Loading summary
Transcript35 lines
- [00:01]
Don Ufford
Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today.
- [00:08]
1-800-Contacts Customer
Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast.
- [00:16]
Aaron (Podcast Host)
And breathe.
- [00:17]
1-800-Contacts Customer
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste.
- [00:25]
Aaron (Podcast Host)
Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order.
- [00:28]
Don Ufford
1-800-contacts.
- [00:31]
Shopify Business Owner
I started Ornod in 2013 and we make bike apparel. The best part of Shopify for me is our ability to run the business as essentially non technical people. We're able to admin everything on the back end, front end and sell things online easily. If Shopify were a bike accessory, I think it would actually be the bicycle. It's the thing that you do the thing on. We run the business on Shopify. So start your free trial on shopify.com
- [01:00]
Aaron (Podcast Host)
Trump officials are beginning the process of interfering with the upcoming midterm election by instituting mandatory changes to America's election system. Hours after Trump spread election misinformation across the world. Mark Wayne Mullen, Department of Homeland Security Secretary, took to a press conference today where he told state officials either get on board with our proposed changes or get out of the way. It comes as a chorus of lawmakers are calling on the 25th Amendment to be invoked for the President of the United States as his speech last night was in one word, deranged. That's what many political leaders are calling for today, 25th amendment time. That's what they want, that's what they're demanding. And I have the latest right now. Make sure to like comment, share, get the word out and subscribe. Today we're on the road to a million subscribers. Click that subscribe button right now. Mark Wayne Mullen today took to a press conference. The Department of Homeland Security secretary says that mandatory changes are coming to America's elections.
- [02:09]
Mark Wayne Mullen (DHS Secretary)
Take a listen by the problem. Everybody should be informed. Working with Secretary Lutnick, we are going to make our second our security enhancements mandatory, meaning that if these states want to grant and they want to be reimbursed to work or to run federal elections, they're going to have to implement security issues, just security issues. We're not trying to get into anything else, but we're saying that the machines have to be secured and that your voter registration list needs to be scrubbed. We need to make sure that individuals that are legally Able to vote, are voting.
- [02:58]
Aaron (Podcast Host)
So they want to scrub state voter rolls. They want to institute these mandatory security things, security protocols. But here's the thing, and here's an interesting point, Mark Wayne Mullen says if they don't do this, they won't have the ability to run their elections. That's not how the Constitution works. States run elections, not the federal government. That's what the 10th Amendment prescribes. And while Mullen says if these states don't do what he says, they won't get funds in the form of funds to stop terrorist attacks in states, but they also will face prison time.
- [03:35]
Mark Wayne Mullen (DHS Secretary)
There's three, I think I like the Daily Caller brethren, Daily Mail. I really don't like the Daily Mail.
- [03:41]
Interviewer
Yeah, there's about three months. I'm sure people are watching President Trump's speech last night, watching your remarks today, and they're feeling uneasy about passing their vote in the midterm election. Can you ensure that the midterm elections will be secure?
- [04:00]
Mark Wayne Mullen (DHS Secretary)
All right, first of all, great question. Thank you. When we start talking about can we, can we ensure that the, that the midterm elections are going to be secure? Yes, we absolutely can build confidence in the American people, but the states have to do their part. I will tell you, if the states that choose not to participate with the state program and they choose not to participate in securing the elections, we will make sure that we make those states a priority to look at who voted in their states and hold then the election officials accountable. If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections, and they chose not to, then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time.
- [04:52]
Aaron (Podcast Host)
So his rule is simple. If these state officials do not comply with what his administration with, the Trump administration wants to do, these, quote, mandatory election changes, then they could face fines, they could even face prison time. And while all of this is creating a call for the 25th Amendment, one member of Congress, Congressman Yassim Ansari, says, how can anyone deny the urgency of the 25th Amendment at this point? California Governor Gavin Newsom echoed these concerns.
- [05:21]
California Governor Gavin Newsom
The only thing missing tonight in Donald Trump's speech was tinfoil. This was a legitimate 25th amendment moment. The ramblings of a mad king. Don't get me wrong. Foreign interference in our elections, that's a real thing. Nothing about what you watched tonight, though, was real. It's make believe. He wants to rig the election in 2026. He knows he's going to lose. He needs to rig the election before one vote was cast. That's what that whole thing was about tonight. This is a serious and profound moment where we can either fall prey to cynicism, fear and anxiety, or we can step up and step in, mobilize, organize, not agonize and turn out in record numbers this November and end Donald Trump's presidency as we know it. We can do that together.
- [06:14]
Aaron (Podcast Host)
They say 25th amendment. We'll see what happens on that front. But a lot of Americans saw last night's speech and are reporting afterwards. And all they say they just want lower health care, they want lower gas prices. They don't want all of these election related concerns. So I spoke with Don Alford, who's running for Congress in Michigan's 11th congressional district, who says Trump was a madman last night. And before I get there, when we talk about lower health care costs, that's why I partner with Chapter, a company that I've worked with for a long time. I think they're very good. They're independent Medicare advisors. And right now, you may not know this, but you may be on the wrong Medicare plan. There are thousands of Medicare plans out there. Most agents will only actually ever show you a handful. If you work with a bad broker, they'll show you the plans that line their pockets with the biggest commissions from the big insurance companies. Think about it like this. You'd never ask the guy selling you timeshares if you should buy one. His advice will always be buy a timeshare every single time. Just like I tell you the news exactly as it is. You need someone to guide you through Medicare with nothing but the facts. And that's where Chapter comes in. They look at your doctors, your prescriptions, what matters to you, and they tell you the truth. If you're already on the right plan, well, they'll tell you you should stay on the plan. If you're not, they'll help you switch. You could save up to $1,100 on average on healthcare costs if you work with Chapter. That's real money. So give Chapter a call. 8645-3806-6486-4538, 0664. And now here's my conversation with Don Ufford. Make sure to like, comment, share, get the word out, and as always, subscribe. Hit that subscribe button and I'll see you soon. Excited to be joined today by Don Ufford, who's running for Congress and Michigan's 11th congressional district. That is the Haley Stevens seat. Haley Stevens, as we know is running for United States Senate right now in a Michigan primary. Don, introduce yourself.
- [07:59]
California Governor Gavin Newsom
Yeah.
- [07:59]
Don Ufford
Hey, thanks, Aaron. Appreciate it. Yeah, I. I am running here. I started out, you know, a little bit on a farm, a little bit about myself. Started out on a farm and grew up on a farm and then got a chance to go and learn to be an engineer and then came out to Michigan to work for Ford Motor Company. Met my wife here, raised our family here, two kids, our sons in the U.S. army. Our daughter, she's studying to be a doctor. And when I finished up, I went out to work for the U.S. department of Commerce in the Biden administration and then over to the White House where I worked on the EV transition and domestic manufacturing. But when Trump came along, I left. They don't like folks like me, and so I raised my hand to run for the U.S. house here in Michigan.
- [08:52]
Aaron (Podcast Host)
So what is Michigan's 11th congressional district? What does this primary look like right now? Why are you the best candidate?
- [08:57]
Don Ufford
Yeah, the primary. There's four of us in the primary. There's myself and there's a lawyer, there's a court administrator, and a term limited sitting state senator that's looking for another job. And so I'm the best one in this race because I'm the one that, you know, has been in this community, raised a family in this community, knows the folks in the community here has had an opportunity to work at Ford, creating, building things, you know, cool things like the F150, the Mustang, and, you know, went off and had an opportunity to work in the federal government and sort of bringing all of that together. It makes me a unique kind of Democrat running in this race, unique from everybody else in it. And I think that's really appealing now where people are looking for a different choice, someone who's not a career establishment Democrat. And they're looking for somebody that's, yeah, lived a life. Life like they have and is willing to take on the system.
- [09:58]
Aaron (Podcast Host)
Now you. I see your sign in the background says no corporate pack. What does that mean? I mean, no crypto, no apac, no AI. I mean, what, what, what does no corporate PAC money mean to you?
- [10:08]
Don Ufford
Gosh, you got it. And yeah, no corporate PAC means I'm not taking PAC money. So, you know, political action committee money. I'm not taking that from corporations. And, you know, it's so easy to get. That's. It's amazing. You know, when you get into these races, it's easy to get that money because they're looking for influence. And I just really didn't want to get involved with that. I wanted to be able to concentrate on delivering for my neighbors and folks I'd grown up with, you know, normal everyday people here in Michigan. So I'm not taking corporate PAC and you know, that means I'm not taking utility PAC and I'm not taking PAC money from insurance companies. And that really frees me up to be able to, you know, go out and fight for things like, you know, more clean energy in order to help bring down utility costs. You know, things like that. Where, you know, my competitor, Jeremy Moss, he's taking that PAC money and he isn't out there fighting for clean energy and he isn't out there fighting to fix health insurance. Because health insurance nowadays, gosh, it's a mess, isn't it? It is a mess and we need to fix that. And I don't think we're going to fix it by nibbling around the edges, which is what insurance companies want. So I'm not taking that. I'm not under that influence. I'm just out there fighting for everyday Michiganders.
- [11:32]
Aaron (Podcast Host)
I got to ask you, if you get to Congress, you're going to be or in the House, you're going to be one of 435. And a lot of people look at this current House of Representatives and I guess just over the past several years it's been one of the least effective House of Representatives in American history. Right. We passed very few, if any pieces of legislation. They had the one marquee piece of legislation, the budget bill that passed last year that cut a number of folks off their health care. But outside of that, they don't actually do too much. So how are you going to get things done?
- [11:59]
Don Ufford
Yeah, you know, I'm so different that I will be only one of 10 engineers in Congress when I go there next year. There aren't very many engineers and you know, most of them are career politicians started in politics or they're lawyers and you know, they have grown up learning to talk past each other instead of talk with each other and, you know, forming solutions. Gosh, you know, my entire life has been around, you gotta figure out how to get things done. And you may not like the in solution, it may not be perfect, but you gotta get things done. You know, growing up on the farm, gosh, I always had to be fixing something and there were problems that we ran into all the time. And so I worked together, you know, with my family and or the neighbors to try and fix the situation and move forward because we knew we had to do that. And then working at Ford Motor Company, I had a great time, you know, working with people, you know, across the United States, around the world. And they didn't always have the same perspective that I had. Gosh, you know, they ate different food, you know, sometimes they're on different time zones, spoke different languages. But we figured out how we could work together and how we could find those common areas to get things done. And I think there's enough people out there, when I'm out knocking doors, when I'm out talking to people, they're telling me, you know, hey, whether, you know, whether they're a Democrat or Republican, sometimes they don't know. And they're telling me, hey, I just want a lower cost. Things are getting way too expensive for me and I don't know what I'm going to do. Or, you know, they're out there, they're worried about their health insurance. They're like, don, this health insurance isn't working for me. It's so broken, we gotta fix it. And so I think we're seeing a groundswell of people. They're saying, you all, you gotta stop fighting so much and you gotta figure out how you're going to get things done for us. And so I'm going to tap into that energy. I'm going to look for places where we can work together, you know, like on affordability, like on healthcare for people, and tap into that, build that coalition to get stuff passed.
- [14:17]
Aaron (Podcast Host)
So how, I guess, how do you lower healthcare costs? How do you lower the. Or how do you reduce the affordability crisis in the United States of America when you have half the Congress right now saying that it's actually pretty affordable and that affordability is a hoax.
- [14:32]
Don Ufford
Oh, yeah, listen. That anybody that honestly believes affordability is a hoax is not living a real life. You know, they aren't out there trying to make sure their kids have health care. They aren't out there worrying about, should I go in and see the doctor? They aren't trying to figure out when they get their medications. It is absolutely a real life issue that's out there. And I think it starts, it starts all the way back. And there's multiple issues that feed into this. Right. And you know, you get the influence of corporate money in politics. That's one of them. And I would bet anybody who says it isn't a problem, they're probably getting that corporate PAC money we just talked about. They're probably getting it from big pharma or the insurance companies. They're getting it from somebody because money talks. And if you don't listen to the money, you go out and you talk to people all throughout the system where they're saying, you know, they're individuals trying to make sure they get their health care. And they're saying, number one, Don, it's too expensive. I, because of the cuts that Trump jammed through with Affordable Care act cuts, Medicaid, Medicare, Affordable Care act, they're like, hey, I had to back off. I had to make a decision between food, rent, you know, health insurance and I feel healthy this month. So that's what I'm going to. That's the wrong decision. We, that it shouldn't be a null set. This should be an and for Americans. You know, we live in one of the richest countries here, so we need to be able to provide that. So I think it starts out with, number one, you need a single payer. And the single payer can go out there and help streamline the system. Right now when I talk to doctor's offices, doctor's offices tell me, don, I have to understand like 10 different insurance systems. My, you know, office staff has to understand how to log into this one and how this one wants the, wants the submission made. And by the way, we got to deal with rejections. You know, the rejections come back. So we have to provide supplemental information. It's just like there's so many hoops that are out there that a doctor's office who should be concentrating on, let me check you out, are you healthy today? How are you feeling? What's going on? You know, instead they're concentrating on trying to get things through the insurance system. So I think we need a single payer like Medicare for all that takes care of that. By the way, doctor's offices know how to use Medicare. Right? There's already 20% of us are using Medicare. And so they know how to use that system. They still have their own business, you know, they're still running their business. Hospitals know how to use it. So that's an affordable way to get in. And it's a way to help reduce some of these systemic costs and inefficiencies, like having to understand, you know, multiple insurance companies approaches to how you're going to get reimbursed. And then we also got to make sure that we can get more doctors into the system. And right now, you know, I said my daughter, she's, she's in medical school, she's learned to be a doctor. We're super proud of her. You know, she, she went through undergrad and, and then has gone to school now and she's learned to be a doctor. But it's so expensive, Aaron. It's like crazy expensive. And you know, you end up racking up huge student loans and those student loans have interest. So now you're racking up, you know, medical school is four years and then plus you got your residency time and other time. And so you have this huge debt that now needs to be serviced and it's big insurance or big interest rates and that's a problem. So they get out and they're like, hold it, if I'm going to go and be a family doctor, it's hard for me to get by. And like that is crazy. That's what we need is we need family doctors and general practitioners that can keep an eye on us and help us understand, oh, I see a trend coming here. It doesn't look like you're going to be healthy in six months or say, well, we need to watch this and be a true partner instead of somebody you just go in and see occasionally. So I think we need more general practitioners. I think a way to do that is make medical school affordable and accessible for students that want to get in because they have a good heart. They have a heart, they want to help people. That's what doctors are like and we need to enable that. And then on the hospital side, we can't be jamming these giant cuts that are coming into hospitals by forcing people off insurance. Now hospitals have to cover it via emergency rooms. Like, doesn't that sound crazy to you? It's, you know, and emergency rooms get jammed up and you know, the care isn't good in emergency rooms. As good as you could get if it was planned care, if it was care with their doctor that they know who's known them over time. So we need, I think you go to that single payer system, you make sure more people are covered and then you don't have jammed up emergency rooms. You don't put the cost burden on hospitals. And you know what, some of these big pharmaceutical chains now that control the entire chain of care, that's a problem. Like, oh my goodness, no wonder they spend so much money on corporate PACs. They spend money on corporate PACs to influence lawmakers. So lawmakers don't say that's a giant chain that needs to be broken up. I think we need to take a look at that. Because when you control everything from the doctor and you hire the doctor through the manufacturing of prescription drugs, through the dispensing through to the care. There's a problem there. There's just too much control in that. So we need to address all of that. It's not an easy solution.
- [20:43]
Aaron (Podcast Host)
I hear you. Election day is right around the corner. What do people need to know if they want to vote?
- [20:49]
Don Ufford
Well, number one, voting is fair and secure in Michigan. We know how to do this. Voting is fair. It's secure. You can get absentee ballots and you can fill out absentee ballots and you can turn them in at drop boxes. Your local election officials have those boxes. They're secure. You can start early in person voting if you want to go. You, you can fill out your absentee ballot early and on the 25th you can go for in person voting and, or you can go for normal voting on election day and you'll see that there's secure confident systems that we have in order to make sure that, you know, we don't have any problems. Like the stuff Trump was spreading last night. Unbelievable. That is. He's just spreading false rumors out there and just trying to scare people. He's trying to scare people away from the polls and who knows what else he's going to do to scare people away, but he's just trying to set the stage so he can rig the election and that's a problem.
- [21:53]
Aaron (Podcast Host)
Don offer thanks so much for the time.
- [21:55]
Don Ufford
Thank you, Aaron.
- [21:56]
Aaron (Podcast Host)
Hey folks, thanks so much for watching. Feel free to add this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or anywhere you watch for the latest breaking news and daily hits throughout the day. Make sure to follow. Subscribe. See you soon for more.
- [22:10]
Don Ufford
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile Now.
- [22:12]
Ryan Reynolds
I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch up front
- [22:31]
1-800-Contacts Customer
ping of $45 for 3 months, $90 for 6 months or $180 for 12 month plan required. $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy. See Terms.
- [22:40]
Shopify Advertiser
When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want. Like all the way. Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet. Track your cha chings from every channel right in one spot and turn real time reporting into big time opportunities. Take your business to a who. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today.