The Intersection
The Intersection 10/9/2024
(upbeat music) - Welcome, welcome, welcome to the intersection on this Wednesday night in October, October the 9th. So much to talk about today and so much to get to. I'm looking for a few colors to join the conversation. If you wanna join the call, all you have to do is Skype, gabnetlive, that's gabnetlive. Skype us now and you'll get on the panel and get a chance to let the world know what you think on these subjects. There is a big hurricane currently hitting Florida. After, you know, they've just got back from leaving for Hurricane Helene. My sister was out of town when Hurricane Helene hit Florida and she had just gotten back and as soon as she got back, she had to turn around and leave 'cause she lives in Sarasota and that Hurricane was heading right for. This time it's Milton and it's a pretty big hurricane. One of the things I saw a lot of today when I was looking on threads, it's stuff about it, was dogs being rescued. There was one dog that Florida highway patrol officer rescued, the dog was tied up to a barber of fence and the water was rising around this little dog. It was, you know, the water was already about, you know, up to the top of his legs or her legs. I don't know whether it was a dog or if it was a female or a male dog. But it was just left out there. I just broke my heart, then I saw another little dog that was found on the side of the road in a cage. You know, with those little carriers, metal carriers. And here comes Brian. - Good evening. - I was just talking about some videos that I saw over on threads. A dogs being rescued in Florida and it just struck me. I mean, I'm not that big of an animal person. We had a dog for a while. When I was little, we had a dog. We had various stray cats because at first, my house was cut on the edge of the city limits where I grew up. So it was common for people who would dump. (gentle music) - Sorry, that little, my alarm. Apparently I hit snooze instead of dismiss on my alarm that tells me, oh, time to start the show. (laughs) - I've done that. - But yes, all of these, it just breaks my heart, seeing these dogs that were, mom was left tied to a barbed wire fence when it was in a cage on the side of the road. Have you seen any of this? What do you thought? - I have seen that, but there's always that story, sorry, back story of these disasters, whether it's a fire and they're letting the horses out of the corral, just in time, or like you're saying, the dogs and the cats and the parakeets and everything else. I mean, yeah. - Well, these poor dogs, the both videos that I saw, the dogs couldn't, like, if the water started rising, which the water was already up to the bottom of its belly for one of these dogs, but he was tied to a post. I mean, it just left there to drown, and the other one was in a little cage, you know, the little, middle carriers. - Wow. - So if something, if the water started running, they couldn't run to get away from it. They had no food, no water. But they couldn't even go out and, you know, hunt or move to hire ground. - Boy, that's a short-sighted pet owner, to be sure, I mean. - It's just cruelty, it's terrible. - I don't know. - Well, I have pulled up a bunch of clips that I wanted to share, and I thought we might have a couple more people on before I started 'em, but I think we're gonna go ahead with the first one. - Well, you know what? I wanna save this first one. - Yeah, save the, yeah, for more people, you know. - Yeah, well, the first one, because it's about elder care. It's her on the view, talking about elder care. And then I've got her on Howard Stern, talking about elder care. - Good, I'd like to hear that. I haven't seen you see that. - But I kinda want, I'm hoping that you haven't heard anything from Alan. - He was on the Alex's show as was Charlie, so they're probably just, you know. - Probably just a like, 'cause he's really the only one of us that still has a living parent that would really, really get this, because it is so important. I don't think people realize that. One of the things she talks about with Howard Stern is that in order to get care beyond a certain point, that seniors, that it's not covered by Medicare. Medicare only covers like 100 days. - Right. - And doesn't really cover at home care. But if you want to get an elderly person into a facility and you don't have this long-term care insurance, which is expensive and hard to get, and if you wait too long, you can't get it, well then you have to basically go broke. So you just have no assets, no money, so that you can qualify for Medicaid. Here comes Alan. All right. Alan, you there? There you are. Well, Alan, what, we're, oop, here comes Charlie. - I'm working on my camera here. - All right, all right, we got Charlie, we got Alan. What we're about to watch is a video of Kamala Harris first on the view and then on Howard Stern. I know Alex is gonna be mad at me 'cause he's got a big beef with Howard Stern, but it's mostly just Kamala Harris. And she's talking about elder care. And I think this is an issue that's so important that most people do not understand but there's a lot of people and Kamala Harris, she and I the same age and it is people our age right now that they are starting to take care, they're taking care of their older parents or even in my case, my mother died January 11th, 2017 and I firmly believe she wanted to die before Trump was inaugurated. Well, he, she loathed him. Oh, here comes Wayne. But I really wanted to wait till you got on Alan before I played this clip because you're the only one that still has a living parent. And so this is especially important for you, I think. - Okay, will this be different from the interview that I actually watched? - I don't watch the Howard Stern one. - Yeah, we talked about it on Alan's show. - Well, this is first the view and then there's a little short one on Howard Stern. So let's share what she says on the view first. - I took care of my mother when she was sick. She was diagnosed with cancer. And so it is a personal experience for me as well as something I care deeply about. You know, taking care of a parent, you know, that means trying to cook what they want to eat, what they can eat. It means picking out clothes for them that doesn't, soft enough that it doesn't irritate their skin, right? It means trying to think of something funny to make them laugh or smile. And it's about dignity for that individual. It's about independence for that individual. I mean, people are of declining skills to some extent, but their dignity, their pride is not declined. They want to stay in their home. They don't want to go somewhere else. Plus for the family to send them to a residential care facility to hire somebody. It's so expensive to your point about being in the sandwich generation. There are so many people in our country who are right in the middle. They're taking care of their kids and they're taking care of their aging parents. And it's just almost impossible to do it all. So what I am proposing is that basically what we will do is allow Medicare to cover in home health care. People say, well, how are you gonna pay for it here? Here's the thing, here's how we pay for it. Part of what I also intend to do is allow Medicare to continue to negotiate drug prices against these big pharmaceutical companies, which means we are gonna save Medicare the money because we're not gonna be paying these high prices and those resources are best then put in a way that helps a family like the one you are describing, which you have already done. Which we have already done with insulin. (audience applauds) I took. - So that was the first one, that was her. And here she is on Howard Stern. - Well, here's what I worry about. You got a guy who says, hey, we're not stopping here. You know gay rights. - Oh, I'm sorry. The client is over. - You know who has said it. - Yep. Who doesn't have it? - That's the wrong one. All right, all right, here we go. - People don't know this yet. If they're not taking care of somebody elderly, it will bankrupt you. - Absolutely right. Or your parent will not get the care they need, or you're gonna have to leave your job. - Right. - Which means you're gonna reduce your income to depending on what it is, almost nothing, in terms of your household income, to do what you wanna do, which is to give your parent the dignity they deserve with care. - And can you imagine if Medicare is impacted or Obamacare for that matter? - All of this is very real, and very much it's taken this election. - Peace. - Okay, so that's the first two. That's what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about this plan for elder care, because it is so important, and... Who besides me has spent, has taken care of an elderly parent. Wayne and Alan, you're still, you still have an elderly parent. - Yeah, but I took care of my father, when he was sick with incurable cancer, so... - Yeah, so this is really personal for so many people. I really would like to get this out there for everybody to see. Wayne, what experience did you have? - Just, you know, she was here in the house, and just prepared meals, a sister, whatever I could, you know, maybe getting up out of the chair or something like that. One thing I did about her chair, you know, she was sitting in a recliner. She had a hard time, you know, getting to the standing position, from the sitting position. So I went to Lowe's and picked up eight patio stones, and I put two under each, you know, leg of the chair there, which raised it up, which made it easier for her to get up. That's one thing I did, and basically I used to just take her to the hairdresser, when she used to go to the hairdresser a lot, or to the doctor, and that's pretty much it. Just a sister, whatever she needed here, you know, bring her, she used to drink a lot of coffee, I'd make a pot of coffee, and she'd drink, you know, four cups or so a day, you know, coffee, so that's a lot. Yeah, well, you know, I think-- - You don't take four cups, there's a lot. - No, no. I mean, you think I stayed awake at night at work? They didn't have Red Bull. We drank coffee all night long. - Hey, no, yeah, that's pretty much about it. Just a sister, what I could. - So you're left, your mother was at home with you. My father was in San Diego. So my sister would not fly, she doesn't fly anywhere. She's afraid of flying. I'm afraid of flying, but thank God somebody developed value. So I was flying back and forth to San Diego every other weekend for a while, so in 1992, and I had a job, and, you know, I used up a lot of my, well, all my vacation and some of my sick leave and told them why, and fortunately, I had a job working for the city and they were very accommodating. - Well, any thoughts about this program? - I don't like it. - You don't. (laughs) - I'm kidding, you, you stopped at this program, so I just made it. About the proposals that Harris is putting on the table for supporting at-home care and supporting care beyond, so that elderly folks don't have to basically declare bankruptcy and lose everything. And any inheritance that they had set aside, my dad was one of these. So, basically, my stepmother divorced him and left him in the nursing home memory care unit in Houston, but he had to have nothing so that he would be eligible for Medicaid. And that's one of the things that she's gonna be addressing. And I just, I can't say enough, I can remember looking for apartments for my mother when she first moved up here. And there are a lot of apartments that are specifically for elderly people in Denton, but most of them require them to have, you know, pretty much nothing in savings and just be getting their social security checks in order for them in order to move in. I think there was like one that didn't have that requirement and it was because it was permanently expensive. - And probably on the third floor with Denton elevator. - Well, now it had elevators, but it was more like almost like a luxury hotel with suites, you know, and that was, you know, the one that in the others, some were two stories but had elevator and, you know, straight entrances in, was one that was fairly nice. But again, she had too much money and she didn't wanna, she'd saved up several, 100,000 to leave behind to her children. And she didn't wanna lose that. - Yep. - So, you know, we ended up not putting her in any one of those places. - I guess I'm fortunate with my father that I didn't think about that. You know, in his own condo and that elevators was a luxury condo complex and he stayed there until three days before he died. So, I guess I was, and then the inheritance came in all that stuff. So. - Charlie, Brian, y'all have any experience in this area? - Well, what happened with me? My mother went into an assisted living facility in Santa Rosa and, you know, at the place where they have arts and crafts and music and play bridge, you see all that kind of stuff, right? And it was a very nice place we visited her there. When she began to decline worse with dementia than she went into a dementia Alzheimer's type home in Oakland, you know, where you need more care. And she lived there probably longer than she should have lived there about eight years, you know, slowly, slowly declining. So, from that perspective, you know. - That's what I say about my family is we don't die, we fade away. 'Cause that's what dementia does. You just slowly, they just slowly recede. And they kind of recede an age. They kind of get younger and younger to where the memories that they have, you know, not long before we moved her into like a little group home for patients like her. She had forgotten that she lived in Conroe for 15 years before moving up to Denton. She still thought she lived a momot. And then by the time that we moved her into that unit, she really had no memory after high school. Like she could remember in detail things that happened when she was a little kid and when she was in high school. She could remember it, tell you a day that she went on in high school in detail, but she couldn't tell you what happened the day before. And at certain point, she couldn't tell you who she was. - I'm that way now. - Charlie, how about you? - Yeah, no, I hadn't because I lived 1,200 miles away. Yeah, but my daughter, my daughter, my sister took care of my mom for the last 20 years of her life. And so my mom had a separate apartment, but my sister went over there practically every day after she taught high school and then after school on her way home to always go look after my mom and fix her dinner and all that stuff. And then she did that for 20 years. And was definitely not. And like he said, she got more and more detached from reality and she could tell you all kinds of things that happened when she was a little girl or she was in high school or whatever, but she couldn't tell you what happened last year or the year before. And sometimes she didn't even recognize us. We come up for a visit or something, yeah. - Yeah, I can remember going in that little group home, going to see her and we have put these paintings that she did of her grandchildren. My mother was a beautiful artist, she really was. And she did, when she was getting her master's degree in art history from Lamar University, she was, my son was a toddler and all of these very active. So she would take pictures of him in action and then she would paint them. So she had all these pictures of all her grandchildren that she had painted. And we'd put them up around the room. She didn't know who those paintings were of. She didn't know that she was the one that painted them. And then I just remember one day being there and talking to her and she didn't know who I was and she didn't know who she was. And I'd tell her, I would say I'm your daughter, Amy. And I said, and she just thought I was lying to her. Why would I lie to you about being your daughter? But it was that far gone. I watched a movie that came out of just a few years ago called Bad Times at the El Royale. Have any of y'all seen this movie? - No. - It was really good. It's kind of a dark comedy, but Jeff Bridges is in it. And he shows up at the El Royale that's pretty well shut down at this point. And he's dressed like a priest. But the reason he's there is that 10 years earlier, he and some other guys had robbed a truck and one of them had buried it underneath one of the rooms in the El Royale. Well, he had spent the last 10 years in prison and had started developing dementia. And so there are parts in the movie where he doesn't know who he is. And I thought it was very interesting. He's played by Jeff Bridges. It's quite a good movie, I recommend it. It's quite, quite interesting. So that was... - He could have ran for president. We have a president that's running that's in that same boat right now. - Yeah. - I'm not, I'm not being funny, I'm trying to, I know it's bad. - Oh, that's true. - I actually, I've been watching Shrinking Trump and I was on my list of things to do was to find some clips on that, but I hadn't quite gotten to that point. - We have two nights. - We can do this another night, right? Well, we'll get to that another night. But yeah, the proof of Trump's cognitive decline gets more and more pronounced. - Absolutely. - And when you read like his answers to questions, somebody asked him a question and you try to read the answer, they make no sense at all. So I really, I'm fascinated by the show called Shrinking Trump that I think it's put out every Friday on the really American network on YouTube, really American channel. And it's two psychologists discussing it and George Conway is involved with that. They had the last week they had on George Conway and they showed some of the videos. - Well, this next one is from Howard Stern and it's on gay rights. - Well, here's what I worry about. You got a guy who says, "Hey, we're not stopping here. "You know gay rights are next. "You know it." - Clarence Thomas said it. "Who doesn't have gay people in their life?" - I actually was proud to perform some of the first same sex marriages as an elected official in 2004. - Right. - A lot of people have evolved since then, but back in 2004, here's how I think about it. We actually had laws that were treating people based on their sexual orientation differently. So if you're a gay couple, you can't get married. We were basically saying that you are a second class citizen under the law, not entitled to the same rights as a couple. The court that Donald Trump created. - That is sanity. - Openly talking about what else could be at risk. And understand if Donald Trump were to get another term, most of the legal scholars think that there's gonna be maybe even two more seats, that'll be up. That means think about it, not for the next four years, for the next 40 years, for the next four generations of your family, what might be a Supreme Court that is about restricting your rights versus expanding your rights? - Yeah, yep. - I think that's true. How many of us don't have a gay friend or somebody that we know it's gay? - Yeah. - I have a gay son. I have a gay cousin. I have a trans cousin. I have a fluid cousin. I've got all those things in my family. And I tell you what happened here recently, my sister in California is totally red-pilled. And she was going on Facebook and doing all this trans bashing that's really in vogue in the Republican party right now. And talking about trans children being the lies about, they're giving them gender reassignment surgery. - Absolutely. - At school. - Absolutely. - 'Cause you know, your nurse can't even give out a frickin' aspirin in the nurse's office anymore without a prescription and a retina from the parrot and calling the parrot to make sure it's okay before they do it, right? - Yep, yep. - So the notion is crazy, but my sister's carrying on and she's posting on Facebook. One of my other sister's friends, sent me a message. And this is a friend that I got to be close to. She was in Rachel's class, who's four years older than me, five years older than me. But we got to be really close in Austin fighting for reproductive rights. And she said, "Any my granddaughter is trans." Or she said, "My grandchild is trans." And your sister is saying the most hateful things. And so I just, I spent a private text message to her saying, "You've got to stop. "Friends and family are affected by the things you're saying "and you're hurting people. "Stop it." But these things, that they focused on that this could be 40 years of these televangelicals controlling the Supreme Court. And just how many rights would we lose? - Yep. - And I got to tell you what's really scary. I just watched something. And they were saying all these polls are getting closer and closer. - Yep. - And she's what, losing in Michigan now. And this is the insanity of it. So it's the Muslim Islamic community. She's supporting what they say is she supports genocide. No, she doesn't. And they, so you've got Muslims who think she's too supportive of Israel and you've got Jews who think she's not supportive of a myth of Israel. And my thought is, can you imagine if Donald Trump gets an office? It's gonna be so much worse for both groups. - Yeah. So gays are an easier target than Latinos or blacks. But if they successfully take away gay rights in this country, the blacks or Latinos will probably be next. - Oh, well, they're talking about mass deportation. And they have signs of their convention that said mass deportation. And think about that. First of all, they don't care about deporting people back to the countries they even came from. They're just gonna deport them to another country. But do you think that they are going, they don't think that any immigrants are legal unless of course they're married to them. Or both Trump and Vance have immigrants wives. - Yep. - Trump's had two immigrant wives. - Yep. - Of course, they were white. But what's her name, Asha? Vance's wife is from India. - Yep. - Don't even think, don't even think that because you have legal status, that is going to stop them from deporting you. Look at what they're doing, what they're saying, about the immigrants who are here legally in Ohio, about the Haitians. - So I have a couple friends of mine that are gay, that happen to be San Francisco police officers. And they said that if they try and round up them or their family, the people that are trying to round them up even though this doesn't make it right, will end up dead on their front lawn. And you can put two and two together with that means. - Right. - So they are not going to just stand idly. The trouble is that San Francisco is a small place in relationship to the whole nation. - Right. - There are gays everywhere. And so these officers that I know that are saying that we're going to defend our family if it includes deadly force to not begin taking to concentration camps or whatever they're going to do with them. I think California would defend too in New York, but unfortunately I think Texas would not. I don't think the Texas legislatures would say, we don't really need them. It's a few thousand people going off the rolls and they're Democrats, goodbye. - Well, I don't think right now that I think the danger for the LGBTQ community is more of them losing their rights. But when it comes to, for example, trans children, the governor of Texas has already threatened a friend of mine. Who happens to have a trans child? Threatened to take away her kids, threatened to put her and her husband in jail because she's a loving parent who stands up for the rights of her child. - Good. Hopefully she's a good shot when they're done. When the people come to collect her, I don't care who it is. She's going to protect her daughter and trying to protect her in courts is not going to work. - You know, I know, I think a lot of police officers straight, gay or otherwise are going to refuse to comply with some of these laws that Trump's going to come up with. - Well, I mean, if you look back. - They don't want to end up dying on somebody else's lawn over something stupid. - Right. Well, there will always be those who are willing. There will always be those. - Yeah, if those numbers will go down quickly. - What? - I don't want to afford something. - Here's the thing. - It isn't right, but it is right to defend yourself and your family. If you happen to be trans and you have a family and stuff like that and they decide to, they're going to deport you to who knows where, or they're going to put you in a concentration camp. You know, we've seen what happens in concentration camps. You know, 50 years ago or 60 years ago, whatever it was. - You don't have to go back that far? - No, I'm not sure I'm going to go-- - Certainly not in Texas. - Right, you can go right now. - Yeah. I'm not sure that I would want to be one of those people in a concentration camp. I think I'd rather stand my ground, so to speak, we don't have it. In California, you don't have any state or ground walls, but I would rather, I'm sure, but on the show would rather stand their ground than be handcuffed and hauled off to a concentration camp. - I think the first group to be deported would be the so-called illegal aliens and so on, and there wouldn't be much, you know. - Well, they don't look like aliens to me, and that's, I don't understand that. That is really going to hurt California big time. And a lot of the country, because a lot of the people that are illegal come over from Mexico, and you know, all the harvest that's done, all the, you know, fruits and vegetables that the Central Valley grows is mainly picked by, you know, Latinos from Mexico. - Same here, same here, and I know plenty of people who, for example, former Sheriff of Dallas County are going to be Valdez, talked about when she was running for governor back in 2018, how her family drove across country through the Crops, and my friend who was on the bat, again, 2018, who was on the ballot with me is for District Clerk when I was running for County Clerk, her family's same thing, and she's from South Texas. And that's, I promise you, people go back and forth across that border all the time. And what happened was, at one point, we had inflation because we had supply chain issues, and it was the governor of Texas was putting a log jam at the border because of immigration and not understanding that that was hurting the economy and Texas worse than anywhere. You know, a lot of the problems we had with inflation were due to things that Republicans did, not Democrats. - Yeah, yeah. - Well, another thing that's been happening is we've had these hurricanes. And, you know, we had Hurricane, Helene go through, and there has been misinformation that's been put out there by the President. And I have a little short here, it's just of Kamala Harris responding to that. Several local Republican leaders have been pleading with them-- - Start again, didn't hit the start, sharing, yeah. - Several local Republican leaders have been pleading with them to stop. Have you spoken to GOP officials in Florida to figure out how to help combat that right now as it's about to get a whole lot worse? - Well, I'll tell you, I have spoken with local officials who have been struck, for example, by Hurricane, Helene. And they are doing an extraordinary job in trying to combat the misinformation. I'm talking about sheriffs, I'm talking about mayors, I'm talking about local officials, I don't even know their party affiliation, by the way, but leaders on the ground who know that it is not in the best interest of the people living in those areas to not know their rights, not to know what they're entitled to and to be afraid of seeking help. It is dangerous, it is unconscionable, frankly, that anyone who would consider themselves a leader would mislead desperate people to the point that those desperate people would not receive the aid to which they are entitled. And that's why I call it dangerous. And we all know it's dangerous. And the gamesmanship has to stop. At some point, the politics have to end, especially in the moment of crisis and the crises that we've been seeing, it affects so many people. I've met people who have lost family members through Hurricane, Helene. We know the desperation and the fear that the folks who are attempting to evacuate Florida are experiencing. The last thing that they deserve is to have a so-called leader make them more afraid than they already are. - So, I personally haven't heard much misinformation. I don't watch the news much and could be- - Well, and they're doing it with bots and Trump. - Yeah, I was just gonna say, AI is changing a lot. - They're doing it with bots and Trump and Vance are out there saying things like, and I thought I had saved the clip on a YouTube, but Laura Ingram of all people fact checked Trump on the issue, first, you know, they were saying, "Well, she's not there." And she needs to be in North Carolina. And Laura Ingram said she was there for three hours today. You know, it's just, and they're telling people, oh, they're giving you hotel rooms because they wanna take your land. No, that's not true. Oh, they're only giving them $750. Well, the $1750 is basically cash to get you through the next few days. And then they're right. And, you know, and they're giving you hotel rooms and giving you a place to say and getting you taken care of immediately. And then there's a process to apply for further help. And they're also saying that FEMA has been bankrupted because they're spending all their money from FEMA on illegal immigrant. - I disagree. - Which is actually, once again, for projection and confession. Because as it turned out, Trump took money from FEMA response, even though they had four several or five hurricanes while Trump was in office. And every time, by the way, including this time, Trump says, we've never heard of her level five. We didn't hear about it from the last one that just came through. - Yeah. (laughs) - I mean-- - Category five to correct the term. - Sorry, category five, I knew that wasn't right. It sounded right. - We knew what you were talking about. - Yeah, I knew that wouldn't right when I said it. Like, I could hear it in my head. I was like, that's not the right word. Well, I'm only 60, but, you know, we know which way I'm going. So, both my parents had to mention, it's gonna happen eventually. And it's already, you know, it's already starting. I don't know. I lose what I see. - I was listening to you then. - But no, you're right, it's category five. But he took money from FEMA to build these huge, payouts to house all these immigrants. - Yeah. - You know. - And he took money from FEMA to build the house for the parents and to take the children from the parents that have come across the border. Trump did. - And guess who, you know, the Republicans in the house refused to do FEMA funding. And they wouldn't come back from break to fund FEMA. So, that's on Mike Johnson. That's on the Republicans. The Republicans don't wanna give any more funding to FEMA. It's not the Democrats. It's the Republicans. - Trump scams, new story. This could go on for days. - Yeah. - Trump scams, huh? - All right, let's see. Time's now. Those Trump Bibles. Guess where they're made? - Uh-huh. They're printed in China. - China. - China. (laughing) - They're the first, yeah. - Oh, very diverse. - And did you all see this about Oklahoma? They passed this bill so that they wanna spend 50, they wanna buy 55,000 Trump Bibles to put in all the Oklahoma public schools. And the law doesn't, yeah, the law doesn't say a Bible. It doesn't say Trump on it, but it's a Bible that also must have the declaration of independence and the constitution, and I can't remember what else, but it doesn't have a leather cover too or something. - Yeah. So, in other words, the exact description of the Trump Bible. - Of the Trump Bible. - The only Bible that satisfies it. And they cost $60 each, whereas you can get a Bible at the local store or whatever, if it's three bucks. - Well, yeah, they're made. They're, the charge from China is $3, but he's selling them for $60. - For $60, yeah. - Yeah, I wonder how much property he's making on his sneakers. They're coming from China too, or Taiwan. - Yeah. - Actually, you know? - The watches also turn out. - They're trying them swiss because they might have a couple of little pieces that come from Switzerland. But they've been debunked. They're totally, you know, they're totally worthless. They're from China. At all the clothes, they're like main Bangladesh. They're made in China, they're made, you know? You know, you should even go for as much as he's paying for asking for it. You should buy it, you know? This is a, this is a Casio, it's a citizen. But the movement is made, the watches made in a foreign country, but the movement's made in Japan. From what he's charging for those watches, at least get it from Japan, and you know that there'll be some quality in there. (laughing) They're asking $100,000, and you can play in Bitcoin. - And-- - I wonder if folks that monopoly money too, 'cause I got that for you. (laughing) - Did you see that Trump gave Putin some COVID testing machines? - Oh yeah, that's the other thing. - Oh yeah, we couldn't get them here. - Yeah, you're on my next day. - Bob Woodward wrote that-- - Bob Woodward, the investigative reporter, and he wrote a new book about all that. - Yeah. - Much more into it. - That's an echo, right? I said it, then you said it. That was an echo, that's cute. Yeah, we both heard the thing in place. - Right, thank you. - Yeah, so when it was really difficult, I don't know if you remember how hard it was to get those testing kits at first. And Trump was sending our COVID test kits to Putin. - No, no, no, no, it's worse than that. It isn't the test kits like the ones that we get here. It doesn't matter, you can't see the name, but this is not what he was sending to Putin. He was sending the machines that the doctors were using. - Yeah, right. - And PPE, the personal protection stuff, masks and stuff that the doctors needed, firefighters and stuff needed here. He was sending that to Putin. The test kits, I think that would be a humanitarian thing. We have an over amount of them, send some off to some other countries. - Well, there's a little chapter in proof of corruption from Seth A. Rinson. There's one whole chapter that's all about all the money he has in China, and all the graft with that. But then there is a whole section on his response to COVID. And at one point, because he got rid of the COVID response, he got rid of the pandemic response department. A year before COVID hit. We didn't have the PPE that we needed. We didn't have, you know, all these different things that they were putting together so that we would be prepared for a pandemic and then a pandemic happens the next year. - Yeah, the medical community, the scientific community knew there was going to be another pandemic, didn't know when. But Trump, he's smarter than them. Let's cancel that money and divert it to building a fence along the Mexico border or something. I don't know what he did in the money. - I was just talking to somebody on Monday about this. She and her son, she is from Brownsville. Now, Brownsville's right there at the very point, right, on the Gulf Coast and the border of Texas and Mexico, where they have this wall. And she said, you know, she had her son in the car and they're driving back and forth through this wall. And he's like, are we in Mexico? No, you're still in Brownsville. The wall is in Brownsville. And you're going back and forth across it because you can't get to different parts of different neighborhoods without crossing to the other side of the wall. That's how it seems like this is absolutely stupid. Her son couldn't believe that it was this stupid. This wall is absolutely stupid. Yeah, it goes through a Gulf Coast, like down the middle of a Gulf Coast. It goes through the campus of, I think, the University of Texas Brownsville, or A&M Brownsville, one of the two. But the other thing that he did was in this book that I'm trying to remember was something like, it might have been Thailand where he puts in on what he says, you know, let's order so much of this stuff. I think it was PPE, it might have been the ventilators from this other country. And they're like, you just, that country is going, but you just shipped all that stuff to us. So, we had the other country make it. We bought it here for this country, and then he shipped it back to that country because they needed it or something like that. Yeah, in the middle of COVID. If there was a possible way to manage that, any worse, I don't know what it was. And the whole thing that now, the Maga Wright is all anti-fauci. All of that is because he couldn't stand that anyone else was getting attention, and people liked fauci more than they liked Trump, and he could not take it. His ego would not handle it. So, he had to demonize fauci. And that is a thing with Republicans. You know, they're demonizing. There were scientists, scientists, and medical communities around the world, in first, second world countries, that are crediting fauci with saving the world twice, once from AIDS and now from COVID. When Fauci spoke about what was going on with COVID, the world listened, not just America, not just a few people. Fauci is, you know, a smart doc, obviously. He's a smart vaccinologist. But, you know, a lot of people, South Africa got a lot of their information, from Fauci. They called him. They said, "What do we do?" You know, England did the same thing, Spain, France. You know? And he was cool. He spent a lot of his life in his office, talking to foreign leaders in foreign countries. They didn't call Trump for advice. No. And he almost died. He just had an article, I think, in the New York Times, where he wrote about, "Believe it or not, going to all of those places, all over the world, and helping all of those people with all those diseases, including Ebola." Yep. He got stung by a mosquito in his own backyard and got West Nile vilers. Yep, sure did. It killed him. Could've killed him. Could've killed him. Could've killed him. Could've killed any one of us. We're all of an age group that puts us at higher risk. Right. And to think about, you know, those mosquitoes are everywhere. Mm-hmm. And the hotter it gets, and the more places that we have lots of standing water for periods of time to grow these mosquitoes, they're just natural born killers. You don't even need standing water. The Panama Canal, when it was being built early on, more people died of malaria than died from the construction accidents and stuff like that the whole time. Mm-hmm. They came out. They were doing aerial spraying of pesticide, which at that time was not as mild as we're using now, but, you know, they told people go walk yourself in doors, close the doors and windows, and they were killing the mosquitoes that way. Oh, we have a threat going right down the street. Yeah, but it's definitely not the same chemical. It's definitely not the same chemical. It's not the same chemical. Well, when I was a kid, I mean, I can remember sitting in Rogers Park. Smoking a joint. No, no. I was knickin' with my boyfriend, and the mosquito truck would go by. But, you know, they would show California people who are comin' in their horrors and stay inside, and the streets would go by. They're like, "This is the same stuff, and here are the kids playing in the street behind the fogger truck." Yeah, they changed the chemical in the '60s or somethin' to Pyrethra, and which is very low risk for humans, as long as you don't drink it. But, you can inhale a certain amount. I hate to catch it off, Alan, but we are out of time. I'm used to it. Oh, oh, oh, oh, I gotta walk away. Yay! You're too late. (laughing) Well, I wanna thank all of you for joining me tonight. So much to think about, so much to talk about, and then still so much, I didn't even... I've still got a whole 'nother page of stuff that we didn't even get to tonight. So, we'll have more to talk about tomorrow night. Yep. As I remind you, every week, get registered, get informed, get politically active, and go vote. I don't have anything nice to say. Comes the next to me. (upbeat music)