You're listening to Bill Handle on Demand from KFI AM six forty.
We have a lot of things to talk about today, but obviously the first order of business here is to give updates on the situation involving Hurricane Milton, which has left land. It hit the west coast of Florida last night. It made its way across the middle of the state pretty horizontally, and the center of the storm has left land is now over the Atlantic Ocean.
The entire time.
That Hurricane Milton was over land, it was still a hurricane. It retained hurricane strength the entire path across Florida. Right now, they're reporting it's traveling east northeast up like north of the Bahamas. If it keeps going this way, I think this may be the end of the destruction from the hurricane. Still has wind speeds sustained maximum wind speeds of eighty five miles an hour.
It's still a Category.
One hurricane and a lot of devastation and unfortunately deaths confirmed at this time. At least four people were killed on the east coast of Florida when tornadoes whipped up. There were quite a few tornadoes thrown up by Hurricane Milton. And four people confirmed dead. There is no doubt that the death toll is going to go up. And there was a police chief of one of the towns there.
I think it's Bradenton who.
Said she said, right now, we don't have a death toll. But what we have not been able to do is to go looking in the areas where people did not evacuate. And as soon as we start looking in the areas where people did not evacuate, we know we're going to have a death toll because anybody who stayed behind was in mortal danger. And the tornadoes are just one of the reasons and the most obvious reason right now that people are dead. Hurricanes can spawn and often do spawn tornadoes.
And I didn't really understand this about hurricanes until Milton came along, and then you know, somebody decides to explain what's going on. So what I've learned is, so you have a hurricane and there's you know, storms and raining, but around the outer perimeter of the hurricane there are separate, additional storms going on. It's like a gang of storms all following the leader and moving across. And when the
hurricane's over water, you won't get tornadoes. But once a hurricane hits land, because now it's on ground, there starts to be friction, and I guess it's the friction that really whips up the formation of the tornadoes and the tornadoes actually touching down and causing the devastation.
There are well over three million people without power.
There are some areas where eighty percent of the people lost power. Now I know that that was being presented as a way of explaining the level of devastation and the power of the storm, but I also feel like I'm sort of surprised that if you were in an area that was hit dead on by this hurricane and twenty percent of you didn't lose power, that's actually surprising to me. I mean, it's, you know, hold comfort if your house was damaged and trees are down and people
are injured. But I just was surprised. I thought there would be some areas where all the power went out. Airports are closed in areas affected by the storms. You know, Orlando International, Tampa International, Saint Pete, Clearwater, Sarasota, they're all closed. There's still a lot of rain and storming going on on the east coast of Florida. Because even though Milton has made its exit. You know, it has a tail behind it, and that's still causing a lot of trouble.
In the meantime, the President Biden is getting briefed by both the head of FEMA, Dean chris Well, and also a Homeland Security advisor, Elizabeth Sherwood Randall. They are the point people for advising the President about what's going on, and emergency workers are all over the place. Number one right now is saving people. Fixing stuff will come, but it's not the number one priority right now. So that
is the situation. I would imagine. Now the news will shift to assessments of the damage and stories of the efforts to recover from it, because thankfully Hurricane Milton is going away rather than on its way. So what we're going to do is get some news from Amy King. Amy, you'll probably have some more stuff on the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, and then we're going to talk about one of, if not the most radical shifts in public opinion in the history of the United States of America. That is
happening right now. It's KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app Wayne Residik here sitting in until nine o'clock and coming up at a Joe Lars Guard will join us as he always does, with some.
Information about to be how to be smarter about money.
And there's a new card coming out that you may want to get, but I believe he's going to tell you that it's garbage and some of the stories we're watching for you. Right now, over three million homes and businesses in Florida have no power this morning after Hurricane Milton made landfall hit land as a Category three hurricane. We know that when hurricanes hit land they start to weaken it, but it only got down to a Category one hurricane when it left the east coast of Florida.
It was still a full on hurricane and it's still producing damaging winds and heavy rainfall, according to the National Hurricane Center. Let's talk about something called thermostatic public opinion. Get ready to find out what it is and why it is behind probably the most fast dramatic shift in US public opinion in the history of this country, and it has to do with the issue of immigration. Let's
walk through it. When Donald Trump was running for president about eight years ago, you may remember he talked about illegal immigration.
He said, and and immigration in general.
And do you remember when he said when this is a quote, when Mexico sends its people, they're not sending the best. And he talked about building a big, beautiful wall. Now, at the time, some people were shocked. This seems very mean and extreme if you but now right now today, when I tell you he said those things, I don't it doesn't really seem particularly extreme. It seems kind of mild compared to how he's talking today. Immigrants are poisoning
the blood of the country. He talks about immigrants, as you know, they're all out of an insane asylum, murdering everybody that they see. He's talking about the largest deportation in the history of the country. So the rhetoric there is shifted, and it's shifted for the Democrats too, because last time Joe Biden was running and his thing was I'm gonna undo all of the Trump meanness. He actually said, We're gonna end Trump's assault on the dignity of immigrant
communities and restore our moral standing in the world. And he was all this, you know, very flowerly, flowery, touchy feely language. So he was talking like that, Okay, here we are now now he's not the candidate anymore. Kamala Harris is the candidate. She's still the Democratic candidate though, And if you look at the messaging on immigration from the Democrats, it has gone from we are gonna wipe out, you know, everything Trump did, and we're going to to
make everybody have dignity in these kinds of feelings. And now Kamala Harris will say, oh, you know, I used to prosecute transnational criminal gangs. Also, I will pass legislation to make the border stronger. There's nothing wrong with any of that, but it's very different rhetoric than we were getting just four years ago. And this didn't just happen for no reason. The politicians are responding to this unbelievable
shift in public opinion on the subject of immigration. Gallup does a poll they've been doing it since the mid sixties where they ask people about immigration, and one of the questions they ask is, and they're not talking about legal or illegal, just immigration, should we have more or should we have less? Four years ago, about a quarter of the country said we should have less immigration.
Here we are it's only been four years.
Fifty five percent now are saying we should have less immigration. That's shocking for how quickly the sentiment has changed, and the fact that, obviously you could imagine Republicans' attitudes are changing a lot. More Republicans say we should have less immigration, but so are independents, and so are Democrats. And public opinion always changes over time and vacillates and goes back and forth. But this is almost unheard of for something
to change this big this fast. There's two big reasons for it, and one of them is that thing I mentioned, thermostatic public opinion. This refers to the phenomenon that public opinion tends to go opposite of whatever the sitting president's rhetoric and policies are. The more polarizing the president, the more public opinion moves away from what that president is about. So Donald Trump, not that he wanted to, or planned to or intended to, he turned up the thermostack big time.
He was talking so vehemently.
Against immigration that this natural process that occurs was turbocharged and public opinion went way way pro immigrant. That's why by twenty twenty only about a quarter of the country said we should have less immigration. Then you get Biden in office, and we already told you what he was talking about.
He's the polar opposite.
So the same process throws everybody in the other direction. He's viewed as very accommodating of immigration. He loves immigration, and so guess what happens now opinion starts moving away from liking immigration. And there's another factor. That's one of the factors behind this. And the other factor is a very real situation. This is this is not a partisan thing.
This is a bipartisan reaction to actual problems. And even if you want to say chaos at the border, I mean, there really has been a tough situation down there, a historic surge of people at the border, and so as you might imagine, that's a real world, real thing that's not political. It's a thing that's happening that you can watch on the news, and so that you might imagine makes people think twice about immigration.
And they call that that thing.
You know, I mentioned earlier to Neil in Handle on the news, I was going to be talking about chaos theory, and this is when I'm talking about it. When you have chaos at the border, when you have whatever you want to call it, chaos at the border, an unprecedented surge of migrants at the border. You can call it a locus of control theory, which sounds nice and academic, or it's chaos theory. And we know that this is legitimate because there's all kinds of survey data and research
in the field of political science, and it's this. When people perceive that the process of immigration is under control and it's orderly and it's fair, they are far more into having immigration. But when they perceive that it's out of control and it's crazy and it's unfair. So having an uncommonly large surge of people at the border would be an example of that, people say, ah, I don't like it.
In other words, there's.
The issue of immigration, and then there's the issue of what's happening with immigration.
Right now, and that's the chaos theory.
If you view right now as being crazy and out of control, you're not going to be as into immigration.
And that's what's happening.
And public opinion changes all the time, and it does go back and forth, but really, pollsters and researchers have not seen opinion shift this much this fast. Ever, let's get some news from Amy King and then did you know that LA run the LA area runs the biggest jail system in this country, possibly in the world, and they're still considering building more jails.
And this has been.
The question in La Fraught from before it was officially a city building more jails.
We've been doing this forever.
And I'll tell you what's going on right now and why and why it's important that someday, somehow they figure this out. This is the Bill Handle Show, and he is on a vacation. I'm Wayne Resnick, sitting in until nine. Coming up at eight o'clock we will have Joel Larscard, the host of How to Money here on KFI, with some great information this week about how to be smarter about the money that you have and also maybe get some more of that money. But right now we're following
some stories for you. Obviously, Hurricane Milton is still the top story in this country.
Amazing in a bad way.
Devastation from this storm that hit the west coast of Florida as a Category three hurricane, moved across the state, causing devastation, knocking out power to over three million homes in businesses, killing at least four people.
And there probably will be more. It has left land.
It is going north northeast across the Atlantic Ocean now, and the work of determining the extent of the damage and starting the slow process of recovery can begin. In the meantime, the Social Security Administration has announced that millions of people will get a two and a half percent cost of living increase to their monthly checks starting next year. It will average around fifty dollars a month for the people who get Social Security benefits. Let's talk about jails.
LA has a long history of building jails. La County has a long history of building jails and then wondering what to do with these jails as they fall apart, and wondering when and how to build more jails. It's a big part apparently, of running the Southland is having jails. I'm not going to go through the whole history of jails in La except to quickly say it goes back to way before La was La. They were taking over buildings and using them as jails, and continued and continued
and continued. But I will kind of pick it up mid sixty they really said we got to have.
We need like a real modern jail.
And so in the sixties, of course, the Men's Central jail was built, and it was intended to hold I think thirty three one hundred people, and back at the time, okay, this is like the mid sixties, and the La Times said, this looks like some science fiction future stuff, this building. But it started falling apart, and you know what, it
did not last that long in excellent condition. I don't know if that's because they built it crappily, because it was only maybe ten years later that people were already complaining about how it was falling apart.
And came a series of federal.
Lawsuits about the condition at the Men's Central Jail, and there was a class action lawsuit and the inmates won, and a judge, a federal judge that said, the jail is on it's so bad, it's unconstant, and you're gonna have to do some things. You're gonna have to give everybody their own bunk. You can't have people sleeping on the floor. You have to let the prisoners outside for an hour a day instead of two and a half
hours a week. Other stuff, bad, bad, bad, And the county didn't do all of those things, at least not consistently. In fact, in some cases the situation got worse. So they built another jail, the Twin Towers, which is downtown, also sort of modern looking, three hundred and seventy three million dollars, and then it sat there empty because they spent three hundred and seventy three million dollars to build the Twin Towers jail, and then they had no money
for operating it. At one time there were over twenty three thousand people living in jails in La County. So now fast forward to today. That case is still going on.
You know the case I told you about.
Where the judge said it's all on constitutionally, you got to get your act together. That case it's still going on. Judge Gray is no longer around, so it's a different judge who is overseeing the matter. And his name is Dean Pragerson. And I only say that because I did work very closely with him when I was with the Feds. And some judges are real jerks. They are, I'm sorry, Some federal judges are jerks. Some federal judges are dumbasses.
He was neither of those. He's a good guy and a good judge, and he's got this case now that's been going on for literally decades where there's still big problems with the men's central jail and now the county. Do you remember when they were gonna build they were gonna replace the central jail. They were gonna spend almost two billion dollars.
Do you remember that.
It was like, I don't know, five years ago they were talking about this, and I don't know they said. At some point they decided we're not gonna do it.
Now. Here's why this is important.
You must have enough proper humane jail space. You have to have it or you are failing the community. You don't necessarily have to fill it up. This is not a discussion about should we send more people or fewer people to jail.
That's a separate thing. What I'm saying is.
When you send someone to jail, it better be constitutional. And here's why, because if it's not, then you get what has already happened in California because of the same problem with the state prisons. You get federal lawsuits, you get judges declaring unconstitutionality, you get judges appointing receivers to oversee the prison system, and then you get, in the case of the state, you get an order to reduce the population, which is what happened to the State of California.
And the State of California appealed this all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, saying, you can't order us to reduce our prison population, and the Supreme Court of the United States said, yes they can. And that's why you got realignment where people were sent to county jails instead of state prisons and therefore got out a lot earlier. That is why you got prof.
Forty seven. That's why you got those things. You didn't really get those things just because of progressive prosit secutors and the like. You got those things because there was no choice but to reduce the population in the jails and prisons. Now, maybe we are sending too many people to jail in prison, but what I'm saying is you must have adequate jail space in any kind of community, or else you get the kind of chaos that we've seen.
And no lessons have been learned at the state level or at the LA county level, No lessons have been learned at all. It's the Bill Handles show Bill on vacation, Wayne Wesnick sitting in until nine o'clock. Top stories We're watching for you at KFI. More than three million homes and businesses without power after Hurricane Milton made landfall hit the West coast as a Category three hurricane moved across the state, destroying a lot of stuff and causing tornadoes
to touch down. Four people confirm dead from those tornadoes. Milton has now moved off the East coast, is over the Atlantic. It's now a Category one hurricane and off it goes. And they are already looking at a couple of other One is a potential storm that they're describing now as a disturbance that could develop into a storm. And there is also a hurricane. There's some hurricane going around in the Atlantic, but right now nobody thinks it's
gonna come anywhere near anything. So we're not done with hurricane season unfortunately. Also, Honda has recalled like one point six one point seven million cars because of some problem with the steering that could make it hard to steer the car, which I think we can all agree. If it's too hard to steer the car harder than it's supposed to be, that could be dangerous. So this was a excuse me, a recall that was ordered by the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It's something in the gearbox assembly, maybe even made wrong, and you will get noticed if you have one of these cars, but their model year twenty twenty two to twenty twenty five and involve some Acura Integras, Honda Civics, Honda crvs, and Honda hr vs. So I don't know if you love the death penalty or you hate the death penalty. I don't know where you stand on it, but I'm hoping maybe by the end of this segment will agree on at least one thing.
About the death penalty.
This has to do with a case that's in front of the Supreme Court and they had oral argument yesterday and the defendant is a death row inmate named Richard Glossip who was convicted of murder.
But there are some problems with the case.
Now. In any death penalty case, as you know, defense attorneys will come up with all kinds of things to stop the execution, which they did in this case to you know, challenging the method of execution itself as being unconstitutional, which Richard Gossip was part of that litigation, and the Supreme Court heard his case with regard to that and said, no, you really can't challenge the method of execution as being cruel and unusual punishment. Sorry, so that was one thing
that was tried and then he went back down. But now they're up in front of the screen court on a completely different issue, and it really is different.
Here's what everybody agrees happened. There is a.
Guy who worked at a motel named Von Trees, and everybody agrees that a guy named Justin Snead beat mister Von Trees to death with a baseball bat. Justin Snead said, yeah, I did that, But here's what happened. He made a deal to avoid the death penalty. The guy who actually beat another man to death made a deal to avoid the death penalty by pointing the finger at Richard Glossip as being the man who arranged it and asked him
to do it. And so Richard Gossip was convicted and was given the death penalty for arranging and causing and procuring the murder of mister Ventrees. Now here's the problem. Mister Justin Snead, who has admitted that he beat a man to death with a baseball bat, also has some pretty serious mental health issues bipolar disorder. He had been
prescribed lithium, and this was not disclosed at the trial. Now, I am not saying that the fact that somebody has bipolar disorder somehow automatically means anything, but it is something that you need to tell the other side if you have your star witness who is basically your only evidence, and they didn't they didn't disclose it. Now here's an
even bigger problem. Bigger problem is sneed lied on the stand. Now, if you knew that he was lying, would that affect your determination of how much you should believe him about other things?
Probably?
So this is what's up in front of the Supreme Court. Mister Glossip wants his case vacated. I don't know if that's necessary. It's not the only option. They could simply send the case back down to the lower court to decide what to do in light of the lying on the stand and the undisclosed mental health diagnosis. I mean, even just as Kavanaugh said that this star witness who is the reason Gossip is convicted and on death row,
was exposed as a liar. Now here's the really interesting twist, Because it's not going to surprise you that Richard Glossop's attorneys are fighting this case and want it thrown out. That's not surprising, it's not almost not even worth mentioning. But the Attorney General of Oklahoma, who is a Republican Kentner Drummond, he is on the side of mister Glossip that at a minimum, he doesn't want the case completely vacated and gone forever. He agrees the execution should be
put on hold and the case should be revisited. The Attorney General of Oklahoma, who I promise you, is no George Gascone at all. He's on the same side as the defense attorneys. You may ask yourself Welvin who's trying to kill him? The Supreme Court had to appoint an attorney to argue against his defense attorneys and the Attorney General of Oklahoma in order so that the case could
be heard. So what I'm saying to you is this is the part I would hope everybody can agree on that when you have something like this, when you have a case that's based on the testimony of a witness who himself was the murderer, and when it comes out that he lied under oath on the stand, that at least you should not kill the guy.
Yet maybe you kill him later but not now.
And it'll be interesting to see what the Supreme Court says about it. My guess is Clarence Thomas will say, hey, there's no problem here, kill him.
But I think your your Kavanaughs, your Amy.
Cony Barrett's might think it's worth another look at least, because it's really true about the death penalty. You know, if you put somebody in prison for life, you can always let him out. Now they've lost all those years, but you can let them out if you execute somebody, there's no do over.
Mulligan. That's it. We'll get some news.
From Amy King, and then Joel lars Guard will join us from the How To Money Show. Here on KFI, there's a new debit card that they want you to get.
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