This is Gary and Shannon and you're listening to KFI AM six forty The Gary and Shannon Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
Macy's is ramping up store closures this year, struggling to revive its business. In February, they announced that they're going to shutter one hundred and fifty of the underperforming Macy's stores within a few years, including fifty five by the end of this year. Now, they said they're going to close sixty five locations by the end of this year.
They said they're going to.
Stay open through the holidays, let you shop, and then do probably a massive clearance sale before they close for good before the end of December. At this point, Macy's has not yet announced which of the sixty five which of their stores would make up the sixty five that are supposed to be closing. Rams beat the forty nine
Ers last night, twelve to six. Thursday Night football and Army Navy game is tomorrow afternoon, and then the college bowl season starts Jackson State Tigers against South Carolina State Bulldogs at the Cricket Celebration Bowl and the Salute to Veterans Bowl between South Alabama Jaguars in the Western Michigan Broncos.
Trump is going to the Army Navy game. That's where we start swampwatch. Swamp is horrible.
The government doesn't work.
Man.
We're gonna make us like an reality TV show. Corn wasn't bad? Doos always a pleasure to be anywhere from Washington, DC.
Ay Joe, a town all too clearly built on a swamp and in so many ways still a swamp.
I have a bunch of malarkey.
When he said drained the swamp, I said, Oh, that's so he'll keep wash, you know the thing. So this is Trump's fifth appearance at the game, the Army Navy game he went as president, elected in twenty sixteen, and then as president in eighteen, nineteen, and twenty. He's also going to be on the sideline with Pete Haig Seth. Of course, his pick for Defense Secretary, former Army Major Ron DeSantis, will be there. Former Navy lawyer who will join Trump.
Jd.
Vance has invited Daniel Penny, the marine veteran recently evacuated on the homicide charges.
Up in New York.
So that's going to be a good, low scoring game, I think, is it Armies or Navy. One of them is ranked at like number twenty two in the country. They've had a great year, so it might not even be a close game, but it will not be an airborne game.
They will not. It's just they never passed the ball.
They don't.
I mean, I think last year they one of those last one of the last couple of years they combined for I think five pass attempts the entire game, like it was being played in nineteen twenty eighth, something like that. Nancy Pelosi is in the hospital. She was put in the hospital in Luxembourg today after she was injured while traveling. Now at this point, the spokesperson for the speaker Amerita, said that she sustained an injury during an official engagement.
No details on the nature of the injury or how it happened, but said that she was admitted to a hospital for evaluation. According to somebody who was familiar with the incident but is not authorized to comment, they said that Nancy tripped going down marble stairs at the Grand Ducal Palace and took a hard fall, which is never good news and could be particularly bad news for someone who's the age of eighty four. Regardless of what kind
of condition she's in going into that fall. This has become a nursing home, and that's not necessarily good news for the country. Mitch McConnell, of course, tripped and fell in the Capitol after the Republican luncheon. He sprained his wrists, sustained a small cut on his face. He's the one who's frozen up several times. Nancy also wears four inch stiletto heels wherever she goes, so that may have been an issue on the marks.
So silly.
We've heard about the pardons, of course, the commutation and pardons that President Biden handed out earlier this week. One of those pardons is commutations, I should say, is getting particular attention because a judge, a former judge, Michael Conahan, was convicted of corruption and sentenced to jail for seventeen years because he was taking kickbacks for sending kids to
for profit detention facilities. He was sharing in two point eight million dollars in the illegal payments from the builder and the co owner of a couple of for profit lockups. Another one of the judges also involved in the scheme. The scandal is considered Pennsylvania's largest ever judicial corruption scheme, with the state Supreme Court throwing out some four thousand
juvenile convictions involving more than twenty three hundred kids. After this thing was uncovered again, the judge Michael Conahan pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy, but was released from prison to home confinement because of his age over the age of seventy and COVID when he had six
years left in his sentence. So some of the people in what Joe Biden likes to refer to as his hometown of Scranton, PA are a little pissed off that he let this judge commuted the sentence for that judge.
I just want to corrections and retractions. I mean, not really corrections or retractions, but something to keep an eye on if you're going to watch the Army Navy game. Bryson Daly is the quarterback for Army, and his twenty nine touchdowns is a record in the AAC. He's having a hell of a year, breaking all the one.
Team nine touchdowns.
Yeah, actually a lot of upsetment that he wasn't in the Heisman conversation. Apparently he is. He's a toss it.
He can run it.
He's like a linebacker running the ball, they say, so that might be exciting to watch.
It's gonna be chili. It's not gonna be a snowy like it was before, but it is going to be chili.
Everywhere's chili. Aren't we under the Lake effect for more? Most of the northeast where it's like below zero this weekend.
I didn't think it was gonna be that cold. I thought it was gonna be like twenties maybe.
Remember the woman who claimed she was raped by the duke all lacrosse players.
Can you believe that was nearly twenty years ago? That's crazy.
Now, she says she made up the whole story. It's the first time she's admitted that publicly. She was on a podcast. Crystal Magnum. Is her name, Crystal Mangum, Mangum.
Excuse no, no, no.
I fell for that too. I did that multiple times. I said her name wrong, but I checked the spelling a couple of times. Crystal Mangum.
They trusted me that I wouldn't betrayed their trust, and I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn't, and that was wrong.
I already a whole conversation of race black. These were white lacrosse players. She was black, and about just class and race and wealth in this country and privilege.
And does do those things give you more or less believability when something happens or you say something happens.
You know?
That was That was well before we had the Me Too movement where we talked about believing all women.
But everybody jumped onto her train.
To support her because her description of it was was so egregious. And these kids, I mean, these were college kids whose reputations were completely destroyed by her. There continues to be some earthquakes that are rattling right along the one hundred and fifty mile long New Madrid fault line in the Midwest. Scientists have warned that the fault line could general rate of magnitude seven or higher in the
next fifty years. And the earthquakes in the last few days have all been really small, especially by California standards. They've been three point zero or less smaller. But they said that even that many quakes of that size are very unusual in that area. For us, it's Tuesday, for them, it's batten down the hatches. The big one is coming.
Back in DC.
Big report that came out from the Inspector General of the Justice Department took a long time, but he said that there were more than two dozen confidential human sources in the crowd outside the Capitol on January sixth. And there's an important distinction, and it depends on where you read this story. The headline is there were no FBI agents in the crowd. That's one headline. The other headline is there were twenty six chs's and the confidential human
sources in the crowd. Now, many of them were not instructed to go there by the FBI, but a few of them were because they they were following or providing information to the FBI about some of these suspect groups. Proud Boys was one of them, and they said that many of the people of the two dozen who were there at the Capitol on the January sixth, they said seventeen of them did enter the restricted capital buildings or grounds.
None of those guys have been arrested. Three of the informants referred to in the report as confidential human sources were tasked specifically by the FBI field officers to go to DC to report on subjects that were part of domestic terrorism investigations. So they're keeping their eyes on specific people for the FBI. But the FBI for a very
long time. I mean, if you remember, Christopher Ray, the director of the FBI, had said that there was no violence that was perpetrated by FBI agents or sources.
Asking whether the violence at the capital on January sixth was part of some operation orchestrated by FBI sources and or agents, the answer is emphatically no, saying not violence orchestrated by FBI sources or agents.
And it's one of those where it's kind of splitting hairs. People are banging on Christopher Ray for lying about whether or not FBI sources were there that day. He's saying there were no agents there that day and that none of the agents or sources did anything to foment any.
Of the violence.
Democrats may be getting honest with themselves. At least one Democrat. Her name is Molly Murphy. She has delivered a speech. This is the first post election meeting of the DNC and the leadership there and she was Molly Murphy was upholster to the Harris campaign. And she said today to top Democratic Party officials that they must confront Trump far
differently differently than they did during his first term. She had an urgent message for them not to focus on every outrage but instead argue that he's hurting voters' bottom lines their pocket books. It was a quiet indictment of much of the party's long standing approach to Trump, and they say it marked one of the most candid conversations that Democrats have had. She said, the twenty twenty five playbook cannot be the twenty seventeen playbook. This was at
the Higatt Regency in DC. She said that most Americans support Trump's transition and that voters don't care about who he's putting in cabinet positions. She said that Trump's going to take office more popular than he was when he first started his first term, though not as well liked
as Joe Biden and Obama when they were inaugurated. But she stresses that Trump's strength for years has been that voters approve of his handling of the economy and that Democrats should aim in his second term to change that. She said, these votes are saying I will give him a pass on the outrageous if my costs come down. That's what they need to hear.
Yeah, that's what they want. I mean, well, they don't may not want to hear that. They don't write that is what they do.
That was probably be a very unpopular speech because they love the outrage. They love the can you believe this guy?
The incoming president elect administration to Trump administrations likely, they said, to bring changes to seafood. Some of the industry said the returning president will be I've never heard that term before, but it makes sense. The returning president will be more responsive to the seafood sector of the US economy. More
complicated picture, they said. Trump's pending trade hostilities with some of our trading partners they set on the table for tariffs with Canada and China, of course, could make an already pricey kind of protein more expensive. But conservationists are fearing that the president's emphasis on deregulation might jeopardize the
fish stocks that are already suffering. Many in the commercial fishing and seafood processing industry said they do you expect Trump to allow fishing and protected areas cracked down on some of the offshore wind expansion, which can threaten some of those populations. Also, Donald Trump's cabinet choices are not normal to sen its confirmation process should be to be
published alongside one that made the opposite point. But because of a tight deadline and because, according to The New York Times, the LA Times editors were baffled by his demand, so they just spiked the article and couldn't come up with the second version of it in time. Prior to the election, of course, you remember he spiked the planned endorsement of Kamala Harris.
Guess whose birthdays are being celebrated today?
Today is December thirteenth.
Yes, two celebrities, Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift and Front of the Show John Bon, Jovie, Dick Van Dijk.
Oh, if it's right, ninety nine today?
Yes, yes, safe marked safe from the Malibu fire.
Escape the fire with his wife Arlene and his cat Bobo.
Thanks to a couple of neighbors. If I'm not mistaken, they helped them get out. That's why we check on our friends when the fires come, right, you don't.
Listen to them. Of Jesus, Well, we hears it different in sound.
Well, three years ago did the Center of our lives.
Something like that? Maybe it was two years ago. It was two years ago because it was while mom was not well.
Right.
This is the story is I was traveling up the Central Coast to visit my mom when she was not well, she was getting sicker, and as I'm driving home, this song comes on the radio and I had never heard it before. I guess i'd never heard I don't remember hearing it.
One Sleep Sound the World of Difference.
Man, it was just the perfect song, perfect timing, it was, and we can't get away from it now.
And then when my dad was dying, I would put this on just and it's got got this like cathartic feeling to it, right, So it's become kind of a song we play all the time on the show, as you know, and today we get to we get to interview and talk to the singer of the Trumps of Jesus, Russ Taff.
Welcome to the show.
Russ, Thanks guys, it's good to be here.
Man.
I saw.
When we first started kind of learning about the song itself, and then of course the recording that the Imperials did that was the name of the group that you were a part of. It brought in some pretty amazing things. Tell us about your career in music. Was there something you wanted to do as a kid and then you get involved with it.
Well, yeah, I grew up by Fresno, in a little town called Farmersville, California, by Bothelia and daddy was a Pentecostal preacher and small little church about twenty people, and music was just a big part of my family. And my mother and her sisters for great singers, and they told me I sank my first solo when I was four years old. Mom put me on the altar and I sang, and it was just a part of me. I mean, I couldn't play sports very well. You know, I'm short and slow, and there's not like a big
demand for that. But my deal was Mom taught me how to play guitar when I was twelve, and I would through the week, I would learn a song and then Sunday night there was time and I would sing. But something would happen to me when I sang. I felt at home. I felt glory, I felt caught up in something that was much bigger than me, and it satisfied me. And when there's a lot of trauma in the home, there's just places of escape. That's just peace.
And music has always been that for me, and I mean I've done it my whole life, but it you know, even alone. Music makes me cry, music makes me laugh, music brings peace, you know, music makes me dance. And so I have just been absorbed in it and never knew that I would have a career, moved to Nashville and travel worldwide, you know, writing songs and singing. But I've just been blessed. I've been out here now forty eight years and just came out with a new record
and new tours and everything else. So I've just been so blessed, so blessed. But yeah, that song was one of the first records I made with the Imperials, So yeah, I still get a lot of requests for that. When I traveled.
Russ you talked about trauma and the home, and I was reading about your life and you had a rough start there.
Yes, yes I did. My daddy, like I said, he was a preacher, but he was also an alcoholic and there would be you know, he would preach like six seven months and do really really well, and then he would relapse big time and lay in the back bedroom and drink and sober up and he loved to preach, and there really was a call in his life that he never got a handle on it. And so you know, when when their addiction is going on in the home, you know, you can stay out till like five in
the morning. Nobody cares because you know Mom's caught up with him and her life is falling apart. But it was, you know, and I've had three three brothers die from addiction. It was just I don't know, it was by the time I was seven years old till he died in ninety seven. He never got a hold of sobriety. And
so there was just constant chaos, just constant chaos. And when you're a kid and you have to protect what's going on in the family, you know, you can't talk outside the family, and so you know, you had to lie. You just had to lie. And when you're a kid and you love Jesus and you've been taught to be a Christian, and all of a sudden, you're having to not tell the truth of people when they wanted to know, why is your dad not going to where? You know?
Why's your dad not in church? And so it just tore the family all the pieces and I left the home when I was seventeen. It was just I was at a point I just could not live there anymore, and so I moved in with the family when I was seventeen that just basically adopted me, and they've been my parents of choice since I was seventeen. But trauma,
it follows you, you know, it just follows you. And being told constantly in that household that you'll never be good enough, you're not worth the bullet to shoot you with, and you're just told that constantly. But that's what their
parents told them. And so I get with the Imperials when I'm twenty two years old and you're winning Grammys and I remember the first one, and you know, the party after the Grammys, and then you go back to the hotel with my wife and within an hour, it's gone the joy of the whole thing because I'm not
good enough. I shouldn't be getting this, I don't deserve this, And you know, you never could really accept the success and you're singing in front of thousands of people and you don't feel worthy because of those messages that were just ingrained in your brain that you're not worthy, you're not good enough. You'll never be good enough. But yet you know you're living your dream, what you've always wanted to do, and it's the greatest thing that can happen
to a singer. But when the concert was over, I'd go to the back of the bus or go back to the hotel, and then depression would come. I'm fooling everybody, I'm faking out everybody, and I don't deserve this. So you know, I went into my career just insecure and afraid and afraid people will find out that I'm not good enough to do this and I'm faking everybody out. But it all started at trauma, you know, when I was seven years old when dad started drinking. So it
caused chaos in my life. It's just absolutely retaboc. And then you get married and because you grew up in a home like that, you don't know how to love. You know, love is conditional. And I tell you what I've been in therapy thirty years. And then I had my own doubt with alcoholism myself. I was twenty six.
I never drank, and I remember I had a beer and those voices, those condemning voices, got quieter, and so I had the second beer, and the voices got quieter, and by the third beer, the voices were silent, those condemning voices that haunted me, and honest to God, I began to thank God. I you know, I'm Pentecostal, so I lifted my hands and I began to say, this must be the way, you know, ordinary people are, and I can live this way. I can enjoy life, not
knowing that it would turn on me so fast. And then all of a sudden, I'm hiding and I'm lying, and I turned into my dad and I hate myself. I just absolutely hate myself. But there were some people around me that I saw what was going on, because I was hiding and I was lying, and I was terrified I'd be found out. And here's this gospel singer, you know, talking about Jesus and he can't wait to get back to the hotel and just numb. I just
wanted to be numb all the time. And everything I sang from the stage, everything I said from the stage, I meant it from the bottom of my heart. But now I'm addicted and I can't get free. And I would beg God and I would pray, and but somebody saw what was going on, and it was my mother of choice confronted.
Russ, your story of redemption is incredible in the documentary you get me. The thing is the thing is your story is so a.
Lot of people. Yeah, it's a twenty eighteen documentary. It's called Russtaff I Still Believe, and it's incredible.
Once I get rolling fun to real it back, Yes, depend when a miracle has happened in You're a lot. But anyway, let me just say real quick, if there's a document and it's on YouTube. One of them is called I Still Believe Russtaff and I did one with Mark Leida called Softwrite Underbelly that I did about five months ago, and it tells this whole story. But forgive me for just rap.
Now listen, it's a story that I think a lot of people could listen to for a long time. Russ hailed as the single most electric fine voice in Christian music, three time inductee into the Gospel Music Association Hall of Fame.
It's just an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much.
Thank you for that song, and thank you for all of the songs that you've recorded.
We greatly appreciate them.
Let me just say this before I get off. You can get free from trauma. There is a way out. But let me just say that as we say goodbye.
Or not, Russ, thank you.
Oh I'm sorry you went away.
Oh oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize that. Have a great day, Russ. Thanks for your time.
And thanks for the work you guys are doing. Thank you so much.
Absolutely say hi to Nashville.
For us, all right, that will bye bye.
Maybe that is a statement to Russ's longevity in the business, in the industry. Yeah, you know, people moved. Plenty of people moved to Nashville for music, just like they come out here to be actors and never do anything and
never materializes. But he's been able to He's kept at it for forty something years years, he said, And like I said, three time member of the Gospel Music Association Hall of Fame, one as Russ Taff, one as a member of the Imperials that we talked about, and then one as a member of the gays Or Vocal Band, which is a long time well known gospel.
Group as well the Imperials.
I wanted to ask him, if I had a chance to keep him on a little longer, I would ask him about the ninety plus members or whatever it is that have been part of the Imperials since that group started in the sixties, just this rotating cast of people, but that they kept the name of the band the whole time, as opposed to changing it. And so that's a yay. It's a good interview. He was a good guy. Most electricalis a lot a lot it. Yeah, did you make it through that?
I mean yeah, I just you know, some people go through a lot and addictions a wild thing, isn't it.
And here's the takeaway that I have in stories like that or from stories like that. Everybody's got some story of something happening in their family. They're addicted to something, whether it's drugs or alcohol or abused or everybody's got something going on in their family. We're all humans and that's just that's the way it is. But it puts into context, what's what your problems really can be?
Right?
You know, we're upset about the traffic this morning.
Yeah, yeah, I mean you're upset because the boss wants me to stay until four thirty on a Friday.
You thought it was weird that your mom put up dead birds in the house.
Right, No, not abusive at all.
And the fact that he's able to come out on the other side of that of not just his father's and mother's abuse and addiction, but his own, and that he was able to overcome all of that is incredible. Well, and it's so powerful and important, especially this time of year when people struggle arguably the most.
It was interesting he said he didn't have a beer until he was twenty six years old, and when he did, the voices in his head were the things that were quieted, and then after another one they were quieted even more. And I think at that point, you know, up until that point, he'd probably feared alcohol because of his father's struggle and never quite understood what the feeling it was
that that alcohol gave his dad. Yeah, right, I mean if he was, you know, sober and then drunk and then sober under trunk.
What his dad's father was like, right, Yeah, Yeah.
That probably is a key in all of that too.
What was that line about the bullet you weren't worth the cost of the bullet to kill you or something like that.
Lord, that's rough. That would that would be abuse? Yeah, that would I would qualify. You've been listening to the Gary and Shannon Show.
You can always hear us live on KFI AM six forty nine am to one pm every Monday through Friday, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app