Season 10, Episode Nine January 12, 2025

SPEAKER_00 0:03

This is the Listening Tube.

SPEAKER_03 0:07

Hello and Happy New Year! Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. I'm your host, Bob Woodley. On this episode, we'll hear about a jackass, a president's farewell address, and the king.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

But first, not the headlines.

SPEAKER_03 0:27

Well, it is a new year, and with a new year comes new laws. After all, that's why our politicians are called lawmakers. Some are also lawbreakers, but that's another subject. Several states have new laws going into effect with the new year, including Minnesota, which now requires upfront pricing on concert tickets and other large-scale events. It doesn't stop Ticketmaster from charging extra fees for everything from administrative fees to transmission fees to fees for using your own bathroom, but it makes sure you know ahead of time what fees you'll be paying. So you'll know how much the ticket will cost before you get to the final checkout. The law also bans robots from buying tickets. Sounds discriminatory, I know. I have nothing against robots at concerts, as long as they're not twelve feet tall and sitting in front of me. Florida has a new law that keeps kids under fourteen from social media. Not a bad idea, but I don't know how it'll be enforced. Kids have been lying to the internet since they were kids. Plus, the Attorney General there agreed to not enforce the new law until the litigation is settled. Apparently, some people think that keeping kids off of social media is somehow restricting free speech. That's the same argument TikTok is making in its defense of the upcoming scheduled ban on the platform in the United States. It just seems funny to me that social media sites think that they're the only way people can express themselves. Nobody's free speech is being restricted by the removal of a social media platform. People are still free to say whatever they wish. It's the equivalent of taking away someone's megaphone. It's not a restriction on free speech. Considering the damage that social media seems to have caused to some of our young people, or perhaps a majority of our young people, it might be a good idea to put an age restriction on access to the platforms, but again, I don't see how it can be enforced. The entire country of Australia recently banned social media from anyone under the age of 16. We'll see how it works out there. The Republic of California has some new laws to start the new year. There's been a backlash against the slap-on-the-wrist approach to law enforcement in the Golden State recently, and the people made it clear they were not happy with the soft on crime policies that had taken hold there. Retail theft had become a problem because of a voter-approved proposition that raised the threshold of a felony of theft to a $950 value. As you might have predicted, people began stealing $949 worth of stuff. The new law lets police add up multiple theft charges against an individual instead of keeping each offense separate, enabling them to apply the felony-level charges. Assuming the district attorney actually enforces the law. Another new California law goes a step further than it had before the soft on crime policies became fashionable. It's now a crime to break into a car even if it's unlocked. When I lived in California back in the late 80s and early nineties, my buddy Chaz had a jeep with a soft top. You didn't lock the doors. So one day we hear his jeep chirp as if someone were in it, and we run out to the parking lot to find a kid in his jeep. We must have surprised and scared him because his pants were wet in the front when we confronted him. We lived in a relatively high crime area of Oxnard, so it was just a matter of time until the police car went by. We flagged him down and turned the kid over to the police. We offered him an option, tell us where you live so we can take you to your parents and tell them what you did, or we'll turn you over to the police. He opted for the police. The police told us he didn't commit a crime because the Jeep wasn't locked. We don't know what the police did with the kid, but today he would have committed a crime whether or not the car was locked. Another California law ushered in with the new year is meant to sort of protect kids who are confused about their gender. As it turns out, there were some schools that required teachers to tell parents if their child was using different pronouns or seemed to be homosexual. Schools can no longer be required to bring these things to the attention of the parents, but there's also no law preventing them from doing so. Teachers can spill the beans, but the school can't make them do it. Here's the problem I see with this. First of all, there's a big difference between being gay and being someone who thinks they need a different body. Transgender people do not fall into the same category as people with alternative sexual preferences. If your kid is gay, you probably already have a clue. But if your child thinks they are in the wrong gender body, they need help. The worst thing we can do for children like that is to keep it a secret from their parents. Especially since a brand new study published by the Journal of American Medical Association says less than one in a thousand kids between the ages of eight and seventeen were given puberty blockers or hormones in support of so-called gender-affirming care. And that's got to be the most hyphens I have ever used in one sentence on the listening tube. The survey covered the years from 2018 to 2022. So there are two ways to look at this. Either transgender issues with young people isn't as great an issue as it seems, which is good news. That means that 99.9% of us are happy with the plumbing we were born with, at least up to age 17. On the other hand, you might ask why we're even doing so-called gender affirming care in the first place. Because we're really not affirming their gender. It's clearly an attempt to change the gender entirely. A child's gender is assigned by the reproductive tools it was born with, not how it feels about those tools. No one should have the option to attempt to change a child's gender with chemicals or otherwise. To do so is child abuse, medical malpractice, and sadistic. Once you're 18, do whatever you want with your body. Just don't expect everyone else to go along with it. President Biden signed a bill this week that increases Social Security benefits for millions of Americans. USA Today says it's the first expansion of such assistance in 20 years. Of course, anybody on Social Security is happy about it, right? Not exactly. Although inflation under the Biden administration has resulted in annual cost of living increases, the bill just signed only benefits certain people. The bill passed the House 327 to 75 back in November, and the Senate had six weeks to consider it. They did, and it passed the Senate last month 70 to 26. It'll cost Social Security $196 billion over the next 10 years, shaping six months off the time between now and when Social Security is scheduled to become insolvent. So why did this additional drain on Social Security receive bipartisan support? We can assume the Democrats would support it because it benefits unions and the government administration that the Trump administration claims is the deep state. But Republicans voted for it too. Maybe it's because so many of our government officials have relatives in the civilian sectors of our administrative government. I would say the benefits are innumerable, but we already know it'll be about $196 billion. More than two and a half million Americans will get lump sum payments of thousands of dollars because they worked for the government and retired as early as age forty-four. Most people don't qualify for Social Security until age 62 at the earliest. The argument is that anybody who worked for the government and retired early and then got another job after retiring from their government job was being penalized because they were already receiving a pension from the government. Any government, local, state, or federal. Clearly, this is just a bipartisan way of rewarding the people who work for the government. This is another reason our government payroll is way too large. We need a much smaller, more efficient government. For too long, the government's answer to everything is to put more money and people to work on whatever the problem was without using the tools that were already in place. It was better optics to show that something was being done, even though nothing more was being done. Now we have to continue to pay for it. You might be thinking, but Bob, this includes firefighters and police officers. You're right. It also includes public school teachers and people who worked at the post office. What they did for a living isn't the point. The point is that our government, already bleeding money, just decided to give away more of it to themselves. Speaking of government jobs, Adam Schiff, the politician from California who got promoted from congressman to senator by the people there, was on NBC's Meet the Press recently and gave what I thought was a highly unusual reason why Donald Trump's nominee to lead the FBI, Cash Patel, should not be confirmed. In case you're not familiar, Schiff is a radical liberal who's an expert in regurgitating talking points. And Cash Patel is a former director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, principal deputy with Director of National Intelligence, and Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Defense. But Adam Schiff believes the attack in New Orleans, in which an ISIS follower plowed into people celebrating the new year, killing more than a dozen, quote, underscores why it's important to have an FBI director that has experience, has judgment, that has character, that will prioritize defending the country against the violence we saw in New Orleans or the violence we saw on January 6th. Paraphrasing what was written in the story NBC wrote about the interview. Just the fact that he equated January 6th with what happened in New Orleans is a sick reminder of how out of touch this guy is. One has nothing to do with the other, but he made it a point to point out January 6th just one more time. Plus, how did the New Orleans attack happen if we already have an FBI director with all the attributes the junior senator from California claims are needed? Clearly, we don't. Maybe we'll get one now. Schiff calls Patel unqualified because his top priorities are political vendettas and deep state conspiracy thinking. The truth is, Adam Schiff is scared that Cash Patel is going to blow the lid off the cover the FBI's been providing the Democratic Party, and Adam Schiff will be exposed for who he is. Other than that, Kash Patel believes the FBI had a hand in the very riot that Adam Schiff is still hung up on January 6th. Patel believes there's a deep state, and now he'll be in a position to find out if he's confirmed. The new Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, also speaking to meet the press, said he believes the FBI needs a makeover, and Cash Patel is the guy for the job. Confidence and trust in the FBI is largely eroded, he says, and he sees an opportunity to fix that. We'll see how the nomination process works out, but if all goes according to plan, the only way you'll get a portrait of Adam Schiff will be from behind him. Cause he'll be looking over his shoulder for the foreseeable future. The Biden administration announced this week a new rule that would eliminate forty-nine billion dollars worth of debt from the credit reports of 15 million Americans. Now, before you get all excited, it only applies to medical debt, and it doesn't mean you don't have to pay your doctor. The rule simply bans medical bills being listed on credit reports and bars lenders from using medical bills as part of the lending process equation. In a story in USA Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau claims that medical debt is a poor predictor of whether someone will repay a loan. It also claims 22,000 more mortgages will be approved every year because of the absence of medical debt from credit reports. This is clearly a benefit to those who have been saddled with an overwhelming amount of doctor bills, perhaps from an emergency or needed major surgery. Even a short stay in the hospital can add up to a year's salary for many people. There are, of course, critics of the new policy. They point out the increased risk lenders will have to take and the increased possibility the borrower will default. That could lead to negative factors that will affect the industry and consumers alike. It may also force doctors to get paid up front to reduce their exposure. Here's what I can't help but wonder. Why stop there? Instead of just erasing medical debt from our credit reports, why not eliminate the debt itself? If forgiving student debt is the right thing to do, even though the student agreed to the loan and promised to pay it back, then forgiving medical debt makes even more sense, since medical debt is often involuntary. Another factor is that many medical centers are owned and run by universities. Some examples are Presbyterian Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. If we can forgive the debt of the students there, why not forgive the debt of the patients too? Instead, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wants to play a shell game with the information lenders need to make educated decisions. I'll have more about the last-minute surprises by the Biden administration later in the program. This week in 1870, a political cartoon for the first time symbolizes the United States Democratic Party with a donkey. A live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion by Thomas Nass for Harper's Weekly. The Jackass was labeled Copperhead Papers, which referenced the Democrat-leaning newspapers, and the lion was Abe Lincoln's Secretary of War. At that time, the Democrats were mostly Southerners, fresh off losing the Civil War. It's interesting to note that the same party that wanted to keep slavery is now the party that has kept minority people under the control of the government through social programs. This week in 1899, the United States takes possession of Wake Island in the Pacific Ocean. Not much happened there until 1935, when Pan Am built an airstrip and a hotel there as a stopover. The Japanese took over during World War II and then it went back to the U.S. after the war. Today it's an unincorporated territory run by the U.S. Air Force and has no permanent residents. Then this week in 1917, the United States pays Denmark $25 million for the Virgin Islands. So the precedent has been set. Denmark is currently mulling over whether or not to sell Greenland to the United States. They may not admit it, but they're thinking about it. Donald Trump wants it to be under the control of the U.S. for national security reasons. We already have troops there and have for decades. I know a few people who were stationed there as broadcasters for Armed Forces, radio, and television. The Danes run the place, though. All of the local people are Danish. I can't imagine what the price tag might be for Greenland if we paid twenty five million for the Virgin Islands over a hundred years ago. But Alaska turned out to be a very good investment. A recent post by the Democratic Party on Facebook says, Democrats want to lower your costs. Trump wants to invade Greenland. This statement is a clear example of how out of touch the people running the Democrats Party are. Well, sh sure, Democrats want to lower your costs. They've had four years to do so and couldn't. Inflation stayed above 2.5% every month of the Biden administration. And, as I already mentioned, we already have troops in Greenland. Trump doesn't want to invade Greenland. He doesn't have to. We're already there. Do the Democrats know we have troops in Greenland? It's called Thule Air Force Base. This week in 1961, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers a televised farewell address to the nation three days before leaving office, in which he warns against the accumulation of power by the military industrial complex. Four years later, the U.S. would get directly involved in the Vietnam War, which had been going on for ten years already. It would last another ten years, with the U.S. pulling out two years before it ended. Eisenhower was a general before he was a president, so he knew what he was talking about. Today, the military-industrial complex wields great power in America's politics and economy. Every weapons maker in America has an army of lobbyists whose job it is to keep military conflicts around the world from ending. This week in 1973, Elvis Presley's concert, Aloha from Hawaii, is broadcast live via satellite to 40 countries around the world and sets a record as the most watched broadcast by an individual entertainer in television history. Over a billion people would tune in. Remember, this was a live television event, and either you saw it or you didn't. There was no streaming or ways to record it and watch it later. Today, sports programming is the most popular. In the United States, nine out of the top ten most watched events are Super Bowls. The only thing that beat a Super Bowl was the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. In Europe, it's soccer matches, and in India, it's cricket matches. In New Zealand, it's rugby. But there will never be anything again like that day in 1973 when a billion People all watch the same thing at the same time. And that's why Elvis is still the king. This week in 1982, it was called Cold Sunday. In the United States, temperatures fell to their lowest levels in over 100 years in numerous cities. Climate change, said no one. Today, everything is blamed on climate change. Much of the southern U.S. is enduring a cold snap as I speak. People are blaming the fires in Southern California on climate change, as if the Santa Ana winds just started happening and electric cars will stop them. More on the fires in a moment. I use Wikipedia for a lot of the research I do for the listening tube. It can't be 100% accurate because it is crowdsourced, but it's generally a very good reference. You have to be careful though. For example, when Kamala Harris began to claim she once worked for McDonald's, then there was some doubt because there was no record or evidence of it anywhere, a line in Kamala's biography suddenly appeared stating that she had worked at McDonald's briefly during college. It was vague, stating simply that at some time during college she worked at a McDonald's. That entry has since been modified with references that were written since then. The people who run Wikipedia don't control the contents of it, so the information is only as good as the people creating it.

SPEAKER_00 23:58

Contact the listening tube by calling 570-601-1101 or email thelistening tube at outlook.com.

SPEAKER_03 24:10

I would like to take a moment and express my shock at the wildfires in the Los Angeles area. The Santa Ana winds are a well-known phenomena in Southern California, but this year they were particularly ferocious. Those winds come from the desert and literally suck the moisture out of everything in their path, including your skin. As a pressman, I worked with a lot of solvents and chemicals, so I was behind the eight ball to begin with, but when the Santa Anna's came through, my hands could crack and bleed just from making a fist. Under conditions like that, somebody throwing a roach out the window could spark the fire that creates a catastrophe. The origin of the fires haven't been confirmed, but it's certain there will be plenty of blame to go around. We'll have years to mull it over while the people there try to rebuild. It won't be easy, and it will never look like it did before. Because many didn't have insurance, because the insurance companies canceled their policies. Many won't be able to rebuild. What's likely to happen is large companies will buy up any land they can and put up apartment buildings, or movie stars will expand their estates where possible. So why did insurance companies pull out? Because the Republic of California put caps on how much they could charge for coverage, and it wasn't enough to keep the insurance companies in business. The politics in California played a major role in why this fire happened and why it was so devastating. But don't count on seeing any resignations or anyone held accountable. If we've learned anything from the Biden administration, Democrats don't admit mistakes, they justify them. To my family and friends there and in Port Waneme, I have every reason to believe you're safe, and I hope you continue to stay that way.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

And here's some unfinished business.

SPEAKER_03 26:18

Well, Joe Biden has one more week to be president of the United States of America. Never before have I been so uneasy about what an outgoing president might do in the final days of the administration. Based on what he's done in the last month or two, anything could happen. Now you might be thinking, come on, Bob, you're just being paranoid. Well, let's recall some of the things that have happened in the death throes of the Biden administration. Eleven prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, all from Yemen, were released recently. There were forty prisoners in Guantanamo when Joe took office. There are now fifteen. Five of them are being held for their roles in the terror attacks on september eleventh, two thousand one. Six of them haven't been charged with anything, and that's why they haven't been brought to the US, where they would have certain rights. Plea deals are in the works, as are prisoner swaps, including negotiating with the Taliban. So anything could happen in the last week of the Biden administration. After hamstringing Ukraine about military aid and how it could be used, Biden suddenly gives permission for Ukraine to use U.S. supplied bombs to strike deep inside Russia, which Russia already said it would not tolerate. I'm not saying he shouldn't have done it, I'm saying he should have done it right away, not weeks before he hands the war over to the new guy. Biden has also authorized about seven billion dollars in weapons to be shipped to Ukraine, just in case the new guy feels differently about America's role there. As I mentioned on the last full episode of The Listening Tube, the Biden administration began selling the parts for the wall at the southern border as scrap metal after letting it sit in the desert for nearly four years. What a vindictive, petty display of contempt for American sovereignty. Joe Biden took an oath to protect America and immediately turned his back on it, letting millions pour into our country without so much as a how do you do, putting Americans at risk and overwhelming cities, schools, hospitals, and housing. And as a parting shot, he sells the parts for the wall for scrap. Another parting shot at not just the incoming president, but also the American people, is a declaration that more than 625 million acres of U.S. shores are off limits to new oil and gas drilling. Now, a lot of this area includes places where nobody wants to drill for oil or gas. It doesn't restrict new drilling off the coast of Louisiana or Texas. So why did he do it now? Well, one story says it's so he can claim to have preserved more coastline than any president in history. And there's also the poke in the eye to Donald Trump, who, as you may know, wants to drill baby drill. Joe Biden's last-minute pardons and commutations have certainly raised some eyebrows. Not only did he pardon his son Hunter for anything he may have done over a decade after claiming he wouldn't pardon Hunter, was just the opening salvo of pardons showing contempt for the American justice system. In Hunter's case, even CNN wrote a scathing fact check of the reasons Biden recently gave for going back on his word to not pardon his son. One reason the old man gave was because Hunter paid the taxes he owed, plus late fees. But the CNN story points out that Hunter has since revealed that he lied on some tax returns, claiming fraudulent deductions. As for the gun charge, Joe said it was because Hunter only had the gun for eleven days and then it was returned. Returned? No, Joe. You mean found in a dumpster after Hunter's girlfriend and former sister-in-law threw it in there. Police were able to track it down to the man who fished it out of the trash. Joe also claimed that Hunter was charged for lying on a form that asks you if you're under the influence of anything. That's not at all what the form asks. It asks if you're an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance. Hunter Biden clearly was at the time, as was demonstrated by the evidence found on the infamous laptop that Joe claimed was Russian propaganda. Right before the 2020 election. For that cover-up alone, one could argue that the 2020 election was rigged or stolen. The more Joe tries to justify his pardon of Hunter, the more he demonstrates he's completely out of touch with reality. But there was more to come. Over 1,500 pardons and commutations were issued by President Biden in the final weeks of his tenure. The pardons were mostly for drug dealers, tax frauds, and petty financial crimes. Kind of like Hunter. The commutations drew more attention when they included a judge in Pennsylvania who put kids in jail for kickbacks from the business that ran the jail. The scumbag's been on house arrest since COVID, and a sentence is set to expire next year. One of the kids he sent to jail committed suicide over the experience. A lot of the kids he sent to the clink didn't deserve to be there. The mom of the kid who killed himself was quoted in another CNN story as saying, This pardon feels like an injustice for all of us who still suffer. Right now I am processing and doing the best I can to cope with the pain that this has brought back. Nice going, Joe. As a native Pennsylvanian, I was appalled at what was done by the crooked judge, and now I get to be appalled all over again by what was done by the president. That's just one of fifteen hundred commutations, none of which the president claims to have read. These commutations were the result of criteria, checked boxes. If a case met the criteria, regardless of the seriousness of the crime or the damage it did, then it got the president's signature. Just like the rest of the leftist agenda, nothing but checking the right boxes is important or even considered. Two of those boxes were giving medals of freedom to George Soros and Hillary Clinton. The only thing George Soros has contributed to the cause of freedom is keeping criminals free to roam the streets and offend again. Hillary Clinton did nothing to promote freedom as First Lady, and her tenure as Secretary of State was a series of failures and the destruction of evidence in an active FBI investigation. It seems as if Joe is going out of his way to make Donald Trump's job more difficult and thumbing his nose to the American people as he's about to walk out the door. He's purposely putting up roadblocks to Trump's agenda, even though the people voted for it. It's the same democratic tactic we've seen for more than a decade. Keep telling the people they're wrong if they don't think your ideas are worthy. Even when the people speak through a national election, the Democrats still insist a majority of the people have no clue. The President has two speeches scheduled before he leaves office. One was to take place after he returned from Italy, a trip that was canceled because of the LA fires. It's supposed to be about foreign policy, according to MSN.com. The second speech will be his farewell address and a retrospective of his lengthy career as a politician. Either of those speeches may contain a surprise or two, considering Joe Biden will officially have nothing left to lose.

SPEAKER_01 35:06

It pulls you along, and though it seems wrong, it feels right. Don't you see this path you're on, needs a permit. It eats the listening tube is written and produced by yours truly, copyright two thousand twenty-five.

SPEAKER_03 36:02

Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. Support the program or text me from the homepage. I'm your host, Bob Woodley, for the I'll add infinitum.

SPEAKER_02 36:29

Left to lose it.