Speaker 2: What's going on?
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Speaker 2: Many of us measure our years by our birthdays. You know,
you have that birthday and you're like, how do I
feel the last I can tell you there are certain
years that were absolutely horrible. I don't remember them necessarily
by January first. You know, we're the fiscal years in
October first. Anyway, lots of different ways to measure, but
by and large, our society looks at you know, January first.
They look back, it's the top ten list, top hundred list,
every way of looking at these sideways, upside down, whatever,
and we kind of take stock. And then we have
these crazy New Year's resolutions, which lasts, especially if they're physical.
Almost if you go to the gym. You know this,
I'm not telling you anything you didn't already know. But
maybe that's my job, remind you of things you already
knew but forgot to laugh at the first time. You
go to the gym on January sixth, and it's packed.
You can barely get onto a machine you want to.
You're gonna get ripped. It's gonna be great. You're gonna
look the best you've ever looked. It's gonna be amazing.
About February the fifteenth, everyone's like, you know what, I think,
I'll just drive it down to once or twice a week,
and by March and by May all the gems are
advertising again. So it's the nature of our lack of focus.
A lot of us have the attention span of, you know,
like a squirrel. With the respect to our life spans.
I mean, squirrels are kind of instantaneously a little lot shorter,
so their attention span is much shorter, but ours is.
You know, you're gonna be a gonna You're gonna work
on an instrument, and I would say the people that
make it in life. Oh, by the way, the voice
is a little strange. This is chat At. I'm singing
in for Pete Calendar here on New stock eleven, ten
ninety nine, three WBT, Happy Monday to you all, and
probably I was kind of do some back the envelope calculations.
I think this is like the seventh most likely week
to not get a lot done, because you got a
moral to everyone's getting ready for summer, have Labor Day
where everyone's getting back from summer, certainly Christmas and Thanksgiving
lots of days off, not a lot of productivity. So
there's four gone, and then you have to look at Easter,
which is another one that's like five, and then it's
kind of a toss up. You know, banks get off
for President s Martin Luther King Day, everybody gets off,
and if you're not doing anything like skiing, then that's
just a three day weekend. And then you get to
January first, and right in the middle of the week,
not a lot of productivity happening, kind of a it's
like a Thursday, So today's like a Thursday, and then
Thursday will be like a Thursday, and then another weekend,
and then the dreariness of the year ensues and your
work and your slaving way, and at some point the
following year you're gonna be at a gas pump, or
you're gonna be standing in line at I don't know,
grocery store, and you're gonna think to yourself, I wonder
how much of my life I spend or have spent,
standing in line wait for something to happen. And when
I get to the end, I'm going to look back
and go, wow, I wonder. You know, if you calculate
that up at like thirty minutes a week times fifty
two weeks times the number of years you're a live,
and you get to an obscene number of like now,
I spent eight weeks of my life in line waiting
for crap. And if you add a Disney World in
there or some kind of theme park, then it's like
a lot more. But the last I digress because my
attention span is thus so well, you'll get through the
year and you have these ridiculous kind of things you
set up for yourself. And I would say that success
and you know this to be true, that the great
successes in life that you know, other than people that
luck into things, but by and large ninety nine percent
are those that have a remarkable work ethic, show up early,
leave late, and make the sacrifices. You know, overnight success
is about fifteen years for anyone paying attention. It really is.
If you look around, if you're forty plus and you
look back at your friends in their twenties and thirties,
there may be a few happenstance opportunities there, but by
and large, it's the people that stuck with whatever it
was they were doing and they became insanely successful because
at a certain point, it's like a rock tumbling down
a hill or snowball for lack of a better analogy,
that at a certain point it picks up steam. And
then if you're really really at it, if you really
get at it and have some form of discipline, then
you're going to be great at whatever it is you
choose to do. If you want to be a great musician.
I had a friend who was a talented musician. I said, man,
you're amazing to have that kind of talent. He says,
it's amazing how talented you can become working an hour
a day for fifteen years on the same thing. And
he's right and amazing. It didn't just come naturally. You
just had to work at it. So the same thing
with everything in life, and at a certain point, if
you're fortunate, and you stick with it enough, and you
don't take too many risks, and you don't do dumb things,
which we all will do. And you're going to find
a point where it's kind of a snowball, where your
worries are not about money. And that's a beautiful thing,
but at a certain point it's about you know your
life and taking stock of your life and looking back
in saying and looking forward and saying, Okay, here's what
I've accomplished, Here's what I have yet to do, and
I've got a limited time to do it. And what
do I want to make of that? What do I
want to do with my hyphen between my birth date
and my death day? What is it I want to accomplish?
And New Year's are often a way to take stock
of that, if for no other reason than kind of
a reflection of where you've been and kind of a
window about where you want to go. So my hope
for all of you is that you take that moment.
It's not that you give yourself unachievable goals for the
next year. And as nutty as you thought, twenty twenty
four was make no mistake twenty twenty five will be
equally so. Where we find ourselves at an accelerated technological pace,
we find ourselves at a time when news has self immolated,
where it has become the least trusted aspect of society.
We also have government agencies. So technology is heading forward
at light speed for lack. It really is at at
at an unbelievable pace. It's an unsustainable pace with respect
to how we conduct ourselves and act with one another.
You look at this, and a good example of that
is the iPhone was invented or brought to society in
about two thousand and seven, and we're now get three
four phones free. You get these thousand dollars phones free,
and the small print is so weirdly un non understandable.
It's cryptic in a way that like you found a
foreign language cryptic. And it's like the time share of technology,
isn't it? Because they they rope you in for a
couple of years, they say, you get all this stuff
for free, but it's kind of negated by the plan
you get. You have to get the best planned, but
you don't realize you're getting the best plan because you
want to use tech anyway. But even though most of
your gigabytes are used in your home Wi Fi or
at the coffee shop down the street. And then you
go through this and all of a sudden you need
a Rosetta stone to understand what the hell you're doing technology,
And don't think that's going to become easier. You know,
fifteen years ago, your names and passwords weren't that difficult,
were they? You had one or two? Now do you
keep how many times have you lost your password? On
the twenty applications you have to use. You think you
can use the same one, but you can't because something's
been compromised or someone hacked it, And all of a sudden,
you have to have fifteen to twenty different passwords, and
you hope that your master password doesn't get messed up
because you need that password to keep track of all
the other passwords. That's and the level of complexity in
our lives is very different than it was twenty and
thirty years ago. I mean, you know, back in the day,
you just had junk mail. You had a pile of
junk mail, you went through and through it away. Now
you're stuck with some junk mail, which is most of
what comes to your mailbox. It's bills and junk mail,
but in your inbox. How many of you've run out
of room on your Gmail or email accounts anywhere, and
you have to go through and figure out how the
hell out I eradicate the past eight years of emails?
How do I do that? You click? Wanted to try
and click click, click click. Some email apps to let
you do more than that, But it's difficult, and that
level of complexity will be added to another layer of
complexity until somebody comes along and invents something that makes
this rather simple. I don't know if it's going to
be biometric. I mean a lot of your computers have
biometric centerm. Now I don't know what it will be.
Maybe it's DNA. Take a hair's follicle and you stick
it over scanner that's you for all of your passwords.
Then you steal someone's DNA, but you've gotta have two
factor authentication, So maybe it's a hair and an IRIS scan.
I don't know. But we've got much to talk about today.
We're gonna be talking about the governor of our state's legacy.
We've got because there's a lot of people that are
trying to write the history, even though we know it's
not true. We're gonna have to. We will address something
about Jimmy Carter. As much as there are many people
that are giving him great credibility and I as well,
they should in some ways, but we also need to
be honest about his accomplishments as well. In the National
Review did a brutal overview and it's almost cruel. But
I would say that Donald Trump, what he had to
say about Carter was quite kind. He said it on
true social We may get to that, but definitely Carter's legacy.
Some strange happenings with the weather. As beautiful as the
weather may be at the moment, it belies something that's
being predicted. I don't know how far will go, but
it could be a brutally cold January, quite rentry for
the Charlotte area and all the way into Raleigh and
even in eastern North Carolina. We'll see. And also Long
Leave Politics has come out with seven predictions for North Carolina.
Some of those will be interesting political ones.
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Speaker 2: A lot going on, As I mentioned before the break,
We're talking a little bit about Governor Cooper's legacy, the
Jimmy Carter things, some weather stuff, the predictions for North Carolina,
the Mike Johnson speaker race in the HB one visa program,
and the H one B visa program is the one.
I don't want to make light of people who have
strong opinions on that. It's just when I look at this,
it's it's like majoring in minor things. The H one
B visa program is not a minor, but the disagreements
on it really are. It's much ado about nothing. It's
mountains out of mole hills. It's important, but people's emotion
get so tied in. This is not the southern border,
This is not terrorists coming into the country. This is
not people committing crimes against the American public. This is
a work visa program that will be updated and changed.
We'll get into that because there's an excellent piece on
that that see who wrote that. Hey, I will get
to it. I can't see it right now, but it's
worth it. It's a good one, and I promise i'll
get through it now. I do want to get to
long Leaf politics first, and if you want to get
on the conversation, as I said, you folks are all okay,
blur Wait one was Nirvana and no it was blur
I guess the old thing was Blurke. Thank you, by
the way for setting me straight. Now over at long
Leaf politics. They're talking about the what's next now Governor Cooper.
There's Ford Porter, who has been Governor Cooper's go to
leftist consultant. And I want to go back to how
Cooper got to be governor. It's very the gravy train
for Democrats to become governors very lucrative. It's been very good.
It's been good for Cooper. It's not going to be
good for Josh Stein. And if you think about it,
Governor Cooper sat at the Attorney General's office forever Democrats going,
are you're ever going to run? Are you're ever going
to run? And they waited till they had a wounded
candidate because Cooper didn't. Cooper doesn't like to go up
against a formidable candidate. He likes to go up against
someone he really believes it's going to be easy to beat.
And when he beat McCrory, McCory was on the heels
of the House bill won the transgender issue way before
it has turned. I mean, if that were to happen today,
Governor Cooper would not have run against Governor McCrory. McCrory
would have probably won a second term. I mean, notwithstanding
the issue in northeastern North Carolina with a fishing community.
Notwithstanding the toll road issue, but the men and women's
bathroom issue is very different than it was when it
was first brought up. I mean, it was just an assale.
It was just an assault on and McCrory. He was
put in an awkward position by the legislature and Governor
Cooper kind of walked in. And then when he ran
for reelection, they had the cover of locking down everything
and they just lampooned how I mean, not how Weather.
They dan poomed Dan Forrest for unmasking and talking to people.
Now history is going to be kinder to Dan Forest.
It's not going to be remembered much. But he was right.
We shouldn't have locked down as much. But it elevated
the careers of Roy Cooper allowed him to go to
a second term. This isn't one of the least accomplished governors,
most accomplishment winning elections, least accomplished from actually doing things,
and they're trying to revise what he is and the
reason they're trying to revise what he is. Right now,
they're going to be poorted on thick Ford. Porter is
even Governor Cooper's kind of saying, look at me, Look
what I did. I was doing a great job as governor,
and as I was reading this, I thought, this is
kind of this revisionist history thing that we're trying to
act like we've done such a remarkable He wrote about
he wrote about him. He said, our state has come
a long way in eight years. Under Governor Cooper's leadership,
North Colna has become the best place on the planet
to do business. He wrote that about himself or his
team wrote it about him? Now is he about him? Then?
His chief consultant often a lot of crowing about who
deserves credit for economic gains. The fact is that Governor
Cooper came into office with a deliberate, intentional plan to
restore north Kin's reputation and make our state the epicenter
for high paying growth industries of the future. And it
has worked. Now. What Ford Porter fails to tell you
is that Governor Cooper didn't even sign a budget until
twenty twenty one. The first four years of his governorship,
he was worked around, he was put in the corner,
he was put in time out like a child by
the legislature. With Phil Berger, and they were able to
just get the budget through. In fact, the new tax rate,
the individual tax rate in North Coline is going to
go from four point five down to four point twenty
five this year, and the next year it's going to
go down another quarter points. So your income taxes are
coming down, not because of Governor Cooper the Democrats, mind you,
but because of the legislative leadership at the time. And
Governor Cooper was just he was kind of he's just
in quarter in time out, being a good, little irrelevant governor.
He had nothing to do with North Conna's roaring comeback,
very precious little, and he didn't even sign a budget
until the middle of the COVID pandemic. And he will
be remembered more for that than anything he had other
than maybe Medicaid expansion, a massive expansion of a government
program that is insolvent. So that's his legacy even though
they're Trump. But the reason they're trying to do this
it's not hard is because here wants some of the
predictions over at long Leaf Politics, and it's worth though
Andrew Dunn wrote it, so here are the bold and
not sole predictions. Roy Cooper will run for US Senate
somehow we're already reaching the end of us under Tom
Tillis's second term. The prevailing wisdom is that outgoing Governor
Cooper will challenge him for the seat in twenty twenty six.
Cooper certainly doesn't need to. He'll be nearly seventy years
old by that election day and just serve two pretty
successful from his perspective terms as governor. I just told
you that. But my gut says he'll run, not mine.
But the authors Cooper loves national politics too much and
has not had the chance to directly participate in it.
The author says, I think Cooper also values the chance
to stay at the head of the state Democratic Party.
For this prediction to be successful, Cooper will need to
announce his candidacy pretty quickly. Now, two things here on
this prediction. One, Tillis is much more vulnerable in a
Republican primary than I think against Cooper in a general butt.
Cooper does have a He's very well known, and he's
very well liked, mainly because people don't know anything about him.
He's kind of the states mister Rogers of politics comes
in Good Day boys and girls. He even has the
intonation of a mister Rogers. He speaks in a very
third grade level for everybody. It's not complicated. Every now
and then he gets mad at Republicans, but he sounds
like he's scolding them. But the issue for Cooper now
the under underside's the wrong word. Let me rephrase this
the other conventional wisdom, that is from friends I have
in circles near him, And again I do not know
this to be true. This was what was related to
me is that his wife would like some time away
from politics. He's been in politics the entirety since the
ninety two, eighty nine, ninety two somewhere there, and his
wife's kind of gone done. She'd like some time. Can't
say that we blame her. But taking a break he
would have about a year break. He'd be raising money
for a senator rate. So maybe the two years would
allow him that time away from politics to get back
into politics. Don't know. But that's the first prediction. So
what does that The first prediction leads us to the
second prediction that they make over at long Leaf, which
is that Tillis, for his part, has already kicked off
his reelection efforts with a high dollar fundraiser in DC.
I would not have been surprised if Tillis had decided
to retire from the Senate, but that does not appear
to be the case. The very online faction of the
Republican Party has identified Tillis as a target, and there
are already rumblings about who might pose a serious primary
challenging to the senior senator. Sitting Senator, don't think that'll happen.
And so you've got to remember, for as much as
you may think Tillis may have a challenge from the right,
who would it be. Who has the name ID, who
has the organizational structure, who has the money to challenge Tillis?
And that list is tiny. I mean right now, the Republicans,
though they've won a couple state level seats, not all
of them. In fact, they lost. They're actually down one.
Republicans underperformed relative to many parts of the nation. In
the Republican circles. I don't care what some people, my
several friends are like, No, we've done great. The Republicans
are doing great. They're doing they're they're mediocreing their way through.
But there there isn't really a name that you can
think now. Anything can change in the next year. But
I don't see any legislator challenging him. There's nobody from
the state level. I mean, you would have had someone
like how Weatherman is lieutenant governor or you or a
Dale follow up former treasurer, but I don't. I don't
see that happening. So Tillis is probably going to coast
because why the prediction is that Trump will endorse till
Us very early this cycle, preventing a challenge. Trump will
use the weight of his endorsement to extract loyalty from
Tillius and give Republicans a better chance to hold on
to the seat in the process. Now, from Trump's perspective,
if he can get Tillis in line, which till this
is kind of a you know, he's sent er right,
how far will Trump be able to pull him in line?
But that would be that would be politically in Tillis's
best interest to be MAGA heading forward, which would make
the race with Cooper fun. I think it would. The
other one is that Governor Josh Stein will veto fewer
than eight bills in twenty twenty five. That's an odd
prediction because you don't know how many bills of the
legislature is going to pass in which ones he would veto.
Cooper just annihilated the record for vetos in a gubernatorial term,
applying the stamp to a total of one hundred and
four bills over the course of eight years. That equates
to an average of thirteen vetos per year. The success
of those vetos was mixed. Cooper's last twenty nine veto's
were all overridden, but the forty seven before that were sustained.
Representing all the vetos from twenty nineteen through twenty twenty two,
twenty twenty five will also look like the beginning of
Cooper's term, more like the where there will be a
mix of vetos overridden and sustained. But Josh Stein said,
what will Josh Diin want to do? It will determine it.
I don't think he'll have as many vetos. I think
he's going to even though his I think his landings
are far more left than Cooper's. I think he wants
to be seen as someone who gets things done more
than Cooper did, and he's much more outspoken. So we
will see.
Speaker 1: All right, Hey, real quick, if you would like to
get your product or service in front of about ten
thousand people multiple times a day. Send me an email
at Pete at Thepetecleanershow dot com and ask me about advertising.
It's super affordable, it's baked into this podcast forever, and
podcasts have a higher conversion rate than other social media platforms,
making it the best bang.
Speaker 2: For your buck.
Speaker 1: Send me a message Pete at the peat calendarshow dot
com and I can show you how it works. Run
the numbers with you again. That's Pete at the Pete
Kallnersshow dot com.
Speaker 2: Uh well, some of the other predictions we were talking
about and that are being made by again, these are
just predictions. They are as meaningful as you know Usain
Kudzu will take over the state this coming year, or
that a unnamed storm will destroy Rawley this year. You
know these kind of you know, the liar's anonymous kind
of thing. Yeah, that's the ticket. So some other predictions,
but these are a lot of these are based in observations.
I do agree with some of these. That Stein. They're
saying the new governor will sign a budget into law.
He'll say it didn't go far enough, but I don't
think he wants the record that Cooper had about being
so obstinate Cooper. One thing about him that you know,
if you get to know him at all, is that
he really doesn't like Republicans at all. He doesn't like them.
He didn't like him in the nineties, he didn't like
him in the two thousands. He has a thin skin.
He criticize me. He doesn't unlike Trump, who you know,
taxes people. Cooper just stews on things. And as much
as he's likable from a public standpoint, he stews on
him and and he's he's he's very secretive that he
doesn't have emails that you can look at, he doesn't
have text messages that are available for public inspection. He's
been that way for two decades. And that's just the way.
I'm not casting aspersions, it's just the way he is.
Stein is much different. Stein is much more gregarious, much
more likely to say things. So moving forward on this,
one of the big predictions, and one of the biggest predictions,
is that Senator Berger from Greensborough the powerful, the probably
the single most powerful politician in all of Raleigh and
has been for a very long time, kind of since
the sunsetting of Mark Bass Knight and the the ironclad
Democrat hold on North Carolina politics. That that Mark Bass
Knight and Tony Rand and Jim Black had until Jim
Black went to prison was broken, and Berger's assent to
the pro tem who crafted years of budgets, who crafted
the income tax cuts. I think his goal was to
have North Carolina be a zero income tax state like
Tennessee and Florida wanted to follow suit. So what we've
seen is this ratchet down. They've had several opportunities to
do it, but he didn't quite force that in through
the Senate the House. It probably could have happened a
few times, but they didn't go that far. They did
go with the medicaid expansion, surprisingly and shockingly, but we
will see a state income tax that, you know, going
from four and a half to four point twenty five
next year goes to three point nine to nine. At
that rate, it'll be the end of my life before
the income tax goes away, it seems like. But and
who knows, maybe another group will come in and figure
that out and we can become because that would be
the next big change in the North Tolna business climate.
Would be a zero income tax state. It would be
an economic boom with respect not just to tourism but
to people moving here and building and building these fortune
five hundred companies. Anyway, back to the prediction, Senate President
pro Tim phil Berger has been in leadership even longer
than Speaker More was. Speaker More was your House leader
for the past decade. He kept saying he wouldn't do
another term. That he did and then he carved out
a congressional district for himself, ran for it. And you know,
there's many questions about his behavior, what he did, and
some of the court testimony that was against Speaker More,
if it was ever run in public, would be damning.
But he carved out a congressional district. One that congressional
district that he carved out for himself. But he's gone,
or will be shortly. He'll be heading to d C
where because he could do even more. I guess Berger,
since Republicans of Control have been setting the record for
the longest continuous term in that role, this could be
his last. Buy him at the helm of the State Senate.
This person from long leave politics thinks twenty twenty five
will be the year in which the rank and file
members of the General Assembly grow discontent with the way
things are operating in rollery Berger's post will be on
the shopping block rather than retire pursue higher office like more.
A lot of will think Burger will run for reelection
as a regular member in twenty six. That would be
a massive, massive shift, massive shift. Now the new lieutenant
governor another one that people you may not know the name.
A lot of people don't know her name is Rachel Hunt.
She's a devout lefty surprising. I was surprised that how
Weatherman lost that race of all the ones that I
thought had a shot, but it was the unbelievable Robinson,
the anti Robinson sentiment and the groups that did a
remarkable job of tagging people and connecting them to Robinson
that were like Dan Bishop and how Weatherman and Michelle Moore.
All these people were tied into Mark Robinson even though
they had nothing to do with Mark Robinson. But except
sharing the party label that they had, Trump was able
to overcome it. Those three weren't. But Rachel Hunt winning
that post. She wants a lot more attention. This is
an individual that will be I believe. I agree with
this prediction. She wants to be a high profile Democrat
right now. Lieutenant governor position in North Carolina is very weak.
It is constitutionally established as the president of the state Senate.
Over the last decade, lieutenant governors have regularly presided over
the Senate, but it has been exceedingly rare for there
to be a partisandifference. Now we have that, we have
a very left leaning Rachel Hunt presiding over the Senate
that is run by Phil Berger. That's where we find ourselves.
A lot of people predict that Lieutenant Governor Rachel Hunt
will use her position for a lot of rhetorical effect.
Other words, she wants to get more national attention. At
least once this year, Hunt will earn herself a national
headline for using her position over the Senate to blast
the Republicans. That's the prediction. I think it's an easy
I think that's a very easy one because Rachel Hunt
is someone who really she if she were in DC,
she would be a member of the squad. That's how
far left she really is politically. And I'm not None
of what I'm saying is intended to be mean or disrespectful.
I'm a conservative, conservative talk show host talk about conservative issues.
That's why I'm here. It's what I do, and I've
been that way for decades, even going back to college
days when I was managing a conservative newspaper in the
UNC system. So she is a devout lefty. She considers
herself very progressive, and she does want to make national
headlines because Josh Stein is going to be term limited
to eight to two terms if he can manage to
get reelected. So where does Rachel Hunt go from there?
Who wants to be known? Does she want to launch
yourself into national politics or does she just want to
be able to replace Stein in eight years if that's
the case, because Stein will be the presumptive nominee for
twenty or twenty thirty I get, or twenty twenty eight,
I guess. So that's where we find ourselves if you
have some opinions about what might take place seven oh four, five,
seven oh eleven, ten, Yours News Talk eleven ten ninety
nine three WBT, And you know, as I look for it,
I hate I hate prediction. I hate predictive politics. But
some people lend themselves to it. Some people lend themselves
well to predictive politics. You can kind of tell. You
can kind of tell by the way they conduct themselves.
So that's just the way it is right now though, WBT,
in collaboration with the Mecklenburg County Alcoholic Beverage Control Board,
is committed to amplifying community voices in providing hope and
resources in the mental and behavioral health domains. For the
month of December, we are navigating the holidays with Resilience.
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that one of the many ways that WBT continues to
be a part of the community and push for the
betterment of it. Now, when we get back from this break,
I don't know how much I want to delve into
it because it sounds like it's going to be negative.
I'm reminded after the passing of Jimmy Carter, and by
the way, Linda Lavin also passed away. Those who remember
the show Alice. She was a kind of a North Carolinian.
The last decades of her life, very active in the
Wilmington area, directing plays and being active. She's even in
a Netflix series right now that that can be seen.
But she passed away last night at eighty seven. But
on Carter's legacy, WBT, I think did a nice montage
about recognizing him. He received the Nobel Prize, but as
we've talked about last week, many Democrats do Obama received
the Nobel Peace Prize just for being elected. Carter is
recognized for a lot of his humanitarian work after he
was president, but it's easy to glossover. I've kind of
in that Mark Antony Julius Caesar moment where Antony recognizes
that Caesar was powerful and must be remembered a certain way.
You know. That's what twenty four is like. It's like
you're always out of breath, wasn't I just walked around
for a second and wanted to stretch my legs and
take a deep breath. Now, moving ahead, as we were
looking at some of the predictions, I think there's a
couple more predictions that go beyond North Carolina, and the
big one coming up today, well not today, but shortly
will be the reelection of Speaker Mike Johnson. Now many
of you who I don't know why I got out
of read so much, but so Mike Johnson is Speaker
of the House. Many on the MAGA right are upset
about this, and this is one of those issues that
I don't fully grasp. I get it. Look, I've been
around the conservative movement for decades, spoke at many a
tea party gathering, I wrote about this stuff. I have
seen it on the front lines. I've been on the
front lines of stopping forest annexation. I have been against
the erosion of property rights. I get all of it.
What I don't get is the hatred of one person.
And it's really it's kind of strange because he is
not anti Trump at all. I mean, Mike Johnson is
took over from Speaker McCarthy and was an air election
after days and days of going back and forth without
who could do it. But you've got to look at
You've got to get to two hundred and eighteen votes
to get anything done in the king Conquerors. Johnson's been
able to navigate those. You can't. It doesn't matter if
they were to elect Marjorie Taylor Green to the speakership tomorrow,
that doesn't mean she can corral two hundred and eighteen
votes on any given issue to push the agenda forward,
because the further right the speaker's position becomes, the less
likely that individual is to be able to get to
two hundred eighteen votes. It would be different if there
were two hundred and sixty Republican House members. There aren't.
It's a slim slim majority, and you would have to
play all sorts of parliamentary games to get to to
a majority. On any given day. You would have to
use tricks like waiting til Democrats aren't there. You would
have to use tricks, you know, you'd have to stack committees.
There was so much that would be unable to get done,
and maybe the American public would like that, but in
many ways, right now, what we want to see is
DC kind of undone. And if Johnson can't get to
two hundred eighteen, we can't start draining the swamp because
Trump's going to need an ally in the House to
get things through legislatively, to get it to the Senate
so that he can sign it into law. He can't
just lead because the one thing that would happen if
they were to get stymied in the House is it
would look like a dictatorial thing. So the political left
would love for the Republicans to get stranded on this one.
They've also got to certify the election for the president,
which means if it becomes a debate about who's going
to be the speaker, then Trump doesn't get certified as
the elected president. So there's so many things. The Democrats
are just sitting back and kind of wink wink, nudge nudging, saying,
look at them. They can't even get along with themselves.
They're playing homage to this kind of way of being
and they're enjoying it. Now. Ultimately, I think Johnson prevails.
Trump came out and joy hors Johnson for the speakership,
and people are screaming, how could he do that? Because
he knows he's pragmatic, he wants to get stuff done.
The only way to get stuff done is to have
a speaker that can get to two hundred and eighteen.
And the further right you go, the less likely you're
gonna get to two eighteen. You're not even gonna have
a speaker. And you can say, well, just the heck
with the Democrats, throw them all overboard. Okay, a lot
of them are left of left. But there's a handful
that are moderate, that are that are that are that
are questionable, that might even be salvageable, that might be
able to be turned to the right. But you can't
do it by being extremist. And so as as much
as I get why people want a head in that direction,
you have to be pragmatic enough to say, I want
to get stuff done. You know, would you rather be
right or would you rather get stuff done that you
agree with? And that's where we find ourselves on the
speaker Johnson stuff it's it isn't It is an odd place.
We'll probably talk about this later because there's some really
good opinions on that subject matter looking out right now now.
And before he went to the break, I louted and
by the way, it was special thanks to Mike Done.
He picked up on that Shakespearean chant right away. He
went right into Everybody remembers that line in high school,
friends of Romans, countryman, lend me your ears. They remember that.
They don't necessarily remember what the rest of the speech
was about. But I'll kind of frame it because we're
talking about Jimmy Carter and going to send some time
about the passing at one hundred the longest lived ex
president in the history of the country. Someone say the
most religious. I don't know about that, because Zachary Taylor's
pretty closed. He wouldn't be sworn in on his you know,
as inauguration day. Short lived president gets sick and dies,
wouldn't be sworn in on a Sunday. And he's a
very religious guy. But Carter is being remembered fondly. The
montage that WBT put together is quite nice. He's i think,
by every account that I've read and seen, as an individual,
he was probably one of the nicest people you could meet,
you know, the Georgia peanut farmer becomes governor, you know,
and becomes President of the United States. The country is
in horrific shape when he leaves, and his work subsequent
to being president that led to him getting a Nobel
Prize with Habitat for Humanity. He got into a lot
of foreign affair issues after his presidency. He was married
for seventy seven years. I think his wife, Roslyn died
last year. If I'm not mistaken, I'm not looking at
my computer right now. And in many ways the way
he's being remembered is very fond Lee. It's very kind.
Over at the National Review, they had some not as
many kind things to say about the ex president, and
and it just a history is it can be very
difficult to to kind of frame things correctly because history
can gloss over a lot, and it can also make
things I don't know. With Carter. I'm kind of torn
because some of what I'm about to read about Carter
is not friendly. I don't mean to be disrespectful. He's
going to lie it in the rotunda and be recognized
as it's almost a beatification process that we're seeing with him.
But here's some reality as well. And again you're going
to throw tomatoes to radio right now for those of
you who want to revel in Carter's you know, passing,
I mean in a good way. Prayers and thoughts for
his family obviously, and Trump said some very kind things.
But here's what the Review had to say. It's it's
a little bit brutal. So I'll just warn you Carter's
true legacy is one of economic misery at home and
embarrassment on the world stage. He left the country in
its weakest position of the post World War two era.
That is absolutely true. After being booted out of office
in landslide fashion. The self described citizen the world spent
the rest of his life meddling in US foreign policy
and working against the US and its allies in a
matter that could fairly be described as trees and it's
his obsessive hatred of Israel and pampaus belief that only
he could forge to Middle East peace led him to
be friend terrorists and laid out lash out at American
Jews who criticized it. That is true. He did. We
don't remember that, but he did. He was Buddy's foetograph
with many of these people who were ardent terrorists against
our country's interest. But we want to gloss over that
and what he did with the economy, economy and with
gas price. Remember that we were led to believe in
the late seventies that we were about to have no
more oil. It was you remember, there were people being
ration you could fill up your car like Monday, Wednesday
and Friday, or maybe Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. It was.
It was there was no more oil. We were going
to run out of energy. It was peak oil. It
was all these and and gas prices surged through the roof,
and it was a lot of the pun in The
Iranians rose to prominence in such a way that the
Russians invaded Afghanistan, which led to decades led to actually
us being there as well. So it was it was
rather disastrous. But his genteel mannerisms and the niceness with
which he approached things, the way he spoke, make you
forget all of that. They make you forget what was done.
That doesn't make him a horrible person. It just makes
him misguided. And I think there was more about him
from an international standpoint that was sorely misguided while he
meant well, and so's that's the nature of the imperfections
of human beings. I mean, he his his presidency led
to the Reagan Revolution. Don't forget that. The way he
left the country, he didn't leave it in better shape
at all. It was worse off by every measure from
I mean we left office, Inflation was at thirteen and
a half percent, interest rates were through the roof. You know,
I think Biden is the only one that could make
Carter look better by comparison.
Speaker 1: All right, that'll do it for this episode.
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