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Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, and mines; fraud bonanza; Starbucks flees high-tax Seattle | 10 Minute Drill
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How one Democrat might be blowing up the Democrat shutdown strategy. The latest on the Strait of Horn moves, and President Trump's efforts to get around minds. And Jill Biden is back and we've got all the details, 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. We pick up today back at Iran, where President Trump is trying to reassure the world that the Strait of Hormuz is safe or soon will be. Late today amid reports Iran's now planning to lay mines in the Strait of Hormuz where tankers carry 20% of the world's oil. On Tuesday, President Trump announced that they had successfully blown up 10 different ships that the Iranian military had been using to lay these mines. Now, a little bit about these mines. They have a few different forms. Some of them are at the bottom of the ocean and operated by magnets to rise up as boats rise over them. Some of them simply explode when touched. And so it is very dangerous and precarious. And President Trump is trying to sort of both reassure tankers and shipping companies about the dangers while also trying to figure out if they can get any of them out of there and out of the way. But in the meantime, there's a lot of discussion about oil prices rising and what might happen there. But as we saw at the beginning of this week, they there's a lot of panic going on that seems to come back down fairly quickly as people realize this is actually in better control than a lot of them understand. But one thing that I wanted to really talk about today is the role of energy in national security. Here's a tweet from Chuck Schumer. Due to Donald Trump's war of choice, gas prices at their highest level in years. Now, when he says highest level in years, he's talking about 2022, because in 2022, they were significantly higher because Democrats intentionally drove up gas prices to try and shift people out of their gas powered cars into electric vehicles. So again, Schumer says highest in years. It's still significantly lower than June of 2022, when gas prices exceeded $5 per gallon. But back to Chuck Schumer. Today, I demanded Trump release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve immediately to bring relief to Americans at the pump. Now, there's a number of reasons this is incredibly rich. First, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was drained to historic lows under Joe Biden. Every time gas prices started rising up, Democrats him to have a release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to dull the political impact. But you'll also remember in 2020 there was a plan as a part of the COVID relief to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve when during COVID oil prices were at near all time lows. Chuck Schumer blocked it and took credit for blocking it. This tweet from Steve Dennis Schumer took credit for eliminating a $3 billion bailout for big Oil in a letter to his colleagues. That bailout was filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. So one thing that's really important through this is energy security is national security. When we have control over reliable energy, we're able to make better choices for our long term national security and for the security of the globe. A lot of countries around Europe and around the entire world are nervously watching the Strait of Hormuz because they don't have other reliable energy resources or stockpiles because in the last several years they've done so much to handicap their own fossil fuels and reliable energy resources. So again, hopefully this will continue to push a conversation that reliable energy is national security. Back to the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. CBS reported this exclusive. More than 300 TSA officials have quit during the latest DHS shutdown, with callout rates more than doubling at airports nationwide. Earlier this month, half of officers at Houston's Hobby Airport called out as hotspots climb. Chris Sununu of Airlines for America also spoke about this issue on Fox. The call outs are increasing. Why? Well, TSA agents get about 35,000 a year. I mean, every paycheck matters. Half a paycheck last week, zero paycheck this coming week. It's understood. So again, we've consistently highlighted the absurdity of this shutdown. Democrats are holding funding for TSA and other homeland security initiatives hostage to protest ice, even though if you've turned on the news, you haven't really seen any stories about ICE in several weeks. At the same time, here's Senate Majority Leader John Thune on the state of play in the Senate. And Democrats have essentially walked away from trying to solve it. So Democrats aren't even at the table. They do not care about finding a solution. It seems like they are perfectly happy to keep the Department of Homeland Security shut down despite all these increased threats so they can keep the issue of fighting ICE alive going into the midterms. And the senator from Hawaii, Brian Schatz, explained exactly why. We are very serene with what is going on, said Brian Schatz, a senior appropriator in the Democratic whip operation. But when you hear Senator Schatz say the word serene, I think of this serenity now, serenity now. I have a very good feeling that as Democrats face pressure over increased threats, multiple terror attacks, multiple threats on airplanes at US Airports and what we're seeing currently in airports with these three to five hour lines and the fact that TSA is currently hobbled at, they will look at Senator Schatz and his serenity and maybe think that they need to fix their messaging. Yesterday, Starbucks announced that they were moving their corporate headquarters from Seattle into Nashville developing. Starbucks founder Howard Schultz announces that his family is leaving Seattle for Florida. The same day Democrats pass an income tax on Washington state, Starbucks corporate is moving to Nashville. The wealth exodus is underway. Democrats have killed Washington's economy. At the same time Exxon the made a similar announcement that they would be leaving New Jersey. ExxonMobil plans to move its legal home to Texas from New Jersey. CEO Darren woods said in an interview the company is looking to protect itself from shareholder abuse. Now this follows a pattern that we've seen from several large companies. Chevron is another one who left their headquarters in California to move to Houston. And you'll note that the Exxon leader there said the word abuse abuse of shareholders. Democrats used to argue that wealthy people and wealthy companies had a patriotic duty to pay higher taxes. But in the last few years, as we've what so many blue cities and states and even our federal government have done with our tax dollars, it gets a lot harder to justify that when you see for example, paying California's sky high taxes only for it to go to complete loss of $24 billion to fight homelessness. Or Gavin Newsom's high speed rail to nowhere, which again is tens of billions of dollars over budget and decades behind schedule. Every blue state has a story like this and at the same time they're asking these people to pay higher and higher taxes actively. California is about to vote on a wealth tax that is a wealth confiscation without ever fixing any of that waste, fraud and abuse. That same issue is exactly what just drove Starbucks, a very liberal company, out of Seattle because they didn't want to pay more money into waste, fraud and abuse schemes that simply help support Democrat donors. Now on that issue of exposing and then cutting fraud, waste and abuse, we've been talking about that since the beginning of this second Trump term with Doge, for example, exposing the billions of dollars our tax dollars went to all around the world for insane things. And then we had things like Nick Shirley helping expose part of the $9 billion of Somali fraud in Minnesota. There are a number of very high profile examples as the rest of sort of the larger media apparatus has dug into this. First from the Wall street journal. She charged $29 million to treat just 84 kids. The boom in autism therapy is Medicaid's fastest growing jackpot. Now that's $345,000 charged per kid. And the autism diagnosis business was a huge part of what we also saw in Minnesota. And it's something that you would see if you were actually allowed to look for Medicaid fraud in states around the country. And it's also part of the reason that the actual number of autism diagnoses has skyrocketed around the country. But another issue where you're seeing similar fraud is in hospice care. This from CBS News, California hospice fraud. There's a stretch in Los Angeles with 500 registered hospice companies within 3 miles of each other and 89 in a single building. But when we visited, we found empty offices, piled up, mail and phone lines dead. Just trying to understand how and why there are so many hospice agencies in like a small cluster in LA County. Would love to speak with you. I'm sorry, you have no comment. Now, that CBS report sounds a lot like Nick Shirley's report where he went door to door at all these registered businesses and showed there was no nobody actually there, even though they were registered to receive millions of tax dollars. But another example of this larger dynamic is in a piece from the Wall Street Journal, Information superhighway to nowhere. The District of Columbia proposed to spend $70,000 per location to connect a shed, a non existent building in an open field, to the Internet. Now, this is from Arielle Roth, who's a part of the Commerce Department. She was reviewing applications for funding to receive parts of what had originally been Joe Biden's massive $42 billion rural broadband or broadband extension. Now, D.C. had applied to receive this funding so they could do their own build out. But what Ms. Roth found was it seemed a little bit strange some of these locations. And she looked at a previous 2023 report in which D.C. had applied to receive funding to build out broadband in a number of questionable places. The Senate Commerce Committee's 2023 Red Light Report found that 58 of 184 supposedly unserved D.C. locations were inside the National Zoo, including Lion, Tiger Hill and the Butterfly Garden. The District proposed spending nearly $70,000 per location to connect 55 addresses, despite many broadband providers already operating in the city. We told local broadband officials last August that costs were unjustifiable. We directed them to redo their proposal and come back to us days later. The office gave us a plan involving the same provider, same technology in same locations, and. But the price had dropped by more than 90% to about $6,000 per location. When they asked for a second application because they said, this sounds crazy. It had gone from $70,000 per location to 6,000. And they're like, wait a sec, this sounds pretty fishy here. So they started looking into the application and what they found was all the places that DC had asked for funding to build broadband into did not actually need broadband. After further discussion, DC reduced its list of proposed locations for broadband from 55 to 11. We checked them against the federal communications national broadband map. Five were already listed as served. The remaining six were listed as unserved. So what she did is she put on a pair of snow boots and went to check each of these six locations to see if they seemed like places that might need broadband expansion. And guess what? They didn't. It turns out DC wanted to spend $70,000 per location to connect a field house on Catholic University's campus, a construction trailer a few feet from a pole with visible fiber, a gated Pepco electric utility building, a shed along Amtrak train tracks in Northeast D.C. a non existent building across from those train tracks, and an open field off the George Washington Parkway. Two hours is how long they spent going from site to site and realizing they didn't actually need any of the funding because none of these places needed broadband expansion. Now, they saved taxpayers about $4 million by doing this little bit of fact checking. But what about the billions of dollars that Joe Biden and his administration signed to without ever checking if it actually was going to anybody who needs it? This is how state and local governments build slush funds to do all sorts of terrible things. And yet taxpayers are on the hook for all of it, no matter what. We've talked here about the Federal Judicial center and the fact that the nonpartisan taxpayer funded think tank for federal judges had been using their guidebook to push climate change alarmism. They had used activist language on things like using gas in your car causes bad weather events. And here's how you should charge energy companies for that. Well, that's become a little bit of a shell game. This from the Wall Street Journal. We told you recently about the Federal Judicial Center's retraction of its biased chapter on climate science. And now the plot thickens. While the FJC said it had ditched the environmentalist portion of the manual for federal judges, the chapter lives on, published by the National Academy of Sciences. So again, the chapter isn't gone, it's simply been moved into another hub. But it is just as problematic within the National Academy of Sciences. So a group of attorneys general have written a letter about this. Over a dozen Republican attorneys general demanded Wednesday that the Trump administration suspend or yank funding for a taxpayer funded scientific organization over politically biased climate change activism, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Wire. We'll continue to follow this because what's clear here is the climate alarm as a movement is engaging in a shell game to try and get their indoctrination to judges through any means possible. And it's clear here that the attorneys general and simply actual scientific fact loving people everywhere are trying to get to the bottom of how this happened. So we will keep you posted for you can't make it up segment. Today, the book wars continue. Dr. Jill Biden, formerly of the White House, married to former President Joe Biden, has a new book coming out. I entered the role of first lady in a unique time in our nation's history in the midst of a pandemic and the shadow of an insurrection. Those days tested all of us, our resilience, our compassion and our belief in one another. Emily Gooden from the New York Post tweeted, joe Biden announces new memoir and reveals its cover. She will discuss Joe Biden's exit from the race. Dr. Biden. Parts of this story have been told, but not all of it. View from the east wing is out June 2nd view from the east wing is out June 2nd. Now I think this is gonna end up being very juicy because Kamala Harris used her book to settle her own scores in which she called Dr. Jill Biden and Joe Biden selfish for having Joe run again. And we've seen a lot of great clips of icy moments between Kamala and Jill. So it's sort of a choose your character. Let's hope Jill's book tour is as successful as Kamala's. To say that he couldn't be on the ticket effectively because he was gay is hard to hear. No, no, no, that's not what I said. She is not well liked at this particular point. The American people, they don't want this. They don't want her. But I also hope that there's an opportunity for Republicans to contribute to Joe Biden's book tour in hopes of sending it to a number of swing states so we can continue to talk about Joe Biden and the damage he did to our country. That is all the time we have for today. 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