Showdown
Showdown Episode 28 3-27-24
[music] Welcome to Showdown. I'm Mark Casein and this is the 27th of March and it's a Wednesday and I'm happy to say that tomorrow is the first day resumption of a century and a half old tradition institution in America which Donald cannot do anything to wreck and that's of course baseball. So we will see where St. Louis comes down on all of this. I understand that we've got a few problems. We sign this guy Sonny Gray who was supposed to be a phenomenal pitcher for us and maybe he will be someday. Let's hope it's in 2024 because at the moment he can't lift his arm. Well, something like that anyway, he's got problems. So we'll see how fast his arm recovers and we'll see possibly what else St. Louis is willing to do to try to fill the gap in terms of pitching support. Obviously a lot of people thought, I've thought that Jordan Montgomery would be a good pick since no one else has signed him and he is a very excellent pitcher and we need him. I understand there's a slight problem because he could probably pitch very well for two or three years, maybe four. Only problem is he wants a contract for seven. Well, if you want to win this year, maybe you better just go for the seven and stop worrying about it because I can tell you right now, Sonny Gray is not looking so great. And I know a lot of people have said to me, well, it's sure a shame that we don't have Jack Flaherty and my response to Jack Flaherty is the same as it's been. As long as we've had him on the team and then of course he left, had similar problems elsewhere in terms of getting the ball over the plate. But here's the thing. Everybody always said Flaherty's got a phenomenal arm. Well, I think he probably does have a great arm. If they say he does, he probably does. The only problem is, can he get the ball in a place where the other team can't hit it? Because if he can't do that, he may have a great arm. But you know, we need him to pitch with that arm. We don't need to just look at it, we don't need to hear about how great it is. It's got to work. And at the moment, we don't have Jack Flaherty as a problem, which I think is good because as much as we've said about how great his arm is, it's never been doing us much good. So we sent him off elsewhere and he had the same results elsewhere that is not too great. But at any rate, here we are. We've got a pretty good looking team. And the best thing that you can say for the team is that it doesn't matter if you look on paper like you can beat everybody or not, because often teams are like that. New York Yankees certainly have been great on paper. They spend a lot of money and then they come in like fourth in their division. Of course, not as bad as the Red Sox. That's another story. But hopefully that won't be our problem and what we have to do is take a team that looks pretty good on paper, not great, not the best, but good, better than last year. And then just count on one thing, it's the only thing that matters in baseball. The number one thing, if you know this, you know everything. It's not the analytics. It's not who is pitching for you or which great hitter you've got or it's none of that, not even the manager. Although as far as I'm concerned, you can take Ollie and send him off to Mars somewhere, let him pitch for those guys and see how the aliens, the real aliens, how they do in outer space. He does well there. Maybe he can come back in a few years, two, five, ten, light years. But anyway, it's not even the manager, not necessarily. It's the baseball gods. Whatever the baseball gods have in store for us, that's where it is because great teams, yeah, they can win and they can also lose and they can be great. Now, I set this up perfectly anyway because I really wanted to do a little transition here in talking about the baseball gods. And I wanted to talk about the fact that you got to be careful about how you talk about these things because you don't want to be a blasphemer. And listen, nothing is meant in any bad way in discussing the baseball gods and how they handle each team's prospects for the future. But what I want to talk about is real God, the one that is being blasphemied by Donald J. Trump. Gee, what a surprise, what a shock. How could that be? Donald wouldn't do that. This is a good man. He's running for president and he's got our best interests at heart or anyway, he's got his best interests at heart, I'm sure somebody's, yeah, it's his. And today he's come up with one of the best, I mean, if you were doing a Saturday night live skit, this would be phenomenal, this would be outstanding. The only question is who gave him this insane idea to sell Trump Bibles, really. And I have been told by friends of mine who are Christians, I have been told that this is flat out blasphemy. This isn't even a question of whether they're for or against him. They say that this is blasphemy in the first place. He is selling Bibles and then taking the funds from those Bibles. And as he says, none of it is going to his campaign, none of it. He says, of course he lies, but let's take the lie part away for a minute. Yes, pretend he doesn't lie, but he didn't say it wasn't going to his legal bills. He didn't say that, did he? No, he didn't. So when Donald decided that he's going to make America pray again, amazing, these are the making America pray again, Bibles, hard to believe. I'm telling you, Saturday night live is probably going to sue him. This was probably their idea to show what a real grifter is, and this is a grifter. Believe me, go look it up in the, in the dictionary or, you know, ask Google. What is, what is meant by saying somebody's a grifter? Just go check it because if they have any sense, they'll tell you what it is, which is to trick people into doing something in order to get their money. But what they need is to just take a nice little mug shot of Donald right next to the word so that even if you can't read what the meaning of the word is, all you have to do is look at the picture and then you know exactly what it is. For $60, you can own a Trump Bible. Isn't that sweet? And then on top of that, and I haven't heard anybody comment on this today, but I thought about this the moment I saw it. That's a big red book. And I know all these things are just a coincidence with, with Donald, you know, it's, it's a coincidence that the words that he uses are exactly the words that are used by Adolf Hitler. That's just a coincidence. He talks about poisoning the blood of America and then says, well, with black people coming from other countries. I mean, that is a coincidence. It's just, he doesn't mean Hitler, just the coincidence, and it's just a coincidence that he happens to read Adolf Hitler's speeches before he goes to sleep at night, has nothing to do with using that language. Okay. So here we are, I'd say it's just a complete coincidence that Mao Zedong had those little red books that all the people in China carried when they were idolizing Mao. And by the way, don't get me wrong. I sort of like Mao. I always did, I'm not saying he's perfect. He had his problems. He could be brutal. He was also an unbelievable womanizer and, and I suspect that Donald probably knows something about that. He certainly knows a whole lot about womanizing, but my guess is that that might be some of the attraction he has for Mao. And he's never, as far as I know, he's never exactly mentioned Mao, but, but suddenly he's trying to populate an entire country in the United States here with Mao like Red Book carriers, which happen to be the Bible. I'm telling you, Saturday Night Live could do this as a skit, probably this is probably where this all came from. He probably stole it from Saturday Night Live, but in any event, it would be funny if he weren't in the middle of this presidential race. And thankfully his poll numbers are collapsing suddenly, which, I mean, I'm not surprised and I've said it, I thought it would happen. I'm not going to say we're all, all the way there yet. It's all flipped though. He was two, three, four points ahead in various places. And he's now one, two, three points behind in all of these places and they were all swing states and then also the national polls as well. So yeah, Donald's got a problem. But it's not as apparent as I think it's going to be as time goes on. Last night, right at the end of the show, I mentioned that the only thing that worries me is that we're in the middle of a very, very strong upward tilting stock market. And yes, it's got some problems in the way it's proceeding upward and it's narrow, narrow is never good. And at some point, the market is going to reverse, start down, probably sharply. And then Donald will say that Biden did it. Now honestly, nobody's done it. And if he hasn't even happened yet, and that's sort of part of the problem is that you could continue to get these upward moves in the market that look like maybe that's about it. And then it goes a little more and then a little more, not powerfully up. But reliably up. And that's good for people that have 401ks and people who like the wealth effect of rising stock prices in the economy, and that's good. All I'm saying is these things always come to an end. And as narrow as this rise has been, it's just a little concerning because it could be something that would put Joe Biden on the defensive. But in case you believe that this is nothing, but a partisan discussion where Democrats say, oh, well, we, we want Joe Biden and then Republicans say, Donald, no, that's not where we are. We are actually looking at possibly the end of democracy in America. Because as Donald is now flashing the little red book that he'd like to sell to everybody for $60 so he could be idolized like Mao Zedong was in China. The issue is that that's what Donald wants. He wants to be a dictator. Now in some ways, like I said, I think that Mao was not a bad dictator. In some ways, some ways he was brutal and I know he killed people that sure, many people died from famine, not exactly Mao's intent at all, but certainly some negligence. And that wasn't good. But that is the point of dictators running big countries. If they make mistakes, those mistakes can be enormous and nobody can stand up against them because they're dictators. That's the point. And that's what Donald has told us. He wants not just to be a dictator on day one, but he wants to be able to say we're going to do things this way and then have everybody fall in line and do it. And then he say this within the last two weeks, I can't tell you the exact date, but you could Google it. It was with Victor Orban and he said the Victor Orban's a great man because in his country, when he tells people we're going to do something, they do it. Not like America where you have all of this difficult negotiation all the time and then you got to deal with somebody that has to vote. You have to actually listen to what the population believes when you think you know better because you've got the little red book. And in the case of Mao, of course, he wrote the red book, you know, it was all his sayings. I mean, there was at least a point to it. In this case, Donald is trying to take over the writings that are in the Bible and make them his own. Talk to some people today. I was surprised really that Donald didn't have along with the Bible a picture of him with Jesus that both of them would have autographed. As long as he's going to blast from me all over the place, why not just do it? I mean, it's all just to get money to pay legal bills. That's the amazing part. That's what his real problem is. He's got to pay those bills. Now, I read something today in one of the articles in one of the magazines where they were talking about Donald's great wealth. And I've said all the time that Donald's broke, but now people are saying the following that look, his wealth is expanding so rapidly that he is wealthier than George Soros approaching the wealth of Mark Cuban. And of course, George Soros acquired his money, the American way through commodity trading. He brilliantly bet on the collapse of the currency in Great Britain, and he was right. And he collected enormous amounts of money as a result. And then of course, there are people like Mark Cuban and Zuckerberg and all the different people in the tech business who have made enormous amounts of money creating great things. Michael Bloomberg, you know, Michael Bloomberg made incredible amounts of money, not even just with being a tech genius, because that's not what he was. He came up with the idea of putting all of Wall Street's information on a black box computer, which now everybody in the world has to have. If you haven't got Bloomberg, you don't know what's going on. You better have access to Bloomberg. Of course, now there's Bloomberg TV that can give you that access, but you know, it depends on how you're trading as to how much access you want, how immediate it is, and so forth. But in any event, it made Michael Bloomberg just a tremendously successful billionaire. So now let's look at Donald. Let's look at what he's done compared to these people who he's being contrasted to. And here's what, here's what Donald did. Donald found something called special purpose acquisition company, SPAC, special purpose acquisition company, and he found it. And what it does is actually nothing. It's not an, it's not in business. It's a company. It's a shell. And the shell goes public. And in going public, they raise money for a certain kind of business that they're going to do, but nobody knows what it is. They don't even know what it is. It's something that's unknown and to be decided sometime in the near future. Well, in the case of Donald, he made a deal with a SPAC. And the deal was that the SPAC would own truth, social. And by the way, it's hard to even say that. It's hard to say truth, social, knowing that that has anything to do with Donald Trump, because first of all, there's no truth, none whatsoever. And the only thing that this guy has to do with social, I mean, it's sort of like the foundation word in sociopath, which it, which he is, sociopath. That, again, I defer to Mary Trump, a true psychologist who says he's a sociopath. And I, I believe that's true. But at any event, here's Donald, he, he's created this new business that has been tacked on to this SPAC, special purpose acquisition company. And in tacking it on to that SPAC, that then went public this week and immediately rocketed to $80 a share from about 30, 35. And everybody's counting their money. Everybody's looking all the way down the road at how much money they're going to make and all the billions, because yes, at, at present, that $80 price, which actually it isn't 80. It hit 80 yesterday, but since hitting 80 yesterday, it did drop 30%. So, you know, we're down to 60, but at any rate, here's the point, Donald's looking down the road and he's thinking like all of these other billionaires that he's heard of probably never met him. I'm sure he never met Soros, a, a great man who has, has been very successful in commodity trading and then has given all his money away to really good people who are trying to advance ideas, having to do with social justice. I know everybody thinks he's the devil, but he's not. But that's all right. We can have a different opinion on him, but, you know, I love Soros and I'm sure Soros is not worrying about whether Donald has a billion more than he's got, because actually Soros has the money. He has the money and he spends the money. He gives the money away to good causes. That's what Soros does. Now what Donald does is Donald counts his money, which he can't even access for six months, because that's the law. Now there is a way he could get it if he could talk the board of directors of this SPAC into allowing him to sell his stock. But the problem there is that he's got 60% of the company and I can tell you right now, if you attempt to sell 60% of a company like this thing that he's plastered together here in some idiotic fashion, I can tell you right now, the price will just collapse. It'll go quickly to zero. So you won't have billions, but Donald maybe didn't figure that out yet because as we've heard in the past, he went to Wharton, but the professors at Wharton said that he was a horrible student at Wharton. One of their worst, they said, so they could be lying. Maybe they have Trump derangement syndrome as well. But in any event, Donald is counting all his millions, which he can't get his hands on, but he's counting them. And the other problem with this is, I'm going to say it one more time, I'm going to try not to say it anymore, but truth social, which is the entire business at this SPAC, which is Trump media, what a joke, Trump media. Not a joke, but anyhow, the revenue, get this, the revenue for this multi-billion dollar company is 12 million dollars. That's how much they made last year, 12 million dollars. I shouldn't say made. That's how much revenue they brought in, 12 million dollars. They actually lost money. They lost 50 million dollars. So this ridiculous new company of Trump's, you know, just like Trump ties, Trump University, Trump steaks, the casinos, I mean, all these people went out of business. And/or bankrupt. So now he's got a new company that he's going to bankrupt. And in this case, it's some kind of media operation. He wants it to sound like it's the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. You know, it's like he's an important man in America. He's got a media company. Yeah, well, his media company lost 50 million dollars last year and his revenue is 12 million and he hasn't do anything. He's not publishing anything. He writes crazy missives at one o'clock in the morning when he's curled in the fetal position out of fear that he will soon find himself behind bars. That's Donald. That's Donald and his media company, his SPAC. That SPAC isn't worth 10 cents. But Donald and all these writers today are comparing his wealth to Soros and Mark Cuban. That's where he is, they say, on the wealth ladder in the United States. But honestly, there's no comparison. There's none zero. What Cubans company made money, lots of it. Donald loses money, 50 million dollars on no revenue because he's not doing anything. He's not doing anything. He's got a little computer hookup that allows him at one o'clock in the morning to write really nasty things about judges and jurors and court employees and their families, threatening people, hoping that violence is dropped down on their heads like Paul Pelosi, who he mocks for having been hit on the head with a hammer. So no, this is not a media company. This is a special purpose acquisition company that has gone public and basically swindled people into giving their money into a business that is essentially non-existent. This is an Amazon where they spent a lot of money over many years and built a powerful company that could sell everything to everybody. So they lost money for years as they built the infrastructure for a company that ultimately has become enormously successful. Donald's company has no business. They do nothing. Zero. They're not selling anything to anybody. Nobody writes anything on there, but Donald and maybe some of his, a few of his sick events, that's all, that's all. People who love him because they think that maybe they're going to become a secretary of state, somebody he probably met at McDonald's, hey, you're eating a hamburger. I might make you the secretary of state. And by the way, coming right on my media company. Now, come on, this man has no business, none at all. There's nothing behind it. There's nothing to it. And when all the hype wears off, I can assure you, Donald Trump media is going to be worth less than the stakes, the ties, the university, all of it, the casinos, all out of business. There's everything that Donald touches, dies, withers, withers away into nothing. This isn't Mark Cuban and it's not George Soros. This is Saturday Night Live and honestly, at this point, it's not that funny. Now, if you want to talk about some real businesses, I'm going to tell you, first you can get great food in Chesterfield Valley at Wenties. Wenties is at 18,000 Chesterfield Airport Road and they have great food. You know, I personally love baby back ribs, I really do. That's my favorite. Now, who doesn't like pizza? Come on. They have pizza, I mean, everything they've got, I mean, they've got great food. They really do. It is just an outstanding place to go, it just is. To get your food and to really enjoy it, yes, it's outstanding. But let me tell you that, yeah, and I pushed a little button here, but that's okay. I think I'm all right. Anyway, let me just say, the wings, the meat, you name it, Wenties outstanding, can't go wrong. You definitely can't go wrong if you've got Joe here in the studio with me pushing buttons. I have no idea what I did, what I do. Yeah, you know, I sit here messing with things. That's all right. Okay. I think that might have killed the audio, so. Killed the audio. Good work, Mark. Good work. Okay. Okay. One, two, three, here we go. Back in business. There we are. We're back. Okay. So I wrecked everything, sort of the way Donald does, I was really, I did that intentionally. I wanted you to see how it works. You touch things, you pretend like you know what's going on. The next thing you, you've wrecked everything in sight. So don't put any money in his special purpose acquisition company. But do go to Wenties at 18,000 Chesterfield Airport Road for great food. You'll love it. You cannot beat Wenties. Ben is the owner there. He's there all the time. And he's just waiting for you to come to his restaurant where he will feed you great food and make you very happy because it's just a great place with great people. Bring your friends, lots of room. You could populate that place with bunches of people and there's still plenty of food for everybody. That's Wenties in Chesterfield Valley. Now listen, you can get at 4506 Hampton. You can get Jules on Hampton. And Al and AJ are so good. They make up great new jewelry for people. They'll do it the way you want it. They'll create their own pieces that they'll offer you as their creative work. They will buy and sell coins and jewelry from people and they, they're just good. They repair watches. I always talk about my, my watch, my 45 year old Seiko, gold Seiko, gorgeous watch. I mean, but you got to keep it working. I mean, those things don't just go for 45 years on their own. You got to sometimes fix them. The person to go to is Al, Jules on Hampton, 4506 Hampton. Again, like all the great businesses, when you've got the owner there, they tend to be the best. Jules on Hampton, you definitely want to tell Al that you heard about him here. Now, the suits and ties are my favorite. And you know, the St. Louis suit company has been there for 29 years. Very successful suits, great prices. The ties, well, they're great ties and if you look at what I'm wearing right now, you'll see it's just, it's just a nice looking tie, $5, $5 for a beautiful silk tie. And like I always say, you could go get a Trump tie. You could get one that looks just like this one, $50 it would cost you. And then it would probably choke you because that's what happens. When you do business with Trump, you end up choked. So stick with the St. Louis suit company. Get your ties, get your suits, great prices, can't go wrong. And I just love suits and ties. I really do. And then finally, let me remind you at the St. Louis suit company that if you're trying to outfit your wedding, they do that. They're really great at doing weddings. St. Louis suit company, Forsyth and Central, in Clayton, Jay and Nick are the owners who are there and actually the whole family's there. They own a great company. They really do. And they're nice people, even though they like me, but they're still nice. St. Louis suit company in Clayton, okay. So let's divert ourselves from Donald for a moment and really just a moment because the dangerous man who's causing great problems for the entire country, putting our foreign policy in great danger by trying to end NATO and certainly talking now about reducing social security and Medicare. You got to love these Republicans. They end up at the state of the union address and Joe Biden brings up the fact that they want to end social security, sort of like they wanted to end Obamacare and they get outraged and dignity. How can you say this? We would never do such a thing. And then they turn around and say, by the way, let's give it a social security. We can fund some other kind of program that'll work just fine. Well, anyway, enough of that for a second. I want to come back to Missouri. Let's come to Missouri. And the reason I want to come to Missouri is this. I think it's very important to look at the states and to see all the problems that are developing in individual states because this is partly how the national picture is drawn anyway. It comes from the states. So what do we find here in Missouri that you can really find all over the United States and it's really, it's evidence of the kind of insidious racism that is really destructive to our country. Is it the Nazi stuff? I don't know. And I only bring up the Nazi stuff because we understand that Donald idolizes Adolf Hitler. But here in Missouri, first look out in Wensville where they were banning books, Tony Morrison, great black writer, they banned her. And then of course, you come a little closer to St. Louis and you've got the school district Francis Howe trying to get rid of anything black. Just, you know, let's just erase the black. Let's get rid of it. We don't want any diversity. We don't want any inclusion. We don't want any equity. And by the way, we certainly don't want black history because black history might upset some white kids who are sitting in the classroom finding out that the history of our country is littered with lynchings. Don't want to do that. Don't want these young white kids to be upset. And by the way, the young white kids aren't dumb anyway. They really aren't typically. It's the young white kids who are extremely progressive, thoughtful, caring and welcoming all different races and all different ethnicities. I mean, that is typical of young white kids. It's their parents that have got serious problems because they're thinking about white supremacy and thinking about how they can somehow prevent themselves from being replaced. That's what they think is happening, that they're being replaced. And with that in mind, the Attorney General of Missouri, Bailey, he came up with a brilliant idea. I mean, you can't beat these people. You really can't. No wonder they love Donald because they're crazy themselves. Not as crazy as Donald, no, but certainly they've got problems. But certainly it's racism and in this case, they were looking at the fight in Hazlewood. Now I've seen the pictures of the fight in Hazlewood and so has probably everybody else. The Hazlewood School District, very upset that that young girl having her head smashed into the concrete over and over and over again. We know. We saw it. Look, whatever possessed this other young girl to do this to another human being, whatever it was, I can assure you, it had nothing to do with somebody being black, nothing to do with it. And according to our Attorney General, this is all a result of DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. That's the reason that this young kid was pummeled at school because it's this DEI in black history and just too much blackness that's destroying these kids. So Attorney General Bailey speaks up on this and all of this was in the post-Dispatch today. And it's not just Missouri, it's all over the country. But again, I warn you not to be despairing over this because the same way that Donald Trump can't get elected to president again, all of this anti-blackness, it's just, it's not going to work. And I do believe that given any amount of time and probably less rather than more time, I think it's going to disappear. Now when I say disappear, don't get me wrong. There are some bad people that will continue their warped ideas rolling forward through various generations. They'll find a way to do it, even though the kids tend to resist this sort of thing. But they'll try. And that's what this Bailey business is about. This is racism. This is anti-black political leaders in states like Missouri, certainly Glenn Yunken in Virginia. He sort of led this all off a few years back when he won the governorship there and he beat Terry McAuliffe, which really did surprise me because I thought McAuliffe was such a great candidate that nobody would be able to, to smear him, but, but Yunken did it. And he was smeared with blackness, selling the neighborhoods, the idea that Terry McAuliffe being attached to black people would eventually destroy your lives. It worked and listen, it worked way back under George H.W. Bush when they use that in the Willie Horton ads, very effective because there's just so much racism in America that if you can convince people that black people are coming to get you, it works. It worked back 40 years ago and it works today and today actually people are very outspoken about it. They feel great about it. They feel comfortable with it. So we've got to put them back in the woodwork where they belong and I really do believe they'll go. That's where they're going to go. And it just takes a little time and I think the young people will make the difference. They tend to make the difference. They don't know everything and they don't always vote, right? And they don't always even vote, but ultimately they seem to be good. They seem to have more idealism that is aimed at trying to make the world a better place. And I think you're going to find that the Bayleys and others, the Yunkens and those trying to whip up fear among white communities, I think you're going to find it doesn't work. You can ban Clemente and Hank Aaron in Florida and think that you're actually getting away with something, but believe me, these things are cyclical and the cycle is not going to last long in the direction it's going because this is not 1950. It is 70 years later and there are some decent people around, including some very excellent immigrants who come here work hard, do the right thing, stay out of trouble, unlike many of our people who were born here who get in a lot of trouble. Most people who died on that bridge were immigrants trying to work, trying to do a good job, trying to take care of their families, trying to do the right thing, trying to take advantage of the American way of life, which means you work hard, you get advantage. Unfortunately, some bad things happened there and that was the luck of the draw because they did nothing wrong. Because most immigrants do nothing wrong. Okay, with all of that in mind, I'm going to get out of here in about a minute, just remind you, Winties has great food, 4506 Hampton, Jules on Hampton. They have great jewelry and Al will take care of your jewelry needs there. And then of course, the St. Louis suit company in Clayton, I love them. They've been with me for years and they've been Clayton for 29 years. They are good. And I'll be back tomorrow at four o'clock. This is showdown. I'm Mark Casein. Read your Bible, but not that red one tonight.