Speaker 1: And hello, yeah, oh yeah, we're back. Welcome to the
Big Podcast on this Tuesday. Today is the twenty sixth
day of May, Year of Our Lord, twenty twenty six.
My name is Tom Sullivan. Hope you had a wonderful
three day weekend. No, they're great, and it's you know,
the unofficial kickoff to summer and all of that. So
here we go. We're into the summer season. I still
am fascinated by the fact I haven't seen the actual numbers.
I don't know if anybody actually has actual numbers. But
Triple A said that there was going to be a
record number of people driving over the three day weekend,
and I go, But so obviously we are not at
demand destruction. When it comes to the price of gas.
People are griping about it, but they're still buying it.
As if you still buying it and paying for it,
they're going to keep charging you for it and charging more.
So anyway, let's get the weekend behind us. Before the
weekend Friday night, this did not get the publicity it
should have gotten. Now, a lot of people talked about
Stephen Colbert last week and it was his last show,
and all the people on the left for crying and
they were all upset. There was CBS that said goodbye
to him, and he was on the CBS television network. Well,
on the other side of the building at the CBS
Broadcast Center was CBS Radio News, and CBS Radio News
died Friday night at eleven thirty one PM. That was
its final broadcast. It did the eleven thirty news headlines.
They did that. It's a one minute it's a one
minute update, and at eleven thirty one the CBS Radio
News was over. Now, I'm been in radio for a
long long time, so this probably means more.
Speaker 2: To me than it does to you.
Speaker 1: But you look at you look at CBS News, and
I'm going they had seven hundred stations carried CBS News
ninety nine years. No, they couldn't squeak out one more.
They started in nineteen twenty seven. They're probably the most
famous of their broadcast was World News Roundup. And the
most famous radio reporter and there's still a big award
that's given out to a top radio person every year
is because of Edward R. Murrow. That's where he worked
at CBS the World War two generation. He brought updates
from London about yes, he was in London for World
War Two on the war status. But it's just it's
just another it's an it was an institution in this
country for ninety nine years, CBS Radio News, and they
said goodbye. And it's sad to see because a lot
of radio news is shrinking and shrinking, a lot of
a lot of radio newsrooms are a fraction of the
size they use to be. So and bear with me,
but I had to pass that along with you. Was
Friday night, eleven thirty one pm, CBS Radio News died.
And it's not going to have it. No, no, I
mean I there are stations that would carry well. CBS
used to own a bunch of stations, then they sold
those to a company that basically took the CBS news
at the top of the bottom of the hour, and
then that shrunk down to where again Friday night, that
was no more. So they're all scrambling to do their
own news updates and things like that. So that's Friday night,
Saturday night. This shows you we were going to go.
I'll tell you what it was. It was a wash
out in the Northeast. We got rain Friday, Saturday, Sunday yesterday.
It wasn't just a little rain. I mean it was
raining all day long, and I mean downpours. So a
lot of people, I'm including we scrapped our plans. We
were going to go do some things, and we scrapped
our plans. It was just it was cold and rainy.
So I'm at home Saturday evening and I was looking
for the Yankees because of the rain and all that,
where that they would play. And I was flipping around
on the TV and there was a shooting outside the
White House Saturday evening around six o'clock, and it was
It turned out to be a guy who was obviously
not mentally healthy. He had tried to make attempts a
number of times to try to enter the White House grounds.
He would go to he would go, oh to the
check in places where the Secret Service staffs these check
in places, and there's three of them try and get in.
They wouldn't let them in. Well, this time he showed
up at the main one by seventeenth and Pennsylvania, and
they and he pulled out a gun and started shooting
and missed everybody, thank goodness. And the Secret Service fired
back and shot him and killed him and also shot
a bystander who is still in the hospital. The thing
about it is when you see reporters reporting from the
White House from outside the White House, and they have
a beautiful shot of the from the angle of the
front of the White House. All the networks have. It's
like a it's more than a tent, but it's kind
of like that. It's called Pebble Beach and there right
next to each other. There's six or seven of them
that are lined up on the north by the on
the side of the north lawn, and that's where the
reporters are. Well six o'clock on Saturday night, everybody had
basically done their reports except for two. One of them
was ABC and the other one was NBC, and they
had some young weekend White House reporters that were doing
their updates. Let me play this one. This is from
ABC News. I don't know the reporter's name, but you'll
hear the gunshots. This woman, she immediately recognized what it
was and she dove under the table.
Speaker 3: Listen to this that President Trump has said a deal
is close, only for the two sides to remain far apart.
Speaker 1: She knew what to do the minute she heard those gunshots.
She dove under the table, and again the crew there's
a producer there, there's a videographer there, there's a lighting
person there. So there's about total with the reporter, about
four people. And she didn't waste any time running under
the table. Meanwhile, a couple tents down is NBC News.
Listen listen to. Well, I'll tell you what she says.
So it's hard to pick out, but she goes the
gunshots start. I mean, this guy was fired and the
Secret Service fired twenty thirty rounds. There was a lot
of gunshots, and they were right by where the reporters
stand up and do their stand ups in front of
the White House. And this reporter heard the gunshots and
stuck her head out of the facilita that the tent,
and kept going, what is that?
Speaker 2: What is that? Here?
Speaker 1: Here she is listen to, this is the NBC reporter.
Speaker 4: What is that? I was like, that was today, obviously
weeks after the shot had a White House.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So not only did she keep going, she did
it like four or five times, what is that?
Speaker 2: What is that?
Speaker 1: And she stuck her head out looking around to see
what it was, and that you could hear a male
voice saying, oh, it sounds like fireworks, and I guess
it just it just reminds me that when there's a
shooting something you hear people eyewitnesses go, I thought it
was fireworks, and I'm going, those were clearly guns shots
one of them. The ABC reporter instantly knew it was gunfire,
and the ABC reporter sticking her head out, going what
is that? He just a little observation I saw on
Saturday night that I thought i'd share with you. But
it just shows people react differently to something. Two emergencies
like that anyway, No, but well, there was a bystander
shot and the guy that did that, tried to fire
his way into the White House, was shot and killed
by the Secret Service. Didn't get a lot of publicity,
but I thought I would. I thought I would play
that for you since we're talking about the White House.
Oh man, the ballroom. I've been I've been to the
White House, I don't know, six, seven, eight times something
like that. Been to events at least four or five times.
In the East Room of the White House, it's a
big room. It holds three or four hundred people. I
mean they pack they can pack a lot of people
in there, and there's a lot of history that has
taken place in the East Room of the White House.
So I know the President says he needs a ballroom
that will hold a couple thousand I think is what
he wants. And it started off as a two hundred
thousand dollars construction project and that he would get the
money from donors, political donors, and I would think, Okay,
he knows about building buildings, so he must know two
hundred thousands about right, But then without any explanation, all
of a sudden, it turned into four hundred thousand double
I thought, well, how did he get that so wrong?
And now he's asking Congress for one billion dollars and
they are pushing back. And part of the pushback will
get to Texas in a minute, but part of the
pushback on not only the ballroom but also the one
point eight billion dollar weaponization bill to pay people who
have been weaponized the government weaponized against them. They're getting
a pushback from the Senate. Part of it being explained
is that the senators are not happy because John Cornyn,
who has been the whip for the Republicans in the
Senate for twenty some years, the President decided to sponsor
to endorse Ken Paxton, who's running against Cornyan. And apparently
the Republican senators are not taking that very well and
they are in a fighting mood with the President over that.
Speaker 2: But as far as.
Speaker 1: A proposed legislation to pay the one billion dollars for
the ballroom, I don't run. I don't understand why he
needs the ballroom, but I do believe that he will
get it. But Elie Honig, who's former federal prosecutor, weighs
in on the legal angle behind the ballroom.
Speaker 3: The significance of this filing is zero because the actual
legal issue in this case is not whether the ballroom
is a good idea bad idea beautiful design, or tacky
necessary for security or unnecessary. The legal issue in this
case is whether Congress has authorized this construction and this spending.
So I read this brief. It's five pages long. It
does not have a single citation to a single case,
a single citation to a single statute, single citation to
a single regulation. It reads appropriately for an op ed
you might submit to a newspaper, for a policy paper
you might submit to Congress, but it has nothing to
do with the legal case. District Court judge in DC,
a guy named Judge Nol who is appointed by George W. Bush,
has ruled that the construction must stop because Congress has
not authorized this spending. There are various statutes that allow
the President to make alterations or improvements quote unquote to
the White House. But the judge said, this is not that,
this is something different entirely. However, that judge said, I'm
going to put my own ruling on hold until this
case can be argued in the Court of Appeals next
week June fifth. And so what that means is at
the moment, construction continues. So the Court of Appeals will
hear the case next week. They may say stop construction.
That's what the lower court said, but as of now,
construction goes on.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: This is a great example of what you learn in
law school that possession is nine tenths of the law.
That's another way of saying, sometimes the physical realities on
the ground dictate the legal result. And here we have this.
The East wing has been demolished, there is a hole
in the ground, there's a foundation being built. So I
don't know how practically, even if a judge decides this
Court of Appeals decides this is not authorized by Congress,
what do you do leave this partially building up. I
do think there's some fault by the way and the
people who challenge this, they should have done it way earlier.
They should have done it before the actual I know
the demolition happened by surprise, but they should have done
it right away. Instead, they waited several weeks until this
thing was already underway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and because of that, I truly believe the ballroom
will be built. I guess the part that bothers me
about it is that it's quite as much larger than
the actual White House. White House is going to be
a shadow of the ballroom, and I think the White
House should be the predominant building on the grounds. But
I think he will get his ballroom. But he could
have probably approached it in a different way. And the
East Room is perfectly fine for having events of three
four hundred people.
Speaker 2: Regardless.
Speaker 1: So we move on. So I mentioned the senators were
upset about the fact that the President would not endorse
John Cornyn. Cornyn has been the number three Republican in
the Senate for a very long time. He's been in
the Senate for twenty four years and apparently he's a
very likable guy, and they did. The Republican senators tried
to get Trump to endorse John Cornyn, but he went
with Ken Paxton, and Ken Paxton is much more of
a mega guy and Cornyn is much more of a
Republican establishment guy. But the thing about Paxton is he
has a very dirty track record, corruption, impeachment, all kinds
of affairs. He's going to be His wife is divorcing him.
But the so I think the divorce trial starts pretty soon.
The Democrats are going to have a field day with him.
I still think even in Texas, even so, people will
will bite their lip if and vote for him. I
think Paxton is going to be the winner in tonight's
Today's Texas primary. I think he will. He's favored to win.
So Paxton will probably be the nominee for the US Senate,
going up against James tall Rico, who is got all
kinds of baggage as well, but he's a Democrat, and
in Texas, Democrats have a hard time of winning. Andrew Desiderio,
who is with punch Bowl News, had these comments, well.
Speaker 5: Look, a Trump endorsement in a Republican party is the
golden ticket usually, right, And the President doesn't usually endorse
someone unless he's very, very confident that that individual is
going to win the primary. He likes to talent his
you know, ninety seven ninety eight, ninety nine percent track record,
whatever it is, of picking the candidate who ends up
winning the primary. In this case, the President had decided
very late in this process to weigh in. Obviously, I
think it was you know, it was probably going to
be the case that Ken Paxton was on track to
win this runoff regardless of a presidential endorsement. But remember,
Senate Republican leaders had been pleading with Donald Trump for
over a year to endorse John Cornyn early on in
this race, in part as a business proposition, right, because
you saw Senate Republican leadership and the super pac aligned
with them and other Republican affiliated super PACs spend almost
one hundred million dollars to boost Senator Cornyn throughout this primary.
And they believe that if the President had simply endorsed
Senator Cornyn early on in this process, that would have
essentially dispatched anyone any sort of challenge, potential challenge to
Senator Cornyn. And in the pit says they would have
saved all that money that they could have used on
some of these other states like North Carolina and Maine
and Georgia and Michigan.
Speaker 1: So what this is going to come down to the
primary in Texas again is today, we'll get the results tonight.
We'll talk about it tomorrow. But the key here is
not only about cornn versus Paxton, but a lot of
people do believe that Paxton will win today, will not
win in November in the general election, and a Democrat
taller Rico will win and that could mean the difference
between the Republicans holding the control of the Senate or
losing the control of the Senate to the Democrat. So
it's a big, big deal. There's a little bit of
Ken Paxton and John Cornell. Start with John Cornyan making
comments on Morning News this morning is voters were heading
off to the poll.
Speaker 2: So we'll be in albatross.
Speaker 6: He could well lose, but even if he doesn't lose,
he will win by such a razors thin margin that
is likely to have a negative drag on the downball
races in Texas.
Speaker 2: This is not a pro Trump guy.
Speaker 1: I don't know if we could be more different on
the Republican issues than John Cornyan and me. So that's
Cornyn and Paxton. Paxton's argument is is that Cornyan isn't
a pro Trump guy. Paxton is what whatever President Trump
says Paxton is for, and he doesn't try to hide
the fact that he's not a man on it that
stands on his own two feet. And character, I thought
in the Republican Party among conservatives, I thought character counted.
Remember people the Republicans were going after Bill Clinton for
his lack of character. How character counted? Not anymore, apparently,
because if Paxton wins, John Cornyn's character is fine, Paxton
not so much. Leanne Caldwell from Puck News is that's this.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So when Donald Trump endorsed Ken Paxton, Senate Republicans, kind
of the whole Senate establishment in DC we're really beside themselves.
And the reason is is because while Paxton is much
more popular we'll find out today, but likely to be
much more popular with the Republican base, there's a lot
of concern about how Paxton will perform and a general
election against a strong Democratic candidate, in this case it's
James Tallarico. They worry that the independent the soft Republican
voters even will not support Paxton over Tallarico, and so
they're worried that they are going to lose a Senate seat,
a red one that should be easy for Republicans to
keep in in their control. So, I mean, as you
said in your opening, over one hundred million dollars about
own nearly one hundred and fifty million dollars just in
the Republican primary and runoff, and most of that money
has actually been spent by John Cornan and his allies.
They had to spend a lot to boost his approval
with these Republican base voters. But I'm told in a
competitive general election, Republicans alone will probably have to spend
two hundred million dollars in order to help Paxton over
the finish line, and that people are saying could be
could be the base, that it could be much much more.
That doesn't even take into consideration how much James Tallerico
is going to spend in the war chest. He has
to play a very aggressive general election campaign. And so
this is a stake that Republicans did not want to
have to worry about. It is been extremely expensive with
several massive media markets and they're going to have to
spend money there while they're also going to have to
defend more than a handful of other Republican states before
they can even try to pick up seats in places
like Michigan.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the amount of money in this Texas race is
obscene and it's going to get words. So why did
the President decide to go with Paxton when they could
have done it much cheaper and gotten a much more
sure bet with Cornan.
Speaker 7: President Trump was extremely frustrated with Senate Majority Leader John
Thune and Senate Republicans for getting rid of the ballroom. Remember,
Trump wants a billion dollars for his ballroom of taxpayer money,
and John Thune told him it's not going to be
possible to get that through the Senate. There's other things
that Donald Trump is frustrated with, including voter voter ID
and citizenship legislation. He wants to get rid of the filibuster.
H And I was told that Trump was so frustrated
that he said, well, okay, then I'm going to endorse Paxton.
Paxton is the person that Trump is more ideologically aligned
with anyway, the person he had always preferred. But he
was going to stay out of the race, and he
got so frustrated that he decided to endorse Paxton just
do whatever he wanted to do and kind of really
put it to Senate Republicans to send them a message.
Speaker 1: So it was out of spite. It's going to cost
a lot of money that spite, and may not be successful.
But we'll find out. The polls I think close up
seven o'clock local time in Texas central central daylight time,
so we'll find out whether it's Paxton's expected to win.
But you never know what the independence in Texas will do.
So how about how about the big war? I know
it's becoming convoluted, and I will tell you I'm not
I'm a big fan of General Jack Keen, and I've
played a number of his comments for you about Jack
Keen is going. We have a military plan. We did
not get to finish it. We were put on hold
by the president. We did not get to do We
had seventy five percent of it done, seventy to seventy
five percent, and we needed to finish the other targets.
I don't know what those targets were, but I would
presume they were probably going to try to take out
the regime. Instead, it got stopped. And now we're more
than six weeks on a ceasefire and they're firing at
each other. They're shooting at it. We shot at them
over the weekend, they shot at us. So they're playing
some semantics game about a cease fire. They're no more
on a cease fire than the Man of the Moon.
But here's my big chakar u. You know, I'm a
big fan of General Keen, but I'm very disappointed, very
disappointed in him. And I remember, you don't get to
be a general, let alone a four star without you
literally need to have a member of the US Senate,
a politician sponsor you for you to get your first
star as a general. So you have to be politically smart,
and sadly, I will play for you. General Jack Keane's
comments today in which he caved, he's caving. He's going,
oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The president's making the right decision.
And even though you know as well as I do,
he wanted to go in and finish the job and
they're not allowing the military to do so. In General Keene,
I think threw in the towel today.
Speaker 8: Listen to this, well, I think we're in the early
stages of it. And less number one, give the President
a lot of credit for the fact that we would
never be here where we are without what he did
with Midnight Hammer in supporting the twelve Day War and
bringing down their nuclear enterprise to the state that it's
at still more work to be done there or remove it,
to be sure. And then certainly the thirty seven day
war that we were conducting diminishing Iran's capabilities rather significantly.
But the point here is dinner with the straits of
a move. Certainly this is a prize that Iran does
not want to give up.
Speaker 2: And what do I mean by that?
Speaker 8: It was the vehicle they used to get a cease
fire when they took control of it. They have never
ever had control of the straits of Moves before, and
they did it largely with intimidation and coercion in terms
of affecting the captains of ship, insurers of ships, and
owners of ships. And they don't want to give that up.
That I mean, it's obviously a negotiating item, and we
have leverage here with the economic blockade. What does Iran
want out of this? Certainly we're talking about opening it. Yes,
they will likely open it, but what they want to
do is maintain authority over it. And they are claiming
right now that this is their water and Oman's waterway
and therefore they have territorial control over it. That violates
international law, where the law of navigation indicates that this
is international waters and freedom of navigation takes precedence here
over any territorial control.
Speaker 2: So legally it's on the.
Speaker 8: Side of it being a freedom of navigation, but that's
not where Iran is.
Speaker 2: Iran wants to.
Speaker 8: Have authority and some sovereignty over it, and how we
describe it and what words we agree to are going
to be important here. Why is this so because the
geopolitical advantage that gives Iran and having influencing a year
from now, five years from now is really significant. They've
never been able to hold that as leverage over the
Gulf States and our allies and partners in the region.
So this step one of negotiations is very important. Look
at the administration. Negotiators got their eyes wide open here.
They know exactly what's at play here. But I just
want to make sure our audience understands how significant this
really is in terms of Aran not having any control
over the straits of the moves and it being returned
to an area of freedom of navigation. And then the
rest of it is very complicated, as we have seen
over many, many weeks and even prior to conflict operations,
dealing with nuclear issues dismantling, We're getting rid of the
enrichment that it has and also pushing back on ballistic
missile development and support for proxies. There's going to be
a frameworks phase one, an agreement on what the framework is,
then get down to the hard work of rolling up
the sleeves and trying to figure out what a good
deal is for the United States. We know what our
positions are. They're very clear, and we have made public
statements to address them. And I'm absolutely convinced we're not
going to make a bad deal. I'm not going to relitigate.
You know, should we or shouldn't we be in this phase.
I felt from the outset we should have continued kinetic
operations and then forced them into uncompromising positions.
Speaker 2: But this is the President's decision.
Speaker 8: He wanted to take a diplomatic action here, and I
think what we need to make certain here and assist
us along and helping inform the American people as to
what the stakes are, what the issues are here. There's
a lot of things going around in the media that
are really uninformed in terms of what's happening here. And
one of the great thing on a regular basis that
keep our audience informed about the facts. And if we
kind of stick to the facts here, we're going to
wind up in a much better place.
Speaker 1: Well, I thought that was a long winded dance around.
His real desire is to use the military to go
in and defeat the regime.
Speaker 2: So he stuck.
Speaker 1: He can't. He does what a general does is say yes,
sir to the commander in chief, and he's not He's
very careful not to blame President Trump, but he's putting
the decision on President Trump.
Speaker 2: I mean, the reason why we got into these.
Speaker 8: Conflict operations after the Twelve Day War back in last
June was for a couple a couple of things were happening.
One is, they made a decision to recover their nuclear
program despite what we had done with them with Midnight
Hammer number two. They were successfully recovering their ballistic missile
program by burying the missiles in tunnels deep under the ground.
Where we couldn't penetrate him with our bombs, and it
was given solid fuel which would assist in using mobile
launchers to launch those kind of missiles. And as a
result of that, it became a matter of physics here
based on the amount they were going to accumulate. If
you run the math on it, it would overwhelm the
defenses that Israel had, as well as our assistance to them,
not to speak of our allies and partners in the region.
So that is why we had to take some action
here that the regime was not going to change whatsoever.
And some people just don't want to pay attention to
those facts. These are facts that were taking place and
when they want to dismiss it, and it cannot be dismissed.
And that's what brought us to this point here. So
we got a regime, it's on its heels. We're move
it into a diplomatic phase, and we've got to come
out of this phase meeting our objectives and goals.
Speaker 1: Well, you can hear in his voice he's disappointed. He
wants to he wants to achieve the mission and goals militarily,
but that you can hear it. He's saying I'm not
going to be able to do that. It's it's in
the diplomatic phase now, and you're gonna keep You're gonna
wind up with Iran in a stronger position. I know
They're military has been decimated. They've we've destroyed a lot
of them. They still have lots of missiles, they still
have lots of drones. So they will get to work
on rebuilding their country and the problem is just going
to be kicked down the road, in my humble opinion,
So let's see Wall Street when there was a lot
this morning, Oh my gosh, as part of the ongoing
we won where where the agreement's done, where we've got
a great agreement. And yet Ron says we don't have
a great agreement. But Wall Street gets suckered in every
single time. It's shot up on that news this morning.
But by the time the closing bell came along, well,
it had lost all and wound up with a red
arrow on it. Gas prices today are down a penny
from yesterday. Four forty nine is the average for the
cheap stuff diesel five fifty eight, so down a penny
from yesterday, down four cents from a week ago. So
maybe we're hitting the top on gas. On the markets,
like I said, we started off positive, but by the
time we finished, we were down one hundred and eighteen.
At the close, the Dow fifty four to sixty one,
but it was a mixed market. The S and P
new record at forty five, the Nasdaq up I think
that's a new record, up three hundred and twelve. You
can you can see where this is being driven. This
is all about tech, It's about the Magnificent seven. It's
all tech stocks and AI. So the NASDAK really benefited
from all of that. The price of gold fell fifteen
almost sixteen dollars, down to four thousand and five oh seven,
and oil West Texas Intermediate and down three bucks. We'll
take it down to ninety three dollars for a barrel
of oil. That's it for today. Thank you for coming by.
We'll be back tomorrow and I hope to see you then.