You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty.
KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. It's the Bill Handle Show. And Bill is coming back from his holiday vacation on Monday. I did talk to him two days ago. He's very excited to come back
and speak with you all. Wayne Resnick sitting in until nine and we're going to I'm going to try to synthesize a tremendous amount of information that I've been taking in about new things that have been learned visa VI the terrorist attack in New Orleans, and also what looks now like a car bombing or I guess technically a
cyber truck bombing in Las Vegas. The death toll in New Orleans is now at least fifteen, and in Vegas there was only one fatality, and it was the person in the truck who is apparently the perpetrator of the incident. Although several people were injured, luckily those people, it was minor injuries for some bystanders that were in the area. And the first thing is that the authorities are now looking at whether or not there could be a connection
between these two events. Now There is one connection in that both of them involved a vehicle, and in New Orleans, as you know, the perpetrator drove the vehicle into the crowd of people and then got out and started shooting and was killed in a gunfight with the cops. Both of those vehicles were rented, and they were both rented not from Avis or Hertz or Enterprise. They were rented through an app called Turo, which I had not heard of, probably because this is not something I would ever do.
Turo is an app where you can It's kind of like an AIRB and B for cars. You can rent a car through Touro from some guy who rents out his car. The appeal of it, and if somebody were to try to sell you on why Touro is cool, it would be because you would be able to rent interesting cars. That hurts inn Avis and those places won't have maybe old cars, maybe custom cars, but a lot of the cars are just basic cars. So you're renting somebody's car. I imagine some people doing that like Airbnb.
Some people rent out their own home or part of their own home. Other people have properties that are only for the purpose of renting them out. And I assume they're people who have cars that are only for the purpose of renting them out, and other people may be rent out the car that they drive when you're not renting it. So both of these people finger quotes people given what they did, in my opinion, rented through Turo and Turo says they are cooperating with the FEDS in the investigation.
Now there's another link. Both of them served in the military.
We've had some information for a day or so about the New Orleans suspect, shamsu Den Jabbar.
Now it's believed that the man.
Who rented the cyber truck and is the perpetrator of the explosion, there is somebody named or who was named Matthew Littlelsberger, and assuming that is the person that we should be talking about, he has a history of serving in the military as well. Now they haven't identified the person who is behind the wheel of the truck in Vegas because, as you might imagine, it's not in very good condition. So they're working to do that through forensics.
But they were able to get the information about who rented it, and they were also able to track not in real time, but after the fact, the drive of the car from Colorado where it was rented through to Vegas by because as whoever drove it drove it from Colorado to Las Vegas, it passed through many license plate readers, and so they're able to get that data and look at the path that was taken. The FBI is conducting
searches and investigations in Colorado Springs. We know that there were search warrants served at the place where the New Orleans perpetrator was staying in New Orleans, and so both of these Both of these events have a lot in common, both in terms of how the investigations are being being handled. They're both in kind of the same stages of investigation, and they both involve people who served in the military,
both of them for many many years. Beyond that, we don't know if there are any other similarities, and by the way, similarities obviously are not the same as connections. The idea that possibly these two people knew each other in some way and agreed to do different types of terror attacks in different parts of the country seems to me right now, seems far fetched, But I do think this.
They're throwing everything they can at it, and they usually are pretty successful at coming up with additional information at this stage of an investigation, So obviously KFI is keeping an eye on this. Anything that comes out that's relevant, we will bring it to you as soon as it happens. And I think Michelle a little bit later in the show, we can revisit this again through the prism of where did the authorities go wrong in trying to prevent what
happened in New Orleans? And was there anything they did wrong? And was there anything they could have done? But for now, let's move on to some other things that are going on in the world. And what are we going to do with this entire generation of people who are not growing up? Who am I talking about? I'm talking about the people in their thirties man. Today, let me start
it differently. If you look at film and photographs of people who were in their thirties back in say the forties and the fifties and even the sixties, they all look old as dirt.
They look old.
There they are in their house with their wife or husband, kids, the car. And if I showed you photos of people from the forties and the fifties and I said how old are these people? I guarantee you because this is what I used to do till I learned better. I would say, I don't know that guy's forty five, No, he's like thirty two. I really do believe that physically we have changed in terms of how aged we look.
But so today now, if you're in your thirties, you really maybe have never looked less like a grown up. There's a physical manifestation of the phenomenon that.
I'm about to tell you about.
I think I honestly believe people are looking younger, and I don't know if it's because of the fact that they're living younger, but maybe there's a connection. Americans in their thirties are not hitting the three big milestones of being a grown up adult, owning a home, getting married, pounded out the babies, and some of them are doing that on purpose. There is a big swing away from
in particular marriage and having children. The percentage of Americans in their thirties now who are not married is significantly higher than it was even twenty years ago. One third of today's young adults will never ever get married. I mean, at least that's what the Institute for Family Studies says. They're a conservative thing tank, and if you go back, say twenty years, maybe fifteen percent say I'll never be married. The projection was fifteen percent of people will never get married.
Let's talk to some adults who don't have kids. Will you have kids? Well, it used to be back in twenty eighteen, thirty seven percent of childless adults who are under fifty, You can't. It's not fair to ask people who are over fifty who don't have kids, do you think you're gonna have kids? Because there's no way. But like thirty five year old, you don't have kids yet?
Are you gonna have kids? And in twenty eighteen it was already sizable, it was about a third of them, and now it's almost fifty percent, and that's according to the Pew Research Center. And a lot of it is by choice, is people don't value marriage anymore, they don't want to have kids. But even the choice there, particularly the choice not to want to have kids, is not one hundred percent a free choice. Because the other thing that's going on is some of these aspects of the
American dream of being an adult is not possible. They don't have a choice. That's the home ownership part of it. Right it's a crazy housing market right now, it has been for a while, is probably going to continue to be for a long time. And today home ownership is out of reach for a much bigger percentage of people in their thirties than ever.
Ever.
There was a time in this country where everybody their mid thirties, almost everybody who wanted to buy a house bought a house. It really wasn't I don't want to say it this way, but it wasn't that.
Big of a deal.
It was reasonably affordable to buy a house anywhere.
And now it's the opposite.
It's like, please show me the zip codes in this country where it's reasonably affordable to buy a house.
And it's not.
Because although some people think the economy sucks, and some people think that like people in their thirties now simply don't have the same income or don't have the same financial wherewithal as people in the thirties and previous generations.
That's not true.
The fact is, median wages for full time workers are up sixteen percent since two thousand, and the wealth the wealth of people in their thirties has gone up sixty six percent between nineteen eighty nine and twenty twenty two.
I think is the most recent numbers on that.
So in fact, the current thirty year olds are in a better financial condition on average. Now, now the aside, these are statistics, and we're talking about averages and medians. So obviously there are a lot of people in their thirties who fall below that and are struggling even by objective economic standards. But it also means that they're thirty year olds who are doing even better than that. But the thing is, the attitude is different. This has been
an ongoing thing. It was really highlighted during the election that so many people have a dimmer view of the economy than the actual economy would warrant, and that's true amongst the people in their thirties. Only twenty one percent of adults in their thirties said the overall economy was good or excellent last year, but by objective measures it was pretty good.
When you ask them a more.
Grandiose question, like you know what you think you're going to quote achieve the American dream, which is very vague and subjective, but they do ask people that, and people in their thirties are far less likely than people in their fifties or sixties to say that it's still a possibility. That was a Wall Street Journal poll just in July.
So there's a pessimism. A lot of people think they're worse off than they objectively are are, and their view of the future is more pessimistic than objective facts might support. And I think it's the housing thing. I really do believe this, because the housing thing objectively is bad. That cannot be sugarcoated. There's no statistics I could give you to try to then say, see, the housing situation's not as bad as you think it is.
The housing situation really is.
And I know some people who are younger than me, and it is a big source of frustration and malaise that they cannot afford a home. And I think there are a lot of people in their thirties that are preoccupied and I'm not saying wrongly, so they're preoccupied with the true objective reality that they simply cannot afford a home.
And it's not their fault. It's the housing market.
And when you can't do that, and it's really important to you, I mean a home. Owning a home is kind of the core of stability as an adult, isn't it. Most people used to you would buy a house first and then you'd start a family. So the idea that that's the initial lynch pin of being an adult is being able to get a house, and you can't. And what's happening is so many younger people they're saying, I can't be an adult because I can't get a house.
They don't realize that that's the equation that they're making in their head. But that's what's going on, and that's why. And the pandemic didn't help. By the way, Hey cameo appearance by the pandemic in this topic because a lot of young people move back home, kind of regressing in terms of what their lives look like heired to their age and now when at least in terms of the pandemic, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to buy a house.
The economics are making it impossible. And so.
I don't know if this is going to continue where it's going to be people in their forties and their fifties who've never done any of these things.
But that's what's happening right now. Let's get into this.
President elect Donald Trump has promised he's going to crack down on illegal immigration and he wants to spearhead significant changes to various immigration laws.
I am so not interested in.
Arguing about whether he should or whether he shouldn't, or is he a jerk, or is he this you know, the smartest man in America for finally dealing with this problem.
Should he.
Is irrelevant if he can't. So let's look practically some of the hurdles that are in place to see what he's up against. Let's go here we go. Number one, there's a massive backlog in the immigration courts.
The way the law works now, with few exceptions.
Immigrants here illegally cannot be deported without a hearing an immigration court. This gives them a chance to ask for asylum or maybe another way to stay in the country, and it's required by law. There are some exceptions, but they're not relevant to the big discussion here. The courts are so backlogged that today somebody who gets a hearing scheduled will be expected to come to their hearing in twenty twenty eight or twenty twenty nine. Yeah, that's how
far backed up the courts are. Now, you get a hearing date, and you are given a work permit, and you can find employment in the US legally and President elect Trump and the people close to him say, Hey, first of all, that's not a good idea, because this is why, this is why so many people are coming to the border, because they know that even if at the end of the process they don't get to stay that for years, they can be here and work. So what do we have to do to solve this problem. Well,
right now, there's about five hundred immigration judges. And immigration judges are not like Article three federal judges. They are they really are employees and they do have to follow directives. And there's about five hundred of them. So they're various experts that have done projections and calculations, and they say Congress will have to hire five thousand more immigration judges. So it's not like we have five hundred and we
need six fifty. That's not what's going on here. Massive amounts of money will have to be spent to hire ten times as many immigration judges as we have. Now, this raises a question in my mind, particularly as to the cost of doing this.
Then you got to have.
Places for them to sit and conduct hearings, so you're gonna have to have a build out of some kind of facilities. It's a ton of money at a time when we continue to run deficits, when the debt ceiling continues to be a political football, and when an administration is coming in that's all Republican in the White House and the Senate and the Congress, and we don't typically think of that kind of a government as being a let's spend like crazy kind of a government. Is there
something else that can be done about the backlog? If we aren't gonna spend all this money to hire ten times as many judges, Well, you could. Here's one thing they could do. You could shuffle around whose hearings happen first. It's mostly a first come, first serve thing right now. But what you could do is you could say, Okay, somebody who shows up here from let's just say El Salvador,
they're gonna get priority. They're gonna get the earliest hearings, and somebody who comes in from somewhere else they're gonna wait even longer.
Or you could do this. I would say, this is a good idea. Here.
People who show up and they have criminal records, they get a hearing absolutely as soon as possible. They move to the front of the line. Because those are people that probably were not gonna let stay. Also, another thing you could do is tweak the laws and procedures so that when you get to the final hearing stage, you
can't delay it anymore. What will happen sometimes is people wait years for a hearing and then they show up and they go blah blah blah a hearing, and then they go, all right, we need one more hearing, and then they keep delaying it, and judges allow the person to delay their final hearing. Usually it's because they say, well, I need a lawyer for my final hearing. I need
more time to find it. If you made it a little tougher to do that, that would shorten the timeline and that would clear the backlog sooner.
Here's the thing, though.
Unless there's a rapid infusion of money to increase the immigration judge situation by a factor of ten, or the laws are changed, most of the people who came here illegally while Biden was president will not be legally able to be deported until after Donald Trump's second term. There's also not enough ice agents. There's another problem. There's about six thousand of them right now. They have money to keep in custody about forty thousand immigrants at a time.
They do not have the planes, the airplanes that they would need to deport millions of people back to their home countries. Now, you know, the Republicans can figure out some ways to free up some money for.
All of this.
And Trump says he'll declare a national emergency that will unlock some money almost right away from Pentagon's budget that could be used for certain things. But the problem is things have changed now. One of the things that Donald Trump likes to talk about is in the fifties, when Eisenhower was president, there was a mass deportation program, and by the standards of trying to mass deport a bunch of people, it was a success.
But here's the problem.
When Eisenhower was president, pretty much every single person that they were deporting was from Mexico, so they were sending everybody to the same place right over the border. That's not the case anymore. Yes, sure a lot of people are from Mexico, but they're from China, and they're from Uzbekistan, and they're from India, and they're from I don't know, Mauritania. So you can't just push them back across the border, and you can't load up planes for short flights.
Boom, now you're back.
You've got to coordinate hundreds of flights to different countries, and you're fighting with the governments of those countries about when or will they receive those flights. It's way more complicated the logistics of it, and that can only be solved with more money. Money for planes, money for logistics, people, money, money, money.
Those are the big hurdles.
There's some other issues, like trying to end birthrights citizenship, which will have to amend the Constitution. But the fact of the matter is the amount of money that is necessary to do this within the current legal framework is beyond the reach of the United States government right now. It's not I don't think it's going to be so much. How much money can they come up with for this effort. I think it's gonna be how much of the laws can they get changed?
And we'll see what happens.
Every five years, the government revises the US dietary guidelines and they're in the process of doing it again. And there's a huge controversy about what to say about drinking. You know, for a long time, the studies would come out, we'd talk about them, and they all said essentially the same thing.
Excessive drinking is bad.
By the way, that's the one thing about drinking for which there is no legitimate counter argument. Excessive drinking, heavy drinking is bad, period, full stop. There's no way to rehabild take that. But the studies would keep saying that, but drinking moderately is actually better than not drinking at all. The number of people who started drinking red wine, for example, because of the studies that said it's good for your
heart health. But then more recently, agencies like the World Health Organization and Great Britain and some other groups are saying no, our evidence shows that no amount of drinking is good, that even literally one drop of alcohol hurts you, and that alcohol in any amount is highly correlated with various cancers, and that there is no safe amount of alcohol. Well,
you have these two schools. Now, there's one school that believes that moderate drinking is actually beneficial and another group that says there's no such thing as beneficial drinking of.
Alcohol, period.
And they're at war over what's going to go into these guidelines. So, in an unprecedented move, the government has commissioned two different studies to help it decide what they're going to say about drinking and these guidelines.
That's not usually what happens.
Usually they just review the existing research and then they decide what to do. But there's such controversy now that they want two different groups of people to weigh in, and one of these groups. There was about one point three million dollars I believe. I don't have the number written from a face, but I think it was about one point three million dollars that Congress gave to the National Academies to put together a panel to look at
this issue and come up with the report. And so the National Academies got the money and they said, hey, there's these two people at Harvard. We should have them be on the panel. But the problem is those two people their research kept saying moderate alcohol consumption is good. So there was a big outcry and they said, all right, we won't use them, they're too controversial. So instead they put on two other people from Harvard who don't.
Say moderate drinking is awesome.
However, some of their research says there is a link between some moderate drinking and a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. I can't believe that word came out of my mouth that way, So not as bad as the first two, but not great. And of these four people, at least three of them, at some point in their research got funding from the alcohol industry, which is really what's on
underneath all of this. Do you think the alcohol industry wants the United States government to tell everybody that even.
One drink is harmful?
No, they do not, And so do they fund studies that they hope wink wink will be favorable in some way? Well, I'm sure that they do. Do they want a report to go to the people who will come up with the new guidelines that it says something nice about drinking alcohol?
Yes, they do.
Now there's going to be another study by a different group of people who don't seem to have any connections to the alcohol industry.
It's a government committee.
Remember this other thing is funded by the government, but it's made up of people who aren't part of the government. This second report is a government committee, and it's called the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking. How complicated has our government become? I could probably spend four straight hours on KFI reading you the names of government agencies and committees that you've never heard of before. I'm not going to do it. Don't worry. I'm just
saying that's how complicated and bloated government has become. So in any event, it's the first time that two separate reports have been commissioned, and you're probably going to get to competing conclusions in these reports, and then they'll decide what to do with the guidelines.
And then in a.
Way it won't matter because in five years they'll redo it again, and five years after that again. Look in twenty years, who knows what we might learn. The guidelines might be you should rub alcohol into your eyeballs ten times a day because we found out it increases is your IQ by twenty points. But that's not happening yet. This is KFI Am six forty Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show.
Catch My Show Monday through Friday six am to nine am, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.