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10 Minute Drill
A horrific stabbing in North Carolina and our crime crisis; also: Zohran, Autopens, Electric bills
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September 9 – Culture of Crime, Biden’s Pardons, Zohran’s Homestretch & Senate Showdown On today’s 10 Minute Drill: -Culture of Crime: North Carolina rocked by the Irina Zarutska tragedy and the shocking case of Decarlos Brown, a repeat...
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A grisly murder in North Carolina and what it means for the United States. We're going to check in on the latest on President Biden and the auto pen scandal. There are some new wrinkles. We're also going to look at the latest in Zoran Mandami and the New York mayor's race. All of that and so much more today on 10 Minute Drill. Everybody get up. Get up. The story of America is the story of an adventure. I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. We are a nation under God and I believe God intended for us to be free. The NFL is back. Here is what we grilled in the Whitlock House to celebrate. President Trump attended the final of the US Open on Saturday. He threw out hats. There was all sorts of feelings about it. But first we're going to a tragic story in North Carolina. Ukrainian refugee Irina Zarudska, who had fled from Ukraine three years ago to avoid the war with Russia, was boarded public transportation in Charlotte, North Carolina and unfortunately sat down in front of 34 year old Decarlos Brown, a 14 time arrested career criminal who brutally, viciously and randomly stabbed her to death and left her to bleed out on that train. He was later arrested that night by police covered in her blood. While this event shocked social media users, traditional media was slow to pick up and report on this. The Associated Press, for example, which has covered a number of different similar crime stories, ignored this completely. There were also reports that editors on Wikipedia attempted to delete mentions of this story. At the same time, we've talked about polling in the last few weeks here about how 81% of Americans believe that crime is a major problem in big cities. We're having a conversation about President Trump deploying National Guard in cities like Washington, D.C. chicago, even some cities in California. While Democrats are attempting to say this is not a big problem, President Trump is highlighting the fact that with this murder and others, it is a big problem that people don't feel safe in big American cities, whether it be Charlotte, whether it be Chicago, or whether it be Washington, D.C. at the same time, Axios reported that there were warnings from President Biden's legal team about his use of the auto pen. On January 17, three days before leaving office, Biden granted 2,490 commutations, the most ever by a president in a single day. When President Biden touted this, he touted that they were non violent drug offenses, that these were people who are simply serving time for drug charges and they had gotten far too much on their sentences. But what his legal team was warning of is there were a lot of violent criminals who had gotten lumped in with this nonviolent group, for example. Unfortunately, and despite repeated requests and warnings, we were not afforded a reasonable opportunity to vet and provide input on those you were considering. He proceeded to list some of those with violent crime records to whom Biden had given clemency, including a man who had pleaded guilty to charges related to murder after killing a woman and her 2 year old, Daugh after the mother threatened to reveal his drug dealing business to law enforcement. So what we see here is that in an effort to set a record for the largest number of pardons granted, President Biden accidentally let out some violent murders, including a guy involved in the killing of a two year old. This adds to the larger problem of Democrats soft on crime policies and the culture of crime that they're allowing both through policies. AI signed executive order number 145 to establish the North Carolina Task Force for Racial Equity and Criminal Justice. But also just through horrific decisions like this that happen to have the unintended consequences of letting out more violent criminals in American cities. Democratic Socialist Zoran Mamdami's mayoral campaign in New York is reaching the home stretch. Over the weekend, he did a few interviews that reminded people exactly what he stands for. First on cnn, in studies that have.
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Been done about the applicability of this in an urban setting like Chicago, that this is something we could actually deliver right here.
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But there's another example in Kansas City where they had a government run grocery store and it's been there for years, but it's on the verge of closing because it doesn't work. They've been riddled with crime. They've dealt with just a lack of inventory. There are other examples where it just hasn't worked because frankly, the government is not that good at being in the business of being in grocery stores.
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You'll see there that Mamdani is arguing with CNN that government can run grocery stores. And when CNN is pushing back on an idea that you have, you know that it's pretty far to the left. But he went on MSNBC to try and answer one of the toughest questions that he's gotten so far. Are you worried about chasing your tax base out of New York with your policies? Here's what he argued.
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My vision is not one where they leave. It is one where they stay.
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It is one how do you get them to stay?
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In part by showing them that asking them to pay more in taxes would increase even their quality of life.
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So it's gonna be a tough argument for Mamdani to argue that the taxes that he's trying to charge people will improve their quality of life, when, in fact, he's already made very clear through his record and through his comments that he does not want to give more money to the police. In fact, he wants to defund the police. He wants to use their tax dollars on things like transgender surgeries for minors, and he wants tax dollars to do it. So again, it's a very, very tough sell to the taxpayers of New York that spending more in their taxes is actually going to improve their quality of life. But this race is in the home stretch and we'll be watching it all here. Over the weekend, a story in the Hill highlighted how Democrats want to use rising utility bills against Republicans. Here's Sheldon Whitehouse. To be clear, electricity prices aren't rising. They're being driven up by Trump on purpose to push money to fossil fuel donors. Sheldon Whitehouse thinks you're stupid. Right now In America, about 80% of our electricity comes from sources like natural gas, coal and nuclear. Democrats spent the last four years attacking those sources, trying to shut down every plant they could, every factory they could that generates that so that they could get more people to invest in renewables, which only make up about 20% of the electricity generation we rely on. Now that they've been successful in shutting down some of those sources and were forced to rely more on the renewable 20%, that costs a lot more, they want you to believe it's Donald Trump's fault that your utility bills are rising. Here's what I think of that for our audio listeners. It's the classic meme of man shoots a person labeled cheap, reliable energy and then says, how could Republicans do this? How could Republicans drive up electric costs? We've talked before here about how the new Department of Energy has attempted to highlight how the previous Department of Energy, the previous EPA and the Biden administration overall were acting a lot without facts, without science on their side, particularly when they spent billions of dollars on things like the green energy transition. There's a new op ed that came out over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal highlighting this. Steve Koonin of Stanford wrote specifically at long last clarity on climate. Koonin, a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, joined a group of experts, nonpartisan independent voices, to do research on climate change, the state of climate change in America, and how policy prescriptions over the last several years are impacting it. And they had a lot of very interesting findings for Example, data aggregated over the continental United States show no significant long term trends in most extreme weather events. Claims of more frequent or intense hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and dryness in America are not supported by historical records. Natural climate variability, data limitations and model deficiencies complicate efforts to attribute specific climate changes or extreme events to human CO2 emissions. The use of the words existential crisis and emergency to describe the projected effects of human caused warming on the US Economy finds scant support in the data. One of the issues that we've talked about here particularly is climate attribution. The fact that you've got left wing groups trying to argue that that rising sea levels, storms are the result of what oil and gas companies are doing by then causing climate change. But what this independent report found is there's no data or scientific evidence really to back that up. A lot of this is, as we've discussed, politically driven hysteria. And not to be outdone, the groups driving the hysteria had something to say about this report. Our work has attracted strong criticism despite its grounding in established science. Almost 60,000 comments were submitted to the Federal Register during the month after its publication. And the Environmental Defense Fund and Union of Concerned Scientists filed a lawsuit to prevent the Energy Department or Environmental Protection Agency from using the report in decision making. Most of these challenges have no scientific backing. Now, as you hear those names, groups like Union of Concerned Scientists, you'll remember we talked about them just last week. The dark money funded groups that have tried to kill and shelve nuclear development in the United States for decades, even though we know nuclear in so many ways is the answer to some of our biggest problems and should be the silver bullet for climate activists who worry about coal, natural gas, things like that, polluting the environment. And these groups are suing to prevent this, reporting this independent content from being used in decision making by the Department of Energy and the epa. What does that tell you? They're worried about cracks in the quote, unquote consensus about climate change. Because once you have scientists asking questions, which they have been all the time, but you've had dark money funded groups trying to shut those down, perhaps the consensus isn't as solid as these people think. One issue that we've been talking about here on 10 Minute Drill for a few months now is the Democrats in the Senate and their blockade of President Trump's nominees. These aren't just judges. These are nominees to all sorts of cabinet positions across the board. These are national security roles, these are foreign policy roles. These are economic roles. At the Federal Reserve, Democrats have mounted an unprecedented blockade to stop those confirmations from happening. Here's a chart. Civilian nominees confirmed via voice vote, unanimous consent. As you look at that, you'll see all the way back to H.W. bush. 817 nominees were confirmed by voice vote. You fast forward to President Trump's first term. 533 nominees were confirmed by voice vote. 530 for Biden. Under President Trump's second term, not a single nominee has been confirmed by voice vote. Again, this is unprecedented. I was in the Senate in 2017 when we saw this blockade the first time. Democrats would use every procedural tool in their power to slow down nominees for a day or two at a time and then vote for the nominee because in the end they supported them, but they just wanted to gum up the works and slow down the process. This again is significantly worse. Look at that again. 533 nominees in President Trump's first term were confirmed by voice vote or unanimous consent. Zero this time. President Trump's been frustrated about this. The whole country should be frustrated about this because these are critical roles. These are people who oversee the national security of the United States. Democrats are playing politics with their confirmations. So John Thune, the majority leader of the Senate, took to Breitbart to talk about this yesterday morning. When the Senate convenes this week, I will begin the necessary procedural steps to reform the Senate's rules. No party should be able to weaponize the confirmation process the way that Senate Democrats are doing now in a way that has never been done before. This total obstruction simply cannot be the standard moving forward, both in principle and in practicality. We must return to the Senate's traditional confirmation process that existed before this unprecedented blockade. Leader Thune has announced that he plans to take action to move this forward this week. We will see if this speeds up the process to get President Trump's nominees in position in these critical roles around the federal government. For our last segment today, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has a new book coming out and one of the interviews that she set up to promote it was with CBS News and with Norah o'. Donnell. Here's a clip from that.
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Donald Trump appointed you to cement a conservative legal revolution. Are you concerned about the narrative of this court that it is no longer a separate and co equal branch of government as designed by the Constitution? I disagree with that conception of the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court is an independent branch of government.
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One thing that eagle eyed viewers noticed was a contrast in the way that Norah o' Donnell interviews Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump nominated more conservative justice versus how she handles Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden's Supreme Court nominee.
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The court has held that the rights to marry, engage in sexual intimacy, use birth control and raise children are fundament, but the rights to do business, commit suicide and obtain abortion are not. Here's Justice Jackson as the first black female on the Supreme Court. What kind of pressure does that come with?
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Here's Justice Barrett again.
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And so when Hillary Clinton, for example, says what's next? She said, my prediction is the court will do to gay marriage what they did to abortion.
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Here's Justice Jackson again.
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The title, lovely one. Yes. That's what your name means. It is.
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It is. That's what your name means. We didn't make that up. At first when I watched this, I thought it was strange how antagonistic she was towards Justice Barrett. But after watching a couple times, I was also a little bit concerned that she seems to think that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a justice on the United States Supreme Court, needs to be spoken to like a small child. And when you wonder why, you have to remember it's because they're all on the same team. That's all the time we have right today. Thank you so much for joining us on 10 Minute Drill. Please, like subscribe, leave us a review, Tell your friends, we'll see you next time.