Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
My friend Tom Kranewitter, who youhear on this show from time to time,
had an extra ticket to see BrittFloyd at Red Rocks last night.
And I don't often go to concertswhen I got worked the next day,
but love hanging out with Tom,and I actually saw a Pink Floyd live
in a give or take a year, I guess nineteen eighty four approximately.
(00:22):
I think it was the Final Cuttour, which is not my favorite Pink
Floyd album by a long way.But anyway, this band has an amazing
reputation as a tribute band, andwe went and saw them. They really
do sound like Pink Floyd. Andthey played the beginning, they played a
lot of stuff from the Division Bellbecause this is thirty years since the release
(00:42):
of that album, and then theyplayed stuff from Animals and Dark Side of
the Moon and Wish You Were Herein the Wall and including another Brick in
the wallpart too that includes we Don'tNeed No Education. And they had a
choir of kids from Colorado. Ithink it's called something like Young Colorado Voices,
something like that. All you know, maybe thirty kids in red polo
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shirts, young kids, young kidson stage singing that chorus and they were
dancing around and having so much fun, and it was it was a really
good show. And I posted onmy blog if you want to go check
it out at Rosskimminsky dot com andthe TGIF blogcast. It says I put
a short video it's probably two minutes, just a segment of that song from
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last night with the Colorado Kids onstage with the band and it was just
so much fun. I left alittle bit before the end of the show,
so I could, you know,beat the rush, because I get
up pretty early. But you know, I caught probably ninety percent of the
show. I didn't leave very early, and I got home, got to
(01:49):
bed around eleven thirty. And Imentioned that for a reason because then I
got up at five because I hada thing to do. And so here's
the thing, and this is thepart where I'm a little bit, a
little bit proud of myself. Sowhen we got back from our road trip,
when christ and I got back,we found that the clothes dryer wasn't
working, and in particular, itwasn't heating right. It would go on
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and the whatever, the drum wouldwould spin and we'd all think, you
know, it would seem like it'sworking, except that it wasn't heating up,
so the clothes weren't getting dry.And this was the day before yesterday,
right, this is when Wednesday afternoonevening. And partly because I like
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to be handy and I take greatpride in being handy and doing things myself,
and partly because I'm cheap, andthe idea of spending two or three
hundred dollars to have somebody come fixa dryer that's probably only worth three hundred
dollars at this point, that justdidn't sit well with me. So I
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went online and I looked up aYouTube video what to do if your dryer
isn't heating. What to do ifin whatever brand of dryer I have,
I forget Ken Moore or something,you know, what to do if you're
ken More dryers and heating. Ifound a two minute video and I watched
it, and it showed some thingsto test with an ome meter to test
resistance, to see if some particularelectrical parts were working the way they were
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supposed to work. So I bustedout one of my multimeters, because I
do have a lot of the electronictoys. I took the I took the
top off the dryer, took theback off the dryer, got in there
with the OH meter and figured outwhat the broken part was, and I,
you know, had to take somethings out, and my you know,
I got real dirty and all.But because there's all kinds of black
sood in there anyway, I don'tknow if that there should be, but
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I this is just what an amazingworld we live in. Okay. So
it's Wednesday, maybe seven or eightpm, and I diagnose the broken dryer,
and I figure out what part isbroken, and it turns out to
be the actual heating element, notany of the fuses or the thermostats or
(04:06):
any of that. It's the actualheating coil is physically broken. There's a
physical break in it. And soI go look up the model of my
dryer. I go online to theGoogle machine. I search for heating coil
for this dryer model number. Ifind it on Amazon for seventeen dollars and
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forty nine cent with delivery the nextday. So we got the twenty seven
cent communist delivery tax here in Coloradoplus tax. So I have the part
delivered the next day for just undertwenty dollars. And this morning I got
up at five and installed the newpart and put it all back together,
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and the dryer is working right now. And so I'm very proud of myself
for being able to fix a dryerway outside on my use ual skill set.
But all but separate from you know, me dislocating a shoulder by patting
myself on the back so hard.What an amazing thing that we live in
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a time and in a place whereyou can find some I'm not gonna call
it an obscure part, but youknow, a random little part from a
dryer, and you can order itonline and have it delivered to your house
the next day for less than twentybucks including the part. I don't just
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mean the delivery for the whole thingwas less than twenty bucks to get the
part to my house in twenty fourhours. Is that not a freaking miracle
of modern logistics? Is that notlike all these people Bemoan folks like Bill
Gates or Jeff Bezos, for allthe money they've got. I mean,
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do think about how much Jeff Bezos, by I am not being sarcastic here,
think about how much Jeff Bezos hasdone for me and every single person
like me who needed a thing,or even just wanted a thing. Maybe
you didn't even need it, maybeyou just wanted it. To be able
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to get that thing delivered to yourhome in one or two days at a
low price. It's a miracle.And all those people deserve all the money
they have. And every time aliberal complains about how much money the billionaires
have, I mean the billionaires whoearned their money, not the ones who
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inherited it. I mean, that'sokay too, but I don't really respect
that the same way. I justthink, you know, what have you
ever done? You complaining liberal?You're just a little jealous, aren't you.
All Right, one quick thing,I'm not sure that I made this
mistake yesterday, But on the possibilitythat I made this mistake yesterday, I'm
(07:06):
going to offer a maybe correction becauseI don't remember just how I said it.
But when we were talking about DDay yesterday and I mentioned a CNN
article about how this might be thelast major meaning the every five year D
Day celebrations that will still have anyliving D Day veterans in attendance, CNN
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said it might be because right now, the youngest D Day veteran is around
ninety six, So in five moreyears, the youngest D Day veteran will
be one hundred and one. Willany of them go to and how many
of them will still be around?Right? Will they go? So?
Anyway, when we were talking aboutthis yesterday, I dropped the number three
(07:51):
thousand on you, and I don'tremember if I said that there are three
thousand World War two vets still abecause if I said that, that would
be wrong. There's somewhere in theneighborhood of one hundred thousand. The three
thousand number somewhere in the neighborhood.Don't really know is the number of D
Day veterans still alive. So Idon't know for sure if I said that
(08:16):
wrong yesterday, but I did wantto just make sure I got that right
when we come back. Governor Polusdid something yesterday that leaves me quite disappointed.
I emailed him about it yesterday afternoonand he replied and told me I
can share his reply on the air, and I will do so. Right
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after this, we will have LaurenBobert joining me in studio, congresswoman representing
Colorado's third congressional district running for theRepublican nomination now in the fourth Congressional District.
She just sent me a text sayingI should be there just a few
minutes before we go on air.I was trying to get there earlier but
ran into my neighbor and he wastelling me that his mom passed, and
so I spent more time in thatconversation. Then anticipated all right, that's
(09:01):
fine, Hopefully she will be hereon time. So yesterday we had a
brief conversation with Sage No Auman fromColorado Voters First, and they are the
group that will be bringing a ballotmeasure. It'll be Initiative three to ten
to have ranked choice voting in thestate of Colorado. So I just I
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want to separate two things here,as we did in that conversation yesterday,
but just to make sure we're allon the same page. So what I'm
talking about today is not about whetheryou do or don't support ranked choice voting.
We will have plenty of time totalk about that before we have the
opportunity to vote on this in November, assuming they get the ballot measure on
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the ballot. What we're talking aboutis political shenanigans. Ranked cho voting,
were it to pass, would likelyshift power away from the furthest fringes of
both parties. Again, I'm notgoing to get into the details of how
it works and all that. Willdo that another time. But you would
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generally expect with ranked choice voting thatthe most conservative Republicans who might win now
wouldn't win under that system, andthe most liberal, most progressive Democrats also
who might win now, probably wouldn'twin under that system. So the kind
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of wing nuts on both sides don'tlike the idea of ranked choice voting.
And so there was an election reformbill that went through the state legislature,
and just at the end of thesession before it was voted on, the
leftist member of the state legislature EmilySerota, added an amendment to it that,
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as I read in news reports,was brought to the floor, explained,
voted on, and passed in aboutone minute. So they were clearly
intentionally hiding it from everybody and notgiving people a chance to understand what it
was about. People figured out whatit was about, and what it was
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about is trying to make it sothat if ranked choice voting passes, it
will not be able to actually beimplemented. They were trying to preemptively thwart
what they think may end up beingthe will of the people. And again,
I am not sitting here to discusswith you the merits or demerits of
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ranked choice voting. Right now,I am talking about this disgusting, dirty
trick by Emily's Serrata and whoever abeddedher to put something into a bill at
the last minute in order to,as I said, preemptively try to prevent
a future vote representing the will ofthe people from being able to be implemented.
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So we were talking yesterday about howwe are hoping that Governor Polis would
veto the bill. Yesterday it wasannounced that he signed the bill, and
he put out a signing statement thatwent along with it. But you can
read that. You can read thatsigning statement on my website. Maybe I'll
share a moment of it with youif I have time here. But I
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emailed Governor Polis yesterday and I said, why did you sign this? Right?
This is bad. The underlying billitself is pretty basic and, as
Sage Noawman said yesterday, not particularlycontroversial, just some tweaks to election stuff.
It's a bipartisan bill, is nobig deal. But they added this
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poison pill to it. So Iasked, Jared, why did you sign
it? And he said, andI have his permission to quote him,
we got agreement of Republican and Democraticleadership to implement ranked choice voting if it
passes, and to ignore this.And what I said to him, and
what I'm saying to you, isthat's nonsense. Governor Polis either got played
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or willingly went along. I don'tknow which I want. On the one
hand, I want to think hegot played because I think but I also
think he's too smart to believe thisRepublican leadership barely matters Democratic leadership in this
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state. Do you think they're actuallygonna abide by an agreement if they think
that this thing that passes is goingto take away some of their power?
And do you think they're gonna abideby an agreement with a term limited lame
duck governor. No, of coursenot. And this is nonsense. And
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Polis said in his signing statement,I'm signing the bill today because of these,
you know what he calls critical provisionsfor the twenty twenty four election.
He said, I don't support languageadded in the final days of the session
designed to frustrate the will of thepeople should voters approve ranked choice voting.
He said, I find those provisionsto be unconstitutional, and he explains why.
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So basically, what Poulus is sayingis, look, he thinks that
the stuff that was in the billthat is designed to stop ranked choice voting
if the people vote for it,is unconstitutional. And he says he has
an agreement from leadership to not tryto enforce it, but they don't need
to try to enforce it. Someleft wing outside group, maybe at the
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behest of leftists in the state legislature, who will pretend, oh, hey,
it's not us. Some left wingoutside group will say sue saying,
look, it's the law. Youhave to do ab CD and you know,
five years of ten years of stuffbefore you can implement ranked choice voting.
And this will be tied up incourts for years longer than it needed
to be. And again, Ithink Governor Polis is too smart to actually
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believe what he told me. Ijust look, I just don't believe it.
I don't believe it. I'm verydisappointed by it. I think he's
probably right that this stuff is unconstitutional. I think also that a voter of
the people will supersede this stuff,and I think a judge would probably rule
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that this stuff that was in thebill, you know, has to be
tossed out because of the will ofthe people says we want ranked choice voting
now. If that passes, butit could still tie it up in court
for years, and so, youknow, I'm very disappointed in Governor Polis
signing that thing, and I'm verydisappointed that he essentially gave Emily Sarota and
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the other low life grifters in theDemocratic Party, dirty tricksters, that he
gave them a win that they didn'tdeserve. Both my parents are doctors.
I didn't know what I was goingto do when I was growing up.
When I was in college for alittle while I was pre med, I
didn't really want to be a doctor. You need to have a certain desire
to help people that I do nothave. And luckily I found my way
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into a different career that I endedup enjoying. But at the time,
I didn't seemed like there was ashortage of doctors. There was no real
talk about that kind of thing inthe nineteen eighties about a shortage of doctors.
But it's pretty different now in healthcarebroadly. In fact, I saw
an article this morning about the shortageof nurses, shortage of all kinds of
things. But we're going to talkmostly about physicians today and joining us to
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talk about how we can try toaddress America's doctor shortage. Jonathan Wolfson is
the chief Legal Officer and Policy directorat the Cicero Institute. Previously, he
was the head of the US Departmentof Labour's Policy Office during the Trump administration.
Jonathan, Welcome to KOWA. It'sgood to have you, Ross,
(16:41):
Thanks for having me. It's apleasure to be here. So one thing
before we talk about doctors. I'man econ nerd, and I'm wondering what
you won the Olin Prize for atWashington University of Saint Louis. So I
did a research paper when I wasthere on the decisions of women to stay
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in the labor force or not basedon payroll taxes. And so I did
that project and did some regression analysisand some legal analysis and put those things
all together. And you know,as we econ nerds likes to do,
sometimes you get some fascinating results.And I was privileged enough to have some
fascinating results out of that paper.All right, Wait, so I'm still
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interested. So were the what werethe fascinating results and were they replicable?
So the results were that the becauseof the way the payroll tax is set
up as being a taxes on individualsversus the income tax being on household the
fact that a high income a highincome household would see a increase in their
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marginal tax for the second earner,which in most households tends to be the
wife, meant that for families whothe husband was arny in excess to the
payroll tax, having kids and havingat us who earn more than the payre
attacks and the same disincentive effects forthe life to be in the labor force.
And so you know, there's somepositive results of that. Means there's
probably a lot more volunteering and otherthings and benefits we get for society.
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But if you're trying to figure outwhy certain people aren't in the labor force,
taxes should be a part of thatconversation. Yeah, okay, that
makes sense. I think. Ithink it seems like common sense to many
people that if you tax something,you get less of it, right,
So you tax work and you getless work. That doesn't seem like too
difficult. I don't mean your studyisn't interesting. I mean, I mean,
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just conceptually, it's funny that somepeople might be surprised by the results
of your study. I think that'sright. I think that you know,
when we create certain taxes, sometimeswe don't think about all the downstream effects
that they have, And unfortunately thathappens far too often in policy making.
People think about the immediate effects,or not even the effects at all.
(18:55):
They just think about the benefits theythink are going to common, not any
of the potential disadvantage. Yeah,that's why I tell my listeners all the
time to go read their bostiacht andhopefully I'm the only talk show host you
have ever heard say that. So, speaking of disincentives, you wrote a
piece for the Wall Street Journal aboutAmerica's doctor shortage, and before we get
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into what you mentioned is one particularway to address it, I wonder if
you could describe the scale of theproblem a little bit. Yeah, so,
the United States is facing a shortageof about one hundred to two hundred
thousand doctors over the next decade.This problem talk about incentive effects. In
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the nineteen nineties, there was aconcern about potentially having too many doctors,
and so there was a concerted effortto limit the funding for residencies that are
the training that doctors have to dobetween medical school and when they get their
license, to limit the funding thatwas going to be spent on that from
a national level, and they effectivelycap that funding in the nineteen nineties.
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And now here we are, youknow, thirty years later, and we're
saying, why do we have notenough doctors to meet the needs of all
the patients in America? You know, Colorado's projected to be about twenty five
hundred doctors short by the end ofthis decade. And part of the reason
is that we're not churning out enoughfolks coming through the residency pipeline. And
so that's that's the cause of youknow, some of the cause of the
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problems. But there's you know,obviously some immediate consequences of people across the
country and across Colorado who don't haveaccess to care, or they call and
the doctor says, yeah, wecan meet you in three months, get
on the gain on the calendar,or folks who are driving hundreds of miles
for an OV visit means they're havingto schedule of C section that they may
have wanted to not have to scheduletheir CE section for. So these consequences
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are facing lots of people, andthat's really the reason that folks across the
country are talking about the position shortage. As you mentioned at the top of
the piece, there is obviously ashortage in a lot of healthcare spaces across
the board, and this just meanspatients are not getting the care that they
need. We've got an aging populationthat is not how here than it used
to be, and folks as theyage tend to use more healthcare resources.
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Mean that we're just going to seethis shortened e exacerbated in the years to
come. I can think of alot of reasons that somebody might not want
to become a doctor, and justyou know, for the record for listeners,
I can also think of lots ofreasons why people would want to be
doctors. Right It's it's tremendous,what a tremendous thing to do and help
people and save lives and all that. But right now we're talking about the
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shortage. So as far as thatI can think of plenty of reasons.
It takes an incredibly long time,although it always did. It's very expensive.
It's more expensive than it ever hasbeen to become a doctor. But
it's always been pretty expensive, andit's always taken a long time, So
there must be something else going on, and so this is what I want
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to ask you about. So amongthose other things, I can imagine,
it's just not very much fun anymore. So, for example, Jonathan,
when I was thinking about possibly becominga doctor, it was just the beginning
of the rise of HMOs, andone of the things I thought to myself
was, I would not be avery good employee of an insurance company,
and I do not want to gointo healthcare to become an employee of an
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insurance company. And gosh, it'sinfinitely worse now than it was in the
early days of HMO. So I'vetalked enough here. What do you think
are the reasons that there is sucha shortage of doctors. So there's a
few reasons. There's obviously the onesyou mentioned. People don't necessarily want to
go into the profession, or theyare choosing to get out sooner than they
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otherwise were getting out because of thepressures that are on them. The practice
has changed in some ways. Also, there's a lot of hospital validation,
hospital buying up practices that used tobe if you owned a if you were
a doctor, you probably were alsoa small business owner. Now a lot
of them are just employees and bighospital systems or insurance companies. To your
point, but a chege. Partof the problem is just the supply of
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folks coming out of school who arelegally allowed the practice is limited, and
as I said earlier, it's becausewe've limited the funding that we provide as
a country for post medical school trainingor residency, and so those numbers have
not changed over time, and theyalso haven't moved across the country since the
nineteen ninety So even though Colorado hasgained a lot of population since the nineties,
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the residency slots Colorado has are thosethat were allocated in nineteen nineties,
and so it just reduces the numberof folks who are even coming out with
the training they need to be ableto get licensed. And so that's why
we say, why should we requiredoctors trained and practicing around the world to
repeat that residency and take a slotthat somebody in the United States come out
of medical school is competing for andwhy are we going to make them do
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that? Why don't we say,hey, if you're a great doctor practicing
outside the United States, you mighteven work on professional athletes or on some
of the top level people in yourcountry. Is there a way that we
can get you to come and workat the hospitals, work with the private
practices in Colorado in other states withouthaving to repeat that residency training that for
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most people end up being pretty redundant. There might be one or two things
they're learning, but it doesn't takethem three to seven years to learn the
handful of things that they need todo to get integrated in our practice.
And that's what we've seen six statesaround the country do, and we're excited
to see more states starting to thinkabout this opportunity. And that was a
great opportunity for me to get totalk about some of these states in the
Weal Street Journal. So essentially,what you're talking about is a form of
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licensing reciprocity is except normally we talkabout that as reciprocity between states, by
which, for listeners, what Imean is if you have a license to
do X in some state, thenthere can be other states that we'll say
we'll accept that license and you don'tneed to come do it here. Again,
similarly to for example, if youhave a Colorado concealed carry permit,
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you can use that to carry concealedin some other states. It's a form
of reciprocity. You're talking about internationalreciprocity, and I think it's an awesome
idea. What I wonder about ispushback, because there's always these fistoms that
want to protect themselves and always saythey're going to make up stories like oh,
people are going to die or whatever. So what are you hearing in
(25:12):
terms of pushback from exactly where youwould expect it from. Yeah, so
the sister is too. We havethe privilege of working with legislators and other
government leaders in the states around thecountry, and one of the things we
commonly hear is that same or brainyou're talking about. People are concerned about
patient safety, and they absolutely shouldbe concerned about patient safety, But there's
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no evidence that indicates that these doctorswho have been practicing for a number of
years around the world, we're ableto pass all the same exams, we're
able to get through the medical Board'sevaluation process, but all they don't have
is a residency are any less capableof providing care than the wonderful doctors that
are treating Americans every day. Andone thing that we put in our model
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legislation and that most of the stateshave included in the bills that they path
is a sponsorship pathway that explicitly requiresthe doctor to be sponsored by a healthcare
facility and to work directly with alicensed doctor in the state. So they
had some mentorships, if they havesomebody else checking their credentials, somebody else
checking to make sure the way theypractice medicine aligns with the way that doctors
(26:18):
in that state had been required topractice under the standard of practice in that
state. And so we think thatthis allows us to get a lot more
doctors. There's doctors all over theworld who are getting paid significantly less than
they would get paid maybe to theUnited States, and so there's a financial
incentive for them to move here.And there are patients desperate for care in
America who could absolutely use their services. We're talking with Jonathan Wilson from the
(26:42):
Cicero Institute. He also used tohead the US Department of Labour's Policy office
during the Trump administration. So justlet me just restate this and make sure
I'm understanding it, because what you'reproposing is actually a little bit less radical
than I had thought, and Ithink that should make it easier for us
a lot of people to swallow.But you're not saying that American states should
(27:06):
or are accepting foreign medical registrations asit as a full reciprocity for here.
What you're saying is that a certainlevel of experience overseas in medicine should be
able to substitute for the residency requirementhere, but still they would need to
(27:29):
take the medical boards and whatever othertests and the rest of the certification process.
Do I have that right now?That's exactly right, Ross. I
think that we've created really good systemsto ensure that we've got doctors who have
learned the right things, who areable to touch the patients and practice in
the right way. But there's nota good argument that I've heard yet from
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somebody explains to me why a residencyin London is so different from a residency
in them or that that doctor can'ttake a few additional courses with the practice
that they work with in Colorado andbe able to treat patients in Colorado in
just the same way. In fact, there's doctors all over the world who
some of the pro athletes go to. There's a surgeon, an orthopedic surgeon
(28:15):
in Finland who treats all the professionalskiers around the world. But the story
I tell people all the time isthat the USK team wanted to hire him
to come and be the ski teamsurgeon for the US Ski team. He
would have to repeat residency in orderto get licensed in the United States,
and that doesn't make a lot ofsense to me. It certainly doesn't fascinating
all around. Jonathan. I appreciateyour time, and I appreciate your engaging
(28:41):
with me on the economic nerdiness beforewe talked about this stuff, because that's
where my heart is always a lotof fun ross And you know, there's
some legislation that some legislators proposed inColorado in the past a couple of years
ago that requires the Medical Board tothink about this. But I think that
it's time for Colorado and other statesthroughund the country to look more closely and
(29:02):
figure out how they can increase thesepathways sooner read than later, I hope,
So I hope you're right. There. We have one of the worst
state governments in the country at thispoint. We have one of the worst
state legislatures in the country at thispoint. So I'm not optimist. I'm
not ever optimistic about anything good beingdone here, Jonathan. Whenever the legislature
is in session, it's not yearround here. Whenever the legislature is in
(29:22):
session, my thought in my headis what are they going to do to
me today, not what are theygoing to do for us? So don't
hold your breath. Well, wecan all hope, right, we can
all hope. Jonathan Wolfson is chieflegal Officer and policy director at the Cicero
Institute. That is Cicero Institute dotorg to learn more. Thanks for being
(29:44):
here, Jonathan. We'll do itagain. Thanks so much. Ross.
All right, Okay, that wasa lot of fun. All right,
let me share a couple other quickstories with you, and don't forget if
all those according to plan. We'regonna have Lauren Bobert joining me in studio
in about forty five minutes, sofingers crossed that she gets here on time.
Last text messages message that she thoughtshe would be here on time.
(30:07):
Let me share a couple stories withyou. So this is from the New
York Post, and one part ofthis story is a little bit interesting,
and another part of the story isreally interesting. So again, headline from
the New York Post. Baggage handlerissues warning to passengers who tie ribbons to
their suitcases. Now, I thoughtthat the issue was gonna be that,
(30:29):
So let me just back up.You know what I'm talking about, right,
You travel, and lots of peopleare traveling these days, and lots
of people have suitcases that look prettysimilar to each other, right, especially
the black ones and the gray ones. Some people have wild colors. It
makes it easy to find. Butfor folks who have suitcases that are reasonably
likely to look like other people's suitcases, sometimes you will tie a little something
to the handle that it makes itidentifiable, not just to you, but
(30:52):
to other people. Right, ifyou tie a I don't know, Broncos
colored thing around the handle, you'llrecognize that's yours. And somebody else who
the suitcase that looks like yours butdoesn't have that ribbon, we'll say,
oh, that one's not mine.It's got the Broncos thing there, Right,
And I thought the story was gonnabe that the ribbons would get caught
in the machines. But that's actuallyapparently not the issue. The issue is
(31:12):
that these machines get scanned and youmay notice, and you should be careful
with this right or just be diligentabout this. When you travel, typically
they put that big sticker around thehandle that says where your luggage is going.
But they also put this small stickerit's like an inch and a half
long and maybe a half an inchat most tall, and they slap that
(31:36):
on the suitcase and that's like abackup, a backup sticker in case something
happens to the big one. Andwhat you want to do when you're done
with a trip is take those smallstickers off. You don't want to leave
the small stickers on your suitcase becausethat could confuse the system. But in
any case, these things need tobe scanned for the automated baggage systems to
(31:56):
get your bag where it needs togo. And the issue here is that
when you put these ribbons on thehandle of your suitcase, if you're putting
them on the same handle that's nearwhere either the small sticker or especially where
the big sticker goes, then youwill end up potentially causing your bag to
(32:19):
need manual handling because it'll fail theautomated scan because the ribbon's going to get
in the way of the scanner.And so that's what this person is saying
is if you put the ribbon on, you need to be a little careful
because you may end up causing yourbag to get pulled to go through manual
scan and then it might not makethe flight, and then it might you
might end up not having your luggage. So there his advice is essentially,
(32:44):
if you're gonna put some kind ofidentifying little ribbon there, try to make
sure that you do it in away that doesn't block the stickers. Now
that's interesting enough. But here's theother thing that This is the part of
the story that I just loved.Another again, this is from New York
Post nypost dot com. Another reasonmany people have their bags pulled is because
they have mars zipan, also knownas almond candy dough, packed inside their
(33:09):
suitcases. This luggage expert who theirquoting, said, don't ever pack marzipan
in your luggage. It has thesame density as some explosives. So your
bag will be removed and you willbe called from the plane for a bag
search. So there you go.Now, I will just add to that
(33:31):
nobody should ever have Marzapan in theirluggage anyway, for the very very simple
reason that Marzapan is gross. Thanksfor spending some time with me. I'm
feeling very proud of myself because Ifixed my clothes dryer. Yes, yes,
I won't tell you the story again, but I got up at five
(33:52):
in the morning and replaced a partthat arrived by Amazon Delivery after just twenty
four hours after ordering at The partarrived while I was at Red Rocks last
night watching the Britt Floyd concert.I put a little two minute clip did
you watch it? Dragon? Iput a little two minute clip up.
I've not seen it yet, okay, And it's Britt Floyd, this Pink
Floyd tribute band. So I don'tthink this can count as in my question
(34:16):
that I asked from time to timeof what's the longest time period you've ever
gone between seeing the same band twice? Because I saw Pink Floyd in the
eighties and now Britt Floyd. Butit's not the same. It's just it
doesn't count. But it is fortyyears between seeing Pink Floyd music live in
concert, I will say, butstill for me, the record remains remains
(34:37):
ac DC seeing them live at MadisonSquare Garden in New York City somewhere around
nineteen eighty four or nineteen eighty five, and then seeing them again at the
Pepsi Center a few years ago beforeit was before it was Ballerina, so
some years ago. That's still myrecord. Anyway, a really fun show,
and they had a chorus of Coloradokids I think they're called Colorado Young
(35:00):
Voices or something like that, onstage singing we don't need no education.
And it was a lot of fun, and I posted just a two minute
clip of that. It's on theblog at Roskiminski dot com if you click
on the TGIF blodcast. And wealso added a dragon's request maybe eight pictures
from our road trip Chris and andour road trip. A few other people
wanted to see pictures, so Iput eight pictures up our road trip.
(35:22):
People keep asking by text, likeRoss, where did you go? Trinidad,
Colorado? Then due west Chauma,New Mexico, with visiting some small
towns in between. Then we wenthiking at a place called the Bistie Badlands
in New Mexico, and then continuedthat same day to Monument Valley, which
(35:43):
is kind of on the border betweenUtah and Arizona. And then the next
day we went to Palisade and spenttwo nights in Palisade, Colorado on the
western slope. Just a gorgeous,a gorgeous place in retrospect, seeing Palisade
as I was driving through Colorado withmy dad. Seeing Palisade was the thing
that made me wanted to made mewant to live in Colorado one day,
(36:07):
where it looks like the garden ofEden on one side of the highway and
the surface of the Moon on theother side of the highway and away.
I always just thought, this isthe most spectacular place. And it took
me a while to figure out afterI came back to Colorado many, you
know, decades later, like whatpart of Colorado was it that I was
remembering? And that's that's what itwas, all right. That's Kristen in
(36:28):
the photo doing the yoga. Correct. Y's not you correct? I don't
know how to yoga. Did youeven come closely doing? No? Okay,
no, I couldn't come close toimagining doing the yoga positions that my
wife can do. So Yeah,there's a picture of her doing a yoga
pose on the top of a verybig rock, and that that particular one
(36:49):
is in a place called Mystery Valley, which basically next to Monument Valley in
Arizona. Anyway, So that's allup at Rosskomminsky dot com if you want
to go check that out. DragonA Rod gave me quite the stink eye
when I said at the end ofthe last segment that Marzapan is gross.
Do you have an opinion about Marzapan? What Marszapan? Oh, it's like
(37:14):
almond flavored candy or and they makemore. You know, I am not
an almond fan, right, Okay, good, I'm gonna go with no,
okay good, All right. Sothis is a story I just wanted
to mention briefly. It was inKoa's news yesterday, but I just want
to mention this from the Colorado Sunco workers raised concerns a decade before former
(37:36):
Colorado forensic scientist was found manipulating datain six hundred and fifty four cases.
Subhead the CBI Colorado Bureau of Investigationis still reviewing Yvonne Missy Woods dating back
to nineteen ninety four, when shebegan working for the agency. State employees
tried to warn managers at the CBIthat forensic scientists Yvonne Missy Woods had been
(37:58):
manipulating data as early as twenty fourteen, almost a decade before the agency investigated
and discovered that she had intentionally manipulatedevidence in hundreds of criminal cases she handled
over her twenty nine year career,the agency said on Wednesday. Doubts over
her work were cited in twenty fourteen, when a coworker questioned her testing of
evidence in a case and reported theconcerns to a technical leader. According to
(38:22):
summary of findings from a ninety fourpage internal affairs report, she was suspended
from working on criminal cases in twentyeighteen after she was accused of manipulating data,
and then she was reinstated. Shewas reinstated, and part of what
apparently she would do was manipulate theresults of DNA tests in sexual assault cases.
(38:46):
And generally what it appears I'm justkind of summarizing here, but it
appears that she not that she completelyfalsified stuff, but she deviated from standard
testing protocol and cut corners and nowthis is my extrapolation, made it more
(39:06):
likely that she would find a positivethat would then be used in a criminal
case against someone. And I thinkit is not just possible, but likely
that this woman's behavior cutting corners becauseof what I think is maybe a combination
of laziness and just wanting to beon the side of the police all the
time, has probably caused an innocentperson, at least one innocent person over
(39:30):
a career that long, to goto prison for something they didn't do.
And you know, this kind ofstory is a pet peeve of mine.
It's part of the reason that Itell my listeners I no longer support the
death penalty because I do not trustthe folks who are in the justice system,
whether it's people like this or lawenforcement officers or prosecutors. It's not
(39:54):
that I believe they will cheat.It's that I believe that some of them
will cheat. And and you weretalking about a system where for me,
it is more important to protect theinnocent than to punish the guilty. And
as long as we have people likethis, and we always will, I
(40:15):
simply cannot support the death penalty.And it makes me very sad that I
do not trust our justice system tothe extent that I should be able to
This story also hit yesterday, andI'm just going to spend fifteen seconds on
it because that's all it needs,and we'll do some other stuff. But
you recall that a judge in Georgiawho was looking the question of whether the
(40:40):
district attorney Fannie Willis, who hiredher unqualified boyfriend to be a prosecutor on
the Donald Trump election interference case downthere. So that judge ruled that Fannie
Willis could stay on the case aslong as her boyfriend was removed from the
case. And that's what happened.I think Fannie Willis he wouldn't be allowed
(41:00):
to stay on the case. Sothe news from yesterday or the day before
is that an appeals court in Georgiahas paused that case while they look at
this question of whether Fani Willis shouldstill be allowed to be the prosecutor on
the case, and they are notlikely to rule on that question until next
(41:22):
year. So I think you're goingto hear nothing more of any importance about
the Georgia case before the election.And so at this point it appears that
that bogus New York case where Trumpwas actually convicted, it was absolute nonsense.
But that appears to be of allthe cases facing him, it was
(41:42):
actually the worst case, but hewas convicted in it. It appears to
be the only one that will goto trial before before the election. So
there's that. What else did Iwant to share with you today? Oh
gosh, all right, this isan annoying little story, but just in
(42:04):
the interest of being fair and balance, they got to share it with you.
So you remember the other day Itold you about how open ai put
out a report about how they haddisrupted influence operations that were using open ai
to create posts on social media platformsto try to influence the American public or
(42:25):
publics in other countries. And therewas something from Russia, and there was
something from Iran and whatever, andnot only they were trying to posting stuff
in America, but they were actuallyalso trying to manipulate the public in Germany
and in Ukraine and some other places. And open ai said it didn't appear
that any of these operations, influenceoperations were particularly successful, but in any
(42:47):
case, they happened. And oneof them that I mentioned at the time
was was from Israel. And Isaid, I have no idea what this
is about. Maybe we'll find out, but they really didn't say anymore.
And now there's this news story.Gosh, I don't like this story at
all. But there's some part ofIsrael's government called the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs.
(43:07):
The diaspora is the Jewish population thatlives outside of Israel, right,
the diaspora is the scattering of Jewsaround the world. So apparently this government
agency allocated about two million dollars toan operation where they hired a political marketing
(43:28):
firm in Israel called Stoic to useopen ai and to create fake accounts posing
as Americans on multiple social media platformsto promote support for Israel. And they
particularly focused their messaging at blacks andDemocrats. Black Democrats like Hakim Jeffries,
(43:52):
who is the House Minority Leader,he's from New York and Senator Warnock of
Georgia, also an African im erand legislator with and I'm quoting from the
New York Times with posts urging themto continue funding Israel's military. And again
it doesn't appear that this effort wassuccessful in any important way, just like
(44:14):
it appeared that the other ones weren't. But still it's pretty disappointing. And
I think Israel should know better thanto try this sort of thing and think
they won't be found out and thinkit won't leave them with some egg on
their faces. It's not very important. It's not nearly as important as the
war. It's not as important asbeing on the right side of history.
But it's still a little bit disappointingwhen we come back if all goes according
(44:36):
to plan, and it is goingaccording to plan, because she just walked
in. Lauren Bolbert joins me instudio. Lauren Bolbert, congresswoman representing Colorado's
third congressional district running for the Republicannomination in the fourth congressional district, joins
me in studio. And this isnot the most important thing, but I
will just say, the last coupleof times I've seen you, you must
have been wearing taller shoes. Yeah, because you're Dana Perino size, which
(45:00):
I did not quite realize. Yes, so I'm five zero a little closer
to the mind. Okay, Iam five zero, and I typically am
in heels. In my own personalopinion, when I wear flats, that
means I've given up on life.But I am in flat tonight, but
I think it's kind of cute.So just for the record, I'm not
given up. Okay, right,very good. We've got lots of stuff
(45:22):
to talk about. We'll start withthe intro music. Are you kidding me?
Well, that's producer Dragon, that'sproducer Dragon. Was that was that
Beatles juice music? It was allright, I'm not ye right, I'm
not going there. I'll let otherpeople ask those those questions. So,
but let's start. Let me startwith a couple of hard things. So
(45:44):
you may remember this when you wonyour last race by a narrow margin that
a lot of people expected, andyou were on the show with me and
I and I asked you, doesthe narrowness of your win make you think
you should, you know, doanything differently going forward? And you said
no. Would you give that sameanswer now? Yes. So what we
(46:07):
discussed was I'm in the majority now, so things will change because we have
more legislative authority. We have thegabbles in the committee, we have control
of the House floor. I wasable to participate in changing the House rules
to get Single Subject Legislation and IndividualAppropriations Bill seventy two hours to read a
bill before we vote on it,so we don't have to pass it to
(46:29):
find out what's in it, andso much more even to open up the
floor for amendments, because I don'tserve on every committee in the House,
and so I don't have jurisdiction overall of the legislation that's passed through committee.
So once it goes to the floor, that's my opportunity to give a
Colorado voice to that legislation. Andfor more than ten years in Congress that
was not allowed. No floor amendmentswere allowed, and so I fought to
(46:52):
bring that back. So it wasn'tthat I would change who I am Russ.
I am radically me. I amauthentically Lauren Bobert, and there's no
changing that. But in my firstterm I was in the minority, so
I certainly had to use the onlything that Nancy Pelosi couldn't take away from
me, and that was my voice. And I was able to bring awareness
(47:13):
to the four hundred and fifty thousanddollars checks the Biden administration was wanting to
issue to illegal aliens who are separatedfrom their families at the southern border.
We shut that down. I gotloud about it, and that went away
also the Disinformation Governance Board. Igot very loud about that. I got
leadership behind me legislation all of this, but I knew the legislation wasn't going
anywhere, so I continued to speakout. And Jane and Gina and what's
(47:37):
her name, Nina Jankowitz, Praisethe Lord. She's so irrelevantw I've had
it say their name in a longtime. Nina Jankowitz was fired, and
you know, the Disinformation Governance Boardis gone. So I had to be
very loud because in Washington, DC, nothing happens without force. However,
in the majority, I get tolegislate. So I had bills in my
first term that sat on Nancy Pelosi'sdesk collecting dust. And now I'm actually
(48:01):
able to move those through committee.And just before I give it back to
you, I have passed more legislationout of the House than any other member
in the Colorado delegation in this term. And that's setting an amazing precedence.
Defined by being a sponsor of thebill, is that my legislation? Yes,
so okay, so again, andwe're gonna weave kind of policy and
(48:22):
politics throughout this whole conversation. Soat the time when I asked you,
like, would you change anything givenhow close that election was? It wasn't
really about the policy stuff. Itwas more like, you know, other
stuff, right, does the personalbehavior or or of just making people feel
like you're a congress woman? AndI was thinking about this a lot like
(48:44):
yesterday. How do I want toword this question to you? Because so
a lot of times when I thinkof famous members of Congress who aren't Speaker
of the House, and I thinkof people like ra Cheated talib and AOC
and Marjorie Taylor Green, and they'refamous for all the wrong reasons, and
(49:04):
I can't stand any of them.And you, I like you. I've
known you a little bit for along time. I like you a lot
as a person. I think you'regenuine and funny. But you're famous,
and I don't know that it's goodfor a member of Congress to be famous.
And I don't know that you're famousfor reasons that you want to be
famous. How do you think aboutthat? And do you wish you were
(49:29):
a little bit less in the spotlight? Well, okay, there's a lot
of questions there and a lot tounpack. So I mean, do I
wish I was less than the spotlight, yes and no, right, I
mean I don't have personal moments.I wish I was less on in forred
camera, that would be great,But you know so, I mean there
are those aspects. I mean,I would like to go to dinner in
(49:50):
Fort Collins with my boys and nothave random people come up and video us,
you know. So, I meanthat that kind of stuff bothers me.
But also if I wasn't who Iam and and as as loud as
I am and in this spotlight,then I don't believe that I would be
as effective. Because in Congress,when I speak, I mean people listen.
(50:12):
And I'm not saying this in likea self aggrandizing way, you know,
but I'm one of the few thatare invited to those closed door meetings
with leadership, with the Speaker ofthe House, whoever the speaker is for
that time being, you know,I was. I was at the table
with Kevin McCarthy in these small roundtablediscussions on policy and and even now with
Mike Johnson. And not that Ialways get what I want, but we
(50:34):
are having meaningful conversation trying to getthe conference to unite and come together on
an issue. Now, also,I mean you mentioned these other members that
I work with. I mean,I'm still going to say there's a Hamas
Caucus. I'm still going to callthem the Jihad squad. I mean,
they're not America first. They areputting other foreign entities before our own country,
and they're serving no argument for me. Rashida Talib is an egregious anti
(50:58):
Semite and a stain on this kind. I absolutely agree, and so I'm
not going to shy away from thatand be quiet about the discussing things that
they did. But also, forinstance, okay, so you saw the
we'll call it a crap show inour oversight hearing when we were going to
hold Merrick Garland and contempt. Now, this was a late night hearing and
(51:19):
it was out of control from thebeginning. Now the Democrats started it,
but I thought it was kind offun, you know, I mean,
it's late, like none of uswant to be there at this time.
They were, you know, kindof just going off and being like bold
in their statements, and some ofit was kind of funny. Jared Moskowoodz
had like, you know, areading of something that trumpets or fun braising
email and then it just turned forthe worse, and my colleague on my
(51:45):
side of the aisle, Marjorie TaylorGreen, attacked another member on the other
side and about her appearance, abouther eyelash here, her dang eyelashes.
And I was so frustrated, andof course, I mean, that's just
erupted and everyone starts. You know, so you were hearing you were in
that room. Yes, I absolutelywas, okay, but you didn't.
(52:07):
You didn't hear that I was inthere? Digit I don't a girl.
Yeah, I was frustrated because we'rethere trying to hold Merrick Garland in contempt
and get this path through committee.And this is this is not a light
issue. This is something that holdsa lot of weight, a lot of
gravity, and that we should betaking seriously. If the Democrats want to
make a mockery of it, fine, they don't want to vote for it
anyway. But I was taking itseriously, and I even so in our
(52:30):
parliamentary parliamentary procedures are rules when youcall to take down someone's words when they're
speaking a committee or the House floor. That means their remarks are struck from
the record and they are unable tospeak for that legislative period of time.
So in committee, if she ifthere was another opportunity she could speak,
(52:51):
she cannot. She's barred from speaking. And so AOC called to take down
her words when she impugned another member'scharacter, and those are the rules,
and it was just so out ofhand. I voted with the Democrats to
take down her words because I wantedthis to end. And now also I
will say if if we were ableto get the vote to take down AOC's
girl baby girl words and everything thatshe had said, I would have voted
(53:15):
to take down those words as well. That vote never came up. We're
talking with Lauren Boebert, currently representingthe third Congressional District, much of almost
half of Colorado, seeking the Republicannomination in the fourth Congressional district. So
why did just answer very basic questionlots of folks who who have huge numbers
of listeners in CD four? Whythe move? Yes? So i' mean
(53:37):
family first. So that is mythat was my number one choice to move
away. My divorce has been verypublic. Unfortunately, I tried to get
through it as seamlessly and quietly aspossible and also to really cover my ex
husband I didn't want to expose himor his faults. That's never been the
(53:59):
way my marriage as operated. Ibelieve that partners should cover each other's weaknesses
with their strengths, not expose theirweakness with their strength. And so I
mean I still help hold true tothat. Unfortunately, he's revealed a lot
of it on his own. Mychildren were not safe, That's been very
publicly documented, and we needed toget out of there. I was seeing
(54:22):
that my children were picking up learnedbehavior that I thought wasn't going to impact
them. I thought that was justsomething between my ex husband and I that
was private enough that it wouldn't affectthem, and it was. And so
we did decide to move. Andthen secondly, yes, I did think
about politically, what does this looklike? Am I going to stay in
(54:43):
the third? Uh? What doesthis look like for Colorado? I want
to move to the fourth. Iwant to be far away. Uh.
And so I did decide to runin the fourth district. And I think
that this is a great move forthe Republican Party and for the conservative movement.
We have stopped the millions of dollarsthat were we're coming in from these
dark money groups and the Hollywood elites. There were over ten million. There
(55:04):
was over ten million dollars raised ina non election year, and it wasn't
on policy or position. It wasjust against me. A lot of people
just don't like you for whatever reason. Part of it is, I mean
the media, they do a greatjob of dehumanizing me, right, I
mean you just said you like meas a person. I'm funny. Okay,
Well, nobody sees that. That'snot that's not front page headline on
(55:25):
the dipper posts. That's true.And I but I'd also say you probably
don't always help yourself in that wayeither, just being how you are.
And I think you kind of don'tgive a you know what, a very
about what other people think of you. I mean, you you want to
win votes, that's what you're doinghere. But I don't think you're out
(55:45):
there as a as a people pleasergenerally. But let me just finish on
the on the last thing. Isit reasonable to say that one of the
reasons you left CD three is that, given how close it was last time
and how much money the Democrat raisedin the interim, and that it's likely
to be the same guy that youthought, there's a pretty strong chance you
would lose if you stayed in CDthree. I didn't feel that I would
(56:07):
lose, but I also don't wantto find out. So I'm not done
with what I'm doing. I don'twant to be there forever. But I
am one of the tips of thespears in this conservative movement, especially when
it comes to America First policies.And my work is not finished. But
I mean, they're in the thirddistrict with my close race. I mean,
we have to take into consideration alot of elements there. It was
(56:29):
a mid term election, there's notgoing to be as much turnout. We
had fifty thousand Republicans not show upto vote, they did not return their
ballots. And you know, Iwas hearing a lot of it on the
ground I put in the work cross. You know, we've talked about the
mileage that I put on. Youknow, I get criticized for it and
I'm called a liar. But allthe Democrats and you know, even opponents
now they're, oh, my goodness, thirty thousand miles, what a woman
(56:52):
of the people. You're amazing.So me like as impossible. You would
drive around the world three times andyou can't do that. So Anyhow,
fifty thousand Republicans. I was onthe ground talking with people. A lot
of people were felt disenfranchised by thetwenty twenty election. They felt that their
vote did not matter. Others wereapathetic. And it's the Republican area,
(57:12):
it's fine. And so when youget fifty thousand people thinking similarly or you
know, life happens as well,you know, it makes a big difference.
So, yes, it was aclose race. I do believe that
we would have done better in thisnext election, but I also believe that
a generic Republican will do even betterand win in a bigger way than I
could have because their only argument isI'm not Lauren Bobert. Okay, So
(57:38):
let's move forward now. So therace you're in, now, you've got
five or six other Republicans, fiveother Republicans, and as soon as you
get into the race, you havethe highest name id in the most money.
Then you've got all these other folksthat you're gonna split the not Lauren
Bobert vote, right, So,and we don't have runoffs in this state.
(57:58):
So some folks are thinking you couldwin the primary with thirty percent or
whatever the number is. And Idon't care about internal polling and all that
you could win the nomination with wellunder fifty percent, given that six people
are in in total, How doyou think about that overall situation? And
(58:19):
if you do win with let's saythirty percent or whatever you think your number
is, how then do you thinkabout winning the general election? Because some
people who have their own motives forsaying this, of course, are saying,
well, Lauren Bobert's the only Republicanwho could lose the district. And
I'm sure you've heard it a lot. So what's your response to these people?
(58:40):
Yes, so, I mean,if we're ignoring numbers, I do
believe it's going to be more thanthirty percent. But yes, the not
Lauren Bobert vote is split by fivepeople. But also I'm talking to the
same people that they are, andmany of them are voting for someone else
because they're a lifelong friend and they'relike, man, you're my number two.
You know I made I made thecalls to the delegates at the Assembly,
(59:04):
and over six hundred phone calls thatI had made, and you know,
there was a lot of folks thatare like, I want to vote
for you. I can't you know. I've known this one forever. We
ranch together, you know, we'rein Douglas County together. We fought the
school board together, any anything likethat. And then they tell me or
like, gosh, I didn't thinkI would like you, and I really
do, and I'm really struggling withthis. So I do believe that those
people are going to come back overafter the primary, and I want them
(59:29):
to. I want to unif.I want to unify with my opponents now.
Now, of course, they haveall abandoned their unity pledges. I've
heard them in person, I've seenthem in writing say I will not impune
my opponents in this primary. Butthey're all attacking me now, which which
fine. I can handle it.That doesn't move me. It's another day.
But I'm not going to do thatto them. I will debate policy.
(59:52):
If you know, all of myopponents are Ukraine first. They want
more Ukraine funding. All of themhave expressed some form of amnesty. All
of them say that the twenty twentyelection was just fine. They would not
have objected to the certification of theElectoral College result. We we differ on
issues. When it comes to spending. Many of my opponents would have voted
(01:00:14):
for the one hundred billion dollar deficitspending for the supplemental Aid. We borrowed
that money from China. It's noteven paid for, and you know,
sending nine billion dollars to Hamas somany other things. And so I will
debate the policy, but the personalattacks I won't because the Republican Party has
to unify after this election. Weneed every Republican we can get in Colorado
(01:00:34):
to take our state back and toreally to keep our momentum. But I'm
not afraid of the general, whoeverit may be. You know, of
course, I'm going to campaign.I'm going to work, and I'm going
to continue to earn votes. Ihave a bipartisan legislative record without compromising my
principles. I'm still one hundred percentconservative rated, and I have bipartisan legislation.
(01:00:57):
So we have four or five minutesleft, and I actually want to
just take a little time following upon a couple of things you just said.
I think on policy, you andI are probably together about two thirds
of the time. There's some otherstuff where you're, well, am I
right and I don't care, youknow, like people are my right and
people are my left. Yeah,I think your position on Ukraine is an
interesting one, and I'm not withyou on it. I support more aid
(01:01:21):
to Ukraine. Could you explain yourposition succinctly just so we can get through
a few things. The most fundamentalaspect of it is, it's been nearly
two hundred billion dollars maybe even more, that we have sent to Ukraine.
Sixty one billion dollars was just approved. This is not just lethal aid.
It is so much more than that, and there have been no audits.
(01:01:45):
We do not know where this moneyis actually going, and they're already asking
for more money. More money isnot the answer. There's no game plan
to actually win, to actually stopRussia. Ukraine is not a NATO country.
We don't have an obligation here tohelp. And also, I would
say, just from serving on theOversight Committee and uncovering the corruption with Joe
(01:02:06):
Biden and his family and their businessties to Ukraine specifically, there's many other
countries, but to Ukraine specifically,I do believe that this is influencing our
policy, and that's Joe Biden sellingaccess to our federal government, which absolutely
makes him corrupt and he should beimpeached for the bribes that have been taken
by Ukraine. So I just thinkthat this has gone too far. There's
(01:02:29):
no plan, and we need tosecure our own southern border before we worry
about someone else's. I agree weneed to secure our southern border. I
think we can do both things.But again, I want to get to
a couple of other issues. Butjust one more thing on this. Don't
you think it's in America's national interestto help, if not defeat, Vladimir
(01:02:50):
Putin, at least stop him sohe realizes he can't then go into Moldova
or Finland or Estonia or something tome. To me, it's a lot
of money. Actually seems kind ofcheap if we end up stopping Vladimir Putin
and sending a lesson to China.Also that we're not going to cave in.
I disagree with you. It's notcheap. You know, every American
right now has over one hundred thousanddollars debt assigned to them at birth even,
(01:03:15):
and so this is not cheap.We're at thirty five trillion dollars in
debt. They're negotiating the farm billright now. That's one point two trillion
dollars. Like it's never stopping,it's never ending. And I believe how
we stop Putin is getting President Trumpback in office, because he would have
never invaded Ukraine if President if wehad a strong commander in chief. He's
(01:03:37):
there now. So if Trump getsin, and I don't want to make
this about Trump, but if Trumpgets in, what like, if Trump
gets in and says we need tohelp Ukraine, are you going to change
and say all right, let's helpUkraine? Now? I don't believe I
will unless there's a serious audit anda plan. If there's a plan,
sure, Look, I was willingto consider a skinny Ukraine Aid where it
was just lethal aid, where we'reonly sending bullets there. And you know
(01:04:00):
I was considering this in the supplementalAid, but then that was completely blown
out of the water and you knowsixty sixty one plus billion dollars that went
over there. But I do believehaving President Trump's strength in his policies does
slow down Putin. Also, weneed to unleash our energy sector. Right
now, we're funding both sides ofthis world. We're purchasing energy from Russia
while sending billions of dollars, hundredsof billions of dollars to Ukraine. Or
(01:04:24):
are we purchasing energy from Russia?We we absolutely are buying buying their energy,
their oil and natural gas. Absolutelywe are, and from our other
adversaries, not right now, butI don't believe that, don but someone
is either, the Indians are,and the Chinese are. Well for if
we unleashed ours, if we hadthe Jordan Cove pipeline, if we were
(01:04:45):
able to export our clean liquefied naturalgas, our energy, we could be
exporting freedom, like Joe Biden's energypolicy. And then going back to something
else you said about national debt anddeficit, these are these are the worst
government policies I've ever seen. Andour national debt is a sin being perpetrated
on our children. And you know, to the extent that you know,
(01:05:08):
like what I say, I thinkthe Ukraine spending is a relative bargain.
If I were king, I wouldgo cut that amount of money and more
from other places in the budget tofund that. But of course no one
should do that. Can we dothat? Try to do it, and
that's called to pay for and itis widely ignored in Congress. Gosh,
I wish we had all day totalk about this, but we are trying
to get the spending actually paid forto cut those areas, whether it's Green
(01:05:30):
New Deal policies where we spent overthree hundred and forty billion dollars in just
one piece of legislation for wind andsolar and other green energy products. But
also, you know, just totie this back to our southern border where
we have ten twelve thirteen million illegalaliens coming into our country. These are
military aged men from countries all overthe world. People are emptying out their
(01:05:50):
jails, their mental asylums, they'resending them here. Their crime rates are
going down, Our crime rates aregoing up. And also China is buying
our farm land and it's surrounding ourmilitary basis. I mean, come on,
we are being set up for sucha gross attack, and we're worried
about Ukraine. We need to protectAmerica or there may not be an America
(01:06:12):
to stand for our allies. Sowe're just about out of time here.
I want to give you the sameopportunity I give every candidate who comes on
the show the last thirty one secondsor something, because I like prime numbers
for talking to voters who are inced A four who've gotten their primary ballots
in the mail already, and they'retrying to decide. Well, Lauren Bolbert,
(01:06:33):
I heard a lot about her.These other people I don't know so
much about them. Why should theychoose you? Yes, Well, I
am the only America First a Republicanin this primary. I have a proven
track record. I have a onehundred percent conservative voting record. I do
not compromise my principles. But I'malso able to work with the other side.
Even our senator has been at Hickenlooperto get legislation over the line to
(01:06:55):
create one thousand jobs in Pueblo,to have more water storage projects. I've
secured twenty million dollars in infrastructure andwater storage in Colorado, another fifty million
dollars for the South Bridge in GlenwoodSprings. I have creative ways to get
our policies and agendas across the lineand signed into law, and make sure
that your tax dollars are coming backto your communities without raising our national debt.
(01:07:19):
I am fiscally responsible. I wanta limited government that gets the heck
out of your way. I amI'm like I said radically me, I'm
not changing. I'm staying in thefight. My voting record comes with me,
My fight comes with me and myperseverance. And again I want unity
after this primary. We need theRepublican Party to be strong here in Colorado.
(01:07:42):
Lauren Bolbert is seeking the Republican nominationin the fourth Congressional district. If
you live in that district and youopen the ballot you got in the mail,
you will see her in a fewother choices, and as an American,
you get to make your decision.Lauren, thanks so much for coming
to join me in studio. Thanksso much, and Ross. Just as
your voters know, I am topline on their ballot, every single ballot
in the district, and I earnedthat by showing up to every county in
(01:08:04):
the district, meeting with people andearning their votes, and I hope to
earn many more. Is our websitethat people can look at if they want
to learn more, Laurenfocolorado dot com. And I also have all of my
accomplishments on there, the initiatives thathave been signed into law, because this
is about delivering for Colorado. Thanksfor joining me in studio, Lauren.
Good to see again. Thanks Roth, We'll be right back a couple minutes
(01:08:24):
and just react reflect a little biton that extended conversation we just had with
Lauren Bobert. I'll give you afew thoughts first, limit let me just
share with you kind of the rangeof listener texts. Right, So the
range of listener texts goes from youknow, she's way too trumpy, or
(01:08:45):
and I'm not going to vote forher, another you know she's not a
proven leader. Then you have kindof interesting middle stuff like ross I listened.
I appreciate you drawing her out.Maybe still a little too trumpy form
right, but people who are kindof are who are thinking about it.
Another one says she seems quite intelligent, completely different from how the media portrays
(01:09:09):
her. And then another one saysshe's a total badass. Colorado needs her
get bleep done. So look,I don't vote in the in the fourth
congressional district. And and you've gotyour ballots already. If you're there,
and you've got Lauren Bobert, andyou've got I'm sure I'm gonna forget someone.
You've got Deborah Flora, you've gotMike Lynch, you've got Richard Holtorf,
(01:09:33):
Jerry Sonnenberg, I think Peter Ughis on that one. I think,
and you got a decision to make, right, You've got a decision
to make for me. Look,Lauren is well, am I right?
(01:09:54):
She's very trumpy. I don't shareher views about the twenty twenty election generally.
I do think there were problems inthat election the way. For example,
Pennsylvania State Supreme Court changed the votingrules in Pennsylvania, which was blatantly
illegal, and they were not allowedto do that. And for folks who
were focusing on that kind of stuff, where branches of government did things they
(01:10:15):
did not have the authority to doto change the way the election operated in
that year, I agree with thatstuff. But I also think talking about
the twenty twenty election is a hugepolitical loser. I think again, I
I don't, especially in races whereI'm not a voter, I don't either
endorse or not endorse based on differencesin policy, right and let because City
(01:10:45):
four is a very Republican district andI'm not a Republican. It's a very
conservative district and I'm not a conservative. So I don't put myself out there
saying that I represent that district andtherefore you should vote the way I say.
I don't do that. That's notmy job. Normally, if I'm
endorsing or not, it's usually basedon character. That's why I've made such
(01:11:12):
a strong endorsement of Jeff Crank inthe fifth Congressional District against Dave Williams,
who I think is a person oflow character. In fact, you heard
in our news this morning, youheard Chad talk about it. I'm looking
at a letter that I got anemail this morning from Republican Jefferson County Republican
Chair Nancy Palazzi, and I hopeI'm pronouncing her last name correctly. Sorry
(01:11:34):
if I'm not Nancy. And itsays in a statement released today, numerous
Colorado Republican county chairs, other partyofficers, members of the Colorado State Central
Committee in all sixty four counties,and many Republican candidates are asking for Republican
State Party Chairman mister Dave Williams toresign, to immediately resign. And they
(01:11:56):
go on and talk about the very, very many things that Dave Williams has
done wrong. Look, I've madeit a personal mission of mine to try
to help encourage people who are ina position to remove Dave Williams from chairmanship
of the party and to beat himvoters in CD five. I'm encouraging everybody
to do that. This guy needsto go. He's a blight on the
(01:12:17):
party and on that district, thesame way that Tay Anderson was a blight
on Denver. But that's usually whenI will make some kind of endorsement.
I also don't think my endorsement mattersvery much. I don't overestimate. Okay,
My question with Lauren in CD fouris has she done enough in her
(01:12:40):
four years in Congress to prove thatshe can be an effective member of Congress,
which I think is even is moreimportant than being a role model or
something like that. You know,I didn't want to bother asking her about
what happened in the theater. We'veall seen it. I don't care is
can she be effective? She madean argument that she is effective. She
(01:13:02):
made an argument that she gets themeetings with leadership that other Republicans don't get.
I don't know if it's true.It's the claim she's making. You
got to make your own decision.I will say I have suggested in this
race voting for somebody else. Ilike Lauren it wouldn't break my heart if
she was in Congress. She's infinitelybetter than Marjorie Taylor Green. She's smarter
(01:13:26):
than Marjorie Taylor Green, and she'snicer than Marjorie Taylor Green. If I
lived in CD four, would Ivote for Lauren Vobert in the primary?
No? Would I vote for herin the general election if she won the
Republican nomination. Yes, that's kindof where I am. That's kind of
(01:13:49):
where I am, And I don'tthink I have much more to add.
I hope you enjoyed the conversation withLaurenbert. I'm I'm sure she'll be back,
and you know, one way oranother whether she wins or or doesn't.
But voters in CD four you geta real choice to make, and
you're gonna have to make it prettysoon. You know. It's funny.
(01:14:09):
I had one question that I didn'tget. I wanted to ask Lauren,
but I didn't get to ask her. People love hating on Lauren Bobert.
They just love it. It's ait's a hobby for so many people.
And I get and I kind ofimplied this, at least in the conversation
that she brings on herself a littlebit, not as much as Marjorie Taylor
Green does. But fifty cent wasvisiting DC and took pictures with lots of
(01:14:33):
members of Congress, including Lauren Bobert, and just people went crazy. They're
criticizing fifty cent for taking picture withher, and I don't get it.
It's like, look, I ifI somehow took a picture with AOC,
like I probably would, now,I would not take a picture with Rashida
(01:14:56):
to Lee. I think Rashida tlei ilhan Omar. I think these are
evil anti Semites. I think AOCis a deluded young socialist kind of but
sort of interesting and in the publiceye a lot. And if I had
the chance to take a picture withAOC, probably probably would. I shouldn't
say that too with too much certainty, because I think I did have a
(01:15:19):
chance to take a picture with AOCa few years back when she came to
Colorado, and I didn't. Butin any case, people get mad about
just such crazy things. Anyway,let's do something different. Now here's a
story over at Westward. There's anotherversion of it at the Denver Post,
(01:15:39):
and this is specifically for Denver Rights. But you will recall that, let's
say a year and a half ago, voters in Denver, who seem to
almost always like to self flagellate atthe ballot box, passed a sidewalk fee.
Okay, they passed a sidewalk feethat basically in the original version,
(01:16:00):
if you own a property in Denver, you will be facing an extra attax
that will be calculated based on howmany square foot feet of sidewalk your house
is on. So so if youown a house on a corner lot,
you're really really screwed. And theconcept was that we're going to use this
to fix sidewalks because sidewalks are dilapidatedin Denver, are too small in some
(01:16:24):
places, or don't exist in someplaces where they should. Now, the
whatever the part of Denver government is, and I think it's the Transportation and
Infrastructure department, they were against thisplan. You rarely, you rarely rarely
hear of a branch of government opposea ballot measure that is going to cause
(01:16:49):
millions of dollars of new revenue toflow into that department of government. But
they did. They said, thisis impractical. We don't have the infrastructure
to fix the sidewalks. Even ifwe got more money. We don't want
this. It's gonna be very hardto implement. It's gonna piss off a
lot of people because it's not gonnawork the way you think. And so
(01:17:13):
the city council has had to delay, and then delay, and then delay.
And now here's this news story headlinefrom Westwards. City Council proposes another
delay to the upcoming sidewalk fee.A Denver City Council committee has advanced legislation
to delay this now until January ofnext year. If approved, it would
mark the second delay on fee collectionsince voters approved the new system in November
(01:17:39):
of last year. City officials stillaren't sure how much in fees would be
collected from home and that's why anotherdelay has been proposed, because they're also
talking about changing this so it's lessunfair to people who, for example,
have the misfortune of owning a homeon a corner. So, as with
(01:18:00):
many bad ideas, and as withmany bad eyed tax hike ideas in Denver,
was not well thought through before beingput on the ballot, but Denver
rights being Denver rights, they passedit anyway. In any case, it
does look as if this will bedelayed until January of twenty twenty five,
and then we're gonna have to seeexactly who is going to be paying what
(01:18:26):
We'll be right back on KOA.I'm so freaking happy about this. I
might have to post pictures on theblog at some point. I was speaking
of blog pictures. If you goto Rosskaminski dot com, click on the
TGIF blogcast I've got on there,like a two minute clip from the concert
I went to at Red Rocks lastnight, which was a Pink Floyd tribute
band called Britt Floyd, and Iguess they have a huge following. I
mean, Red Rocks was full andthey really do sound like Pink Floyd.
(01:18:47):
But anyway, in the second halfof the concert, and when I say
second half, I mean there wasa there was an intermission. So after
the intermission they played a lot ofthe older stuff and they played another Brick
in the Wall part two. Youknow we don't need No Education, and
you know in that song there arethese kids singing. And at the concert
yesterday they brought out a choir ofColorado kids and the kids were they were
(01:19:09):
having so much fun. They werelike dancing around and waving their arms and
singing Pink Floyd. It must justhave been great for them. But I
put up like a two minute clipor so of that, and then at
the request of the boss Dragon Redbeard, I posted eight pictures from the road
trip that Christin and I just did. And I think I put little,
just very very short captions on themso that you could see where each picture
(01:19:31):
is. But if you want totake a look at just eight pictures of
Kristin and I are are road trip. It's all up at Rosskiminsky dot com.
Linked to our guests and links totopics. Are a lot of topics
that I didn't get to today.There's just any of the Lauren Bobert interview.
It is up now, all right, So we had Lauren Bobert live
in studio. I went a littlelonger with her than I probably should have,
(01:19:53):
but we went like twenty three minutesor something. It's up on the
blog at Roskiminski dot com, soyou can see that there. Of course,
you should subscribe to my podcast,so through the podcast feed you will
get the whole show, and youwill get almost every interview as a standalone
podcast, And of course you don'thave to listen to all of them.
You can pick and choose. Okay, I want to hear I want to
(01:20:13):
hear the whole show today, orI heard most of that already. I
just want to hear Bobert or howeveryou wanna, however you want to do
it. So please subscribe to TheRosskominski Show podcast wherever you get your podcasts,
and don't forget. You can listento me, Mandy the sports guys
a lot of different ways. Right. You can listen on the iHeartRadio app
and just tune it to KOA.You can tell your smart speaker to play
(01:20:34):
KOA on iHeartRadio. You can listenon our stream at Koacolorado dot com,
and so on. So I wantto do a few quick topics with you,
and then we're gonna do name thattune. It's it's my turn this
week. And because I filled outmiserably last yeah, yeah, I yeah,
(01:20:55):
I'll take the l Yeah. Okay, yeah, I mean that's a
pretty clear like you can't just saythat's Ross changing the rules in the middle
of the game. The game reallywas Ross wins because he was really right.
I was really right that one.But anyway, by the way,
I've heard that the song you didlast week, Stacy's Mom, which I
(01:21:17):
assume all along was kind of intendedto be a parody of Jesse's Girl,
because it sounds so much like itthat that's what I thought that it was.
But I still don't remember, andI don't know if I ever knew
the name of the band who didStacy's Mom. What are they called Toountains
of Wayne? Fountains of Wayne?I don't so anyway, But but that
(01:21:41):
song didn't count because it was releasedin the two thousands. I will also
just say, for those of youlistening on the podcast for reasons that I
won't get into, we don't putname that tune on the podcast. So
if you want to catch name thattune and you need to listen to the
show live, you know, overthe radio or over the stream or whatever
while while we're doing it. Soif you're listening on the podcast right now
(01:22:02):
and they're like, where to namethat tune? Go, it's not on
the podcast. But I'll just leavethat part there. So let me do
a few things with you before weget to name that tune. New York
Post which generation tips the best betweengen Z and boomers? The results of
this survey may surprise you. Now, I will say that the results of
the survey doesn't surprise me. SoDragon, what's your guess? Now?
(01:22:27):
You and I are both neither genZ nor boomer where we are gen X,
so we're in between these people,but we kind of understand each of
them a little bit. So howwhat's your guess as to the tipping habits
of gen Z and what's your guessas to the tipping habits of boomers?
I would like to think that boomersare much more generous when it becomes to
(01:22:50):
tipping, but their value of tippingis probably a lot less, so they
may tip, you know, theten to fifteen percent. Sitting next to
a couple of the restaurants, thisserver was really nice and dropped out two
quarters and was like he did areally great job. But where the z
ers, they've grown up with tipping, so that's just a normal thing for
(01:23:11):
them. So that's just what they'regoing to do. As to the exact
quantity of each dollar amount, it'sa toss up. Okay, I don't
know. So you're addressing two differentthings, which is the right way that
I want to think about this?And one is the propensity to tip at
all. And then the other isdo you tip a lot or not so
much? Right? Okay? Sobetween boomers and gen Z, which group
(01:23:34):
do you think tips more of thetime? Tips are bigger Z? And
then which group do you think tipsmore when they do tip? Probably the
boomers Boomers? Okay? And Idon't know, by the way, I
don't know if this study is anygood. But this is a survey conducted
(01:23:56):
by bank rate, which is abig website. It's a real legit company.
And what they say, what adude from bankrate says older Americans seem
to have the most sticker shock aboutthe rise and cost of tipping, Yet
they are still much more frequent tippersthan gen Z and millennials, and they
(01:24:21):
tend to tip more. So Boomerstend to tip more often and more money
than gen Z. And I thinkI'm not surprised by this. I won't
get into why or why not I'msurprised. Let me just share more of
this with you. A majority ofboomers age sixty to seventy eight and gen
(01:24:45):
X age forty four to fifty ninereported what they call at least one negative
view of tipping. More millennials,let me look for hold on no,
so a smaller number. That part'sboring. Older generations may be the most
fed up with being expected to tipwell everywhere, but that doesn't mean they
(01:25:05):
don't do it. Meanwhile, goodluck getting a good tip from gen Z,
and in particular from gen Z menapparently the worst tippers. Only thirty
five percent of Gen z Ers whogo to sit down restaurants say they always
leave a tip. That's a shockinglylow number, isn't it thirty five?
(01:25:29):
That's what it says. Only thirtyfive percent of gen Zers say they always
leave a tip, compared with fiftysix percent of millennials, So that's the
next group. Seventy eight percent ofour generation Gen X and eighty six percent
of Baby boomers. Seventy one percentof women say they always add a tip.
Only sixty three percent of men saythey always add a tip. But
(01:25:50):
good service is still worth something tomost Americans. The majority of people,
sixty four percent, say the biggestfactor that influenced how much they decide to
tip is the quality of the service. Only about ten percent say they always
tip the same amount regardless of thequality of service. Boomers, seventy six
percent of boomers sixty percent of Genand X are more are much more likely
(01:26:15):
than millennials at fifty five and GenZ at fifty percent to show their appreciation
with a tip. Anyway, Ithink I'm I'm not that surprised. It
also might be that boomers just havemore money that could be than than gen
Z people. I see the genzs feel pressured when they tipping, when
they flip the little screen around likeah, so they just it's just an
(01:26:38):
automatic for them, no matter what. For me. I look, my
default position when tipping in a restaurantis twenty percent or thereabouts. Since I
am nerdy a lot of times,what I will do is I will come
up with a tip amount that isaround twenty percent but has some odd number
(01:27:00):
of cents so that the total addsup to a round number of dollars.
So if it's something something in seventythree cents, I'll add something in seventy
seven cents as the tip on whichis But but I have to say it's
extremely hypocritical of me. In fact, I hadn't thought about this until looking
at you right now, dragon andthinking about this. I should never do
(01:27:24):
that again. I should do theopposite of that, because I'm the guy
who only sets appointment times at alarmsand the time to cook something on the
microwave at prime numbers. Right,So why on God's green Earth would I
add a tip to make my restaurantbill come out to exactly fifty six dollars
(01:27:45):
when I would never ever use anumber like that for anything else. It's
always got to be a prime numberfor everything else. And I'm going out
of my way to make a distinctlynon prime number when I'm tipping. Oh
my gosh, that need to beprime or no, I remove the decimal
point, or like with the time, I remove the colon, Right,
(01:28:08):
So I mean for your future tipping, for your prime numbers? Yeah,
yeah, the whole number. Dothe need to be prime or just a
tip amount or the decimal point needsto be p No? No, no,
the whole number, the whole number, which is tricky because when you
get to start getting the bigger numbersyou were in, fewer of them are
prime, and I might end upeither having to like tip much more than
(01:28:29):
I was looking for or tip less. And then at that point, I
think, like any normal human beingin America, where we have this tipping
culture. Of course, my tipis massively influenced by the quality of service.
Right right now, I don't meanI quibble around the edges. If
the service is good or or verygood, they're probably gonna get about the
(01:28:53):
same tip. And the tip iswhen the service is clearly not good,
I'll lower it. It's It's onlybeen probably two or three times in my
life that I've left no tip becauseI thought the service was so bad.
What about you. You were inthe restaurant business, although it wasn't a
sit down restaurant exactly. We neverasked for tips or anything in the subway
franchise that we were in. Butif they were offered, I would politely
(01:29:15):
decline and say, no, that'sfine, you don't have to do that
here. But if I were offeredagain, yeah, then yes, of
course, thank you very much.I'll have a wonderful day. Right But
me going out to eat, Idon't think at a sit down place I
have ever not tipped. It startsat a certain point, right, It
gets lower the worse you do asa server, right right, You know,
in a way, and I don'twant to extrapolate too far here because
(01:29:40):
I've never worked in a restaurant.But so you tell me again, and
you didn't work in a sit downrestaurant. But here, here's kind of
my mindset. If you tip zero, the the server might just think you're
poor, or you're a foreigner,you come from some or whatever. I
(01:30:01):
think if you tip five percent,I think that's a much stronger message than
tipping nothing. Like, Okay,I recognize you, I recognize you're working
for tips. You were so badthat I'm giving you this, But so
I'm giving you something, so youknow, I'm aware of what's going on
here. But I'm giving you thistiny amount because you sucked. But it
(01:30:26):
would probably hurt a little bit moreif it was like two one dollar bills,
uh huh. If it was cashon the table, if they just
sign on the credit card, youdon't really see that until your paycheck,
right, But if it's seen cash, two one dollar bills on the table,
yeah, I like it. Allright. Let me do a very
different story here. You may havenoticed, may have during many of the
(01:30:54):
anti Semitic protests on college campuses aroundthe country, there were people walking around
with signs that didn't say anything aboutfree Palestine or Israel or whatever. UAW
union signs round signs with the Ithink it's sort of purple and white UAW
(01:31:17):
logo. I think and you mighthave wondered what is that about? And
what it's about is that at someuniversities, the United Auto Workers have become
the union that represents workers at theschools and at the University of California.
Right now, the UAW, whichrepresents researchers and grad students in the University
(01:31:45):
of California system, has gone onstrike against the University of California. I'm
at a website here, I'm atthe center square, is what this news
outlet is called. This strike beganon May twentieth at U see Santa and
then it spread to UCLA and yousee Davis, and now it has since
expanded to you see Santa Barbara,you see San Diego, when you see
(01:32:06):
Irvine. Meaning more than half ofthe ten campus systems UAW workers are on
strike. And we're talking about likeradical leftists who are striking because they hate
Israel and striking because they want,you know, grad student or somebody who
broke the school rules and got introuble to get let out of their trouble.
(01:32:27):
And they're doing things like these gradstudents who are teaching classes are not
showing up to teach class with nonotice. They're not showing up and this
could impact the ability of kids tograduate. It could impact with their final
exams get graded. And this iswhat happens when you play nice with unions.
The UC system didn't have to goalong with UAW. They could have
(01:32:49):
made it harder, but it's UCand there are a bunch of leftist tools
and now they're getting basically what theydeserve. But pretty fascinating and probably not
something you would have expected. Thereis a strike against much of the UC
system by graduate students represented by theUnited Auto Workers. Pretty crazy. Hey,
(01:33:10):
folks, if you're listening on thepodcast right now, that's the end
of today's show. Thank you somuch for listening. Don't forget. You
can catch us every day on thepodcast as you are right now, on
your smart speaker, on your iHeartRadioapp, even on the computer at Koa,
Colorado, and the good old fashionedway on your radio. Thanks so
much for listening to the show.
My friend Tom Kranewitter, who youhear on this show from time to time,
had an extra ticket to see BrittFloyd at Red Rocks last night.
And I don't often go to concertswhen I got worked the next day,
but love hanging out with Tom,and I actually saw a Pink Floyd live
in a give or take a year, I guess nineteen eighty four approximately.
(00:22):
I think it was the Final Cuttour, which is not my favorite Pink
Floyd album by a long way.But anyway, this band has an amazing
reputation as a tribute band, andwe went and saw them. They really
do sound like Pink Floyd. Andthey played the beginning, they played a
lot of stuff from the Division Bellbecause this is thirty years since the release
(00:42):
of that album, and then theyplayed stuff from Animals and Dark Side of
the Moon and Wish You Were Herein the Wall and including another Brick in
the wallpart too that includes we Don'tNeed No Education. And they had a
choir of kids from Colorado. Ithink it's called something like Young Colorado Voices,
something like that. All you know, maybe thirty kids in red polo
(01:04):
shirts, young kids, young kidson stage singing that chorus and they were
dancing around and having so much fun, and it was it was a really
good show. And I posted onmy blog if you want to go check
it out at Rosskimminsky dot com andthe TGIF blogcast. It says I put
a short video it's probably two minutes, just a segment of that song from
(01:26):
last night with the Colorado Kids onstage with the band and it was just
so much fun. I left alittle bit before the end of the show,
so I could, you know,beat the rush, because I get
up pretty early. But you know, I caught probably ninety percent of the
show. I didn't leave very early, and I got home, got to
(01:49):
bed around eleven thirty. And Imentioned that for a reason because then I
got up at five because I hada thing to do. And so here's
the thing, and this is thepart where I'm a little bit, a
little bit proud of myself. Sowhen we got back from our road trip,
when christ and I got back,we found that the clothes dryer wasn't
working, and in particular, itwasn't heating right. It would go on
(02:12):
and the whatever, the drum wouldwould spin and we'd all think, you
know, it would seem like it'sworking, except that it wasn't heating up,
so the clothes weren't getting dry.And this was the day before yesterday,
right, this is when Wednesday afternoonevening. And partly because I like
(02:36):
to be handy and I take greatpride in being handy and doing things myself,
and partly because I'm cheap, andthe idea of spending two or three
hundred dollars to have somebody come fixa dryer that's probably only worth three hundred
dollars at this point, that justdidn't sit well with me. So I
(02:58):
went online and I looked up aYouTube video what to do if your dryer
isn't heating. What to do ifin whatever brand of dryer I have,
I forget Ken Moore or something,you know, what to do if you're
ken More dryers and heating. Ifound a two minute video and I watched
it, and it showed some thingsto test with an ome meter to test
resistance, to see if some particularelectrical parts were working the way they were
(03:20):
supposed to work. So I bustedout one of my multimeters, because I
do have a lot of the electronictoys. I took the I took the
top off the dryer, took theback off the dryer, got in there
with the OH meter and figured outwhat the broken part was, and I,
you know, had to take somethings out, and my you know,
I got real dirty and all.But because there's all kinds of black
sood in there anyway, I don'tknow if that there should be, but
(03:43):
I this is just what an amazingworld we live in. Okay. So
it's Wednesday, maybe seven or eightpm, and I diagnose the broken dryer,
and I figure out what part isbroken, and it turns out to
be the actual heating element, notany of the fuses or the thermostats or
(04:06):
any of that. It's the actualheating coil is physically broken. There's a
physical break in it. And soI go look up the model of my
dryer. I go online to theGoogle machine. I search for heating coil
for this dryer model number. Ifind it on Amazon for seventeen dollars and
(04:29):
forty nine cent with delivery the nextday. So we got the twenty seven
cent communist delivery tax here in Coloradoplus tax. So I have the part
delivered the next day for just undertwenty dollars. And this morning I got
up at five and installed the newpart and put it all back together,
(04:51):
and the dryer is working right now. And so I'm very proud of myself
for being able to fix a dryerway outside on my use ual skill set.
But all but separate from you know, me dislocating a shoulder by patting
myself on the back so hard.What an amazing thing that we live in
(05:13):
a time and in a place whereyou can find some I'm not gonna call
it an obscure part, but youknow, a random little part from a
dryer, and you can order itonline and have it delivered to your house
the next day for less than twentybucks including the part. I don't just
(05:38):
mean the delivery for the whole thingwas less than twenty bucks to get the
part to my house in twenty fourhours. Is that not a freaking miracle
of modern logistics? Is that notlike all these people Bemoan folks like Bill
Gates or Jeff Bezos, for allthe money they've got. I mean,
(05:59):
do think about how much Jeff Bezos, by I am not being sarcastic here,
think about how much Jeff Bezos hasdone for me and every single person
like me who needed a thing,or even just wanted a thing. Maybe
you didn't even need it, maybeyou just wanted it. To be able
(06:21):
to get that thing delivered to yourhome in one or two days at a
low price. It's a miracle.And all those people deserve all the money
they have. And every time aliberal complains about how much money the billionaires
have, I mean the billionaires whoearned their money, not the ones who
(06:43):
inherited it. I mean, that'sokay too, but I don't really respect
that the same way. I justthink, you know, what have you
ever done? You complaining liberal?You're just a little jealous, aren't you.
All Right, one quick thing,I'm not sure that I made this
mistake yesterday, But on the possibilitythat I made this mistake yesterday, I'm
(07:06):
going to offer a maybe correction becauseI don't remember just how I said it.
But when we were talking about DDay yesterday and I mentioned a CNN
article about how this might be thelast major meaning the every five year D
Day celebrations that will still have anyliving D Day veterans in attendance, CNN
(07:30):
said it might be because right now, the youngest D Day veteran is around
ninety six, So in five moreyears, the youngest D Day veteran will
be one hundred and one. Willany of them go to and how many
of them will still be around?Right? Will they go? So?
Anyway, when we were talking aboutthis yesterday, I dropped the number three
(07:51):
thousand on you, and I don'tremember if I said that there are three
thousand World War two vets still abecause if I said that, that would
be wrong. There's somewhere in theneighborhood of one hundred thousand. The three
thousand number somewhere in the neighborhood.Don't really know is the number of D
Day veterans still alive. So Idon't know for sure if I said that
(08:16):
wrong yesterday, but I did wantto just make sure I got that right
when we come back. Governor Polusdid something yesterday that leaves me quite disappointed.
I emailed him about it yesterday afternoonand he replied and told me I
can share his reply on the air, and I will do so. Right
(08:37):
after this, we will have LaurenBobert joining me in studio, congresswoman representing
Colorado's third congressional district running for theRepublican nomination now in the fourth Congressional District.
She just sent me a text sayingI should be there just a few
minutes before we go on air.I was trying to get there earlier but
ran into my neighbor and he wastelling me that his mom passed, and
so I spent more time in thatconversation. Then anticipated all right, that's
(09:01):
fine, Hopefully she will be hereon time. So yesterday we had a
brief conversation with Sage No Auman fromColorado Voters First, and they are the
group that will be bringing a ballotmeasure. It'll be Initiative three to ten
to have ranked choice voting in thestate of Colorado. So I just I
(09:22):
want to separate two things here,as we did in that conversation yesterday,
but just to make sure we're allon the same page. So what I'm
talking about today is not about whetheryou do or don't support ranked choice voting.
We will have plenty of time totalk about that before we have the
opportunity to vote on this in November, assuming they get the ballot measure on
(09:43):
the ballot. What we're talking aboutis political shenanigans. Ranked cho voting,
were it to pass, would likelyshift power away from the furthest fringes of
both parties. Again, I'm notgoing to get into the details of how
it works and all that. Willdo that another time. But you would
(10:03):
generally expect with ranked choice voting thatthe most conservative Republicans who might win now
wouldn't win under that system, andthe most liberal, most progressive Democrats also
who might win now, probably wouldn'twin under that system. So the kind
(10:26):
of wing nuts on both sides don'tlike the idea of ranked choice voting.
And so there was an election reformbill that went through the state legislature,
and just at the end of thesession before it was voted on, the
leftist member of the state legislature EmilySerota, added an amendment to it that,
(10:48):
as I read in news reports,was brought to the floor, explained,
voted on, and passed in aboutone minute. So they were clearly
intentionally hiding it from everybody and notgiving people a chance to understand what it
was about. People figured out whatit was about, and what it was
(11:09):
about is trying to make it sothat if ranked choice voting passes, it
will not be able to actually beimplemented. They were trying to preemptively thwart
what they think may end up beingthe will of the people. And again,
I am not sitting here to discusswith you the merits or demerits of
(11:31):
ranked choice voting. Right now,I am talking about this disgusting, dirty
trick by Emily's Serrata and whoever abeddedher to put something into a bill at
the last minute in order to,as I said, preemptively try to prevent
a future vote representing the will ofthe people from being able to be implemented.
(11:56):
So we were talking yesterday about howwe are hoping that Governor Polis would
veto the bill. Yesterday it wasannounced that he signed the bill, and
he put out a signing statement thatwent along with it. But you can
read that. You can read thatsigning statement on my website. Maybe I'll
share a moment of it with youif I have time here. But I
(12:18):
emailed Governor Polis yesterday and I said, why did you sign this? Right?
This is bad. The underlying billitself is pretty basic and, as
Sage Noawman said yesterday, not particularlycontroversial, just some tweaks to election stuff.
It's a bipartisan bill, is nobig deal. But they added this
(12:39):
poison pill to it. So Iasked, Jared, why did you sign
it? And he said, andI have his permission to quote him,
we got agreement of Republican and Democraticleadership to implement ranked choice voting if it
passes, and to ignore this.And what I said to him, and
what I'm saying to you, isthat's nonsense. Governor Polis either got played
(13:05):
or willingly went along. I don'tknow which I want. On the one
hand, I want to think hegot played because I think but I also
think he's too smart to believe thisRepublican leadership barely matters Democratic leadership in this
(13:26):
state. Do you think they're actuallygonna abide by an agreement if they think
that this thing that passes is goingto take away some of their power?
And do you think they're gonna abideby an agreement with a term limited lame
duck governor. No, of coursenot. And this is nonsense. And
(13:46):
Polis said in his signing statement,I'm signing the bill today because of these,
you know what he calls critical provisionsfor the twenty twenty four election.
He said, I don't support languageadded in the final days of the session
designed to frustrate the will of thepeople should voters approve ranked choice voting.
He said, I find those provisionsto be unconstitutional, and he explains why.
(14:07):
So basically, what Poulus is sayingis, look, he thinks that
the stuff that was in the billthat is designed to stop ranked choice voting
if the people vote for it,is unconstitutional. And he says he has
an agreement from leadership to not tryto enforce it, but they don't need
to try to enforce it. Someleft wing outside group, maybe at the
(14:30):
behest of leftists in the state legislature, who will pretend, oh, hey,
it's not us. Some left wingoutside group will say sue saying,
look, it's the law. Youhave to do ab CD and you know,
five years of ten years of stuffbefore you can implement ranked choice voting.
And this will be tied up incourts for years longer than it needed
to be. And again, Ithink Governor Polis is too smart to actually
(14:52):
believe what he told me. Ijust look, I just don't believe it.
I don't believe it. I'm verydisappointed by it. I think he's
probably right that this stuff is unconstitutional. I think also that a voter of
the people will supersede this stuff,and I think a judge would probably rule
(15:13):
that this stuff that was in thebill, you know, has to be
tossed out because of the will ofthe people says we want ranked choice voting
now. If that passes, butit could still tie it up in court
for years, and so, youknow, I'm very disappointed in Governor Polis
signing that thing, and I'm verydisappointed that he essentially gave Emily Sarota and
(15:35):
the other low life grifters in theDemocratic Party, dirty tricksters, that he
gave them a win that they didn'tdeserve. Both my parents are doctors.
I didn't know what I was goingto do when I was growing up.
When I was in college for alittle while I was pre med, I
didn't really want to be a doctor. You need to have a certain desire
to help people that I do nothave. And luckily I found my way
(15:56):
into a different career that I endedup enjoying. But at the time,
I didn't seemed like there was ashortage of doctors. There was no real
talk about that kind of thing inthe nineteen eighties about a shortage of doctors.
But it's pretty different now in healthcarebroadly. In fact, I saw
an article this morning about the shortageof nurses, shortage of all kinds of
things. But we're going to talkmostly about physicians today and joining us to
(16:19):
talk about how we can try toaddress America's doctor shortage. Jonathan Wolfson is
the chief Legal Officer and Policy directorat the Cicero Institute. Previously, he
was the head of the US Departmentof Labour's Policy Office during the Trump administration.
Jonathan, Welcome to KOWA. It'sgood to have you, Ross,
(16:41):
Thanks for having me. It's apleasure to be here. So one thing
before we talk about doctors. I'man econ nerd, and I'm wondering what
you won the Olin Prize for atWashington University of Saint Louis. So I
did a research paper when I wasthere on the decisions of women to stay
(17:03):
in the labor force or not basedon payroll taxes. And so I did
that project and did some regression analysisand some legal analysis and put those things
all together. And you know,as we econ nerds likes to do,
sometimes you get some fascinating results.And I was privileged enough to have some
fascinating results out of that paper.All right, Wait, so I'm still
(17:26):
interested. So were the what werethe fascinating results and were they replicable?
So the results were that the becauseof the way the payroll tax is set
up as being a taxes on individualsversus the income tax being on household the
fact that a high income a highincome household would see a increase in their
(17:48):
marginal tax for the second earner,which in most households tends to be the
wife, meant that for families whothe husband was arny in excess to the
payroll tax, having kids and havingat us who earn more than the payre
attacks and the same disincentive effects forthe life to be in the labor force.
And so you know, there's somepositive results of that. Means there's
probably a lot more volunteering and otherthings and benefits we get for society.
(18:11):
But if you're trying to figure outwhy certain people aren't in the labor force,
taxes should be a part of thatconversation. Yeah, okay, that
makes sense. I think. Ithink it seems like common sense to many
people that if you tax something,you get less of it, right,
So you tax work and you getless work. That doesn't seem like too
difficult. I don't mean your studyisn't interesting. I mean, I mean,
(18:33):
just conceptually, it's funny that somepeople might be surprised by the results
of your study. I think that'sright. I think that you know,
when we create certain taxes, sometimeswe don't think about all the downstream effects
that they have, And unfortunately thathappens far too often in policy making.
People think about the immediate effects,or not even the effects at all.
(18:55):
They just think about the benefits theythink are going to common, not any
of the potential disadvantage. Yeah,that's why I tell my listeners all the
time to go read their bostiacht andhopefully I'm the only talk show host you
have ever heard say that. So, speaking of disincentives, you wrote a
piece for the Wall Street Journal aboutAmerica's doctor shortage, and before we get
(19:15):
into what you mentioned is one particularway to address it, I wonder if
you could describe the scale of theproblem a little bit. Yeah, so,
the United States is facing a shortageof about one hundred to two hundred
thousand doctors over the next decade.This problem talk about incentive effects. In
(19:36):
the nineteen nineties, there was aconcern about potentially having too many doctors,
and so there was a concerted effortto limit the funding for residencies that are
the training that doctors have to dobetween medical school and when they get their
license, to limit the funding thatwas going to be spent on that from
a national level, and they effectivelycap that funding in the nineteen nineties.
(19:56):
And now here we are, youknow, thirty years later, and we're
saying, why do we have notenough doctors to meet the needs of all
the patients in America? You know, Colorado's projected to be about twenty five
hundred doctors short by the end ofthis decade. And part of the reason
is that we're not churning out enoughfolks coming through the residency pipeline. And
so that's that's the cause of youknow, some of the cause of the
(20:18):
problems. But there's you know,obviously some immediate consequences of people across the
country and across Colorado who don't haveaccess to care, or they call and
the doctor says, yeah, wecan meet you in three months, get
on the gain on the calendar,or folks who are driving hundreds of miles
for an OV visit means they're havingto schedule of C section that they may
have wanted to not have to scheduletheir CE section for. So these consequences
(20:41):
are facing lots of people, andthat's really the reason that folks across the
country are talking about the position shortage. As you mentioned at the top of
the piece, there is obviously ashortage in a lot of healthcare spaces across
the board, and this just meanspatients are not getting the care that they
need. We've got an aging populationthat is not how here than it used
to be, and folks as theyage tend to use more healthcare resources.
(21:03):
Mean that we're just going to seethis shortened e exacerbated in the years to
come. I can think of alot of reasons that somebody might not want
to become a doctor, and justyou know, for the record for listeners,
I can also think of lots ofreasons why people would want to be
doctors. Right It's it's tremendous,what a tremendous thing to do and help
people and save lives and all that. But right now we're talking about the
(21:26):
shortage. So as far as thatI can think of plenty of reasons.
It takes an incredibly long time,although it always did. It's very expensive.
It's more expensive than it ever hasbeen to become a doctor. But
it's always been pretty expensive, andit's always taken a long time, So
there must be something else going on, and so this is what I want
(21:48):
to ask you about. So amongthose other things, I can imagine,
it's just not very much fun anymore. So, for example, Jonathan,
when I was thinking about possibly becominga doctor, it was just the beginning
of the rise of HMOs, andone of the things I thought to myself
was, I would not be avery good employee of an insurance company,
and I do not want to gointo healthcare to become an employee of an
(22:11):
insurance company. And gosh, it'sinfinitely worse now than it was in the
early days of HMO. So I'vetalked enough here. What do you think
are the reasons that there is sucha shortage of doctors. So there's a
few reasons. There's obviously the onesyou mentioned. People don't necessarily want to
go into the profession, or theyare choosing to get out sooner than they
(22:33):
otherwise were getting out because of thepressures that are on them. The practice
has changed in some ways. Also, there's a lot of hospital validation,
hospital buying up practices that used tobe if you owned a if you were
a doctor, you probably were alsoa small business owner. Now a lot
of them are just employees and bighospital systems or insurance companies. To your
point, but a chege. Partof the problem is just the supply of
(22:56):
folks coming out of school who arelegally allowed the practice is limited, and
as I said earlier, it's becausewe've limited the funding that we provide as
a country for post medical school trainingor residency, and so those numbers have
not changed over time, and theyalso haven't moved across the country since the
nineteen ninety So even though Colorado hasgained a lot of population since the nineties,
(23:19):
the residency slots Colorado has are thosethat were allocated in nineteen nineties,
and so it just reduces the numberof folks who are even coming out with
the training they need to be ableto get licensed. And so that's why
we say, why should we requiredoctors trained and practicing around the world to
repeat that residency and take a slotthat somebody in the United States come out
of medical school is competing for andwhy are we going to make them do
(23:42):
that? Why don't we say,hey, if you're a great doctor practicing
outside the United States, you mighteven work on professional athletes or on some
of the top level people in yourcountry. Is there a way that we
can get you to come and workat the hospitals, work with the private
practices in Colorado in other states withouthaving to repeat that residency training that for
(24:02):
most people end up being pretty redundant. There might be one or two things
they're learning, but it doesn't takethem three to seven years to learn the
handful of things that they need todo to get integrated in our practice.
And that's what we've seen six statesaround the country do, and we're excited
to see more states starting to thinkabout this opportunity. And that was a
great opportunity for me to get totalk about some of these states in the
Weal Street Journal. So essentially,what you're talking about is a form of
(24:26):
licensing reciprocity is except normally we talkabout that as reciprocity between states, by
which, for listeners, what Imean is if you have a license to
do X in some state, thenthere can be other states that we'll say
we'll accept that license and you don'tneed to come do it here. Again,
similarly to for example, if youhave a Colorado concealed carry permit,
(24:49):
you can use that to carry concealedin some other states. It's a form
of reciprocity. You're talking about internationalreciprocity, and I think it's an awesome
idea. What I wonder about ispushback, because there's always these fistoms that
want to protect themselves and always saythey're going to make up stories like oh,
people are going to die or whatever. So what are you hearing in
(25:12):
terms of pushback from exactly where youwould expect it from. Yeah, so
the sister is too. We havethe privilege of working with legislators and other
government leaders in the states around thecountry, and one of the things we
commonly hear is that same or brainyou're talking about. People are concerned about
patient safety, and they absolutely shouldbe concerned about patient safety, But there's
(25:33):
no evidence that indicates that these doctorswho have been practicing for a number of
years around the world, we're ableto pass all the same exams, we're
able to get through the medical Board'sevaluation process, but all they don't have
is a residency are any less capableof providing care than the wonderful doctors that
are treating Americans every day. Andone thing that we put in our model
(25:56):
legislation and that most of the stateshave included in the bills that they path
is a sponsorship pathway that explicitly requiresthe doctor to be sponsored by a healthcare
facility and to work directly with alicensed doctor in the state. So they
had some mentorships, if they havesomebody else checking their credentials, somebody else
checking to make sure the way theypractice medicine aligns with the way that doctors
(26:18):
in that state had been required topractice under the standard of practice in that
state. And so we think thatthis allows us to get a lot more
doctors. There's doctors all over theworld who are getting paid significantly less than
they would get paid maybe to theUnited States, and so there's a financial
incentive for them to move here.And there are patients desperate for care in
America who could absolutely use their services. We're talking with Jonathan Wilson from the
(26:42):
Cicero Institute. He also used tohead the US Department of Labour's Policy office
during the Trump administration. So justlet me just restate this and make sure
I'm understanding it, because what you'reproposing is actually a little bit less radical
than I had thought, and Ithink that should make it easier for us
a lot of people to swallow.But you're not saying that American states should
(27:06):
or are accepting foreign medical registrations asit as a full reciprocity for here.
What you're saying is that a certainlevel of experience overseas in medicine should be
able to substitute for the residency requirementhere, but still they would need to
(27:29):
take the medical boards and whatever othertests and the rest of the certification process.
Do I have that right now?That's exactly right, Ross. I
think that we've created really good systemsto ensure that we've got doctors who have
learned the right things, who areable to touch the patients and practice in
the right way. But there's nota good argument that I've heard yet from
(27:52):
somebody explains to me why a residencyin London is so different from a residency
in them or that that doctor can'ttake a few additional courses with the practice
that they work with in Colorado andbe able to treat patients in Colorado in
just the same way. In fact, there's doctors all over the world who
some of the pro athletes go to. There's a surgeon, an orthopedic surgeon
(28:15):
in Finland who treats all the professionalskiers around the world. But the story
I tell people all the time isthat the USK team wanted to hire him
to come and be the ski teamsurgeon for the US Ski team. He
would have to repeat residency in orderto get licensed in the United States,
and that doesn't make a lot ofsense to me. It certainly doesn't fascinating
all around. Jonathan. I appreciateyour time, and I appreciate your engaging
(28:41):
with me on the economic nerdiness beforewe talked about this stuff, because that's
where my heart is always a lotof fun ross And you know, there's
some legislation that some legislators proposed inColorado in the past a couple of years
ago that requires the Medical Board tothink about this. But I think that
it's time for Colorado and other statesthroughund the country to look more closely and
(29:02):
figure out how they can increase thesepathways sooner read than later, I hope,
So I hope you're right. There. We have one of the worst
state governments in the country at thispoint. We have one of the worst
state legislatures in the country at thispoint. So I'm not optimist. I'm
not ever optimistic about anything good beingdone here, Jonathan. Whenever the legislature
is in session, it's not yearround here. Whenever the legislature is in
(29:22):
session, my thought in my headis what are they going to do to
me today, not what are theygoing to do for us? So don't
hold your breath. Well, wecan all hope, right, we can
all hope. Jonathan Wolfson is chieflegal Officer and policy director at the Cicero
Institute. That is Cicero Institute dotorg to learn more. Thanks for being
(29:44):
here, Jonathan. We'll do itagain. Thanks so much. Ross.
All right, Okay, that wasa lot of fun. All right,
let me share a couple other quickstories with you, and don't forget if
all those according to plan. We'regonna have Lauren Bobert joining me in studio
in about forty five minutes, sofingers crossed that she gets here on time.
Last text messages message that she thoughtshe would be here on time.
(30:07):
Let me share a couple stories withyou. So this is from the New
York Post, and one part ofthis story is a little bit interesting,
and another part of the story isreally interesting. So again, headline from
the New York Post. Baggage handlerissues warning to passengers who tie ribbons to
their suitcases. Now, I thoughtthat the issue was gonna be that,
(30:29):
So let me just back up.You know what I'm talking about, right,
You travel, and lots of peopleare traveling these days, and lots
of people have suitcases that look prettysimilar to each other, right, especially
the black ones and the gray ones. Some people have wild colors. It
makes it easy to find. Butfor folks who have suitcases that are reasonably
likely to look like other people's suitcases, sometimes you will tie a little something
to the handle that it makes itidentifiable, not just to you, but
(30:52):
to other people. Right, ifyou tie a I don't know, Broncos
colored thing around the handle, you'llrecognize that's yours. And somebody else who
the suitcase that looks like yours butdoesn't have that ribbon, we'll say,
oh, that one's not mine.It's got the Broncos thing there, Right,
And I thought the story was gonnabe that the ribbons would get caught
in the machines. But that's actuallyapparently not the issue. The issue is
(31:12):
that these machines get scanned and youmay notice, and you should be careful
with this right or just be diligentabout this. When you travel, typically
they put that big sticker around thehandle that says where your luggage is going.
But they also put this small stickerit's like an inch and a half
long and maybe a half an inchat most tall, and they slap that
(31:36):
on the suitcase and that's like abackup, a backup sticker in case something
happens to the big one. Andwhat you want to do when you're done
with a trip is take those smallstickers off. You don't want to leave
the small stickers on your suitcase becausethat could confuse the system. But in
any case, these things need tobe scanned for the automated baggage systems to
(31:56):
get your bag where it needs togo. And the issue here is that
when you put these ribbons on thehandle of your suitcase, if you're putting
them on the same handle that's nearwhere either the small sticker or especially where
the big sticker goes, then youwill end up potentially causing your bag to
(32:19):
need manual handling because it'll fail theautomated scan because the ribbon's going to get
in the way of the scanner.And so that's what this person is saying
is if you put the ribbon on, you need to be a little careful
because you may end up causing yourbag to get pulled to go through manual
scan and then it might not makethe flight, and then it might you
might end up not having your luggage. So there his advice is essentially,
(32:44):
if you're gonna put some kind ofidentifying little ribbon there, try to make
sure that you do it in away that doesn't block the stickers. Now
that's interesting enough. But here's theother thing that This is the part of
the story that I just loved.Another again, this is from New York
Post nypost dot com. Another reasonmany people have their bags pulled is because
they have mars zipan, also knownas almond candy dough, packed inside their
(33:09):
suitcases. This luggage expert who theirquoting, said, don't ever pack marzipan
in your luggage. It has thesame density as some explosives. So your
bag will be removed and you willbe called from the plane for a bag
search. So there you go.Now, I will just add to that
(33:31):
nobody should ever have Marzapan in theirluggage anyway, for the very very simple
reason that Marzapan is gross. Thanksfor spending some time with me. I'm
feeling very proud of myself because Ifixed my clothes dryer. Yes, yes,
I won't tell you the story again, but I got up at five
(33:52):
in the morning and replaced a partthat arrived by Amazon Delivery after just twenty
four hours after ordering at The partarrived while I was at Red Rocks last
night watching the Britt Floyd concert.I put a little two minute clip did
you watch it? Dragon? Iput a little two minute clip up.
I've not seen it yet, okay, And it's Britt Floyd, this Pink
Floyd tribute band. So I don'tthink this can count as in my question
(34:16):
that I asked from time to timeof what's the longest time period you've ever
gone between seeing the same band twice? Because I saw Pink Floyd in the
eighties and now Britt Floyd. Butit's not the same. It's just it
doesn't count. But it is fortyyears between seeing Pink Floyd music live in
concert, I will say, butstill for me, the record remains remains
(34:37):
ac DC seeing them live at MadisonSquare Garden in New York City somewhere around
nineteen eighty four or nineteen eighty five, and then seeing them again at the
Pepsi Center a few years ago beforeit was before it was Ballerina, so
some years ago. That's still myrecord. Anyway, a really fun show,
and they had a chorus of Coloradokids I think they're called Colorado Young
(35:00):
Voices or something like that, onstage singing we don't need no education.
And it was a lot of fun, and I posted just a two minute
clip of that. It's on theblog at Roskiminski dot com if you click
on the TGIF blodcast. And wealso added a dragon's request maybe eight pictures
from our road trip Chris and andour road trip. A few other people
wanted to see pictures, so Iput eight pictures up our road trip.
(35:22):
People keep asking by text, likeRoss, where did you go? Trinidad,
Colorado? Then due west Chauma,New Mexico, with visiting some small
towns in between. Then we wenthiking at a place called the Bistie Badlands
in New Mexico, and then continuedthat same day to Monument Valley, which
(35:43):
is kind of on the border betweenUtah and Arizona. And then the next
day we went to Palisade and spenttwo nights in Palisade, Colorado on the
western slope. Just a gorgeous,a gorgeous place in retrospect, seeing Palisade
as I was driving through Colorado withmy dad. Seeing Palisade was the thing
that made me wanted to made mewant to live in Colorado one day,
(36:07):
where it looks like the garden ofEden on one side of the highway and
the surface of the Moon on theother side of the highway and away.
I always just thought, this isthe most spectacular place. And it took
me a while to figure out afterI came back to Colorado many, you
know, decades later, like whatpart of Colorado was it that I was
remembering? And that's that's what itwas, all right. That's Kristen in
(36:28):
the photo doing the yoga. Correct. Y's not you correct? I don't
know how to yoga. Did youeven come closely doing? No? Okay,
no, I couldn't come close toimagining doing the yoga positions that my
wife can do. So Yeah,there's a picture of her doing a yoga
pose on the top of a verybig rock, and that that particular one
(36:49):
is in a place called Mystery Valley, which basically next to Monument Valley in
Arizona. Anyway, So that's allup at Rosskomminsky dot com if you want
to go check that out. DragonA Rod gave me quite the stink eye
when I said at the end ofthe last segment that Marzapan is gross.
Do you have an opinion about Marzapan? What Marszapan? Oh, it's like
(37:14):
almond flavored candy or and they makemore. You know, I am not
an almond fan, right, Okay, good, I'm gonna go with no,
okay good, All right. Sothis is a story I just wanted
to mention briefly. It was inKoa's news yesterday, but I just want
to mention this from the Colorado Sunco workers raised concerns a decade before former
(37:36):
Colorado forensic scientist was found manipulating datain six hundred and fifty four cases.
Subhead the CBI Colorado Bureau of Investigationis still reviewing Yvonne Missy Woods dating back
to nineteen ninety four, when shebegan working for the agency. State employees
tried to warn managers at the CBIthat forensic scientists Yvonne Missy Woods had been
(37:58):
manipulating data as early as twenty fourteen, almost a decade before the agency investigated
and discovered that she had intentionally manipulatedevidence in hundreds of criminal cases she handled
over her twenty nine year career,the agency said on Wednesday. Doubts over
her work were cited in twenty fourteen, when a coworker questioned her testing of
evidence in a case and reported theconcerns to a technical leader. According to
(38:22):
summary of findings from a ninety fourpage internal affairs report, she was suspended
from working on criminal cases in twentyeighteen after she was accused of manipulating data,
and then she was reinstated. Shewas reinstated, and part of what
apparently she would do was manipulate theresults of DNA tests in sexual assault cases.
(38:46):
And generally what it appears I'm justkind of summarizing here, but it
appears that she not that she completelyfalsified stuff, but she deviated from standard
testing protocol and cut corners and nowthis is my extrapolation, made it more
(39:06):
likely that she would find a positivethat would then be used in a criminal
case against someone. And I thinkit is not just possible, but likely
that this woman's behavior cutting corners becauseof what I think is maybe a combination
of laziness and just wanting to beon the side of the police all the
time, has probably caused an innocentperson, at least one innocent person over
(39:30):
a career that long, to goto prison for something they didn't do.
And you know, this kind ofstory is a pet peeve of mine.
It's part of the reason that Itell my listeners I no longer support the
death penalty because I do not trustthe folks who are in the justice system,
whether it's people like this or lawenforcement officers or prosecutors. It's not
(39:54):
that I believe they will cheat.It's that I believe that some of them
will cheat. And and you weretalking about a system where for me,
it is more important to protect theinnocent than to punish the guilty. And
as long as we have people likethis, and we always will, I
(40:15):
simply cannot support the death penalty.And it makes me very sad that I
do not trust our justice system tothe extent that I should be able to
This story also hit yesterday, andI'm just going to spend fifteen seconds on
it because that's all it needs,and we'll do some other stuff. But
you recall that a judge in Georgiawho was looking the question of whether the
(40:40):
district attorney Fannie Willis, who hiredher unqualified boyfriend to be a prosecutor on
the Donald Trump election interference case downthere. So that judge ruled that Fannie
Willis could stay on the case aslong as her boyfriend was removed from the
case. And that's what happened.I think Fannie Willis he wouldn't be allowed
(41:00):
to stay on the case. Sothe news from yesterday or the day before
is that an appeals court in Georgiahas paused that case while they look at
this question of whether Fani Willis shouldstill be allowed to be the prosecutor on
the case, and they are notlikely to rule on that question until next
(41:22):
year. So I think you're goingto hear nothing more of any importance about
the Georgia case before the election.And so at this point it appears that
that bogus New York case where Trumpwas actually convicted, it was absolute nonsense.
But that appears to be of allthe cases facing him, it was
(41:42):
actually the worst case, but hewas convicted in it. It appears to
be the only one that will goto trial before before the election. So
there's that. What else did Iwant to share with you today? Oh
gosh, all right, this isan annoying little story, but just in
(42:04):
the interest of being fair and balance, they got to share it with you.
So you remember the other day Itold you about how open ai put
out a report about how they haddisrupted influence operations that were using open ai
to create posts on social media platformsto try to influence the American public or
(42:25):
publics in other countries. And therewas something from Russia, and there was
something from Iran and whatever, andnot only they were trying to posting stuff
in America, but they were actuallyalso trying to manipulate the public in Germany
and in Ukraine and some other places. And open ai said it didn't appear
that any of these operations, influenceoperations were particularly successful, but in any
(42:47):
case, they happened. And oneof them that I mentioned at the time
was was from Israel. And Isaid, I have no idea what this
is about. Maybe we'll find out, but they really didn't say anymore.
And now there's this news story.Gosh, I don't like this story at
all. But there's some part ofIsrael's government called the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs.
(43:07):
The diaspora is the Jewish population thatlives outside of Israel, right,
the diaspora is the scattering of Jewsaround the world. So apparently this government
agency allocated about two million dollars toan operation where they hired a political marketing
(43:28):
firm in Israel called Stoic to useopen ai and to create fake accounts posing
as Americans on multiple social media platformsto promote support for Israel. And they
particularly focused their messaging at blacks andDemocrats. Black Democrats like Hakim Jeffries,
(43:52):
who is the House Minority Leader,he's from New York and Senator Warnock of
Georgia, also an African im erand legislator with and I'm quoting from the
New York Times with posts urging themto continue funding Israel's military. And again
it doesn't appear that this effort wassuccessful in any important way, just like
(44:14):
it appeared that the other ones weren't. But still it's pretty disappointing. And
I think Israel should know better thanto try this sort of thing and think
they won't be found out and thinkit won't leave them with some egg on
their faces. It's not very important. It's not nearly as important as the
war. It's not as important asbeing on the right side of history.
But it's still a little bit disappointingwhen we come back if all goes according
(44:36):
to plan, and it is goingaccording to plan, because she just walked
in. Lauren Bolbert joins me instudio. Lauren Bolbert, congresswoman representing Colorado's
third congressional district running for the Republicannomination in the fourth congressional district, joins
me in studio. And this isnot the most important thing, but I
will just say, the last coupleof times I've seen you, you must
have been wearing taller shoes. Yeah, because you're Dana Perino size, which
(45:00):
I did not quite realize. Yes, so I'm five zero a little closer
to the mind. Okay, Iam five zero, and I typically am
in heels. In my own personalopinion, when I wear flats, that
means I've given up on life.But I am in flat tonight, but
I think it's kind of cute.So just for the record, I'm not
given up. Okay, right,very good. We've got lots of stuff
(45:22):
to talk about. We'll start withthe intro music. Are you kidding me?
Well, that's producer Dragon, that'sproducer Dragon. Was that was that
Beatles juice music? It was allright, I'm not ye right, I'm
not going there. I'll let otherpeople ask those those questions. So,
but let's start. Let me startwith a couple of hard things. So
(45:44):
you may remember this when you wonyour last race by a narrow margin that
a lot of people expected, andyou were on the show with me and
I and I asked you, doesthe narrowness of your win make you think
you should, you know, doanything differently going forward? And you said
no. Would you give that sameanswer now? Yes. So what we
(46:07):
discussed was I'm in the majority now, so things will change because we have
more legislative authority. We have thegabbles in the committee, we have control
of the House floor. I wasable to participate in changing the House rules
to get Single Subject Legislation and IndividualAppropriations Bill seventy two hours to read a
bill before we vote on it,so we don't have to pass it to
(46:29):
find out what's in it, andso much more even to open up the
floor for amendments, because I don'tserve on every committee in the House,
and so I don't have jurisdiction overall of the legislation that's passed through committee.
So once it goes to the floor, that's my opportunity to give a
Colorado voice to that legislation. Andfor more than ten years in Congress that
was not allowed. No floor amendmentswere allowed, and so I fought to
(46:52):
bring that back. So it wasn'tthat I would change who I am Russ.
I am radically me. I amauthentically Lauren Bobert, and there's no
changing that. But in my firstterm I was in the minority, so
I certainly had to use the onlything that Nancy Pelosi couldn't take away from
me, and that was my voice. And I was able to bring awareness
(47:13):
to the four hundred and fifty thousanddollars checks the Biden administration was wanting to
issue to illegal aliens who are separatedfrom their families at the southern border.
We shut that down. I gotloud about it, and that went away
also the Disinformation Governance Board. Igot very loud about that. I got
leadership behind me legislation all of this, but I knew the legislation wasn't going
anywhere, so I continued to speakout. And Jane and Gina and what's
(47:37):
her name, Nina Jankowitz, Praisethe Lord. She's so irrelevantw I've had
it say their name in a longtime. Nina Jankowitz was fired, and
you know, the Disinformation Governance Boardis gone. So I had to be
very loud because in Washington, DC, nothing happens without force. However,
in the majority, I get tolegislate. So I had bills in my
first term that sat on Nancy Pelosi'sdesk collecting dust. And now I'm actually
(48:01):
able to move those through committee.And just before I give it back to
you, I have passed more legislationout of the House than any other member
in the Colorado delegation in this term. And that's setting an amazing precedence.
Defined by being a sponsor of thebill, is that my legislation? Yes,
so okay, so again, andwe're gonna weave kind of policy and
(48:22):
politics throughout this whole conversation. Soat the time when I asked you,
like, would you change anything givenhow close that election was? It wasn't
really about the policy stuff. Itwas more like, you know, other
stuff, right, does the personalbehavior or or of just making people feel
like you're a congress woman? AndI was thinking about this a lot like
(48:44):
yesterday. How do I want toword this question to you? Because so
a lot of times when I thinkof famous members of Congress who aren't Speaker
of the House, and I thinkof people like ra Cheated talib and AOC
and Marjorie Taylor Green, and they'refamous for all the wrong reasons, and
(49:04):
I can't stand any of them.And you, I like you. I've
known you a little bit for along time. I like you a lot
as a person. I think you'regenuine and funny. But you're famous,
and I don't know that it's goodfor a member of Congress to be famous.
And I don't know that you're famousfor reasons that you want to be
famous. How do you think aboutthat? And do you wish you were
(49:29):
a little bit less in the spotlight? Well, okay, there's a lot
of questions there and a lot tounpack. So I mean, do I
wish I was less than the spotlight, yes and no, right, I
mean I don't have personal moments.I wish I was less on in forred
camera, that would be great,But you know so, I mean there
are those aspects. I mean,I would like to go to dinner in
(49:50):
Fort Collins with my boys and nothave random people come up and video us,
you know. So, I meanthat that kind of stuff bothers me.
But also if I wasn't who Iam and and as as loud as
I am and in this spotlight,then I don't believe that I would be
as effective. Because in Congress,when I speak, I mean people listen.
(50:12):
And I'm not saying this in likea self aggrandizing way, you know,
but I'm one of the few thatare invited to those closed door meetings
with leadership, with the Speaker ofthe House, whoever the speaker is for
that time being, you know,I was. I was at the table
with Kevin McCarthy in these small roundtablediscussions on policy and and even now with
Mike Johnson. And not that Ialways get what I want, but we
(50:34):
are having meaningful conversation trying to getthe conference to unite and come together on
an issue. Now, also,I mean you mentioned these other members that
I work with. I mean,I'm still going to say there's a Hamas
Caucus. I'm still going to callthem the Jihad squad. I mean,
they're not America first. They areputting other foreign entities before our own country,
and they're serving no argument for me. Rashida Talib is an egregious anti
(50:58):
Semite and a stain on this kind. I absolutely agree, and so I'm
not going to shy away from thatand be quiet about the discussing things that
they did. But also, forinstance, okay, so you saw the
we'll call it a crap show inour oversight hearing when we were going to
hold Merrick Garland and contempt. Now, this was a late night hearing and
(51:19):
it was out of control from thebeginning. Now the Democrats started it,
but I thought it was kind offun, you know, I mean,
it's late, like none of uswant to be there at this time.
They were, you know, kindof just going off and being like bold
in their statements, and some ofit was kind of funny. Jared Moskowoodz
had like, you know, areading of something that trumpets or fun braising
email and then it just turned forthe worse, and my colleague on my
(51:45):
side of the aisle, Marjorie TaylorGreen, attacked another member on the other
side and about her appearance, abouther eyelash here, her dang eyelashes.
And I was so frustrated, andof course, I mean, that's just
erupted and everyone starts. You know, so you were hearing you were in
that room. Yes, I absolutelywas, okay, but you didn't.
(52:07):
You didn't hear that I was inthere? Digit I don't a girl.
Yeah, I was frustrated because we'rethere trying to hold Merrick Garland in contempt
and get this path through committee.And this is this is not a light
issue. This is something that holdsa lot of weight, a lot of
gravity, and that we should betaking seriously. If the Democrats want to
make a mockery of it, fine, they don't want to vote for it
anyway. But I was taking itseriously, and I even so in our
(52:30):
parliamentary parliamentary procedures are rules when youcall to take down someone's words when they're
speaking a committee or the House floor. That means their remarks are struck from
the record and they are unable tospeak for that legislative period of time.
So in committee, if she ifthere was another opportunity she could speak,
(52:51):
she cannot. She's barred from speaking. And so AOC called to take down
her words when she impugned another member'scharacter, and those are the rules,
and it was just so out ofhand. I voted with the Democrats to
take down her words because I wantedthis to end. And now also I
will say if if we were ableto get the vote to take down AOC's
girl baby girl words and everything thatshe had said, I would have voted
(53:15):
to take down those words as well. That vote never came up. We're
talking with Lauren Boebert, currently representingthe third Congressional District, much of almost
half of Colorado, seeking the Republicannomination in the fourth Congressional district. So
why did just answer very basic questionlots of folks who who have huge numbers
of listeners in CD four? Whythe move? Yes? So i' mean
(53:37):
family first. So that is mythat was my number one choice to move
away. My divorce has been verypublic. Unfortunately, I tried to get
through it as seamlessly and quietly aspossible and also to really cover my ex
husband I didn't want to expose himor his faults. That's never been the
(53:59):
way my marriage as operated. Ibelieve that partners should cover each other's weaknesses
with their strengths, not expose theirweakness with their strength. And so I
mean I still help hold true tothat. Unfortunately, he's revealed a lot
of it on his own. Mychildren were not safe, That's been very
publicly documented, and we needed toget out of there. I was seeing
(54:22):
that my children were picking up learnedbehavior that I thought wasn't going to impact
them. I thought that was justsomething between my ex husband and I that
was private enough that it wouldn't affectthem, and it was. And so
we did decide to move. Andthen secondly, yes, I did think
about politically, what does this looklike? Am I going to stay in
(54:43):
the third? Uh? What doesthis look like for Colorado? I want
to move to the fourth. Iwant to be far away. Uh.
And so I did decide to runin the fourth district. And I think
that this is a great move forthe Republican Party and for the conservative movement.
We have stopped the millions of dollarsthat were we're coming in from these
dark money groups and the Hollywood elites. There were over ten million. There
(55:04):
was over ten million dollars raised ina non election year, and it wasn't
on policy or position. It wasjust against me. A lot of people
just don't like you for whatever reason. Part of it is, I mean
the media, they do a greatjob of dehumanizing me, right, I
mean you just said you like meas a person. I'm funny. Okay,
Well, nobody sees that. That'snot that's not front page headline on
(55:25):
the dipper posts. That's true.And I but I'd also say you probably
don't always help yourself in that wayeither, just being how you are.
And I think you kind of don'tgive a you know what, a very
about what other people think of you. I mean, you you want to
win votes, that's what you're doinghere. But I don't think you're out
(55:45):
there as a as a people pleasergenerally. But let me just finish on
the on the last thing. Isit reasonable to say that one of the
reasons you left CD three is that, given how close it was last time
and how much money the Democrat raisedin the interim, and that it's likely
to be the same guy that youthought, there's a pretty strong chance you
would lose if you stayed in CDthree. I didn't feel that I would
(56:07):
lose, but I also don't wantto find out. So I'm not done
with what I'm doing. I don'twant to be there forever. But I
am one of the tips of thespears in this conservative movement, especially when
it comes to America First policies.And my work is not finished. But
I mean, they're in the thirddistrict with my close race. I mean,
we have to take into consideration alot of elements there. It was
(56:29):
a mid term election, there's notgoing to be as much turnout. We
had fifty thousand Republicans not show upto vote, they did not return their
ballots. And you know, Iwas hearing a lot of it on the
ground I put in the work cross. You know, we've talked about the
mileage that I put on. Youknow, I get criticized for it and
I'm called a liar. But allthe Democrats and you know, even opponents
now they're, oh, my goodness, thirty thousand miles, what a woman
(56:52):
of the people. You're amazing.So me like as impossible. You would
drive around the world three times andyou can't do that. So Anyhow,
fifty thousand Republicans. I was onthe ground talking with people. A lot
of people were felt disenfranchised by thetwenty twenty election. They felt that their
vote did not matter. Others wereapathetic. And it's the Republican area,
(57:12):
it's fine. And so when youget fifty thousand people thinking similarly or you
know, life happens as well,you know, it makes a big difference.
So, yes, it was aclose race. I do believe that
we would have done better in thisnext election, but I also believe that
a generic Republican will do even betterand win in a bigger way than I
could have because their only argument isI'm not Lauren Bobert. Okay, So
(57:38):
let's move forward now. So therace you're in, now, you've got
five or six other Republicans, fiveother Republicans, and as soon as you
get into the race, you havethe highest name id in the most money.
Then you've got all these other folksthat you're gonna split the not Lauren
Bobert vote, right, So,and we don't have runoffs in this state.
(57:58):
So some folks are thinking you couldwin the primary with thirty percent or
whatever the number is. And Idon't care about internal polling and all that
you could win the nomination with wellunder fifty percent, given that six people
are in in total, How doyou think about that overall situation? And
(58:19):
if you do win with let's saythirty percent or whatever you think your number
is, how then do you thinkabout winning the general election? Because some
people who have their own motives forsaying this, of course, are saying,
well, Lauren Bobert's the only Republicanwho could lose the district. And
I'm sure you've heard it a lot. So what's your response to these people?
(58:40):
Yes, so, I mean,if we're ignoring numbers, I do
believe it's going to be more thanthirty percent. But yes, the not
Lauren Bobert vote is split by fivepeople. But also I'm talking to the
same people that they are, andmany of them are voting for someone else
because they're a lifelong friend and they'relike, man, you're my number two.
You know I made I made thecalls to the delegates at the Assembly,
(59:04):
and over six hundred phone calls thatI had made, and you know,
there was a lot of folks thatare like, I want to vote
for you. I can't you know. I've known this one forever. We
ranch together, you know, we'rein Douglas County together. We fought the
school board together, any anything likethat. And then they tell me or
like, gosh, I didn't thinkI would like you, and I really
do, and I'm really struggling withthis. So I do believe that those
people are going to come back overafter the primary, and I want them
(59:29):
to. I want to unif.I want to unify with my opponents now.
Now, of course, they haveall abandoned their unity pledges. I've
heard them in person, I've seenthem in writing say I will not impune
my opponents in this primary. Butthey're all attacking me now, which which
fine. I can handle it.That doesn't move me. It's another day.
But I'm not going to do thatto them. I will debate policy.
(59:52):
If you know, all of myopponents are Ukraine first. They want
more Ukraine funding. All of themhave expressed some form of amnesty. All
of them say that the twenty twentyelection was just fine. They would not
have objected to the certification of theElectoral College result. We we differ on
issues. When it comes to spending. Many of my opponents would have voted
(01:00:14):
for the one hundred billion dollar deficitspending for the supplemental Aid. We borrowed
that money from China. It's noteven paid for, and you know,
sending nine billion dollars to Hamas somany other things. And so I will
debate the policy, but the personalattacks I won't because the Republican Party has
to unify after this election. Weneed every Republican we can get in Colorado
(01:00:34):
to take our state back and toreally to keep our momentum. But I'm
not afraid of the general, whoeverit may be. You know, of
course, I'm going to campaign.I'm going to work, and I'm going
to continue to earn votes. Ihave a bipartisan legislative record without compromising my
principles. I'm still one hundred percentconservative rated, and I have bipartisan legislation.
(01:00:57):
So we have four or five minutesleft, and I actually want to
just take a little time following upon a couple of things you just said.
I think on policy, you andI are probably together about two thirds
of the time. There's some otherstuff where you're, well, am I
right and I don't care, youknow, like people are my right and
people are my left. Yeah,I think your position on Ukraine is an
interesting one, and I'm not withyou on it. I support more aid
(01:01:21):
to Ukraine. Could you explain yourposition succinctly just so we can get through
a few things. The most fundamentalaspect of it is, it's been nearly
two hundred billion dollars maybe even more, that we have sent to Ukraine.
Sixty one billion dollars was just approved. This is not just lethal aid.
It is so much more than that, and there have been no audits.
(01:01:45):
We do not know where this moneyis actually going, and they're already asking
for more money. More money isnot the answer. There's no game plan
to actually win, to actually stopRussia. Ukraine is not a NATO country.
We don't have an obligation here tohelp. And also, I would
say, just from serving on theOversight Committee and uncovering the corruption with Joe
(01:02:06):
Biden and his family and their businessties to Ukraine specifically, there's many other
countries, but to Ukraine specifically,I do believe that this is influencing our
policy, and that's Joe Biden sellingaccess to our federal government, which absolutely
makes him corrupt and he should beimpeached for the bribes that have been taken
by Ukraine. So I just thinkthat this has gone too far. There's
(01:02:29):
no plan, and we need tosecure our own southern border before we worry
about someone else's. I agree weneed to secure our southern border. I
think we can do both things.But again, I want to get to
a couple of other issues. Butjust one more thing on this. Don't
you think it's in America's national interestto help, if not defeat, Vladimir
(01:02:50):
Putin, at least stop him sohe realizes he can't then go into Moldova
or Finland or Estonia or something tome. To me, it's a lot
of money. Actually seems kind ofcheap if we end up stopping Vladimir Putin
and sending a lesson to China.Also that we're not going to cave in.
I disagree with you. It's notcheap. You know, every American
right now has over one hundred thousanddollars debt assigned to them at birth even,
(01:03:15):
and so this is not cheap.We're at thirty five trillion dollars in
debt. They're negotiating the farm billright now. That's one point two trillion
dollars. Like it's never stopping,it's never ending. And I believe how
we stop Putin is getting President Trumpback in office, because he would have
never invaded Ukraine if President if wehad a strong commander in chief. He's
(01:03:37):
there now. So if Trump getsin, and I don't want to make
this about Trump, but if Trumpgets in, what like, if Trump
gets in and says we need tohelp Ukraine, are you going to change
and say all right, let's helpUkraine? Now? I don't believe I
will unless there's a serious audit anda plan. If there's a plan,
sure, Look, I was willingto consider a skinny Ukraine Aid where it
was just lethal aid, where we'reonly sending bullets there. And you know
(01:04:00):
I was considering this in the supplementalAid, but then that was completely blown
out of the water and you knowsixty sixty one plus billion dollars that went
over there. But I do believehaving President Trump's strength in his policies does
slow down Putin. Also, weneed to unleash our energy sector. Right
now, we're funding both sides ofthis world. We're purchasing energy from Russia
while sending billions of dollars, hundredsof billions of dollars to Ukraine. Or
(01:04:24):
are we purchasing energy from Russia?We we absolutely are buying buying their energy,
their oil and natural gas. Absolutelywe are, and from our other
adversaries, not right now, butI don't believe that, don but someone
is either, the Indians are,and the Chinese are. Well for if
we unleashed ours, if we hadthe Jordan Cove pipeline, if we were
(01:04:45):
able to export our clean liquefied naturalgas, our energy, we could be
exporting freedom, like Joe Biden's energypolicy. And then going back to something
else you said about national debt anddeficit, these are these are the worst
government policies I've ever seen. Andour national debt is a sin being perpetrated
on our children. And you know, to the extent that you know,
(01:05:08):
like what I say, I thinkthe Ukraine spending is a relative bargain.
If I were king, I wouldgo cut that amount of money and more
from other places in the budget tofund that. But of course no one
should do that. Can we dothat? Try to do it, and
that's called to pay for and itis widely ignored in Congress. Gosh,
I wish we had all day totalk about this, but we are trying
to get the spending actually paid forto cut those areas, whether it's Green
(01:05:30):
New Deal policies where we spent overthree hundred and forty billion dollars in just
one piece of legislation for wind andsolar and other green energy products. But
also, you know, just totie this back to our southern border where
we have ten twelve thirteen million illegalaliens coming into our country. These are
military aged men from countries all overthe world. People are emptying out their
(01:05:50):
jails, their mental asylums, they'resending them here. Their crime rates are
going down, Our crime rates aregoing up. And also China is buying
our farm land and it's surrounding ourmilitary basis. I mean, come on,
we are being set up for sucha gross attack, and we're worried
about Ukraine. We need to protectAmerica or there may not be an America
(01:06:12):
to stand for our allies. Sowe're just about out of time here.
I want to give you the sameopportunity I give every candidate who comes on
the show the last thirty one secondsor something, because I like prime numbers
for talking to voters who are inced A four who've gotten their primary ballots
in the mail already, and they'retrying to decide. Well, Lauren Bolbert,
(01:06:33):
I heard a lot about her.These other people I don't know so
much about them. Why should theychoose you? Yes, Well, I
am the only America First a Republicanin this primary. I have a proven
track record. I have a onehundred percent conservative voting record. I do
not compromise my principles. But I'malso able to work with the other side.
Even our senator has been at Hickenlooperto get legislation over the line to
(01:06:55):
create one thousand jobs in Pueblo,to have more water storage projects. I've
secured twenty million dollars in infrastructure andwater storage in Colorado, another fifty million
dollars for the South Bridge in GlenwoodSprings. I have creative ways to get
our policies and agendas across the lineand signed into law, and make sure
that your tax dollars are coming backto your communities without raising our national debt.
(01:07:19):
I am fiscally responsible. I wanta limited government that gets the heck
out of your way. I amI'm like I said radically me, I'm
not changing. I'm staying in thefight. My voting record comes with me,
My fight comes with me and myperseverance. And again I want unity
after this primary. We need theRepublican Party to be strong here in Colorado.
(01:07:42):
Lauren Bolbert is seeking the Republican nominationin the fourth Congressional district. If
you live in that district and youopen the ballot you got in the mail,
you will see her in a fewother choices, and as an American,
you get to make your decision.Lauren, thanks so much for coming
to join me in studio. Thanksso much, and Ross. Just as
your voters know, I am topline on their ballot, every single ballot
in the district, and I earnedthat by showing up to every county in
(01:08:04):
the district, meeting with people andearning their votes, and I hope to
earn many more. Is our websitethat people can look at if they want
to learn more, Laurenfocolorado dot com. And I also have all of my
accomplishments on there, the initiatives thathave been signed into law, because this
is about delivering for Colorado. Thanksfor joining me in studio, Lauren.
Good to see again. Thanks Roth, We'll be right back a couple minutes
(01:08:24):
and just react reflect a little biton that extended conversation we just had with
Lauren Bobert. I'll give you afew thoughts first, limit let me just
share with you kind of the rangeof listener texts. Right, So the
range of listener texts goes from youknow, she's way too trumpy, or
(01:08:45):
and I'm not going to vote forher, another you know she's not a
proven leader. Then you have kindof interesting middle stuff like ross I listened.
I appreciate you drawing her out.Maybe still a little too trumpy form
right, but people who are kindof are who are thinking about it.
Another one says she seems quite intelligent, completely different from how the media portrays
(01:09:09):
her. And then another one saysshe's a total badass. Colorado needs her
get bleep done. So look,I don't vote in the in the fourth
congressional district. And and you've gotyour ballots already. If you're there,
and you've got Lauren Bobert, andyou've got I'm sure I'm gonna forget someone.
You've got Deborah Flora, you've gotMike Lynch, you've got Richard Holtorf,
(01:09:33):
Jerry Sonnenberg, I think Peter Ughis on that one. I think,
and you got a decision to make, right, You've got a decision
to make for me. Look,Lauren is well, am I right?
(01:09:54):
She's very trumpy. I don't shareher views about the twenty twenty election generally.
I do think there were problems inthat election the way. For example,
Pennsylvania State Supreme Court changed the votingrules in Pennsylvania, which was blatantly
illegal, and they were not allowedto do that. And for folks who
were focusing on that kind of stuff, where branches of government did things they
(01:10:15):
did not have the authority to doto change the way the election operated in
that year, I agree with thatstuff. But I also think talking about
the twenty twenty election is a hugepolitical loser. I think again, I
I don't, especially in races whereI'm not a voter, I don't either
endorse or not endorse based on differencesin policy, right and let because City
(01:10:45):
four is a very Republican district andI'm not a Republican. It's a very
conservative district and I'm not a conservative. So I don't put myself out there
saying that I represent that district andtherefore you should vote the way I say.
I don't do that. That's notmy job. Normally, if I'm
endorsing or not, it's usually basedon character. That's why I've made such
(01:11:12):
a strong endorsement of Jeff Crank inthe fifth Congressional District against Dave Williams,
who I think is a person oflow character. In fact, you heard
in our news this morning, youheard Chad talk about it. I'm looking
at a letter that I got anemail this morning from Republican Jefferson County Republican
Chair Nancy Palazzi, and I hopeI'm pronouncing her last name correctly. Sorry
(01:11:34):
if I'm not Nancy. And itsays in a statement released today, numerous
Colorado Republican county chairs, other partyofficers, members of the Colorado State Central
Committee in all sixty four counties,and many Republican candidates are asking for Republican
State Party Chairman mister Dave Williams toresign, to immediately resign. And they
(01:11:56):
go on and talk about the very, very many things that Dave Williams has
done wrong. Look, I've madeit a personal mission of mine to try
to help encourage people who are ina position to remove Dave Williams from chairmanship
of the party and to beat himvoters in CD five. I'm encouraging everybody
to do that. This guy needsto go. He's a blight on the
(01:12:17):
party and on that district, thesame way that Tay Anderson was a blight
on Denver. But that's usually whenI will make some kind of endorsement.
I also don't think my endorsement mattersvery much. I don't overestimate. Okay,
My question with Lauren in CD fouris has she done enough in her
(01:12:40):
four years in Congress to prove thatshe can be an effective member of Congress,
which I think is even is moreimportant than being a role model or
something like that. You know,I didn't want to bother asking her about
what happened in the theater. We'veall seen it. I don't care is
can she be effective? She madean argument that she is effective. She
(01:13:02):
made an argument that she gets themeetings with leadership that other Republicans don't get.
I don't know if it's true.It's the claim she's making. You
got to make your own decision.I will say I have suggested in this
race voting for somebody else. Ilike Lauren it wouldn't break my heart if
she was in Congress. She's infinitelybetter than Marjorie Taylor Green. She's smarter
(01:13:26):
than Marjorie Taylor Green, and she'snicer than Marjorie Taylor Green. If I
lived in CD four, would Ivote for Lauren Vobert in the primary?
No? Would I vote for herin the general election if she won the
Republican nomination. Yes, that's kindof where I am. That's kind of
(01:13:49):
where I am, And I don'tthink I have much more to add.
I hope you enjoyed the conversation withLaurenbert. I'm I'm sure she'll be back,
and you know, one way oranother whether she wins or or doesn't.
But voters in CD four you geta real choice to make, and
you're gonna have to make it prettysoon. You know. It's funny.
(01:14:09):
I had one question that I didn'tget. I wanted to ask Lauren,
but I didn't get to ask her. People love hating on Lauren Bobert.
They just love it. It's ait's a hobby for so many people.
And I get and I kind ofimplied this, at least in the conversation
that she brings on herself a littlebit, not as much as Marjorie Taylor
Green does. But fifty cent wasvisiting DC and took pictures with lots of
(01:14:33):
members of Congress, including Lauren Bobert, and just people went crazy. They're
criticizing fifty cent for taking picture withher, and I don't get it.
It's like, look, I ifI somehow took a picture with AOC,
like I probably would, now,I would not take a picture with Rashida
(01:14:56):
to Lee. I think Rashida tlei ilhan Omar. I think these are
evil anti Semites. I think AOCis a deluded young socialist kind of but
sort of interesting and in the publiceye a lot. And if I had
the chance to take a picture withAOC, probably probably would. I shouldn't
say that too with too much certainty, because I think I did have a
(01:15:19):
chance to take a picture with AOCa few years back when she came to
Colorado, and I didn't. Butin any case, people get mad about
just such crazy things. Anyway,let's do something different. Now here's a
story over at Westward. There's anotherversion of it at the Denver Post,
(01:15:39):
and this is specifically for Denver Rights. But you will recall that, let's
say a year and a half ago, voters in Denver, who seem to
almost always like to self flagellate atthe ballot box, passed a sidewalk fee.
Okay, they passed a sidewalk feethat basically in the original version,
(01:16:00):
if you own a property in Denver, you will be facing an extra attax
that will be calculated based on howmany square foot feet of sidewalk your house
is on. So so if youown a house on a corner lot,
you're really really screwed. And theconcept was that we're going to use this
to fix sidewalks because sidewalks are dilapidatedin Denver, are too small in some
(01:16:24):
places, or don't exist in someplaces where they should. Now, the
whatever the part of Denver government is, and I think it's the Transportation and
Infrastructure department, they were against thisplan. You rarely, you rarely rarely
hear of a branch of government opposea ballot measure that is going to cause
(01:16:49):
millions of dollars of new revenue toflow into that department of government. But
they did. They said, thisis impractical. We don't have the infrastructure
to fix the sidewalks. Even ifwe got more money. We don't want
this. It's gonna be very hardto implement. It's gonna piss off a
lot of people because it's not gonnawork the way you think. And so
(01:17:13):
the city council has had to delay, and then delay, and then delay.
And now here's this news story headlinefrom Westwards. City Council proposes another
delay to the upcoming sidewalk fee.A Denver City Council committee has advanced legislation
to delay this now until January ofnext year. If approved, it would
mark the second delay on fee collectionsince voters approved the new system in November
(01:17:39):
of last year. City officials stillaren't sure how much in fees would be
collected from home and that's why anotherdelay has been proposed, because they're also
talking about changing this so it's lessunfair to people who, for example,
have the misfortune of owning a homeon a corner. So, as with
(01:18:00):
many bad ideas, and as withmany bad eyed tax hike ideas in Denver,
was not well thought through before beingput on the ballot, but Denver
rights being Denver rights, they passedit anyway. In any case, it
does look as if this will bedelayed until January of twenty twenty five,
and then we're gonna have to seeexactly who is going to be paying what
(01:18:26):
We'll be right back on KOA.I'm so freaking happy about this. I
might have to post pictures on theblog at some point. I was speaking
of blog pictures. If you goto Rosskaminski dot com, click on the
TGIF blogcast I've got on there,like a two minute clip from the concert
I went to at Red Rocks lastnight, which was a Pink Floyd tribute
band called Britt Floyd, and Iguess they have a huge following. I
mean, Red Rocks was full andthey really do sound like Pink Floyd.
(01:18:47):
But anyway, in the second halfof the concert, and when I say
second half, I mean there wasa there was an intermission. So after
the intermission they played a lot ofthe older stuff and they played another Brick
in the Wall part two. Youknow we don't need No Education, and
you know in that song there arethese kids singing. And at the concert
yesterday they brought out a choir ofColorado kids and the kids were they were
(01:19:09):
having so much fun. They werelike dancing around and waving their arms and
singing Pink Floyd. It must justhave been great for them. But I
put up like a two minute clipor so of that, and then at
the request of the boss Dragon Redbeard, I posted eight pictures from the road
trip that Christin and I just did. And I think I put little,
just very very short captions on themso that you could see where each picture
(01:19:31):
is. But if you want totake a look at just eight pictures of
Kristin and I are are road trip. It's all up at Rosskiminsky dot com.
Linked to our guests and links totopics. Are a lot of topics
that I didn't get to today.There's just any of the Lauren Bobert interview.
It is up now, all right, So we had Lauren Bobert live
in studio. I went a littlelonger with her than I probably should have,
(01:19:53):
but we went like twenty three minutesor something. It's up on the
blog at Roskiminski dot com, soyou can see that there. Of course,
you should subscribe to my podcast,so through the podcast feed you will
get the whole show, and youwill get almost every interview as a standalone
podcast, And of course you don'thave to listen to all of them.
You can pick and choose. Okay, I want to hear I want to
(01:20:13):
hear the whole show today, orI heard most of that already. I
just want to hear Bobert or howeveryou wanna, however you want to do
it. So please subscribe to TheRosskominski Show podcast wherever you get your podcasts,
and don't forget. You can listento me, Mandy the sports guys
a lot of different ways. Right. You can listen on the iHeartRadio app
and just tune it to KOA.You can tell your smart speaker to play
(01:20:34):
KOA on iHeartRadio. You can listenon our stream at Koacolorado dot com,
and so on. So I wantto do a few quick topics with you,
and then we're gonna do name thattune. It's it's my turn this
week. And because I filled outmiserably last yeah, yeah, I yeah,
(01:20:55):
I'll take the l Yeah. Okay, yeah, I mean that's a
pretty clear like you can't just saythat's Ross changing the rules in the middle
of the game. The game reallywas Ross wins because he was really right.
I was really right that one.But anyway, by the way,
I've heard that the song you didlast week, Stacy's Mom, which I
(01:21:17):
assume all along was kind of intendedto be a parody of Jesse's Girl,
because it sounds so much like itthat that's what I thought that it was.
But I still don't remember, andI don't know if I ever knew
the name of the band who didStacy's Mom. What are they called Toountains
of Wayne? Fountains of Wayne?I don't so anyway, But but that
(01:21:41):
song didn't count because it was releasedin the two thousands. I will also
just say, for those of youlistening on the podcast for reasons that I
won't get into, we don't putname that tune on the podcast. So
if you want to catch name thattune and you need to listen to the
show live, you know, overthe radio or over the stream or whatever
while while we're doing it. Soif you're listening on the podcast right now
(01:22:02):
and they're like, where to namethat tune? Go, it's not on
the podcast. But I'll just leavethat part there. So let me do
a few things with you before weget to name that tune. New York
Post which generation tips the best betweengen Z and boomers? The results of
this survey may surprise you. Now, I will say that the results of
the survey doesn't surprise me. SoDragon, what's your guess? Now?
(01:22:27):
You and I are both neither genZ nor boomer where we are gen X,
so we're in between these people,but we kind of understand each of
them a little bit. So howwhat's your guess as to the tipping habits
of gen Z and what's your guessas to the tipping habits of boomers?
I would like to think that boomersare much more generous when it becomes to
(01:22:50):
tipping, but their value of tippingis probably a lot less, so they
may tip, you know, theten to fifteen percent. Sitting next to
a couple of the restaurants, thisserver was really nice and dropped out two
quarters and was like he did areally great job. But where the z
ers, they've grown up with tipping, so that's just a normal thing for
(01:23:11):
them. So that's just what they'regoing to do. As to the exact
quantity of each dollar amount, it'sa toss up. Okay, I don't
know. So you're addressing two differentthings, which is the right way that
I want to think about this?And one is the propensity to tip at
all. And then the other isdo you tip a lot or not so
much? Right? Okay? Sobetween boomers and gen Z, which group
(01:23:34):
do you think tips more of thetime? Tips are bigger Z? And
then which group do you think tipsmore when they do tip? Probably the
boomers Boomers? Okay? And Idon't know, by the way, I
don't know if this study is anygood. But this is a survey conducted
(01:23:56):
by bank rate, which is abig website. It's a real legit company.
And what they say, what adude from bankrate says older Americans seem
to have the most sticker shock aboutthe rise and cost of tipping, Yet
they are still much more frequent tippersthan gen Z and millennials, and they
(01:24:21):
tend to tip more. So Boomerstend to tip more often and more money
than gen Z. And I thinkI'm not surprised by this. I won't
get into why or why not I'msurprised. Let me just share more of
this with you. A majority ofboomers age sixty to seventy eight and gen
(01:24:45):
X age forty four to fifty ninereported what they call at least one negative
view of tipping. More millennials,let me look for hold on no,
so a smaller number. That part'sboring. Older generations may be the most
fed up with being expected to tipwell everywhere, but that doesn't mean they
(01:25:05):
don't do it. Meanwhile, goodluck getting a good tip from gen Z,
and in particular from gen Z menapparently the worst tippers. Only thirty
five percent of Gen z Ers whogo to sit down restaurants say they always
leave a tip. That's a shockinglylow number, isn't it thirty five?
(01:25:29):
That's what it says. Only thirtyfive percent of gen Zers say they always
leave a tip, compared with fiftysix percent of millennials, So that's the
next group. Seventy eight percent ofour generation Gen X and eighty six percent
of Baby boomers. Seventy one percentof women say they always add a tip.
Only sixty three percent of men saythey always add a tip. But
(01:25:50):
good service is still worth something tomost Americans. The majority of people,
sixty four percent, say the biggestfactor that influenced how much they decide to
tip is the quality of the service. Only about ten percent say they always
tip the same amount regardless of thequality of service. Boomers, seventy six
percent of boomers sixty percent of Genand X are more are much more likely
(01:26:15):
than millennials at fifty five and GenZ at fifty percent to show their appreciation
with a tip. Anyway, Ithink I'm I'm not that surprised. It
also might be that boomers just havemore money that could be than than gen
Z people. I see the genzs feel pressured when they tipping, when
they flip the little screen around likeah, so they just it's just an
(01:26:38):
automatic for them, no matter what. For me. I look, my
default position when tipping in a restaurantis twenty percent or thereabouts. Since I
am nerdy a lot of times,what I will do is I will come
up with a tip amount that isaround twenty percent but has some odd number
(01:27:00):
of cents so that the total addsup to a round number of dollars.
So if it's something something in seventythree cents, I'll add something in seventy
seven cents as the tip on whichis But but I have to say it's
extremely hypocritical of me. In fact, I hadn't thought about this until looking
at you right now, dragon andthinking about this. I should never do
(01:27:24):
that again. I should do theopposite of that, because I'm the guy
who only sets appointment times at alarmsand the time to cook something on the
microwave at prime numbers. Right,So why on God's green Earth would I
add a tip to make my restaurantbill come out to exactly fifty six dollars
(01:27:45):
when I would never ever use anumber like that for anything else. It's
always got to be a prime numberfor everything else. And I'm going out
of my way to make a distinctlynon prime number when I'm tipping. Oh
my gosh, that need to beprime or no, I remove the decimal
point, or like with the time, I remove the colon, Right,
(01:28:08):
So I mean for your future tipping, for your prime numbers? Yeah,
yeah, the whole number. Dothe need to be prime or just a
tip amount or the decimal point needsto be p No? No, no,
the whole number, the whole number, which is tricky because when you
get to start getting the bigger numbersyou were in, fewer of them are
prime, and I might end upeither having to like tip much more than
(01:28:29):
I was looking for or tip less. And then at that point, I
think, like any normal human beingin America, where we have this tipping
culture. Of course, my tipis massively influenced by the quality of service.
Right right now, I don't meanI quibble around the edges. If
the service is good or or verygood, they're probably gonna get about the
(01:28:53):
same tip. And the tip iswhen the service is clearly not good,
I'll lower it. It's It's onlybeen probably two or three times in my
life that I've left no tip becauseI thought the service was so bad.
What about you. You were inthe restaurant business, although it wasn't a
sit down restaurant exactly. We neverasked for tips or anything in the subway
franchise that we were in. Butif they were offered, I would politely
(01:29:15):
decline and say, no, that'sfine, you don't have to do that
here. But if I were offeredagain, yeah, then yes, of
course, thank you very much.I'll have a wonderful day. Right But
me going out to eat, Idon't think at a sit down place I
have ever not tipped. It startsat a certain point, right, It
gets lower the worse you do asa server, right right, You know,
in a way, and I don'twant to extrapolate too far here because
(01:29:40):
I've never worked in a restaurant.But so you tell me again, and
you didn't work in a sit downrestaurant. But here, here's kind of
my mindset. If you tip zero, the the server might just think you're
poor, or you're a foreigner,you come from some or whatever. I
(01:30:01):
think if you tip five percent,I think that's a much stronger message than
tipping nothing. Like, Okay,I recognize you, I recognize you're working
for tips. You were so badthat I'm giving you this, But so
I'm giving you something, so youknow, I'm aware of what's going on
here. But I'm giving you thistiny amount because you sucked. But it
(01:30:26):
would probably hurt a little bit moreif it was like two one dollar bills,
uh huh. If it was cashon the table, if they just
sign on the credit card, youdon't really see that until your paycheck,
right, But if it's seen cash, two one dollar bills on the table,
yeah, I like it. Allright. Let me do a very
different story here. You may havenoticed, may have during many of the
(01:30:54):
anti Semitic protests on college campuses aroundthe country, there were people walking around
with signs that didn't say anything aboutfree Palestine or Israel or whatever. UAW
union signs round signs with the Ithink it's sort of purple and white UAW
(01:31:17):
logo. I think and you mighthave wondered what is that about? And
what it's about is that at someuniversities, the United Auto Workers have become
the union that represents workers at theschools and at the University of California.
Right now, the UAW, whichrepresents researchers and grad students in the University
(01:31:45):
of California system, has gone onstrike against the University of California. I'm
at a website here, I'm atthe center square, is what this news
outlet is called. This strike beganon May twentieth at U see Santa and
then it spread to UCLA and yousee Davis, and now it has since
expanded to you see Santa Barbara,you see San Diego, when you see
(01:32:06):
Irvine. Meaning more than half ofthe ten campus systems UAW workers are on
strike. And we're talking about likeradical leftists who are striking because they hate
Israel and striking because they want,you know, grad student or somebody who
broke the school rules and got introuble to get let out of their trouble.
(01:32:27):
And they're doing things like these gradstudents who are teaching classes are not
showing up to teach class with nonotice. They're not showing up and this
could impact the ability of kids tograduate. It could impact with their final
exams get graded. And this iswhat happens when you play nice with unions.
The UC system didn't have to goalong with UAW. They could have
(01:32:49):
made it harder, but it's UCand there are a bunch of leftist tools
and now they're getting basically what theydeserve. But pretty fascinating and probably not
something you would have expected. Thereis a strike against much of the UC
system by graduate students represented by theUnited Auto Workers. Pretty crazy. Hey,
(01:33:10):
folks, if you're listening on thepodcast right now, that's the end
of today's show. Thank you somuch for listening. Don't forget. You
can catch us every day on thepodcast as you are right now, on
your smart speaker, on your iHeartRadioapp, even on the computer at Koa,
Colorado, and the good old fashionedway on your radio. Thanks so
much for listening to the show.
The Ross Kaminsky Show News
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