably have them in stores within a few weeks.
But I don't know. My iPhone is a few years old.
It works just fine. I don't know why I would
need a new one. But Apple continues to do well,
and so does Wall Street, with the Dow Jones industrials
up to a new record high today, the Dow up
one hundred and ninety six to close it forty five
thousand and seven to eleven, the S and P up seventeen,
the NASDAC up eighty, price of gold fell thirteen dollars
down to thirty six sixty three, and oil despite the
fact that Israel attacked the Hamas people in Doha. It
says something about the oil patch. Oil up only fifty
cents today to sixty two dollars and seventy seven cents
for a barrel of oil. Thank you for coming by.
We're going to try this again tomorrow. Hope to see
you then.