Today in Politics | Explainer

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]I actually have something very specific on my mind today anyway. So, I hope you will bear with me that I didn't ask for questions. I think I sort of know what the questions are out there. Although, as I say, I've been on the road all day, so I may do a deeper dive in the um for the tonight's letter. But the the thing that that is just sticking in my craw, if you will, today is that the Senate Republicans introduced what they want for the budget reconciliation measure.

[00:00:31]Now the remember that the because of the Senate filibuster there are and remember the filibuster essentially simply says that you can't make senators start stop talking. So they could theoretically talk forever and nothing would ever get voted on. So there's a system for getting rid of people talking, but it takes 60 votes.

[00:00:54]It's called cloer. Takes 60 votes. And what that essentially means is that the Senate has to, even though it's supposed to be a majority institution, it really needs 60 votes to get anything through.

[00:01:06]And I'm not going to argue about that today. just have that in the back of your minds because the Senate realized quickly that it had to exempt certain things from that system or nothing would ever get done in the Senate. And so one of the things that they exempted were financial measures so that the government can be financed. And what that means is you cannot filibuster something like a budget reconciliation bill. So what the Republicans have done since last year is they have used budget reconciliation. And by the way, the Democrats do the same thing when they're in power. But the Republicans have taken this to a fine art because what they've done is they've thrown everything they possibly can into a budget reconciliation measure because they can pass it without any Democratic votes at all.

[00:01:53]The only requirement is that whatever they are passing has to have something to do with financing. And theoretically there is the Senate parliamentarian who makes the decisions about whether or not what they're putting in that bill are okay. That's not binding. But people do tend to defer to the Senate parliamentarian. Anyway, that's what's what measure they they advanced last night, yesterday evening. Uh they put forward what they would like to see in the budget reconciliation measure that they're working on right now.

[00:02:26]And what's sticking in my craw, as I say, is that one of the things in that budget reconciliation measure, and I hope you're sitting down because this one is just so over the top, is a billion dollars of taxpayer money for security features in the White House, including Trump's proposed ballroom. Remember that Trump tore down the east wing of the White House on October 20th of last year, two days after the No Kings rally of October 18th. It was pretty clearly just a toddler peak that he was going to go ahead and knock down. So, you know, he had received a narcissistic injury by the fact so many people turned out on October 18th to say they didn't want him in office. So, he turned around two days later and hurt us. Did something that he knew would really upset people. He knocked down the east wing of the White House, but then he sort of turned around and said, "Wait, wait, wait. You don't have to worry because we're going to build this entirely with private money."

[00:03:35]Which itself is a huge problem because what you essentially saw was a number of very wealthy individuals or corporations using that vehicle as a way to put money in Trump's pocket essentially. And but that was what he kept maintaining is that people who didn't um you know who didn't want the ballroom were being ridiculous because it was going to be built for free and back and forth and you know we didn't have to worry about it. It was all going to be private money and so on.

[00:04:03]Now, Senate Republicans are saying that they want to appropriate a billion dollar of taxpayer money for that exploitive ballroom.

[00:04:18]That to me is in a way a bait and switch that looks a lot like the Republican party's ideology since the the 18 the 1980s. And I wanted to go a little bit into that because one of the things about being where we are in American politics is that so much is happening so fast it feels a lot like everything's shallow. And by that I mean I don't mean that it doesn't matter. I mean that it's hard to tell why people are doing certain things and there are certainly things that are happening in politics that don't on the surface seem to make any sense and it's important I think to understand the ideologies that under which people are operating. So what happens is out of coming out of World War II and the depression before it, Americans of both parties, Democrats and Republicans, take a look at the economic system of the 1920s and a little bit before that, and they say, you know, that really didn't go very well. We had a global depression and we had a a world war. So maybe we should think of something else. And this is where Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats come in with what they called the New Deal. And that actually came from a speech from FDR who said, "I pledge to the American people a new deal." That is the old deal in which the government was arranged to benefit business and a few wealthy men as it was in the 1920s was no longer going to work. He was going to offer a new deal.

[00:05:54]And what that New Deal did was it regulated business so that workers were uh would get decent salaries and not have to work hideous hours and the um business people couldn't pollute and you know had had to actually work in ways that were good for the American public.

[00:06:12]So it regulated business. It provided a basic social safety net so that um you know that actually comes from a sort of a story. It isn't even apocryphal. a real story about a guy looking out his window and seeing grandmothers eating out of trash cans and saying, "Come on, we got to do better than that." But we got a basic social safety net that protected women and children, widows and children and disabled workers and protected laborers. We got infrastructure like the Tennessee Valley Authority which uh provided electricity for the a part of the country that had not had it before. We got um the electricity. We got some attempts uh to move toward health care. we got um you know these infrastructure systems that are going to really take off after World War II under Dwight Eisenhower primarily um although the Democrats of course especially Lyndon Baines Johnson really go to town with that in the 1960s but it's really FDR who puts his stamp of approval on it as a Republican with the um interstate highway. If you've seen those signs on the interstate highway that are like stars around them and it says the Eisenhower Highway, um that's because he was instrumental in getting the Interstate Highway Act put into place. At the time it was the largest public works program in the country. So you had regulation of business, you had a bas b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b basic social safety net, you had infrastructure, you had the protection of civil rights and FDR sort of noodles around with that, but it takes off under um Truman and then really takes off under Eisenhower and then going forward to LBJ in the 1960s. And you also had, which I won't talk about at all today, this attempt to create a an a rules-based international order that would enable countries to cooperate with each other in monetary stuff and in trade and in educational and cultural fields, but that it would also give them systems like the United Nations and NATO to work out their differences and then NATO to backs stop security. So you had this system coming out of World War II in which the government took an active role in trying to hold the playing field level for everybody. And we get in those years something called the great compression. What economists call the great compression. And what that means is that the income and the wealth of the people at the very top and the people at the very bottom compress. It's why they call the great compress compression. you know, people start that doesn't mean that everybody's equal, but it does mean that you no longer have the extremes that you got in the guilded age and going into the 1920s. Well, when Reagan uh rises and then when he's elected into office in the 1980s, he argues for an entirely different kind of political economy. He wants to change that whole system because what he says is the government first of all um using regulating business means that businessmen can't run their lives the way they want to. So and can't run their businesses the way they want to. So they don't have liberty, they don't have freedom. So he wants to get rid of that and he wants to get rid of the taxes that are necessary to support that social welfare state or it isn't really a social welfare state, the social welfare programs. uh because of course those require high taxes and under Eisenhower in the 1950s Eisenhower's Republican in the 1950s you know so many people now look back to the 1950s as the houseian days of our past remember the top income tax bracket in the 1950s was 92%.

[00:09:45]So that it's actually um uh JFK who starts to bring those things down in the early 1960s. What you get is you get Ronald Reagan picking up sort of a radical idea that this use of taxpayer money in this fashion is a form of socialism that it's stealing our liberty and what he argues but but there's a real problem because people for him because people really like that system.

[00:10:10]They like having wage protection. They like having clean air and clean water.

[00:10:14]It's actually Nixon who's really behind that, you know, who's a Republican. They like this system. They like social security. They like education, making it easy to go to college and making sure that we have head start and things like that. They like civil rights. That's actually popular. Um, and they like the idea of not having another world war.

[00:10:33]So, one of the things that Reagan argues is that if you start to cut taxes and regulations, what that will do is it will just sort of jumpstart the economy extraordinarily well. And that will mean that even though people are paying less taxes, less in taxes, that you'll be able to keep those public programs because the economy will go so hot that the taxes that still exist will generate far more income than they had before.

[00:11:02]And that what you really need to do to make an economy boom is to focus on the supply side of the economy. That is the people who are owning factories and who have a lot of capital to invest in the economy versus the demand side, the workers, the the people who ordinary people who um you know the government after the depression would focus on because the they believed that if you put money in the hands of those people, they'd spend it and it would keep the economy growing. Um, so you get this idea in the 1980s that becomes firmly embraced by the Republican party that the way to make the economy better for everybody is to cut regulations and to cut taxes. That's supply side economics.

[00:11:50]It also later on becomes known as neoliberalism, which I'm not going to go into right now. But so their idea is that this is how you really make stuff go. But, you know, from the very beginning it didn't work. you know, under Reagan when they said, "Hey, we're gonna cut all this stuff." And here's how the economy is going to boom, the government computers said, "Actually, you're gonna just explode the deficit."

[00:12:13]And so, you know what they did? They reprogrammed the computers. Um, rather than simply saying, "Oh, we have a problem." Remember, those of you who are of an age like me, you remember George HW Bush calling Reagan's ideas voodoo economics because, you know, most people said, "This is not going to work." Well, in fact, uh, what has happened since 1981, since the system went into effect, is, you know, more than $50 trillion has moved from the bottom 90% of us to that top 1%. You know, the system actually doesn't work for ordinary Americans. But they kept selling it by saying, "Oh, this is going to be really good for you.

[00:12:52]This is going to be really good for you.

[00:12:53]We're going to cut these taxes. We're going to cut these regulations, and everybody's going to do well." A rising tide lifts all boats. Remember, when I look at the fact that, you know, Trump promised this ballroom was going to be funded privately and, you know, this is going to be this great thing for the American people. And now they're turning around and saying, "Oh, by the way, we need a billion dollars from you to make this happen." To me, it just looks like supply side economics. You know, this idea that we're going to have this great thing, we're going to cut regulations. We're going to cut taxes, and you're all going to do incredibly well. But in fact, what happened was $50 trillion, more than $50 trillion moved from that bottom 90% to the top 1%. So what do I actually mean by that? And what does that look like nowadays? So last July, uh July 4th it was, the Republicans passed what they called the one big beautiful bill act. It also was a budget reconciliation bill. So they passed it without a single Democratic vote. And even still, they lost a couple of Republicans. So JD Vance, who was the vice president, had to come break the tie in the Senate to pass this. I mean, it was it was not a popular measure. But that measure was a wish list for the Republicans. They threw everything in it that they could. And crucial to that were those tax cuts that Trump claimed that he was going to give to corporations and to the very wealthy during the campaign. And that's exactly what he did. Huge tax cuts in that one big beautiful bill act or the budget reconciliation bill or budget reconciliation act now. And what are we seeing now? They actually put that in place in such a way that it the real hits from that bill wouldn't come till later with the idea that people wouldn't really notice what was going on until after the midterms when they could either blame it on the Democrats or it would be too late for the the American people to do anything.

[00:14:56]Well, those things are starting to show.

[00:14:58]So, first of all, we've seen rural hospitals closing um at a at really quite a clip because one of the things that the one big beautiful bill act did was it cut back on support for patients.

[00:15:11]So, the ones you know the the the ones who keep the rural hospitals going. But just uh in the last two days, we've seen two things that to me were really egregious. So people like me, you can look back over my old files, people like me pointed to the one big beautiful bill act and said, "You're going to throw Americans off healthcare and off of supplemental nutrition assistance."

[00:15:37]And the Republicans said, "No, no, no, no. You're lying. This is propaganda.

[00:15:42]This is going to be so great for everybody. We will move fraud away from the system, but no, no, no, no. This is all going to be great for everyone."

[00:15:49]Well, we learned uh earlier this week uh I'm sorry, at the end of last week that so far uh about 20% of the people who had been covered by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, have in fact dropped their health care because they no longer have the uh health care supplements that uh the Republicans cut from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And that expected to go up another five percent. So about 26% of Americans who had been covered by the Affordable Care Act will not be they will not have health insurance. So far that's about 5 million Americans have lost their health insurance.

[00:16:35]Then today and uh this week I guess it's been um uh Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has been uh out in front of the cameras talking about how under her uh oposes at the Department of Agriculture 43 million I'm sorry 4.3 not 43 4.3 million Americans have in her words been lifted off uh supplemental nutrition assistance programs. That is what we used to call food stamps. Now it's known as SNAP.

[00:17:06]Um, and she says that they have been lifted lifted off because uh they either were committing fraud over the over supplemental nutrition um or because the economy is so good they don't need it any longer. The reality is uh that in fact the one big beautiful bill act cut um about 186 billion dollar in federal spending. It's about 20% from SNAP over 10 years. That's according to the Congressional Budget Office. And they made it so difficult to apply that people are simply not being able to fill out the paperwork. they're not being able to to manage to get into the system to get the supplemental nutrition they need, the food they need um in a in a country where we have people a lot of people living in in with food insecurity.

[00:18:01]So that's another place you're seeing this idea that oh the the um cutting taxes and cutting regulations is going to just do just great stuff for the economy and look we've lifted these people off food stamps. No, we've actually taken their food away from them is what we have done. And it's important to remember that this is an ideological position of the Republicans. This is this is their ideology under which they are operating. And um now there's in the Republican party, there's a split. There now are a number of Republicans, the younger, more even more radical Republicans who actually want to use a very strong government to impose their will on people. Not to get rid of the government, which is what the, you know, the Reaganites and on wanted, but rather to have a very strong government that they can impose their will on other people. And you see that aspect of the Republicans in this budget reconciliation measure coming from the Senate because if they are not going to be funding the American people's health care or food, um, for example, uh, what are they interested in funding? Well, first of all, they're interested in taking, I'm sorry, this is just sticking to my craw, a billion dollars of our tax money for security for that ballroom.

[00:19:22]Um, but what else are they funding? They have proposed to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE and Customs and Border Protection.

[00:19:34]Remember, that's the parent agency for Border Patrol. Border Patrol was the agency that was overseen by Greg Bevino that was so incredibly violent in Minneapolis and other places as well.

[00:19:47]and ICE. Of course, you you know about ICE. So, um so they the if you remember the Republic the Democrats re in the Senate refused to fund um the Department of Homeland Security until those two agencies were taken out of the funding because they want to see reforms. And those reforms, by the way, are not something new and dramatic. They literally want those agencies to behave the way they did before Trump got into office.

[00:20:17]by doing things like not wearing masks as law enforcement officers are not supposed to, but also by doing things like having to have a judicial warrant before they knock down someone's door.

[00:20:28]And that, by the way, is absolutely uh the way that the Fourth Amendment has been interpreted all along. So, what the Trump administration is doing is crazy new and radical. And that's the Democrats are simply saying, "We want to go back to the system under which we operated before you before Trump took office." But so they finally did a few days ago fund Homeland Security, which is uh the Federal Emergency Management Agency and um uh Transportation Security Administration. And you know, there's a lot that Homeland that Homeland Security does we want to keep funded. Our coasties, the Coast Guard are in Homeland Security now. and some people were getting paid and some people weren't getting paid at first and you know they that is now funded but the Republicans want to fund ICE and Border Patrol through budget reconciliation because they won't then have to make any reforms in it and they won't have to operate with the support of the Democrats. Now remember that ICE and Border Patrol are really unpopular. I mean, among other things, uh, and I'm just not even going to make a list of them all, but among other things, they shot and killed two American citizens who were exercising peacefully exercising their right to protest.

[00:21:45]So, um, the Senate budget reconciliation measure proposes, and I hope you're sitting down, 72 72 72 billion dollars to fund ICE and Border Patrol, which already got a huge package last year in the budget reconciliation, ICE and Border Patrol through 2029.

[00:22:15]Can you hear what they're doing there?

[00:22:18]They are removing from the American people the ability to pressure the government to force reforms to ICE and Border Protection. I'm sorry, Border Patrol. Well, Customs and Border Protection, but Border Patrol. They are saying we are gonna take this away from the American people who at this point thoroughly disapprove of this administration, thoroughly disapprove of the president and thoroughly disapprove of the Republicans. We're going to take that out of their hands with our votes alone and we're going to pour money, yours and my tax dollars into ICE and Border Patrol for three more years and there's nothing you're going to be able to do about it.

[00:23:04]And then there is another layer to this and that is the administration went to war in Iran without consulting Congress as you know and they did so arguing that under the 1973 War Powers Act, they had 60 days after notifying Congress to have to exercise this operation.

[00:23:32]And remember the the War Powers Act 1973. It's after Richard Nixon has bombed Cambodia secretly and Congress is trying to stop the president from doing things like that. So they passed the War Powers Act and what it says is that if there is an imminent threat, which is why Trump and his people were saying that Iran was an imminent threat even though his own intelligence said they weren't going to have a nuclear weapon for at least a decade. If there's an imminent threat, the president can operate without consulting Congress, but he has to let Congress know what he's done within two days. And then within 60 days, he either has to have congressional approval or he has to remove the troops. He's got 30 days to remove the troops. But they have to stop fighting and they got to pull out. That deadline was May 1st.

[00:24:25]And the administration said they wrote a letter to Congress and I wrote about this to both the Senate prom the the technical head of the Senate. It's a long story and the speaker of the house saying um you know they put in writing that in fact the Iran war had terminated was their word terminated on April 7th which is news to the service members who are still sitting over there and to the American people and to anybody interested in the flow of oil through the straight of Hormuz and anybody who is interested in the fact the US did in fact fire on an Iranian ship on April April 19th, which last I checked was significantly after April 7th, but they're arguing that once a ceasefire was declared, the clock started again. So, he didn't so Trump didn't actually have to remove the troops uh with the 60-day deadline.

[00:25:23]Well, first of all, that's not at all what the law says. And this is um this is really an extraordinary power grab. And I'm going to unpack that a little bit in just a second. But let me finish with with what's going on in Iran right now.

[00:25:40]So um of course now we've got this real issue that the straight of Hormuz is closed that the Iranians are um have taken control of it and they're not letting oil through except a little bit of it. And that is controls about 20% of the world's oil, which is a huge problem. I mean, you're already seeing the issues at the gas pump, but we're going to see a really really big price strike in the next uh several weeks because oil is so expensive and oil and I mean, if if you're looking at the price of diesel, which of course around here we are, um if you're in a profession that uses diesel, um the prices for diesel are eyepopping. And of course it's trucks that run on diesel that carry our food to markets for example and carry products around the country. So um so right now that straight of hormones is closed and what's happened is um the Trump administration has declared this is a little complicated but the Trump administration declared a blockade and if you read the newspaper they're a little bit fuzzy on what's being blockaded and people are saying it's a blockade on the straight of Hormuz but it's not. It's a it's a blockade on the ports, the Iranian ports um of of Iran um so that they can't ships can't come and go from them because what Trump is trying to do is he's trying to strangle Iran's economy and so they're not letting ships in or out of Iranian ports. At the same time that Iran looked at that and said, "Okay, we're not we're not going to open up the straight as long as you have done that. you're as long as you've got a blockade on, we're not gonna open up the straight. And just again, a blockade is an act of war. Um, I may have a rabbit hole there for you, but but a blockade is an act of war. So, while Trump is sitting there saying the war is over, he is literally engaged in an act of war. But so what's happened is that Trump is now trying to force that straight open. You know, he's begging South Korea to come help. He's telling China they need to come help. But the Iranians have control over the straight.

[00:27:53]and they have control of the straight because all they really have to do is convince insurers that they don't want to ensure the ship's coming and going through the straight be and because they might get hit with a drone and then no insurers is going to touch it. So that's that's actually the me mechanism by which they're closing the straight.

[00:28:11]They're not actually sitting there with guns. They're saying, "Don't try it cuz you have this giant metal thing full of extraordinarily explosive material." And we have a very hot drone over here that we could just drop on it. So over the weekend, beginning yesterday morning, it was announced on Sunday and it was it was it began yesterday morning. Uh the Trump administration uh um announced project freedom and what they are what they say they are doing is they are going to escort commercial ships through the straight of Hormuz and they're they're building this as being humanitarian because there's a lot of um uh seaman who are trapped because of the closure of the straight and it is a humanitarian crisis. These people were supposed to be in and out. Their food's running low. the sanitation on the ships is bad. I mean, it's a real problem and you know I you know I I talk a lot about maritime issues and it uh I feel like our maritime around the world but certainly our US maritime I feel is so often overlooked. Um I've obviously have friends in the in the maritime industries and um and it's a crisis for them. That's that's absolutely true. But he's doing it insisting that this is a humanitarian effort because what he's trying to do is he's trying to to open up that straight. And Iran has said ain't happening, dude. You know, you you're you're not just going to um going to do this. We have said that straight is closed. We've said we'd cooperate, but not while you're engaged in an act of war against us. So yesterday, they um sent drones and missiles toward uh two US destroyers, I think, and two commercial ships. Um, didn't hit either one of them. They were intercepted, but they did apparently hit uh part an important oil uh region in the United Arab Emirates or the UAE, sort of as a demonstration that, you know, we could really wreak havoc here if you're not going to play with us. Because, um, you know, Trump has really two options at this point. he can continue bombing which he keeps alternately threatening to do. Um or he can basically announce he's won and walk away with Iran having control of the straight of Hormuz. So um essentially Iran appeared to be demonstrating if you think you want this war to start up again a reminder that we could hit the oil fields um and so please don't go that direction. Mind me, meanwhile, mind you, there are negotiations apparently going on, but who knows what's what's going on with this administration. We're all reading other count's newspapers to figure things out. Anyway, so um so today, um the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, um who appeared to be running, you know, trying out whether or not he's going to run for president in 28, uh told reporters that the firing back and forth now here happening, even though there's a ceasefire, which apparently doesn't actually mean a ceasefire, um that that is not a sign that the cease fire is over.

[00:31:28]Because if it were, then they got to deal with the fact they're 4 days overdue from getting congressional approval for this war, which is just been a global disaster.

[00:31:40]So, what Rubio said is that the war is over. The the the first part of the war is over. Uh, Operation Epic Fury is over and now we're in a new phase. And that new phase is the project freedom phase.

[00:31:57]So we don't really have to worry any longer about that first 60-day thing because we have something new going on over here now which is to me such a profound um rejection of the key principles of American democracy. You can hear how angry I am because one of the things that the the founders but also the framers of the Constitution were absolutely all over was the right of the American people to have a say in whether or not we went to war. And that in many ways was the symbol of it all because if a leader could take you to war as kings did across Europe in in the memories of the framers themselves without your consultation that meant that the king had the right to impose extraordinary taxes on you for his own ends without you having any say in it, which is of course what the revolution was fought over, but also that the king could spend your lives however he wanted without you having any say in it, rather like Vladimir Putin is doing to Russians right now who are essentially being fed into a meat grinder. So to have this administration pretending that we are not at war and pretending that they do not need to consult the Congress of the United States for that war seems to me to go all the way back to that billion dollars they want to put into the ballroom.

[00:33:47]That is this whole idea started by the Republicans in the modern era. It actually comes from an earlier period that you would make America great by cutting taxes and cutting regulations because that was going to be great for everybody. But somehow taxes were the real villain here and that if you just cut taxes you'd you'd have a better economy and more freedom. What that did was it led to a country where people don't have health care, people don't have food security. We have uh our roads are crumbling. We have all these ways in which our actual country is falling apart.

[00:34:25]And the extraordinarily wealthy people are no longer paying taxes. They're the ones who got the tax cuts. And what they are getting is government contracts from this administration. They're getting lax regulations for the fields that in the industries that they care about that they're making billions from. We have a president who has just poured money into his own pockets. And now we have this bait and switch on the ballroom which is such a slap in the face to the American people. Oh, you know, we're we're doing this to modernize the ballroom, you know, or modernize the East Wing. Trump needed to take it down without any permissions, without consulting Congress. And now he's going to build this beautiful ballroom and it's going to be privately funded. And now here we are, October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May, 7 months later, and they want a billion dollars from us to put security in that stupid ballroom.

[00:35:29]And so for me, the story of today is bait and switch, but also the extraordinary uh the hollowess of that ideology that says if we cut more taxes and we cut more regulations, everybody's going to do better. and and at the same time they're turning right around and saying, "Oh, but while we're at it, can you guys just pour money into our pockets?" And that to me, with the corruption and everything else in this administration, to me, I just I was in the car for a very long time, could not get off that budget reconciliation bill that the Republicans can in fact hammer through without a single Democratic vote. And we will have to live with that for at least three years uh with the the funding for ICE and Border Border Patrol and all that that means for our loss of liberty, for their use of surveillance technologies, for all the ways in which they are consolidating power among a very small group of people.

[00:36:42]But we're also going to have to look at that damn ballroom.

[00:36:49]So that's really all I've got today. And um uh because I like I say, I didn't really have a chance to play around a lot in the news. Uh but I will be back um uh tomorrow, I'm sorry, Thursday. And I would urge you uh you know, for all that, my outrage is over this ideology and what it has done to us as a people.

[00:37:13]But never forget that we also have the other ideology and that's the one that I embrace. The one that that we saw coming out of World War II. The idea that if we regulate business, we have progressive taxation so people including billionaires pay their share. We have a social safety net for those people who need it. And here's a news flash. We are all going to need it in our lifetimes.

[00:37:38]Um we h we invest in infrastructure so that we have decent roads and schools and hospitals, weather stations, the things we need to have, you know, wealthy in the non-monetary but in the hum humane sense uh lives and uh and civil rights so that we are all treated equally before the law and that we have an international system that guarantees or at least takes a huge step toward guaranteeing security for everybody. so we don't have another world war. That theory has been proven to work. And that theory is the one that I think you're seeing gaining momentum in the country again because many of us thought we didn't need to protect it any longer because it was so obviously better than this other system. But remember that that is out there as well and people are embracing it. And again, now is absolutely the time to use your voices and to make people understand that if they expect us to vote for them, they better do what we want. And right now, the Republican party is actively working against the vast majority of Americans.

[00:38:44]And they are keeping in office a president who is clearly unfit for the