Speaker 1: You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM
Speaker 1: six forty.
Speaker 2: KFI AM six forty Bill Handle. Here it is a
Speaker 2: Wednesday morning, February nineteenth. Some of the stories we're looking
Speaker 2: at President Trump President Putin are expected to meet before
Speaker 2: the end of the month.
Speaker 1: Now, first Amendment case really a good one.
Speaker 2: We start with the head of the FCC, newly appointed
Speaker 2: head of the SCC, Brendan Carr, and he is well,
Speaker 2: let me put it this way. He was on a
Speaker 2: Fox show, strangely enough, and he was appointed by the president.
Speaker 2: And he announced that the FCC is investigating KCBS San
Speaker 2: Francisco AM station over its coverage of the administration's mass
Speaker 2: deportation raids in San Jose. And here's what happens, or
Speaker 2: here's what happened. You have kcbas read looking at a
Speaker 2: raid that is happening in real time and saying, there's
Speaker 2: an undercover car over there, here are agents over there,
Speaker 2: all of this in real time, and he is arguing
Speaker 2: that got in the way of law enforcement. You can't
Speaker 2: do that. Of course, First Amendment people are going, wait
Speaker 2: a minute, we sure as hell can. What we're doing
Speaker 2: is reporting what is happening So that is one issue.
Speaker 2: And the other issue, which I think is more fun,
Speaker 2: only because I have a personal experience with this, is
Speaker 2: there was against CBS. There's a move that's being taken.
Speaker 2: This is a civil suit Trump is doing for ten
Speaker 2: billion dollars because sixty Minutes in an interview with Kamala
Speaker 2: Harris and edited it to look like she was answering
Speaker 2: the question one way when she was answering a question
Speaker 2: the other way. And he wants ten billion dollars of
Speaker 2: interesting to see what damages they are because what happened
Speaker 2: as a result. Oh, I don't know. He won. So
Speaker 2: where's he going to get his ten billion dollars even
Speaker 2: if a jury agrees with him.
Speaker 1: Yes, KSEBS or CBS.
Speaker 2: Wrongly edited the Kamalay Harris interview.
Speaker 1: Okay, now what you won?
Speaker 2: So case in point because I have some experience with this,
Speaker 2: not particularly running for president or winning, but being interviewed
Speaker 2: by sixty minutes. And this happened in the early eighties
Speaker 2: when sixty Minutes I was doing a doing one of
Speaker 2: his segments on surrogacy, and I was a big part
Speaker 2: of it because there were two of us on the
Speaker 2: planet that were doing surroget parenting law, and so I
Speaker 2: was I was a guest. I was featured on sixty
Speaker 2: minutes and they ran I don't know, forty seconds of
Speaker 2: me saying things and then an interview there. I was
Speaker 2: filmed for three hours. That's how long. The interview ran
Speaker 2: three hours, and they ran about a minute and a
Speaker 2: half of it. And that's simply the way they operate.
Speaker 2: And there is no such thing as unbiased. It doesn't exist.
Speaker 2: And it's a question of how much bias there is.
Speaker 2: You go to Fox, MSNBC, that's biased. You go to Newsmax,
Speaker 2: that's crazy bias. It's all biased. And case in point,
Speaker 2: let me tell you about a story that broke another
Speaker 2: personal story and goes to show you that there is
Speaker 2: bias no matter what, and just one word can change
Speaker 2: everything much less a series of questions. When I was
Speaker 2: doing one of my clients was Tag Romney, who was
Speaker 2: Mitt Romney's son in the middle of his run for presidency,
Speaker 2: and he was a client of ours and had a
Speaker 2: kid with us and was on a second child. And
Speaker 2: what we do is we have a ten plate, an
Speaker 2: abortion template, an abortion clause in our contract that says
Speaker 2: that the surrogate mother will not have an abortion under
Speaker 2: these circumstances. Child is anomaloust or whatever has a genetic
Speaker 2: disorder such that the child will not have a quality
Speaker 2: of life, and the parents make that decision, followed by
Speaker 2: a paragraph in font into the world headline saying that
Speaker 2: this clause cannot be enforced under Roe v Way, there
Speaker 2: is no such thing as enforcing.
Speaker 1: These this clause. Okay, fair enough with that.
Speaker 2: The Romneys, who are very conservative Mormons and are not
Speaker 2: particularly pro choice. What happened was that to remove that clause,
Speaker 2: because that's our general clause.
Speaker 1: It has to be removed manually from my contract.
Speaker 2: And since it was the same surrogate and only the
Speaker 2: dates were different, the clause ran in the second tract
Speaker 2: that says the parents will decide if.
Speaker 1: The surrogate is to have an abortion. Yeha, okay Romney.
Speaker 2: Romney's son just sighed a contract that says he has
Speaker 2: the right to abort a child not even carried about
Speaker 2: his own wife.
Speaker 1: How controversial is that?
Speaker 2: And this is the run for the presidency that Mitt
Speaker 2: Romney was engaged in at the time.
Speaker 1: TMZ picked up that story.
Speaker 2: Someone got hold of the contract and sold it to TMZ,
Speaker 2: and there it was his signature the abortion clause. Oh
Speaker 2: my god, that was going to break wide open. Now
Speaker 2: the good news is Harvey Levin is a friend of
Speaker 2: mine who I have known, who runs and heads and
Speaker 2: created TMZ. I've known him for over thirty five years. Actually,
Speaker 2: he was my ethics professor in law school. Now let
Speaker 2: me repeat that, the guy who created TMZ was my
Speaker 2: ethics professor in law school. In any case, I talked
Speaker 2: to him and said, the story has to break. But
Speaker 2: here is the difference. One word difference, and that is
Speaker 2: I explained to him what happened, that the paralegal just
Speaker 2: put in the wrong paragraph and it was a mistake,
Speaker 2: and then we crossed it out and did a new contract.
Speaker 2: And so here's how that line ran. Bill handle coma
Speaker 2: director of the Center for Surrogate Parenting, explains what happens
Speaker 2: versus claims what happens? You could use both, because I
Speaker 2: made the claim and I explained, And which word do
Speaker 2: you think has well I get the benefit of, of course,
Speaker 2: the word explained as opposed to I claimed there was
Speaker 2: a clerical error.
Speaker 1: Kamala Harris was interviewed for Ours.
Speaker 2: And choosing what she says is biased no matter what
Speaker 2: you do unless you run all the raw footage. And
Speaker 2: that's exactly what Trump wants, by the way, he wants
Speaker 2: all the raw footage, and he will see and you
Speaker 2: know you have stutters. Oh here's another one. You get
Speaker 2: the raw footage, and you have the interviewee going uh
Speaker 2: and sort of missing a word, either either a malapropism
Speaker 2: or missing the sentence completely, and you know, missing misconstruing.
Speaker 2: And that's what's run goes to show you what a
Speaker 2: moron she is versus a tight, well conducted answer that
Speaker 2: is cogent. You can do anything with that. So anyway,
Speaker 2: what's happening is the FCC is going down hard on
Speaker 2: KCBS right now and CBS, and it's you know, the
Speaker 2: media is biased. By the way, the argument that the
Speaker 2: media is biased towards the left I completely agree with.
Speaker 2: And that's been going on forever because all the reporters
Speaker 2: I've ever met are pretty left wing. Okay, airplane crashes.
Speaker 2: Two things that come to mind whenever I say airplane crashes.
Speaker 2: One is a look at the number of crashes that
Speaker 2: have happened recently. Look at the number of incidents at
Speaker 2: airports where there have been collisions or there have been
Speaker 2: near collisions up in the air. You have the possibility
Speaker 2: of collisions, you know, the planes missing each other by
Speaker 2: a few hundred feet. Okay, scarier the hell airplane accidents.
Speaker 2: I mean, they're just bound to happen. The other phrase
Speaker 2: is flying airplanes is probably the safest way to travel
Speaker 2: that's ever been invented. Second is true. First, not so much,
Speaker 2: because if you look at the statistics in terms of
Speaker 2: airplane debts, they are actually less than the last year
Speaker 2: and less than they have been in decades. People just
Speaker 2: don't die in airplanes. They don't fall out of the sky.
Speaker 2: You don't usually see pilot error, you don't usually see
Speaker 2: mechanical problems that cause deaths. It just doesn't happen, did it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it just happened in at Reagan International. We know that
Speaker 2: at Pearson International Airport in Toronto, we had that plane
Speaker 2: that flipped over and they're trying to figure out what happened.
Speaker 2: It maybe came in too hard, don't know. No deaths
Speaker 2: in that one, and of course all the deaths occurred
Speaker 2: in the at Reagan International Airport. The reality is there
Speaker 2: have been years in which no deaths have occurred, not
Speaker 2: only in the United States, but all of the world
Speaker 2: on scheduled airlines, it still is extraordinarily safe going out
Speaker 2: on the road, and driving is far more dangerous statistically.
Speaker 2: But even I don't get frightened when I drive on
Speaker 2: the road. Do I think what's going to happen if
Speaker 2: the plane goes down? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I do, even though I'm very comfortable flying.
Speaker 2: As I've told you many times, George Norry and I
Speaker 2: have flown together a few times on the way to
Speaker 2: Las Vegas, and we always have George Norri does the
Speaker 2: overnight for people that don't know. He does the coast
Speaker 2: to coast business with Poltergeist and Martian Anal.
Speaker 1: Probes and whatever the hells he does.
Speaker 2: And we always argue about who's going to get Number
Speaker 2: One building if the plane goes down, and I always
Speaker 2: say he is going to and he always says I'm going.
Speaker 2: To The point is I do consider that. I don't
Speaker 2: consider that when I'm driving at all. Maybe it's because
Speaker 2: a lack of control, maybe because I don't do it
Speaker 2: every day. And I think most of us are in
Speaker 2: the same position. And some people are scared to death
Speaker 2: of flying because of the possibility. Because one of the
Speaker 2: things you get in a car accident, you're good chance
Speaker 2: you're going to survive or not be injured.
Speaker 1: You fall out of the sky.
Speaker 2: Ye airplane accident, You're not making it out on that one,
Speaker 2: that's for sure. But the reality is it is safe
Speaker 2: to fly. It is safer to fly now. So now
Speaker 2: what ends up happening. You have these possible mid air
Speaker 2: collisions where planes get too close to each other.
Speaker 1: Well, that does happen?
Speaker 2: Is it because it's being reported now because it's a
Speaker 2: much bigger deal now, Yeah, I think that's the case.
Speaker 2: By the way, the vast majority of deaths that do occur,
Speaker 2: and we're talking in a bad year of a couple
Speaker 2: one hundred, are in small planes. They're all in small
Speaker 2: planes two three passenger little cessens or occasionally you have
Speaker 2: a leered jet or a corporate jet. But those pilots
Speaker 2: are pretty good. Plenty of young pilots two three hundred
Speaker 2: hours in the air, not even forty hours in the air,
Speaker 2: that are flying private planes. Those guys get in a.
Speaker 1: Little bit of trouble. But even so, it's so rare.
Speaker 2: So next time you get on an airplane, let me
Speaker 2: put it this way, I'm going to make you feel
Speaker 2: a little bit better. There are so few deaths that
Speaker 2: occur so rarely that I want you to think, when
Speaker 2: you get on an airplane, you're due. Okay, statistically it's
Speaker 2: about to happen to you. Have a good time, enjoy
Speaker 2: your vacation. I want to go back to the fires, because,
Speaker 2: as I said earlier, we're going to talk a lot
Speaker 2: about the fires and one of the things and this
Speaker 2: is Altadan, and we're going to talk about because Altadena
Speaker 2: has a whole history of First of all, to say,
Speaker 2: many African Americans live there.
Speaker 1: It is not a wealthy area like the Palisades.
Speaker 2: It is going to need more help probably, and rebuilding
Speaker 2: all those thousands of homes is no easy.
Speaker 1: Trick, and it can't be the traditional way of building.
Speaker 2: Hire an architect, you go back to Department of Planning,
Speaker 2: Building in Safety for the permits.
Speaker 1: It's just not going to be done. They're looking at alternatives.
Speaker 2: How are we going to do this, Well, let's make
Speaker 2: the building process easier, let's make it faster, Let's figure
Speaker 2: out some way of financing this.
Speaker 1: Another way of doing it is.
Speaker 2: Going back to what happened at the turn to the
Speaker 2: last century when sears.
Speaker 1: The sears catalog sold homes.
Speaker 2: Now it's not a question of listing homes, not a
Speaker 2: question of selling them on the open market.
Speaker 1: It was a kit that you bought to build your house.
Speaker 2: For those people that buy model airplane kits for example,
Speaker 2: which I did as a kid. Right, you got all
Speaker 2: the pieces and you put them together and it took
Speaker 2: a little while.
Speaker 1: You know, the glue and in this case was glue.
Speaker 2: But with the kits that you bought to build your home,
Speaker 2: it was nails and lumber was all pre cut. I mean,
Speaker 2: it was a kit where everything was supplied, the nails,
Speaker 2: the screws, the electrical panels, I mean, everything other than
Speaker 2: the foundation which had to be poured. And people built
Speaker 2: their own homes. And if you think that was a
Speaker 2: rare occurrence, they sold one hundred thousand of these homes.
Speaker 2: And this was in a day and age where and
Speaker 2: it was right out of the Seers catalog. I don't
Speaker 2: know if you've ever seen a Sears catalog. It got
Speaker 2: to the point where Sears, and this Sears was the
Speaker 2: Amazon of its day. It went from a brick and
Speaker 2: mortar store to a catalog store. Amazon started as a
Speaker 2: catalog store on the internet. So the two have a
Speaker 2: lot in common and everything that Amazon is today. Sears,
Speaker 2: Roebuck and Company was that in the early nineteen hundreds
Speaker 2: through the thirties, and it got to the point where
Speaker 2: the Sears Catalog was four hundred pages and they would
Speaker 2: be sent out and people would I mean, they couldn't
Speaker 2: wait to get it. It was second only to the
Speaker 2: Bible in people's homes. They would be used at outhouses
Speaker 2: on a nail. The pages, the covers were framed and
Speaker 2: put inside people's homes. I mean, it was extraordinary what
Speaker 2: that was. And so you're looking back. They're looking back.
Speaker 2: People are saying, Okay, do we go back to kit homes?
Speaker 2: And they had a lot of them, but and they
Speaker 2: had a lot of them, but the design was already there.
Speaker 2: That's it. There was no building process other than putting
Speaker 2: them together. And what I want to do, I want
Speaker 2: to spend a few minutes just talking about the Sears
Speaker 2: catalog itself.
Speaker 1: And the homes you could buy in talking about.
Speaker 2: The Altadena fires and rebuilding thousands of homes. New methods,
Speaker 2: new ways of doing this simply have to be done.
Speaker 1: And the talk is.
Speaker 2: All about speeding up the process, building permits architectural absolutely,
Speaker 2: maybe pre manufacture manufactured.
Speaker 1: Homes, No one really knows.
Speaker 2: Manufactured homes modernly are the closest thing to what I'm
Speaker 2: going to talk about, and that is Sears catalog, the
Speaker 2: kit homes that you put together yourself. And I'm going
Speaker 2: to digress on the history of this because it's just
Speaker 2: great fun when we're talking about it. I'm looking at
Speaker 2: the Sears Catalog page of a home, a kit home
Speaker 2: that was sent to you or sent to customers. Every nail,
Speaker 2: every screw, every panel, every piece of wiring. Of course,
Speaker 2: the lumber all sent via kit and it was delivered
Speaker 2: on a railroad car and delivered to your house, to
Speaker 2: your site. And I'm assuming you had to pour your
Speaker 2: own foundation. They didn't ship a foundation. And so I'm
Speaker 2: looking looking at a home and this is the Barrington
Speaker 2: model home kit small house, one small bedroom, a living room,
Speaker 2: not bad, by the way, fifteen by thirteen. Okay, So
Speaker 2: let's go back and get into why Sears was doing this.
Speaker 2: Because Sears was selling everything under the planet, everything, home goods,
Speaker 2: farming equipment, virtually everything, jewelry.
Speaker 1: It started with jewelry, by the way.
Speaker 2: So the Modern Homes catalog was a separate catalog that
Speaker 2: sold these kids. Nineteen o eight to nineteen forty is
Speaker 2: when the homes were sold. At the beginning of nineteen eight.
Speaker 2: The prices ranged from one hundred and seven dollars for
Speaker 2: a home. That's thirty five hundred dollars today for a home,
Speaker 2: a kit home. It's just ridiculous. Then you had the
Speaker 2: highest level at that time with thirty five hundred dollars today.
Speaker 2: No one hundred and thirteen one thousand dollars today, and
Speaker 2: that was the Saratoga Flush. Toilets were not also included
Speaker 2: because they were a luxury, although it did say any
Speaker 2: of the houses in this book, this catalog can be
Speaker 2: arranged with bathroom for a small additional charge. That was
Speaker 2: the nineteen oh eight catalog. So Seares introduced three lines,
Speaker 2: the simplex sectional, the Standard Built, the Honor Built, the
Speaker 2: simplest sectional, the cheapest two rooms, no bathroom. It was
Speaker 2: basically a cottage, a small cottage. However, it did have
Speaker 2: ancillary buildings included outhouses, chicken coops, hoghouses were included in
Speaker 2: the price. Different kind of clientele. Standard Built was built
Speaker 2: for warmer climates because they couldn't retain heat. It was
Speaker 2: a little tougher now. The Honor Built was the finest,
Speaker 2: and it had cyprusiding, cedar shingles and maple trim that
Speaker 2: went for in today's dollars, one hundred and thirteen thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was a different, different world.
Speaker 2: Nineteen eighteen, the Magnolia, a ten room Honor built mansion,
Speaker 2: sold for fifty one hundred dollars. In this we're talking
Speaker 2: nineteen eighteen dollars, about one hundred and one thousand dollars today.
Speaker 2: Nineteen thirty nine. The last one, the Winnona Bungalow, the
Speaker 2: cheapest model, sold for effectively today sixteen thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: The Malden, the kind of house that puts a.
Speaker 2: Lift in your soul, sold for what today would be
Speaker 2: fifty six thousand dollars. It's just completely crazy. Handle.
Speaker 3: I was checking this out looking you up because it
Speaker 3: fascinates me as well. So apparently they sold over seventy
Speaker 3: thousand of these homes between nineteen oh eight and nineteen forty,
Speaker 3: and then.
Speaker 2: I show one hundred thousand, but that's okay, okay, roughly,
Speaker 2: but okay, they say roughly seventy percent of them are
Speaker 2: still standing to this day and that nuts. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: they're a catalog home. That is a bit of history
Speaker 2: that is extraordinary. But then I was sorry. I had
Speaker 2: to be pretty handy to put together a house.
Speaker 3: Well, they apparently destroyed Seers destroyed their sales records. No
Speaker 3: one knows exactly. But there are these little there's these
Speaker 3: little stamped these stamped wood on the unfinished areas like
Speaker 3: the attic that apparently that you can tell if they
Speaker 3: were one of these houses or not.
Speaker 2: Isn't that insane? Yeah, it's just the history of this
Speaker 2: is an incredible Sear sold cocaine, Sear sold heroin. No, now,
Speaker 2: these were Yeah, these were medical miracles at the time
Speaker 2: when you had nothing but quackery there and these were
Speaker 2: doctors that produced these quack remedies and Sear sold them.
Speaker 3: I remember when they were when you'd get the Sears
Speaker 3: wish book before Christmas and that's what you'd look through.
Speaker 2: You'd look through and that's what you picked.
Speaker 3: My dad worked at Sears when in the seventies doing displays,
Speaker 3: design and displays, and so we always got what you know,
Speaker 3: stuff from Sears and it was always scratching dent.
Speaker 1: I'm sure I am going.
Speaker 2: To end with a personal memory. I was, uh, what's
Speaker 2: Cono doing. It was in the nineteen fifties. I was
Speaker 2: just very, very small, and I remember this that in
Speaker 2: the Sears parking lot in North Hollywood, they had a
Speaker 2: very large Sears. Then we lived a couple of blocks away.
Speaker 2: Sears was selling bomb shelters against atomic attacks, and they
Speaker 2: put a bomb shelter in the parking lot that you
Speaker 2: could walk through. That was their display because there was
Speaker 2: such a fear of the Russians attacking us with nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1: It was the the.
Speaker 2: Height of the Cold War, when everybody was afraid that
Speaker 2: Russia was going to launch. And there was the bomb
Speaker 2: shelter that you could buy from Sears. That was a
Speaker 2: great that great store. And then of course Sears went
Speaker 2: under and they went bankrupt, and it was and they
Speaker 2: had Craftsmen tools, they had ken More, their own name
Speaker 2: in appliances, Craftsmen tools, and they kept selling those off
Speaker 2: because Sears couldn't function anymore. All right, So much for
Speaker 2: that coming up. A generation of young people have gone
Speaker 2: far right. Donald Trump picked up young people. But wait
Speaker 2: a minute, young people are left wing. When I was
Speaker 2: in college, man, it was communism, it was socialism. I
Speaker 2: wanted people to I want a government to pay for
Speaker 2: everything I did. What's happened one overriding factor and just
Speaker 2: the way the world is going. And I'll come up
Speaker 2: with that. And then what was that saying?
Speaker 3: If you're young and conservative, you have no heart. If
Speaker 3: you're old and liberal, you have no brain. Yeah, isn't
Speaker 3: that the old saying?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's another one. If you're young and hung you
Speaker 2: do very well in bars. Do I have that wrong? Oh?
Speaker 4: Okay, sorry, right, okay, let's go ahead and pick up
Speaker 4: the right wing and it comprises young people.
Speaker 2: KF I am sixty. You've been listening to.
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