@Chrisontheair Chris Merrill - Best Of!

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Sixty more stimulating talk Chris Merrill. So, if you missed it, the President introduced tariffs on all vehicles that are produced outside of the United States and tariffs on all car parts that are produced outside of the United States. This is going to have an impact. It's going to have an impact on the new car market, and I'm going to tell you in a minute that it's going to have an impact.

On the used car market as well.

NBCLA was doing a breakdown on what this means to you inside.

The Oval Office. President Trump explains what he just signed, so.

Will effectively be charging a twenty five percent tariff. But if you build your car in the United States, there's no tariff.

The tariff's go into effect permanently on April second, when it comes to trade. That's the day the President has referred to as Liberation Day in America.

This is the beginning of Liberation Day in America.

Oh wait a minute, hold on, So March twenty sixth, and well, just mark down March twenty six for our Liberation Day celebrations moving forward, thank you, We'll just call it l Day.

We're going to take back just some of the money that has been taken from US.

And this is a direct attack, to be clear, a direct attack.

Autos are Canada's second largest export, and tonight Prime Minister Carney says he will assess the details of the Trump decision before taking retaliatory measures.

Oh, they're coming. There will be retaliatory measures, but.

Vowing to protect hundreds of thousands of Canadian auto workers, we are going to.

Stand up for Canada. We're going to be united.

In Japan, autos make up twenty eight percent of the country's total exports to the US.

Wow, I realized it was that much.

I chibunk kak, Japan's Prime Minister Isshub, telling lawmakers he is strongly requesting the US not to apply these tariffs to Japan and is quote considering all options in response to them. President Drum said he expects auto firms to relocate to the United States and build new sites or.

Expand existing ones. And of course there are some here.

We know that Honda's open site, Hyundai's open the site, Toyota's got a plant here.

But still parts.

Aren't necessarily being manufactured here. In fact, many parts for domestic automakers are manufactured elsewhere.

These twenty five percent terris will almost certainly increase the cost consumers will pay to buy new vehicles affected by the duties. We wait to see how the stock market will react when it opens, but shares of the top us automakers did fall sharply in after hours trading. So just how will these tariffs impact you?

Well?

According to autoweek, prices will go up and be passed on to buyers. Autoweek says, depending on the model you purchase, expect to pay between four and twelve thousand dollars more.

I'm Robert Cathosik, all right, so four and twelve thousand dollars more. By the way, I'm looking at the market right now, and the Dow is pretty flat. Ford is down four percent though, so we are seeing that there are some some of these movers that are moving in the wrong direction. But overall, let me see, S and P is up, no, slightly up, it's about flat, and NASDAK is just up thirty five points.

So what does this mean to your pocketbook?

It means that if you want to buy a car, it's gonna cost you more, and that doesn't just go for new cars. That's going to go for used cars too. And here's the logic, it's pretty basic economics. The price of the new cars goes up four to twelve thousand dollars, so you say, well, I'm not going to give four to twelve thousand dollars more for that new car. I'm gonna buy a gently owned, gently loved used car. Maybe it's a certified pre owm doesn't matter.

You're not the only.

One doing that, which means that demand for used cars goes up. If new cars are up four to twelve thousand dollars, you're going to start looking at a gently pre owned vehicle, and so is everybody else. If demand goes up and supply remains the same, then you're going to see.

The prices go up.

Expect supply, however, in the used car market to decline. And the reason is if you are considering a new vehicle, but all of a sudden, that new vehicle price goes up four to twelve thousand dollars.

You might say, let's see, let's say.

Much longer I can push this one because there is no cost in new car payments if you're still driving the old car. Now, the old car costs might go up because of maintenance, but your other costs they don't increase. So the best way to save money is to not buy a new vehicle. The longer you make your car last, the more value you get out of it. And as a result, fewer cars will be entering into the used car market, which means supply drops at the same time

And YadA, YadA, YadA.

Don't I don't buy that this falls under the president's tariff philosophy. It just happens that his top advisor is a South African born in Canada and doing business in the United States, and he will benefit from this to a degree because as soon as there are retaliatory tariffs. That's when Tesla's gonna get stung. And we already know that he's been trying to crack into the Chinese market

Merrill Live everywhere in the iHeartRadio app.

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KFI AM six forty on demand anytime the iHeart Radio app. We know that we've had a couple of high profile swatting incidents in southern California here and the last few weeks, we're actually seeing a number of swatting incidences, incidents, incidents growing nationwide. In fact, one happened to a radio host, syndicated host out of Texas, and the FCC chair Brendan Carr,

Bad actors will face accountability.

That according to the FCC, when it comes to some of these others incidences incident SI. But what about closer to home, Well, believe it or not, you can't do a whole lot if somebody swats, and by swatting, I mean they call in law enforcement and they file a false claim saying oh there's a bomb or something, you can't really do a whole lot about it if it's if it's done against an institution. Now, if Amy were to say that that Chris Merrill has a bomb, then

What what can be done?

Well?

Legislators aren't tackling the matter. Cakew was reporting that Claremont.

Pete says the intent to prosecute the people who recently pulled a swatting incident here, but they're often hard to track down and to prosecute. They're hoping some new laws will change that. Massive law enforcement responses at both Claremont McKenna College and Lowilinda University Medical Center last week after two separate swatting calls or popes at nine to one one reports in two days, required both campuses to be evacuated.

Then here there's like a potential shooter, like yeah, yeah, that's it's also quite disruptive too.

I mean, you're not just disrupting one person. You're talking about disrupting the operations of a hospital.

Send students in Claremont into a panic.

Everyone else was kind of running around and leaving campus.

So it's scary, very freaky.

I was on the phone calling all of my.

Friends at a time when swatting calls are on the rise across the country. I just said that, why are police departments here in California struggling to hold the suspects account of why?

You can hide your regular phone number, your IP address. You can basically use a voiceover for you, your own voice, so it disguises your voice. So any of that type of evidence we're looking for is very hard to track down.

But it's also because of California laws that require at.

Some point, speaking of disguising your voice, at some point one of us is gonna get wrapped up in a in a legal matter. You know that, right at some point they're gonna they're gonna take samples of Bill's voice or Amy's voice, or Neil Savadra's voice, and they're gonna use AI to process it, and then they're gonna have what sounds like Neil or Amy or Bill make a dastardly call, and then there's gonna be a knock on the door.

Ah.

Yes, mister handle, we'd like to talk to you about a recent phone call you made and Bill's gonna go I don't even know how my cell phone works. I have and make the calls for me. But this is gonna happen. You're gonna you're gonna start getting You're gonna start getting h crank calls from Keanu Reeves, from Taylor Swift, You're gonna start getting crank calls from all kinds of celebrities whose voices have simply been emulated by AI mark my words.

But it's also because of California laws that require perpetrators here to threaten specific people instead of just an entity like a school or a hospital in order to prosecute.

So what do we do to especially since there now reaching across the US and people are realizing this is a bigger issue than what we're actually thinking about.

This bill really is going to tackle that loopo where you don't need to mention a person and it's still against the law.

The Senators Susan Rubio, who represents Baldwin Park, authored a new Senate built SB nineteen, which allows prosecutors to charge people who make any credible threats of mass violence at schools, houses of warship.

I mean, this one seems like a no brainer. Why did it take so long?

Children deserve better, our students, our communities deserve better. So hopefully you know, this will set a strong message.

Students we spoke with think threats of violence should not be tolerated.

If it negatively impacts the community that it affects.

It negatively impacts the police because they could be doing a myriad of other things.

And yeah, this is not a free speech issue because this is intended to incite immediate reaction. For those of you that say, well, I was my speech not protecting, No, no, this is the definition of an exception to free speech. It is intended to incite immediate reaction here and in this case violence or at the very least, disruption by the authorities.

So no false threats, not okay.

And Senator Rubio says these swatting calls often cost one hundred thousand dollars in police response when you factor in things like helicopters and getting responding agencies out to help clear campuses. She says it's important for parents to talk to their kids about how serious it is to make a threat. But you know, sometimes the people who do these swatting calls are adults reporting in Claremont Nicolecommstock k CAL News.

Yeah.

I think oftentimes we and I'm glad you made that point because oftentimes I think we say, oh, the kids these days, here's what they're doing.

I don't think so.

I think sometimes you've just got some disgruntled or off kilter people that they're bored.

They like the challenge or the adventure. They like to make people jump.

Maybe they are sitting alone in their home and they feel powerless and this gives them some element of control. I'm sure there's a psychological factor to this, but either way, we've got to tighten the laws up so that we can track these people down and stop the sort of nonsense in the future. Okay, I A six forty were live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.

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There is an issue with some.

Of the DNA samples that the La County Sheriff's Department had tested in the past. Now they have to retest them all because somebody didn't get an email.

Oops.

So very bizarre situation about how all of this went down. So here's the thing. The Sheriff's apartment over at their science lab has a series of DNA tests that they use for various crimes like sex crimes, DNA and murders, all kinds of different things. So here's the deal. The company that provides those tests for them notified the Sheriff's partment that the tests that they had were bad. The problem is that the company sent a letter to a person who no longer works at the sheriff's department.

Oops, yeah, that's a problem.

So that happened more than a year ago, and so for the last amount of time since that letter was sent out, the Sheriff's Partment continued to use those tests, not knowing that they were actually bad.

Here's the thing.

The company that runs the testing program says it doesn't provide false positives, but it's just not as reliable as they should be. So what happens now Now the department is trying to retest four thousand DNA samples to figure out if everything is still okay with the way it was tested the first time. The problem is, as we reported before, in certain crimes, in certain situations, there's not a lot of DNA evidence to test. So in some cases, there may be none left to retest with these cases.

Uh oh, that's a problem now.

Isn't it interesting that this email got sent to somebody that's no longer with the sheriff's department, which means either they left the sheriff's department and the email was taken away, which means that the email was sent to a box it no longer exists and it's up in the ether. And I don't know if they got a return message at the manufacturer, but they didn't do any other follow up. They certainly didn't send a second notice, third notice, another

Have fired me, and then they delete the email.

To be honest, I would have done that unless I thought that it was putting somebody in jail, you know, wrongly, then I would probably follow up. But if I thought that you know what this is on you guys, yeah, I probably would have just the leader of the email and been like, shouldn't have fired me?

Now, what does this mean for all of the cases that have already gone through judicial system using these now hampered essentially DNA tests. Well, the District Attorney's office is working with the sheriff to try to sort all of that out. Defense attorneys could certainly get a hold of this and demand that certain things be retested or retried, and they could have a very big implication for the criminal justice system.

We'll have to wait and play that out.

By the way, the Sheriff's department is the only one that's come forward and told us about this issue, but we are told that other law enforcement agencies in the county also use that company. So we're reaching out to the different agencies throughout LA County to figure out if anybody else has been impound by this tests. But we are talking thousands of bad DNA tests at least with the Sheriff's department.

Gests and that's just the Sheriff's department. As he said, this could be this could have a wider fallout. And if I'm a if I am a defense attorney, I'm salivating right now. I mean salivating, not like into a sample tube that they can future test, but I'm salivating like figuratively speaking, that would be.

They got to be very excited about that.

Okay, if I AM six forty were live everywhere on the iHeartRadio.

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I'm there.

I've told the story before, but I don't think I've told it on the morning show, so I'm gonna do it again. First came to California in twenty twelve and I rolled in. I worked in San Diego and I rolled in. They were putting me up at a resort, which was nice until I got the tax bill on that that was fun.

So I roll up into this resort.

It was February the twentieth, I believe, And as I pull into this resort, I had left.

I was working in Kansas City, and I left Kansas City.

I pull into this resort, you know, drive, drove across country, pull in, and as I'm driving in in February, there's girls standing in the parking lot in bikinis, and I thought, I'm never leaving California.

This is the most amazing thing ever.

So I start working at this radio station and great stations, still love it. Fantastic people there, and I hear about this high speed rail project.

Again.

This is twenty twelve, so still in the planning stages, and they said, well, you know, I was given a little bit of the backstory in I hadn't heard about it until then, and I'm giving the backstory. And they said, well, the voters approved this eight billion dollars to go towards starting this high speed rail and eventually it's going to run from the Bay Area and eventually it'll go from the Bay Area all the way to San Diego. But initially they want to get it from Bay Area and

And the.

The projections are already at I don't know what it was at the time, twenty five billion dollars or something like that. So shortly after I get there, they go, uh, oh, we're gonna need more money. Projections are now up to thirty billion or forty billion dollars, whatever it was. And I said, I've seen this play out before. I've been fired from enough stations and enough cities to see how government waste is ubiquitous. It is not a California problem. It happens everywhere.

You have people.

It's sort of like when you go to a buffet and your eyes are bigger than your stomach.

That's what happens.

When the politicians get just an iota of power. They go, we want to do this grand project, and they want to attach their names to it.

Right.

So Governor Brown really wanted to have this high speed rail. He says, this is going to be great, and they all push for it. And you had a bunch of the politicians and Sacramento patting themselves in the back.

This is gonna be spectacular.

And I went, wait a minute, the voters approved eight billion dollars. You're already up to forty or fifty billion dollars. Just said you, mark my words, this is gonna go up to one hundred billion dollars. And what I didn't realize is how wrong I was, because we blew past one hundred billion.

Dollars a long, long time ago, long time ago. And what do we have to show for it?

Raise your hand if you have ridden the high speed rail in California?

Anybody, anybody? Anybody?

Oh yeah, we are well over the initial projections. And not a single person has ever taken a single ride because there's.

No train on any track.

And yet the most Bruce Wayne looking politician in history, our Governor. Governor Batman is now saying, oh, it's on its way.

Off we go.

As I say we did the railhead. We're starting to lay track. This thing's starting to get very very real, is.

It, though? You're starting to lay track?

Well good, because you know you've gotten enough money and the projections are already at one hundred and twenty five billion dollars, and lord knows, we'd like to see something out of it.

But where we lay in track? Is it coming out of the Bay Area?

Is it somewhere in in Riverside?

No?

No, We've spent all this money on the easiest part thus far, between Bakersfield and Mercet.

But wait, there's more. CACRA had the story.

Governor Gavin Newsom defending California's high speed rail project on his latest podcast episode, released Wednesday morning. The project, originally pitched to voters in two thousand and eight as a bullet train between La to San Francisco, is significantly short on funds and nowhere near finished.

Yeah, it's barely started.

The state has so far spent about fourteen billion dollars and needs more than double that just to finish the first line between merced and Bakersfield.

The first line across the easiest part where they had to do the least amount of modifications to infrastructure, housing, zoning, everything else. Laying it across the Central Valley has already bloomed up to twenty eight billion dollars. Oh, this is this is going to be tremendous.

The Trump administration is now reviewing the use of four billion in federal funds so far.

Four billion. Oh, the fens got off easy on this one.

Finishing the full route between the Bay Area and southern California needs at least one hundred billion dollars.

Yeah, finishing the full route needs one hundred billion. But we're spending twenty eight billion on the easiest part.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Most of that money has yet to materialize.

Yeah.

I mean the end of the day, we've got these constraints that are well established already, these pre existing constraints, and there's not a high speed railing system that's not enjoyed some popularity and success. Most at least are wildly popular. It's an experience no one's had in the United States of America. At least, we're out there daring with.

Some democratic lawmakers during a hearing on the project wednesday, had different thoughts.

Yeah, what did they say?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.

I always love it when somebody tells me the definition of insanity. Actually, if you look up the definition of insanity, that's not it.

The High Speed Rail had not yet submitted its annual report, which irked Assembly members Wednesday. The state's Legislative Analysts Office told lawmakers the project needs seven billion dollars by next June in order to move forward.

Oh, is that all just another seven billion? Or else seven billion? Or else? Or else?

What?

Or else will have wasted the other? No, this is a fallacy. This is a sunk cost fallacy. Well, you've already spent eight billion, or we've already spent fourteen billion.

You better give us.

Another seven or I mean that's just a waste of the other fourteen or it's a waste of twenty one billion total, because you're gonna come back and say, well, we gotta have another ten billion, Well we gotta have another fifty billion. Well we gotta have another one hundred billion, Well we gotta have another two hundred and fifty billion dollars and for what, so that we can realize the dream of Governor Choo Choo, no.

Stop. You got to know when to hold them, You've gotta know when to fold them. You got to know when to walk away, and in this case, you gotta run.

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