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 on this Tuesday, April First. Anybody planning April First jokes, Sonya, no bad news for Luigi MANGIONI remember him. He was the one who shot and killed the United Healthcare CEO in New York. US Attorney General Pam Bondi pushing for the death penalty in the case. She's pointing out in a statement it was a premeditated, cold blooding assassination.
She's ordered Acting US Attorney Matthew.
Podolski to pursue the death penalty, saying it aligns with President Trump's agenda to crack down on violent crime and make America safe again.
Did you see that.
A ballot initiative has been introduced in California that the organizers want to call the Luigi U.
Mangione Act.
No, it would The initiative would make it bless you illegal for the insurance companies to delay, deny, or modify any medical procedure or medication.
And they're naming it after the guy who shot and killed the guy.
That's the plan. It's up to the Secretary of State's office.
This is in California. Yeah, let's see who authored that.
It's it's not any legislator.
This is a oh you're right, a referendum. Yeah, battician.
So at this point they won't know.
I think a public comment period is open for April twenty fifth. But what what kind of an a hole would then ask that this be named after this guy?
Yeah?
Oh, one quick thing before we get onto our story about the sales tax.
My dad, a retired marine, stated that if I didn't learn to drive a stick shift, I wasn't going to learn to drive. I currently have a Genesis G eighty and my other vehicle, which I've kept as my dog carrier, is in nineteen eighty four Toyota land Cruiser FJA sixty with a five speed manual transmission. I would probably never get rid of that vehicle.
Yeah, it's a great for a twenty years great vehicle.
Nothing will go for a million miles. Love the manual, Love the manuals Yeah. I mentioned that that was I learned on a stick. My kids learned on a stick. My wife drove a stick like that is.
My parents did not, I mean my dad did years ago. But in my whole life they had and my mom did. I don't think my mom ever learned to drive a manual transmission, but I.
Learned in high school.
I grabbed a into adjacent I remember what it was. But a girlfriend of mine, she had a little hatchback car, a little beater that I learned to drive stick on.
She we swipped.
We swapped cars for a week and that's how I learned to drive stick. Trial and error probably dropped her transmits. But anyway, that's how I learned, just by getting in the car and nobody, nobody taught me.
I just kind of taught myself that's the best way to do it. And then how long I mean you drove you probably I had a couple of forty years.
Yeah, yeah, I didn't.
I drove a stick from the time I was fifteen and a half until I was forty six years old.
Only exclusively drove a stick.
Well, they're cheaper too, They are cheaper, and like like our Brian Moody, our guy from Auto Trader, was saying, it forces you to pay attention to what you're doing well.
And I'm surprised it's not gaining more traction of a resurgent idea with people needing to be constantly stimulated. You're constantly stimulated if you're driving a manual transmission. True, you're never bored in the car. All right, So, sales tax, because we don't pay enough, you're going to pay even
more starting this week. Starting today, you're going to see a sales tax increase in LA count on your purchases, because why not throw more money that it's not spent correctly on the homelessness issue?
Is this one of those the mentality of voting for these ongoing tax increases or fees or something like this, attaching the word homeless to it. Is this a lazy way for people to feel like they're doing something.
Yes, and it's been done so many times. I mean, bond measure after ballot measure after bondman. We've done this repeatedly. We've vocated again, Like we've said on this program for ten years, it's not the money that's a problem. It's the lack of organization or the will or the looking the other way to what the true root of homelessness is when it comes to addictions and things like that.
I mean, you really do need to get dirty and do the undesirable things politically and otherwise to to eradicate that. You're never going to fully eradicate homelessness, but to make a dent in it. It can't just be feelings and flowers and muffins. It's got to be, like you say all the time, the carrot and the stick. You can't make it comfortable for people to be drug users in open air. You can't make it comfortable for people to live on the streets and be drug users.
If you make it.
Comfortable, people aren't going to want to leave that environment.
Yeah, La County will have one of the highest sales taxes in the state at ten and a quarter, sorry, at a nine point seventy five. Alameda County right now has the highest county wide sales tax at ten and a quarter. There are places within La County that are higher, but across the board.
La County is at nine point seventy five percent.
This morning, and with billions spent on homeless services and the results not actually coming through, the board of Supervisors is going to vote on a plan today to consolidate
homeless services into one county department. They said, right now they have fourteen different departments that handle different aspects of homelessness in La County, and the suggestion, according to Supervisor Lindsay Horvath, is to combine it all into one, make one giant county clearinghouse for homelessness issues and then have all of the money go through there.
Well, we're going to talk about this more because this is a direct reflex to what happened last week, and we report it to you when it happened in federal court when that Judge David Carter went after the bosses of the Board of Supervisors and the bosses of the city, including Mayor Karen Bass, for their failure to tract spending. I mean, he was so direct to the point and scathing and his takedown of these people. Finally was was my feeling. Finally, we'll revisit that and tell you what.
He's holding their feet to the fire too. He not only went after them last week, but they're going to have to answer to him, and they are going to have to track all the money, and we are going to probably uncover a lot of fraud and a lot of phony, bogus contracts that have been handed out under the guise of solving homelessness in La County and who's going to benefit when we get to the edit this.
I bet you better believe it's.
Going to be all the people that were in that room when that judge went after him.
You're listening to Gary and Shannon on demand from KFI AM six forty.
Speaking of the Dodgers, they're now six and oh on the season. It's been a long time since they started six and oh. They beat the Brave six to one last night the seven to ten first pitch Tonight. Angels also beat the Cardinals five to four. Their first pitch back in Saint Louis is going to be at four forty five on this April first.
Garyan Shannon, I played in April Fool's Joke on the checker at Albertson's. I have a little crush on her and I went through the line with a cucumber, a bottle of baby oil, men's diapers, emodium, and I don't think she was so thrilled. I think that she probably gets rated on how many items she has to cancel out, so kind of.
Backfired items she has to cancel out, well, okay, a couple things.
Number one.
I think that's funny, Like if I was working as a checker at Alberton's.
That would break up the day, break up the monotony.
Right guy comes through with a cucumber baby oil diapers.
I'd be like, yes, this is why we woke up this morning. I'd laugh.
Now if she didn't laugh at that, she didn't have a sense of humor, And that's probably not a love match.
Or she's so dialed in she doesn't even it doesn't even come true.
It's not odd about that he's the third guy today. How about that? That's also a possibility. We were also talking about driving. I don't know how we got onto the stick ship.
I have a BMW four forty six speed manual. It is the funnest.
Car to drive.
Wouldn't drive an automatic for all the cars in the world. And I'm sixty five years.
Old, I'm sixty five.
Sixty five is like forty five these days.
One of my girlfriends in high school, I don't remember the vehicle it was because I was a high school girl, but it was in the It was an older vehicle and it was in the shape of an H.
Yeah, and it was tricky. I mean you had to really know. I mean, it wasn't uh, it wasn't spelled out for it. It wasn't a smooth changing of gears.
You know, you had to like put it up and over and then there's a little divot that you had to know where that was to get.
It around there, to get it in gear.
It was a whole time, some of the ones where you had to push down to get it into reverse. My dad's sixty five Chevy the pickup three on the tree right there.
Yeah, gear second gear, third gear.
Three on the tree. That's the last time you heard that.
That was a very fun, wow vehicle to drive.
We were talking about La County sales tax just went up today to help us cover measure A was it. Yeah, because we're so stupid that we can't figure out why, well you keep throwing money.
At it, we can't figure out why it don't work.
So the sales tax in La County is up to nine point seventy five percent from nine point five percent. Also, the La County Board of Supervisors today is looking at making a move considering whether to pull more than three hundred million dollars in funding away from LASA, LA Homeless Services Authority and put it back under the county. A new county organization designed to keep an eye on homelessness and do something about it.
So last week in federal court, a judge finally held these people accountable, the people who have been given these boatloads of cash that we have approved as voters in La County for the past twenty years, at least since as long as I've been paying attention here, and the judge in the case, David Carter, went after the mayor, went after the head of the Board of supervisors for
failing to track spending. They weren't even going line by line and saying how this money was accounted for, the money that we've okayed, the billions of dollars he calls he's calling for a forensic audit, despite the fact that we've highlighted this last week that there have been several audits over the years the county and the city have paid agencies to look at how they've wasted money. I mean, they're wasting money in the business of wasting money. That's
how ridiculous this whole thing is. So he wants to do like an independent audit. They're not going to be involved in it. They're not going to hand out the contract to whatever company is going to look into their waste of money to see what the hell's going on here. Money has been spent, but where are the results. So he thinks that there's going to be fraud and abuse that's uncovered in this forensic audit. So they are looking at a third party to take control of everything.
A city county.
You don't get to spend the homelessness money that we approved because you've effed it up for so long.
Now, a part of the disagreement, by the way that you mentioned is that the city controller believes that he has the power to conduct a new audit, but that Mayor Bass doesn't want him to. Her comment last week was it would be improper for one elected official to audit another. Well, wait a minute, that's what the city controller does. That's the job description, whether he's elected or not.
That's what you elected him to do. Now, if they can't figure this out, if they can't agree the controller and the mayor on a forensic audit, Judge Carter had said that he's talking about like you're referring to this third party receiver or basically, I mean, for more casual purposes, a homelessness czar for the city of la And now
that doesn't guarantee anything. That doesn't guarantee smooth operation. It doesn't guarantee that we don't continue to waste money on this issue, but it does have a central point of contact. Whether it's just for David Carter, it's for the media, it's for the people in the city. Everybody would have at least someone to blame as opposed to blame or credit depending on how they do for the ongoing problems with the homelessness issues that we've seen.
All right, coming up next, we talked about these red flag laws, the see something, say something turns out that a say something a phone line in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting has prevented something like eighteen people who had concrete plans to attack schools.
These are kind of some of the stories you.
Don't hear about, Like the plane landing safely never makes the news, right, right, Not all of these shootings that have been stopped ever make the news.
We'll get into it when we come back.
You're listening to Gary and Shannon on demand from KFI AM six forty.
I go all hippie on you and start wearing cloth.
Diapers, oh like with a little safety pen.
Well it wouldn't be little. It'd be pretty big, wouldn't it.
Yeah, imagine what you're worth. That didn't come out right.
Hy, Gary and Shannon.
Both my boys learned on sticks and I did this purposely. And those were the cars I feed them so they could not text and drive.
That's an interesting thing, anything about that?
And Shannon, So I drove them up and down the four five freeway for fifteen years driving a stick Oh, needless to say, I could skip leg day at the gym.
Yeah, keeping your foot on that clutch in traffic.
Yeah.
When I was seventeen, my dad bought me a car, and I said, I want a stick shift because that way none of my girlfriends will want to borrow my car because none of them could drive a stick but neither could I. So it said in my driveway for a month before I taught myself how to drive it. Best decision I ever made. Though none of my friends were able to drive my car.
See that was never my experience because my friends didn't care.
That they didn't know how to drive it. They'd drive it anyway, just like I did with my girlfriend's car. Yeah, exactly.
So.
There was a chat group devoted to school shootings on the discord app, one of those encrypted end on end communications situations. And in this chat group, an eighteen year old in Indiana recently typed, I'll be honest, I'm close to shooting mine up. I have an AR fifteen. A nineteen year old in Wisconsin was in the group chat and wrote, that's so cool, but wait, do you have a solid plan? And the teenager in Indiana who had photos of mass shooters posted on her bedroom wall responded,
Parkland part two. Of course, I've been planning this for a year. She confirmed on this group chat twice that Valentine's Day would be the date the same as the twenty eighteen school shooting in Parkland. That's the one that killed fourteen students left three adults killed as well. Another member of this group chat said, Okay, that'll.
Be enough of that.
Contacted these say something. Anonymous reporting system set up by Sandy Hook Promise, the group founded by the parents the Sandy Hook Parents. An operator at the twenty four hour tip line called the FBI. They track down that teenager in Indiana. They search her home. They find multiple AR fourteens fifteen's excuse me, a box of forty caliber AMMO and they thwart what they believe was absolutely going to
be a shooting. Her name was Trinity Shockley, Yes female, arrested in charge with conspiracy to commit murder the eighteenth Credible school shooting interrupted by a tip to this say Something phone line since twenty eighteen.
Okay, I I do have a hard time though.
How do they know how?
And I guess there's no just better to be safe than sorry in the situation like this, But how do they know it was actually going to come to fruition? I meant it does have all the ingredients. In many cases, it does have the ingredients that would make it possible.
So you're waiting for a football move kind of yeah.
And I'm not saying that the kids like this. Obviously somebody needs to step in. That's not what I'm saying.
You're not.
You don't just do it hands off until they do something awful. Because clearly the infatuation with that kind of event, the infatuation, the videos, the information, the studying on the researching these school shootings, that's a sign of a bad thing.
I think you have to take them all together. If it was just one comment, it's one comment, It's like the kid in I want to say, somewhere in the Midwest whose parents were called into the school. He had been drawing something about a gun, and it was coupled with the fact that he also said he's depressed and asked for a counselor for three years.
Or what have you.
You got to take all these things, I guess into consideration before you roll on it.
You roll officers out there.
The fact that she had talked about wanting to kill, had the mass shooters on her walls, had access to guns, and AMMO made several comments about it. How do you not take that seriously?
And I mean, when weever we do stories like this, whether it's the parents that gave their kid the gun, or parents like this who appear to be so completely out of touch with their own kids that they don't know that that's what's going on in their kid's life.
Well, and it's also delicate when you're looking at areas of the country where firearms are a way of life. Yeah, the dad's got several ar fifteens, but so does Bob across the street, and so does Janine down the hill.
You know, I mean, it's just the way it is. It's not odd. I mean, if somebody here in.
LA had a cash of fifteen ar fifteens, you'd be like, oh, that's weird.
But it's not in many areas, right.
And it's also based on very anecdotal evidence, and that's just from being an observer to situations like this. It's rarely the kid who has been taught how to use guns and to respect guns for h or her for their life. They're rarely the ones that go in and then use those guns to hurt other people.
It has happened.
It's not saying it doesn't happen, but there's generally my house, we were taught very very early on. These were not toys. They're not something to be messed.
Also very rare that a kid that grows up in a home with no guns goes on to do this though as well, Access is a big part of it.
So they've said that you mentioned that they've they're at least eighteen of these that they believe, countless lives saved. According to Mark Barden, who is the Sandy Hook Promised co founder. Mark lost his son Daniel back in twenty twelve. He sent to video thanking the students at Largo High School and the first responders who intervened in one of
those situations. It's again the say tips to the Say Something line have also prevented more than seven hundred teen suicides nationwide, using in school tre sessions to teach students how to recognize a threat, how to report it, et cetera. And again, it's one of those things like if that's true, that's awesome, that's incredible, that's great work.
But how do we know it's it was going to get to that level.
I don't know if we need to.
I think that intervention with a kid who's talking that much about shooting up a school and having access to weapons, there should be an intervention there, and a cal therapist exactly should be.
Called for that child.
Whatever that kid's going through, it's something more than the average child.
All right.
Coming up next, people are stealing from Whole Foods and Amazon.
I left the reference to the Lex Luthor. Yes, the Superman villain. Gary and Shannon will continue in just a moment.
You're listening to Gary and Shannon on demand from KFI AM six forty.
There is a developing story out of Boston. Just about a half an hour ago, a big rider moving van truck penske sorry slammed into a bunch of pedestrians in an area downtown Boston. If you know it, it's the intersection of Niland and Harrison. They said at least five people have been hit. Pretty busy spot that is located right near Boston Medical Center and the Chinatown area in Boston. A lot of foot traffic in that area at that
time of day. Emergency crews rushed in. They said they have five patients at hospitals now, conditions to be determined. They have not yet said or have not yet been able to figure out if this was an accident, a breakdown, maybe some sort of an attack. But again, a truck crashed off of a Boston street and hit a handful of people, So keep an eye on that. Let us let you know when we find out.
Some more.
Shoplifters are targeting whole foods.
Because you can.
Never have too many gluten free frostings or something. They say they're not doing anything wrong because they're simply liberating items from lex Luthor. They are describing Jeff Bezos as lex Luthor, and they figure, well, he won't miss any of it, so why don't I just take it Jesse, one of nearly a dozen Whole Foods thieves interviewed by a news outlet by Business Insider, said that he would often steal entire bags of groceries, including steaks, from the store with his roommate.
Jesse not his real name.
He said, I never felt bad for the corporation as a whole, because it was Amazon, and you know, it was Jeff Bezos. This guy, a thirty something year old tech worker, said he just profits so much taking advantage of the little people. So if we as little people can bite back a little bit, that's me taking one hundred dollars maybe out of revenue for him. That's a little bit of a middle finger. He doesn't care, Jesse. Just so you know, the bigger act would be to
stop buying Amazon and stop going to Whole Foods. That that's going to impact him a lot more if you could convince people to do that. Another regular Whole Foods thief, somebody named Carson, said he and his friends joke that they're not stealing items from the store, but they are liberating them. A whole pack of smoked salmon that he had stashed in his laptop case. He said he works at a nonprofit that he saves about one thousand dollars a year.
Ripping off Whole Foods.
He also has a scheme where he buys hundreds of dollars of decorations from Amazon, uses them, and then returns them to get his money back. And he said, my lack of remorse for any of this is it's because it's a big corporation. They have so much money. Eggs are ten dollars. Screw them, said another one who steals from Whole Foods, Elon Musk, of course, is seen in a similar light, and that's why people are torching and
vandalizing a bunch of Tesla's and vandalizing the dealerships. Musc has taken heat because he is the head of Doge, but he and Jeff Bezos, who are the two world's two richest men in that order. Jeff Bezos blocked the Washington Posts endorsement of Kamala Harris last.
Year, alligedly.
Some of the other petty criminals say that they feel indifferent after they steal from Jeff Bezos's business, but they're not the only ones. Regular people, of course, suffer the consequences if you do not steal from whole foods. Then you have to end up paying the difference for those morons who do steal from whole foods. What would you steal from whole foods?
Your favorite?
I would steal a salad.
I'm still a little bit upset with whole Foods because of a salad I purchased, probably about three years ago. The salad included romaine lettuce, It included a few slices of cucumber. It included some garbonzo beans, and I believe that is it. I placed one little container of I believe it was Italian, maybe a lemon vinegarrette in a small container, put it in the box, took it to the checkout, and they told me that salad was going to.
Be twelve dollars.
Twelve dollars for pieces of lettuce, pieces of cucumber, a couple of garbonzo beans, and some vinegar f and rett.
So I would steal that salad.
In fact, I still might go back, make same salad and steal it and then say, what are you gonna do? What do you do, Jeff Bezie, what are you gonna do? They're gonna tackle I meanine that, you know, because it's not their fault. It's my fault. I'm the ass in this asinine story. Why because I should have known that that was going to be the outcome, or I should have thought about that potentially being the outcome. Who am I to think that a salad that includes nothing is going to be twelve dollars?
That should have been a four dollars salad. If that's you had too many garbonzo beans in there, it was weighing too much. That's ridiculous.
If you can't get a cold can of guy old can of garbonzo beans for about sixty nine cents, very true. And I didn't put a whole can in there. I put it in about a third of a can, maybe maybe probably a fourth of a can, So that should have been like twelve cents. But no, they weigh the garbonzo beans a whole foods like they're wearing golden nuggets.
They're about three things.
It makes no sense. The wait, get out of here.
Seriously, what are you weighing that's in a salad that cost anything nothing?
It's the box too, I don't know. Now now you put me in a mood.
Oh I'm having a great day. I'm driving to play pickleball. Good. I'm listening to.
You all on the radio like I do every day.
Thank you. And I just found out I don't have cancer.
On my Lynch notes, I hope everyone else is having a good day.
Film that's that's that's averon of rockets right to the top.
It is excellent.
Oh my god, it's like you can hear the sun shining through the window too.
I love that. Congratulations.
Gary.
Channel will continue. Swamp Watch is up next right after this. 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.