Speaker 1: And hello, welcome to the Big Podcast on this Thursday.
Today is the fifth day of March, Year of Our Lord,
twenty twenty six. My name is Tom Sullivan, and so
I'm minding my own business. We're putting the podcast together.
We've got great topics to go down. And in the
middle of all that, all of a sudden, there's a
news flash that comes out that says Christinome has been
fired as Homeland Security Secretary. I if you've listened to
this podcast, you know that I have been very disapoint
pointed in Christinome. I think she has failed so many times,
and it's so obvious to me. I don't understand why
the President picked her in the first place. You could
see what she was doing when she was governor of
South Dakota. She would take the entire tourism budget and
use it to produce commercials in which she was the
focus of the commercials. One of them she was a
plumber and she was fixing things. Another one she was
a dentist and she was for healthcare. And another she
had all these dress up roles and she would be
the star of all of these commercials. And you know,
they were basically saying come to South Dakota. Well, the
problem is is that the people of South Dakoma's South
Dakota's tax dollars were paying for all this, And I thought, wow,
she's And there were a number of occasions I could
I could regale you with about the fact that she
wanted to be the vice presidential pick for Donald Trump
two point zero. She did everything in her power to
be the vice presidential pick. And I'm sure she was
severely disappointed when Trump picked Jadie Vance. But she is looking.
I'm all for ambition. I think ambition in people, I
love it. I love ambitious people. But you've got to
be smart, and I don't think she is. I think
she's lacking not only smarts, but in addition to that,
she has no management skills. The stories about her belittling
her staff and talking down to them and treating them poorly,
We've all met those people. We have some of us
have worked for some of those people, and it's because
they don't know how to manage. So the President today, well,
I don't know what it is that he sees in her,
but he basically announced that she was no longer going
to be the Secretary of the Homeland Security Department of
Homeland Security, and that she was being replaced immediately. Well,
actually it's going to take place at the end of
the month, but the announcement was she's out, and Mark
Wayne Mullen, the Republican Senator from Oklahoma, has been nominated
by the President to be the next Homeland Security Secretary.
Now this isn't important. There's all kinds of wonderful jobs
in the cabinet, but this is important. This is about
keeping our country safe, and you want the best and
the brightest to do that. Now, I'll tell you Mark
Wayne Mullen. He's a good old boy. He's a good
old boy from Oakland, and he says what's on his mind.
He seems to be a very straight shooter. He seems
to be a guy that doesn't have a lot of
patients with people that are playing political games. He's very
successful in business. He started his own business, bought a
couple of other businesses. He's been financially successful in business.
And now he is going to be the next secretary
of the Department of Homeland Security. I'm not quite sure
where to start. The reaction to this has been huge.
The precipice of this, what broke the straw on this
story probably came to a head yesterday. She was Christinohan,
was testifying before a committee and they were asking her
various questions and I'll play I'll play a couple of
them from yesterday. This is Tom Tellis, senator from North
k who really just chewed her out during the hearing yesterday.
But it was it's been coming. I've been telling you
on this podcast for months that she doesn't she was
going to be the first one out. I'm surprised she
lasted this long. But here's Tom tell Us from the
hearing yesterday.
Speaker 2: Secretary. I read your book last week, and honestly, some
of the parts of it impressed me, but some of
it distresses me. And I'll give you a good example
of one that does the passage where you talk about
killing a dog that was fourteen months old. I trained dogs,
all right, And you are a farmer. You should know better.
You should know that if you're going out to a
hunting lodge and you're putting pheasants out and you're putting
dogs out, you don't take a puppy out there. A
fourteen month old dog is basically a teenager in dog years.
You decided to kill that dog because you had not
invested the appropriate time in training. And then you have
the audacity to go to a book and say it's
a leadership lesson about tough choices.
Speaker 1: It's in your book.
Speaker 2: We could play it if we had time.
Speaker 3: At that same lunch hour, you killed a goat, and
you killed the goat because you said it was behaving badly.
You are a farmer. You don't castraight a goat. They
behave badly. You should have probably done that before. But
my point is those are bad decisions made in the
heat of the moment, not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis.
I expect we're an exceptional nation, and one of the
reasons we're exceptional is we expect exceptional leadership. And you've
demonstrated anything but that.
Speaker 2: And the time that I've seen you responding to the
emergency in North Carolina and across the Southeast and acknowledging
when mistakes are made and speaking too soon for the
expedient of social.
Speaker 1: Media or whatever it is. I'll leave you with this misnome.
Speaker 2: I'm expecting answers to Charlotte's web I requested it in
a month ago.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's the senator from a stake that was damaged
heavily biased dorm and he's trying to get answers and
he hasn't. He hasn't obviously succeeded the whole idea. I
mean about management. Rodney Scott is the head of see
the Customs and Border Protection. He's twenty nine years experience
and he is the head of this CBP staff and
Christine Noman and her wink advisor, Corey Lewandowski were challenged
by him because they would say things and try to
do things, make decisions that they didn't have any knowledge of,
and he would try to give them some direction as
a guy with twenty nine years experience, and they did
everything according to the staff that they treated mister Scott
as with evil tactics that would negatively impact his family
and others. I mean, they're just they're nasty people, according
to the reporting. And so this is a guy who
really has the experience and they should have relied upon him,
but they tried to push him out and were unsuccessful
in doing that and not happy about it. And the
same reporting goes on about todd Lyons. Todd Lyons is
the acting director of ICE and she and Loandowski apparently
tried to push him out of the way. And the
man who's been there also similar decades of experience, so
not a good manager. So we got Tom Tellis chewing
her out. Senator Kennedy asked about this latest advertising This
may have been the crux, the latest advertising contract that
she signed for two hundred and twenty million dollars in
which the ads were going to feature her very much
like she was doing in South Dakota. Here's, Senator Kennedy, the.
Speaker 4: President approved ahead of time you spending two hundred and
twenty million dollars running tvaedgs across the country in which
you are featured prominently.
Speaker 5: Yes, sir, we went through the legal processes.
Speaker 1: Well, apparently the President did not know anything about this,
and it was just the latest of one after another
after another of her making up stuff He didn't know.
She all we went through the legal process hawking Jeffries,
as you could imagine, could not be happier. But let
me play what he said.
Speaker 6: Christin Nolan has been fired consistent with what we have
demanded on behalf of the American people. But let me
also make clear a change in personnel is not sufficient
we need a change in policy and that has to
be bold, dramatic, transformational, and meaningful.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's nice political words, and I expect him to
say something like that. But now the question is what
are they going to do about funding DHS. Noam is gone.
Now they're going to have to deal with somebody who
probably will be able to get some sort of agreement
with the Democrats on this. It'll be interesting to see
how Mark Wayne Mullen handles all of that. Peter Doocey
was over at the White House at his post for
Fox News and said he got text messages from people
within the White House.
Speaker 7: Straits as follows, it was time. Replacing Christy was based
on the culmination of her many unfortunate leadership mishaps, including
the fallout in Minnesota, the two undred million dollars ad campaign,
the allegations of infidelity, the mismanagement of her staff, and
are constant feuding with the heads of other agencies, including
CBP and ICE. Christy's drama sadly overshadowed and distracted from
the administration's extremely popular immigration agenda, which will continue full force,
and so so it sounds like the only thing that
was really saving Her job was that the border remained
pretty much close. They are rattling off a number of
very big stories that swirled up, but her job was safe.
There would be a little mini scandal. She was safe.
President trouble get asked about it. He was pleased, but
he was keeping tabs. And now she's gone.
Speaker 1: The list of bad management and scandals. Yeah. She testified
that the president knew about the budget for the ad campaign,
the two hundred and twenty million dollar ad campaign. Not true.
The President was not happy with the way that Ice
handled the deportations in Minneapolis, the ad, the ad campaign,
the rumors that have been other politic about she and
Corey Lowandowski have an intimate relationship as opposed to they're
both married to other people. The fact that she's been
buying airplanes, I mean multi multi million dollar private jets
for her personal use. And there was one yesterday that
came out and showed a photo of there was a big,
giant twin bed in the plane. And she was asked
about it at the hearing yesterday about why do you
need a jet with a big twin bed in the
back and with a bedroom, and she said that it's
being used for deportations. There's just multiple failures of leadership.
But the President, I don't know what he sees in her,
but he's kind of saving her a little bit. She
is now, he says, she's out as a Secretary of
Homeland Security, but she's going to be the head of
some new organization that is being started on Saturday called
the Shield of America. I don't know what that is.
It sounds kind of like the Board of Peace. I
don't know what it is. But she is going to
somehow head that up. Now, maybe she can do her
ads and play like she's a plumber or a dentist
or oh. Back to the airplanes. There was another little
episode where they flew in to someplace and the plane
had a mechanical so they needed to switch planes. Fine,
so they got Corey Lowandowski and Christinom off of plane
number one and brought them over to plane number two.
And the fact that in doing so somebody forgot Christinom's
favorite blanket, and also there was apparently a bag of
some kind and we don't know what was in that bag.
But Lowandowski fired the pilot on the spot. So they
get everything moved over and then file everything else. They
looked around and they go, well, how do we fly
back to Washington. Well, you just fired the pilot, Corey,
so they had nobody to fly in the back, so
he had to rehire the pilot. I mean, it's that
sort of juvenile management decisions they've been making that have
been just horrible.
Speaker 8: Carl Row weighs in, well, a pretty dramatic change. We
should not have been surprised about this ad campaign. When
she was the governor of South Dakota in twenty twenty,
there was some controversy about her taking the entire tourism
budget and put it behind a television campaign that featured
her inviting people to come to South Dakota and then
running it on Fox News and other conservative outlets, and
it was not a you know, there was a little
bit of controversy over that, and her advisor in that
situation was the same advisor apparently behind this ad campaign,
Corey Lewandowski. So important for the president to stop the
hemorrhaging it started when he sent Tom Homan to Minneapolis
to settle things, to take command of these enforcement efforts,
and smart to make the decision now and get it
done with.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I talked about her ad campaigns in South Dakota.
Long before she got to Washington. She was trying so
hard to get their Carl in fact continues on.
Speaker 8: With that, Yeah, that was a second ad campaign. The
first ad campaign was aimed at tourism, the second. You're right,
there was a second campaign that said move your businesses
to South Dakota. That followed the two. I think that
was like twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two and incidenttally.
Speaker 1: But the pal was the Federal Reserve. But you're right.
Speaker 8: The President doesn't like people who are wasting money, and
this was clearly a waste of money. But good that
he sent Tom Homan in. Senator Mullen is going to
be I think very well received by his colleagues in
the Senate confirmation. Well, it will be a little bit bumpy.
Should should move pretty fast. But notice today Hakeem Jeffries
is upping the ante. The Democrats have got to be
afraid that now that this change has been made, that
they are going to start there's going to be more
at tension to the fact that they're holding up the
approval of the DHS budget for an and ever growing
and ever changing lisht of demands with regard to policies
inside the agency. So when we get cramped at the
airports with TSA's fewer TSA screeners has happened to me
two nights ago, We're going to increasingly be turned into
the Democrats and saying why are you holding up funding
this important part of government. It should have been dealt
with earlier. You have the problem if she insisted on
approving all contracts over a very modest amount. So you
had a lot of complaints from areas like western North
Carolina that had suffered terrible natural disasters and not getting
the assistance they needed. You had Minneapolis where she shot
her mouth off pretty quickly claiming that a man who
was killed in an altercation with Ice agents was a terrorist,
and it turned out that wasn't the case, and the
administration got a black eye on that. So yeah, no,
I'm glad it happened. It would have been better had
it happened earlier. So now the question is Mark Wayne Mullen.
He is a successful businessman. He also apparently a champion
MMA fighter formerly undefeated. A mixed martial arts fighter, he
holds a black belt in jujitsu. He challenged the head
of the teamsters to a fight in a Senate hearing.
He's no, let me put it that way.
Speaker 1: This guy's a tough guy, and I kind of like
the idea of a tough guy being the head of DHS.
So the process from here is picked up by Carl Well.
Speaker 8: First of all, the governor of Oklahoma, I think, has
the authority to appoint a Senator who will serve until
the next election, so the Republicans won't be down one
vote in the Senate. But you know, it's a safe choice,
and he will be replaced by a Republican immediately by
the governor, and probably replaced by a Republican in the
election whenever.
Speaker 1: That is.
Speaker 8: Mullin was not up for election this year, so I
think at least two years left in his term, maybe four.
But also it shows that a president a sensitive to
getting these things done and out of the way before
we get deep into the summer and then into the fall.
If you're running a White House political operation, you want
to be able to control as much of the agenda
for the fall, for basically for August, September, October, and
the first few days in November as you possibly can,
so get things like this done and out of the
way sooner rather than later.
Speaker 1: Red Bear, who knows where all the bodies are buried
in politics in Washington, DC, also weighed in.
Speaker 9: So starw that brought the camel's back is accurate, because
I've talked to a couple of people already who say
this was it. This was what kind of pushed the
president over. There was a thought that he was not
going to move and make any moves in his cabinet
prior to the midterm, but this was too much. The
drama surrounding Christinome was accelerating, and it wasn't just the Minnesota.
It wasn't just the allegations of infidelity and.
Speaker 1: All of that.
Speaker 9: It was this answer really upset President Trump.
Speaker 1: And that was the answer she gave to John Kennedy
about the fact, well, you went through all the proper
legal steps and all this sort of stuff. So it
will be interesting to see what happens from here. I
don't know what the Shield of America is, but she's
going to be tossed a bone and that will give
her something to do up here. I wish they would
send her back to South Dakota. Very incompetent. So let's
get updated on what's going on with the war in Iran.
It's going to go into a period of where we're
just going to have daily updates about the latest. But
I want to bring up the status of the six
soldiers who were killed in the drone attack in Kuwait.
The first four names that we got was Sergeant Declin Cody,
Sergeant first Class Noah Tiagens, Sergeant first Class Nicole Aymore,
and Captain Cody Cork. They were the first four names,
and then today we got the other two, Major Jeffrey
O'Brien from Indianola, Iowa, and Chief Warrant Officer Robert Marzan
from Sacramento, California. Don't have I don't have words to
adequately say. How are our hearts? Are sad for the
for the families who thought that their loved ones were
just going to go over there and there they were
in a reserve unit uh and take care of their
obligation as members of the military. But sadly they're coming
back in a coffin. There will be a dignified transfer.
We don't know when. There was some rumor it might
be today, but so far we haven't heard that it's
going to take place. Today, so probably tomorrow at Dover
Air Force Base in Delaware. So again, our hearts, our prayers,
our thoughts to the six families of these brave soldiers
that died on the battlefield, in this case in Kuwait.
Don't have I don't have words to adequately say, how
are our hearts are sad for the for the families
who thought that their loved ones were just going to
go over there and there they were in a reserve
unit and take care of their obligation as members of
the military. But sadly they're coming back in a coffin.
There will be a dignified transfer. We don't know when.
There was some rumor it might be today, but so
far we haven't heard that it's going to take place today,
So probably tomorrow at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
So again, our hearts, our prayers, our thoughts to the
six families of these brave soldiers that died on the battlefield,
in this case in Kuwait. So the war continues, in fact,
another round of attacks again missiles and so forth. The
story is that again when the government broken into these
various provinces of Iran, they were all given they all
have their own military units, and they were all given
very specific constructions on what to do if they were attacked,
and that's why they are still out there all over
Iran doing what they were assigned to do if they
were attacked. So that's why not only they're shooting missiles
obviously at Israel, but they're also the various Arab nations
that are getting hit continued to get hit with missiles.
So this is far from over. And then the question
comes down to do we have Do we have enough
equipment inventory of the interceptors and all the other things.
We need enough weapons stockpile to keep going for quite
some time. General David Petraeus was asked about that. I
think it's very real, and it's great to see the
President bringing together to the industrial leaders who presumably are
going to be asked to ramp this up very very substantially.
To put some perspective here, last year, reportedly they were
somewhere around six hundred and twenty Patriot missile interceptors produced.
They're about two million per copy. Smaller numbers were produced
of the THAD interceptors SM six and these others that
are on ships and so forth. So we're talking about
a relatively finite number, and what you want to be
sure that you don't have to do, but we have
seen happen during this operation is to use a two
million dollar interceptor against the twenty thousand dollars Iranian shaheit.
By the way, Ukraine experienced this, a member of the
Iranians provided Shahads to Russia, even the ability to manufacture them.
The Russians have now done product improvement efforts there and
so Ukraine realize they can't use sophisticated missile interceptors for this,
and they developed a very comprehensive approach. There are guns,
there's electronic warfare, there are even drones that run into
the Iranian drones. Anything to prevent from having to use
again a Patriot or similar interceptor. So this is a
very important meeting. We need to ramp up very rapidly.
Reportedly the production of Patriot will go up to about
two thousand per year. That's still not a huge number
when you look at the numbers of missiles that have
been coming from on much less than number of drones.
There are some outliers. The Emirandis have invested very substantially,
not just in the interceptors, but also in the short
range air defense systems, and they have had quite a
successful rate of interceptors of drones without having to use missiles.
But you do not want to up again with this
cost effectiveness ratio of two million to twenty thousand. Yeah,
the interceptors cost two million and they blow up these uh,
these drones that cost twenty thousand dollars, and so that
that you no, you got it. You can't keep using
those interceptors at that rate. So let's get to something
you and I pay attention to, and that is gas
and oil. And if you look at the Strait of
horror moves, Iran Has says, we will let anybody through
the Strait of horror moves as long as you are
not affiliated with the United States, Israel. Was it else
that they were, Oh, Europe, any European ships. So I
guess the ships from China can go through. But Brian Sullivan,
my old palell from Fox Business, he's over at CNBC.
He's become quite the energy expert. And this is how
he described the whole situation with getting oil out of
the Mideast. Knock on effects.
Speaker 5: Listen, oil as oil is a bunch of different things,
but ship shipping attacked. There was a ship near Kuwait
that was on fire. There's some other ships that have
been hit. Here's the reality of where we are right now.
And I know we serve the investor. So I want
to quickly walk through Morgan Stanley with a note out
last night about sort of what are we looking for
if you're an investor. Well, they want clearer outlines of
policy objectives by the administration. Basically, what do we want
what would it take to end this war on either
our side or the Iranian side? Also watch iranium proxy activity.
Are they basically funding the Houthis to blow up ships
to the Red Sea whatever that may be.
Speaker 1: And then, of course, guys, that's straight of horm moves activity.
Speaker 5: I do have a little bit of good news for
you for oil and we can get to other stuff.
So the Saudi's of a pipeline that goes across their country. Okay,
they load most of their oil in the Persian Gulf,
which means you got to go through the strait of
horror moves. They've shipped a lot of that activity left
the Red Seas. On the left side of that screen,
a lot of ships there are and there's a lot
more than there were a couple of days ago, because
the ships are coming around to load it a new
port called Yanbu. Again, I know this is wonky stuff.
They can do about five million barrels of days. It's
not going to mitigate the twenty million or so that
go through the strait, but it will help a little bit.
Speaker 1: So that's my map.
Speaker 5: On the right straight or four moves left, you could
see a lot more shipspeacky. But the knock on effects
for everything else jet fuel, fertilizer, even potable drinking water. Yes,
what does that have to do and put a lot
because a lot of water is shipped in the Middle East,
they don't have a lot of potable drinking water, so
they actually ship a lot of water. There's things that
are yes, there's things that are starting to run out,
jet fuel storage, very specific for example. I'm just saying
this this. I know we're used to things being over
very quickly in the United States. More and more people
I talk to every day are worried that this may
not be over in the near term period of time,
and then we haven't maybe begun to feel some of
these effects.
Speaker 10: That's certainly the way our market is trading you know,
closed up again yesterday on the idea that this is
going to be over and done and kind of passed.
What would be the signs we would look to to
and what are the people who are saying this could
take longer?
Speaker 1: What are they pointing to? Apparently, oil refineries you can't,
and oil pumps you can't. You can't just flip them
on and flip them off, Brian explains it. It's going
to take a while to get the oil business back
on its feet like it was before the war tre gas.
Speaker 5: You look at some of these companies, Venture Global Stock
has swored a lot of the shipping company stock Sword Qatar,
number one natural gas producer.
Speaker 1: In the world, offline.
Speaker 5: It's going to take two weeks to get that refinery restarted,
and then maybe another two weeks to cool the gas.
So you're looking potessially a month with one fifth of
the world's natural gas.
Speaker 1: Right offline.
Speaker 5: It's possible that in the next few days a week
this continues, we could see more knock on effects. But
to your point, Becky, right now the US markets are
trading like everything's just fine, Joe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that it's gonna take some time. You can't
just flip the switch, and this is natural gas. One
fifth of the world's supply is basically shut down. But
that was from this morning. But as the markets went
back to work today, everything took a pretty good dive again,
so way up or way down today. We went down
seven hundred and eighty four on the Dow to forty
seven thousand and nine fifty four, the SMP down thirty eight,
the Nasdaq down fifty eight, Gold down forty five, I'm sorry,
forty four dollars to five thousand and ninety and oil
just keeps going higher. It's trading right now up four dollars,
up to seventy nine dollars and some change for one
barrel of oil. It was over eighty during the intra
day trading. So we're not done. There's a lot more
war to be taken care of here before everything comes
back to wherever we were before the war started. So
that's it for today again. Enormous gratitude to the six
soldiers who gave their lives, Sergeant Decland Cody, Sergeant Noah Teaching,
Sergeant Nicole Moore, Captain Cody Cork and Major Jeffrey O'Brien,
and Chief Warren Officer Robert Marzon. May they rest in peace.
Thank you for coming by. We will be back again
tomorrow and I hope to see you then