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- [00:00]
Samsung User
I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, hey, find a keto friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a finger so I can get in more squats anywhere I can.
- [00:12]
Cashier
1, 2, 3 will that be cash or credit?
- [00:17]
Brian Reed
Credit. 4 Galaxy S25 Ultra the AI companion that does the heavy lifting so you can do you get yours@samsung.com compatible with select apps. Requires Google Gemini account results may vary based on input. Check responses for accuracy.
- [00:31]
Samsung User
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- [01:00]
Mike Pesca
If you're listening to the Gist on Spotify right now and we have some indication that you are, we would appreciate it if you would follow rate and share the show with a friend. It takes less than half a minute, but possibly more than 22 seconds and it helps keep the show healthy. Thank you so much. Now here is the aforementioned show. It's Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the Gist. I'm M. Pesca. You know that thought experiment where he asked to go back in time and kill baby Hitler? I'm against it by the way, not killing baby Hitler thought experiments. But let's say you were that guy. You were the time traveler. The time traveling assassin. That's free intellectual property Forever wants to write the series. You were the time traveling assassin at the military commander who commissioned the whole thing introduces you to the guy running the time travel machine, right? And you have your life in his hands, right? You're going back to the 1890s when Hitler was a baby and he he's going to suck you back into the present. And then if you found out that the guy operating the time machine was just the commander's brother in law, you might question it. Not only might you say is this really the best person for the job, it might undermine the world defining task at hand. And this brings me to though he wasn't Hitler and isn't Hitler Trump, Donald Trump, the next president was likened to Hitler, certainly likened to a fascist. I certainly think he has authoritarian tendencies. And there was the stakes. The Stakes were presented as impending fascism. So we have to do all we can. But just like a brother in law in charge of a time machine, if you found out that, for instance, politicians, Democratic politicians took out ads to run against more MAGA candidates to try to go into the Republican primary and pick out the worst MAGA candidate because they thought correctly, as it happens, that it would help them in the general, wouldn't that tend to undermine the claim of fascism? I think it might. And then when the Democrats push forward once again, Joe Biden, which we're hearing about in the Wall Street Journal and what a very questionable choice that was, wouldn't it tend to undermine the fascism at hand? And then on the local elections, sure, maybe you could say, okay, there's a cabal of national politicians acting in concert. But on the local level, there were the prosecutions of the very action, the heart of the action that was the most fascistic that Donald Trump did took trying to undo an election. And there in Georgia you have Fanny Willis, who was the prosecutor. And so you would think if you're taking this seriously, as she said they were, if everyone in Democratic politics said you needed to be, if she was taking this seriously, mightn't she not have had an affair with the prosecutor that she hired to run Operation Antifascist? I think she might. So today, and I will quote lawfarers and a Bauer breaking. Georgia Court of Appeal says Fani Willis should be disqualified from prosecuting Trump and other co defendants in Fulton county election interference case notably is important. The appeals court declined to toss out the indictment entirely, meaning that another prosecutor could in theory take over the case. But the court disqualifies Willis based on finding of an appearance of impropriety related to her romantic relationship with Nathan Wade. This was that issue in a lower court. I thought the lower court really an adjudicator decided solomonically that Wade should be removed, but Willis can stay on. Then this the Georgia Court of Appeals said no, Willis must be removed. It is rightly pointed out that those are three Republican appointees. Others are talking about how Trump evades justice or white men are powerful men, but really fascism, the country on a line. This might be the last election and these are the choices made by those who are the self appointed bulwarks of defending us from impending fascism. It just tends to bring into question how much the people who were closest to this idea that we got to stand up about fascism, how much they really believed it, were they just so incompetent or reckless that it couldn't be helped that people who correctly adjudicated America is on the cusp of fascism also happen to be a bunch of people who will do whatever it takes to win an election. Or really thought that Joe Biden was the best president or decided to run a case while sleeping with the person who you pay to prosecute the case. Or maybe this talk of fascism, maybe it was overblown. Maybe worst of all, it wasn't overblown. Just the people who are in charge of protecting us were never up to the job on the show today I spiel about you think that's depressing. I spiel about the now blowed up continuing resolution. Hey, continuing resolutions to end the government shutdown. I hate government shutdown because of late night tweeting from Elon Musk. I really should hate Elon Musk more than the government shutdowns. It's kind of a wild character, isn't he? But first, we're back with Brian Reed, who is the host of Question Everything. And if you listen to the show yesterday, you know that Brian was on for the whole episode. But then I listened to an additional episode that Question Everything posted and I couldn't let him go. He maybe it's because Brian, who created S Town and the Trojan Horse Affair, has a show called Question Everything. But I said to myself, well, I have questions and this is Everything. So Brian Reed is back and he's up next. Foreign.
- [07:12]
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- [07:43]
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- [08:30]
Mike Pesca
I did with Brian Reed. And then I heard another episode of his show, and it was so striking to me that I had to call him back up, ask him to come back on the show to discuss what it was that I just heard. Brian, thanks for doing this again. Thanks for indulging me here.
- [08:47]
Brian Reed
Yeah. What's. What struck you?
- [08:49]
Mike Pesca
What struck me was the episode called when to Call a Thing what It Is. And it started off with you saying you like to monitor journalistic debates. And there was a debate about how to talk about what was going on in Springfield when, with the infamous J.D. vance and Donald Trump claim that Haitians were eating the dogs, eating the cats. And you had to journalism poobahs kind of hash it out and do you want to give what each of them said, the precis?
- [09:19]
Brian Reed
Yeah. So we had Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor, I believe, at Montclair State, now formerly at cuny, who is kind of of the broken New York Times. Broken New York Times side of things, often critiquing legacy outlets for not being aggressive or in his view, precise enough in their language and their headlines about the behavior of Trump and others, particularly on the right in this era. And so that's kind of where he's coming from. And then we had David Folkenflick, longtime media correspondent from npr, who I know, you know, Mike, and he had a more circumspect view, you know, which is basically like the media writ large is a very complicated beast. It gets many things wrong every day, but it does many things that we would be lost without every day as well. And you have to give that an acknowledgement. I would say that's kind of his broad kind of response to Jeff conversation.
- [10:25]
Mike Pesca
But on the eating the dogs, eating the cats.
- [10:27]
Brian Reed
Oh, specifically. Yeah, yeah, specifically. Basically like Jeff Jarvis on that we got to talking about that wasn't the premise of the conversation, but that's, you know, largely what we talked about in the conversation, given what was going on in the news at the time. And yeah, Jeff Jarvis was just saying, like, it isn't enough to just call this, like you need to call this a lie, but you also need to do more. You need to kind of get into the motivations for the lie. Like, we're, we're kind of, as a press, flaccid in the face of this, this lie that these politicians are repeating without accountability. And David Folkenflick basically was arguing that you know, even when things are lies, there's a journalistic argument to not always call them as such because the public's ability to absorb, you know, so much kind of outrage and calling a thing a lie is limited.
- [11:16]
Mike Pesca
Right. Since you said that Jarvis talks and complains a lot about the New York Times. The New York Times coverage of this, I'll read some headlines. J.D. vance appears to backtrack on false claim. Vance sticks by pet eating claims. Ohio woman says she regrets sharing false rumor. How False claims about immigrants and dead pets. Why? Debunked falsehoods about Haitian migrants. Trump's false tale of immigrants eating pets. Trump repeats false claim about immigrants eating cats. Focal flick was saying, calling it false or unfounded. That's what the. That's what journalists should do. Then added, the Wall Street Journal did an, you know, resource intensive deep dive where they track down the very origin of the rumor. That's what journalism should do. And Jarvis was essentially saying, journalism should do more.
- [12:04]
Neil McElveen
And the story that is actually occurring, especially as we have a candidate who is black and Indian and the daughter of immigrants running for the presidency, I don't think that me and I'm. We sit here as four white people around a table, and I'm. If you can't hear it on the radio and know it, I'm an old white guy. Too much of media have been run by people who look like me. What's going on here is fundamentally about race. How do we rebuild a journalism that goes beyond facts and goes to this context?
- [12:39]
Mike Pesca
And then he said, but of course, this is just four white guys talking. So then you, as God, intervene and say, you know, you're right. So you found a journalist for the Haitian Times who had done a lot of reporting on Springfield, and her name is McElveen.
- [12:56]
Brian Reed
That's right.
- [12:56]
Mike Pesca
Okay. And what did. Besides just, well, having a knowledge of the area and being Haitian and disrupting the idea that you were four white guys talking. Who's the fourth one, by the way?
- [13:07]
Brian Reed
Well, it was three. It was actually three white guys and my white producer, Sophie.
- [13:11]
Mike Pesca
Oh, okay.
- [13:12]
Brian Reed
Okay. Sitting there. So, yeah.
- [13:14]
Mike Pesca
So what did Neil say? How did Neil flesh this out? And this is why I had to talk to you.
- [13:18]
Brian Reed
So Neil is an editor at the Haitian Times. She's based in New York, but she'd been out in Springfield when this was happening. Almost by happenstance, she'd actually been scheduled to go out there anyway before it got thrust into the news. And she both. She was basically taking Jarvis's side. She felt like, yes, it was great. It's helpful that the Wall Street Journal went and disproved the lie. It was helpful that cnn, these are examples that David had brough. You know, Dana Bash had pressed JD Vance on the lie and gotten him basically to admit that he was making it up, you know, and actually saying a bit about his motivation. It all just felt to her, having been on the ground, like, a little too late, A little too late, you know, too little too late. And yeah, she just felt like both not giving it steam at the beginning and then when you eventually had to, after it was like, mentioned at the debate, pushing back in this aggressive way was warranted, basically. Jarvis was specifically arguing that it should be called a blood libel, which is an idea he took from Jamelle Bouie, who's a columnist at the New York Times, basically. And that wasn't an idea that McElvee had come to, but when I ran it by her, she said, yeah, I could see there could be value to that, basically. And then, interestingly, she convened a meeting with locals in Springfield on behalf of the paper that included some academics who study kind of Haitian history, the history of Haitian immigration to the US and one of them independently called it a blood libel as well. This claim that Haitians were eating animals.
- [14:55]
Mike Pesca
So folk and Flick, I guess, defending mainstream media's coverage saying falsehood, saying there were a few times where a lie was actually said, but, you know, lie does go to the motivation of the speaker, but saying falsehood, just making crystal clear that it was false, not good enough. Jarvis pounded on the word lie and then also lit upon the idea of the blood libel taken from the columnist at the Times. McElveen said blood libel sounds good, but she also said, and she talked about two other phrases, she and some of the experts. She said that he's preparing the terrain so that a race war could spring up if it goes unchecked. She said of the term blood libel, we didn't use the term blood libel. We talked about it as a potential race war waiting to happen because it felt that way. And then she talked about one of the professors and said, when I heard the doctor saying this, I had a knee jerk reaction stating that Donald Trump is laying the groundwork for. Oh, sorry, this was actually you saying that.
- [15:54]
Brian Reed
That was my reaction.
- [15:55]
Mike Pesca
That was you saying that.
- [15:55]
Brian Reed
I heard him, I heard him say something similar. And I was like, wait, is that. That's like a little.
- [15:59]
Mike Pesca
And what he said was right. What he said was, Donald Trump is laying the groundwork for a genocide against Haitian Americans. So we went from, I think, a somewhat academic but important debate, went to say lie, went to say falsehood. The idea of blood libel gets injected. The expert, who you defer to, who you bring in to correct the problem of only white people talking about it, says not only blood libel, but we should talk about race wars and genocide. And, Brian, this is where you lost me. I think that that would not be good journalism. I think that that would be incendiary journalism, and I understand laying the groundwork for why there has been horrors perpetrated against Haitian people and Haitian Americans. But you really think headlines about genocide and race war are a better way to go than falsehood?
- [16:51]
Brian Reed
I don't think I make that argument in the piece. I think the part you just read is me reacting in the same way you are to him, saying that.
- [16:58]
Mike Pesca
Well, no, at the end you agreed with McElveen. You said you could see where she's coming from. And, I mean, you said that. When I first heard that, it struck me as, wow, that's too far. And then you laid out what McElveen's reaction was and then concluded it was legitimate. No, I misheard it.
- [17:19]
Brian Reed
I think what's legitimate is McElvee then goes to explain what's known as the Parsley Massacre. I believe that specifically happened to Haitians, that she'd done a bunch of reporting on, which took place in the Dominican Republic, is, I think, if not officially determined to be arguably a genocide. Many thousands of Haitians were targeted and killed, and it began in large part with rumors about them going after animals. And I think providing that historical background as part of coverage, which I did not know personally until doing this reporting, I think would be very valuable. I think it helped me understand the fear that people might have a very specific fear that I didn't understand, coming from people's cultural and national backgrounds. I don't think I'm arguing that Donald Trump arguing for a genocide needed to be in the headline, but I do see where she's coming from, that that idea could resonate with her and be resonant for this community and be an important part of the coverage about why this kind of language could be dangerous, for sure. Does that make sense, Mike?
- [18:37]
Mike Pesca
It does make sense, but that is not the impression that I. And I asked another, or actually coincidentally, another journalist who, you know, and it's not focal flick, but I know you respect. We both said our jaws were on the ground. When you came to these conclusions, when.
- [18:53]
Brian Reed
You said, how many people died? At least 20,000 Haitians so it was chilling when he said that. And so the parallels to me just seemed really obvious. It's really. Yeah, it's.
- [19:08]
Discover Representative
Yeah.
- [19:09]
Brian Reed
Kind of enlightening to hear you talk about this because when I watched the professor talk in the meeting, my reaction was a little bit like, is that hyperbolic? Like is that just scaring people for no reason? You know, like. But it seems like having the kind of historical, cultural background that you have and this knowledge about what happened in the Doctor doesn't make it feel that way.
- [19:35]
Mike Pesca
That's you saying it's not hyperbolic? No, that's how I interpreted that.
- [19:39]
Brian Reed
I don't think it was for them for like McElvee and her experience in the meeting. I think it's different than saying that's what I would say the headline should be. But I don't know if that's like I want to take you up on your argument. I felt talking to her like I really saw where like maybe the headlines would be like these claims about Haitians in Springfield. I mean like the lead or whatever, kind of like the angle of the coverage, if not a headline would be like these claims about Haitians eating animals in Springfield, you know, really strike close to home, you know, draw on very specific, very horrific crimes that have happened, you know, in the not too long past. Like this is terrible writing, but like those ideas, that's kind of, I do think that is valid and I did not see that present in the coverage and I would have benefited from it and possibly the coverage overall, you know, and at the same time there are, there are, you know, as we were reporting this, we were sent a KKK flyer, you know, that's going around town like there the feeling that they had that a race war, the fear of a race war. Again, I do have a knee jerk reaction to that. That seems like much, a bit much. But when you do look at some of the evidence on the ground of the white supremacist marches that had happened weeks before and KKK flyers going around, I don't think it's totally fair to dismiss those fears from a minority community in that area.
- [21:11]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, no, I mean, I wouldn't a. I wouldn't dismiss fears unless it's a spaceship conspiracy type thing. I mean, especially when there is history there be to fill in the history that can inform people who know their history. That's important. And I certainly did read that it wasn't present in all the coverage that didn't go back to the Trujillo regime, for instance, but I saw a bunch of that. But your story, I think maybe it confused me about what should be the thing that we call what went on. Because it's called when to call a thing what it is. And. And so I said, well, what is the thing? You certainly came out against what folk and Flick was saying and what the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and cnn, what they had been saying. What that this is a falsehood and this is a undocumented claim. That's not the thing to call it. And so the thing to call it is what what is? If it's when to call a thing what it is, what is this thing? Is it a potential race war or genocide?
- [22:16]
Brian Reed
Oh, I think. I think there's an argument in the piece that to call it a blood libel, but I wouldn't argue to call that he's calling for genocide. I wouldn't report that. I don't think what I saw supports that statement, But I think there is support that you could characterize it as a blood libel. Possibly.
- [22:37]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. I mean, that's a good argument from Jamelle Bouie, who's an opinion columnist. There's a historical analog in terms of readers or listeners understanding something. We're now going to introduce a third concept that maybe they aren't familiar with. Explain that and then explain that to explain this other thing which are based on actual facts. If people are or aren't eating the dogs, you know, I don't know how helpful it is aside from a kind of elite already read in audience.
- [23:03]
Brian Reed
I know which I asked, which I asked McElvee about. I have that question in two. What does she say? She said, like, you know, I'm like, really? Do you think that actually makes a difference? You know, like, where I have skepticism is the focus on headlines. And like, I understand people are frustrated. Like, I've had that experience with whatever my own things of seeing a headline and feeling like this seems like it doesn't match or, you know what I mean, and different people write them. But where I'm hoping that we get to by the end of that episode is like, there's more to explore here. You know, something else Jeff Jarvis says there is. Like, he kind of calls for a new way of journalism, which he says, like, I don't know how to do it, you know, but it draws on history more than the facts of the moment. And it goes beyond fact checking. And he's kind of like putting these ideas for that are kind of abstract. And he admits, I don't know how to do them. And my Hope with the second half was to be like, here's something that's not totally traditional that this editor in this newspaper, the Haitian Times, are doing. You know, they're having a community meeting in response to a traumatic thing that is happening to this community. They're bringing in historians and academics. Like, that's kind of. I was interested that that had happened. Basically. Like, she kind of put a few of these ideas that he was postulating in the academy into practice on the ground. And I was. That's largely a lot of what I was interested in looking at beyond just like the words and labels used, you know. Yeah, but maybe it's poor editing. You and another person came away with this feeling. I don't know. Sorry.
- [24:31]
Mike Pesca
I think that what Jeff Jarvis would like is we say headline, but I think we would have been better off saying the takeaway. What is the message? The takeaway, the main point, the gist, if you will. And I think that what he would like is the main point or the gist to be something like, this is extremely dangerous, loaded and with a history of danger. And that's fair enough. And I got some of that. But before, before that, I wanted to just know, is it true or is it not? And why is it said? And where did it come. So actually, journalism was answering the five W's for me.
- [25:04]
Brian Reed
I agree. And I really, I thought the Daniel Bash interview was like, you know, striking for me as like one of the special liking effective interviews, I thought, you.
- [25:13]
Mike Pesca
Know, and if, and if talk of genocide or race war or even blood libel were the most prominent thing. I'm not sure, not that journalists are trying to win or lose a campaign, but I'm not sure that wouldn't give extra ammunition, almost literally to the lying JD Van side of this. You know, look how over the top, look how overwrought they are. This is a thing that he could assert either happened or might have happened, or if you think about another city and another animal did happen, I, you know, I don't know that that's how I define journalism. And the thing that I come down to is what does Jarvis, what does he think will happen had his preferred form of journalism attached itself to this story? Like the same sort of people reading the New York Times and the CNN and mostly believing them now we could push them to believe, oh, there's also this history of 20,000 Haitians killed by Dominicans and what and how and why would Donald Trump have not said it in the debate? And why wouldn't it have become a jokey? Meme. Like, there's almost this mad. This box, this magical box that he puts the. His idea of good journalism into. And somehow because of that, in the magic box, real world reactions result. And I.
- [26:32]
Brian Reed
Well, that's one of those issues that I'm just encountering with the show. It's like, you know, the thing that suffuses every question we ask is like, okay, so you change the New York Times coverage of this, and it reaches half the people, you know, and half people never even see it. And does that even matter? And it reaches people who've already, you know, come to a certain view on this anyway.
- [26:50]
Mike Pesca
But don't you think in general, it's this relic of this old way of thinking about the world journalism and how people come to their opinions in the United States?
- [26:59]
Brian Reed
It was, what a relic.
- [27:02]
Mike Pesca
Changing journalism of the New York Times will change anything.
- [27:07]
Brian Reed
No, I kind of feel that way. That's why I liked looking at what McElvee's doing, even though it's small. And I'm not saying that's something that's come up in some reporting I've done, stuff that hasn't aired, too. Thinking about specific audiences a little more and can you actually have an impact for them? So actually going to the place where the people who are the subject of this lie, who are dealing with a lot of the fallout from it, bringing them together, offering resources, trying to understand what's happening, trying to reflect that to their larger community elsewhere in the country, you know, it seemed like maybe that actually matters more than the New York Times getting the headline right. You know, I don't know.
- [27:50]
Mike Pesca
That, to me, is a sort of a group healing process. I don't mean to degrade it. That's some sort of combination of history, some sort of fact finding, certainly social services. You know, I don't know that it's journalism or should be or can be.
- [28:06]
Brian Reed
I disagree with you there. I'm open to that being journalism. I don't know. I don't have such a. The idea that a newspaper that is widely read in a specific place couldn't meet and provide some kind of forum and resources. And it's also an opportunity for them to get to know the people they're covering. I don't know. I'm open to that being journalism. I mean, it certainly seemed unique. That's why I went to her. But I do feel like we're wanting for something better, and that doesn't seem so, like, antithetical to what we're doing. You know, it might be Different? Does it seem antithetical?
- [28:45]
Mike Pesca
No, it's not antithetical. It's just so orthogonal, that. And time intensive. And one of the main problems with journalism is there's no money. So I don't think it solves that problem at all. Then again, you could argue that, you know, journalism spend, or what is called journalism, spends all this money on conferences. I guess they make money on it. Yeah. It seems like something that the government should be doing rather than journalists. I mean, there are the questions of, like, to whom do you extend this courtesy of this, you know, traveling healing show? And who doesn't get it?
- [29:19]
Brian Reed
Yeah.
- [29:19]
Mike Pesca
If you're the Haitian Times, the answer is a little obvious. If you're the New York Times, it's not less so, at least.
- [29:25]
Brian Reed
Yeah, I don't know that it is a. It is a national paper thing. You know, it's more of a niche community audience thing.
- [29:35]
Mike Pesca
I guess the last thing I'll say is that this idea that McElvee said, you know, it's not enough to do even the bedrock. What do you do then? That's where it's something. That's where it's so easy to be inflected by a lot of subjectivity. And that becomes a little dicey for me in terms of my traditional definition of journalism. What do you do once you have the facts? I mean, the old answer would be give it to the audience. You know, trust. Allow for them to interpret that as they will. And then when you start. I don't know. And when you start messing with that as the answer to what do you do when you have the bedrock facts? I get worried.
- [30:18]
Brian Reed
Yeah. I mean, I didn't. I hear you. I agree. There's. There's worry there. To be fair to her, I really heard her talking about, like, this is what I felt when I heard those words. I immediately went to this massive project I'd done documenting this genocide that did happen after a lie about animals to my people. And if you look at her coverage, they're not covering it as he's calling for a genocide in their paper. They're using racist lie. They're using words like that to cover it. They're reporting on the white supremacist march that happened, you know, weeks before. Like, you know, they're covering that stuff aggressively. But it didn't feel like I didn't have the reaction to any of their coverage that I had to that moment in the meeting with the. With the professor.
- [31:05]
Mike Pesca
You know, Brian Reed is the host of Question Everything, the KCRW podcast and he's generous enough to join me for a follow up question because I was in fact questioning not just things I questioned him about the first time, but everything would include even this interview. Thank you again, Brian.
- [31:24]
Brian Reed
Call me back up for the next episode, okay?
- [31:26]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, exactly.
- [31:43]
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- [32:13]
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- [32:37]
Mike Pesca
And now the spiel. The two worst words in public life. Okay, let's be fair. School shooting. That's worse than what I'm going to say. Maybe. So is cybertruck. Although cybertruck counts as foreshadowing. But these two words I'm thinking of, they're bad. They're soul crushing. They are government shutdown. And yes, I looked it up. Shutdown's one word. Government, which people don't like that much. Shut down. Okay, we're striking out against something we don't like. But this is worse. This is worse. And it's not just worse for the hardworking employees of every VA hospital everywhere or the tsa. It's worse for the hard listening audiences of podcast. I'm thinking about you people. I loathe government shutdowns, but I especially loathe government shutdown coverage and government shutdown talks. I decry it, if I'm being honest, like a system of governance where an anti majority faction is too much leverage. I shut down upon hearing the words government shutdown because it's so bad. Not just in practicality, but in discussion and in abstraction. I mean, government shutdown is such a depressing ailment that even the cure for government shutdown is really quite horrible. That cure being continuing resolution. Continuing is fine. It's good to continue out, depending on what it is, our downward trajectory into irrelevance. No resolution. That's a fine quality to have a virtue. But we're going to have a continuing resolution and we call it a CR I don't, I try not to, but the most boring people who cover politics talk about the CR and they say things. Not just people cover politics, people who are politicians say things like, well, I think we have the votes to fund the CR through March. Yeah, the CR that, that'll be the V. E Day of crisis. That will be the triumphant resolution of this standoff. The CR getting passed. Yeah, that's the equivalent of the trapped child emerging from the mind. Woo hoo. You've done it, baby. Jessica's alive. The Thai soccer team lives to kick again. Wait, whoa, no. What is it? What's the glorious resolution to this horrible affair? Oh, we're going to have a CR through March. We will continue to fund the government. Or maybe not. Maybe we won't continue to fund the government. That every once in a while is what happens. But I do think we'll continue to fund the government. It will just be one of those examples of a really bad cure for an annoying and avoidable disease. The continuing resolution is the colostomy bag of politics. Yeah, you need it, but it's embarrassing that you need it and it stinks. This time around there is a different outside agitator affecting things, mixing it up. Depending on how you think about it, he's either the anti charismatic super villain or just the unconventional visionary. He's Elon Musk. Here was Democratic Representative Eric Garcia on MSNBC asked to place the blame on on why talks for the continuing resolution broke down. They were going to have one. We were going to not shut down the government. Then Elon comes in. See if you could pick up where Eric Garcia places the blame. This is just some of his first minute of answering MSNBC's questions. First, welcome to the Elon Musk presidency. One where Donald Trump has been relegated to be the vice president. Clearly what Elon Musk wants, Elon Musk is going to get. And in a five minute interview, Garcia mentioned Elon Musk five times. The anchor mentioned Elon Musk twice. And he hung. He wafted in the air. The whole thing was just why does Elon Musk hate VA workers? But you know what? That's not the whole thing. Because the Democrats want to blame Musk. Because Musk deserves some of the blame. He raised issues, many of them based on poor information saying that the United States Government was giving away millions of dollars to the Washington commanders to build the stadium. Not true. But anyway, he did raise his objections on X, as he calls it, and Republicans scurried. But you know, the Republicans, the elected members of Congress, they could do what they want and stand up to him or just recognize that their own self interest is in not shutting down the government. The President of the United States, though, he likes Musk and his kids, apparently, or grandkids consider him like an uncle because that's what Elon Musk needs. More 8 year olds to figure out who they belong to. But Trump could do something. Trump could say something. Many people could say something, you know, said something. Another Democrat, I heard California Democrat Barbara Lee on CNN refer to Musk repeatedly as an unelected billionaire. Damn, why did we set out this year's billionaire election midterms? I want elected billionaires. And Musk, as I said, tweeted dozens of times and seemed to put heat on Republicans who would agree with Mike Johnson and not throw chaos into the air. But you know, Musk is entitled to his opinion to use his leverage to get concessions. Even after a bill's been crafted, that is probably what will go on. There'll be something to Musk's liking and Trump's liking, and they'll consider it excellent brinksmanship because they don't really care about anyone else but their own agenda. But they'll get something they could point to and say, see, aren't you glad we intervened? But the basic flaw in the system is that Elon Musk can threaten to primary Republicans who sign onto a deal. And our laws don't have any way from preventing him from doing so. But that's where we are. We are here showing a lack of a spine to a cranky near half trillionaire. Now, my friends, is the wrinkle. It's a giant obstreperous cybertruck of a wrinkle. It's a wrinkle on a scabris process that is the government shutdown and is its nearly as bad cure. The continuing resolution could also put into that bucket the convex flange. That last one is actually a term related to the care and upkeep of colostomy bags. But it really does fit right in. And that's it for today's show. Quaint mallards are producer Cory Juarez, senior producer Joel Patterson. Michelle Pesca is CBSO of Peach Fish Productions. Let's not forget Leo Baum. He's got finals coming up. He's a young kid, he's an up and comer. He's our intern. And thanks for listening.
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Cashier
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