BHS - 7A - Politicians are getting too old | Heavy Petting - podcast episode cover

BHS - 7A - Politicians are getting too old | Heavy Petting

Jul 05, 202431 min
--:--
--:--
Download Metacast podcast app
Listen to this episode in Metacast mobile app
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more

Episode description

Hey baby, I got a proposition for you. Mayor Bass is a Nimby. Why are politicians so old? Females are running what?

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

You're listenings KFI AM six forty the Bill Handles Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app. You are listening to the Bill Handle Show. Here's Wayne Resnick. All right, everybody, it's KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. And that guy just told you what's going on. Bill's back on Monday. I'm Wayne. Some of the stories we're watching for you here.

Hurricane burrows now a Category two storm and is sending winds, rainfall. Dangerous storm searches over Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. At this point, at least ten people have been identified as deceased because of this storm. There are a lot of people missing, and they're saying it's going to get stronger again before it hits somewhere. It could hit northeastern Mexico or South Texas over the weekend. Jobs

report is in for June. We added two one hundred and six thousand jobs, a little bit less than in May, but still pretty good, especially given that interest rates are still high. Now I'm about to proposition you, well, I'm about to tell you about all the propositions that are going to be on the ballot in November because it is time we start to wrap our heads around the things we're going to be asked to vote on, particularly because

of some trends that I'm seeing in these propositions. So here we go, in no particular order, although it's kind of in the order that they're numbered. You got Prop two. Now, why are we starting with Prop two and not Prop one? Because Prop one was that mental health proposition that was voted on in March. So Prop two borrow ten billion dollars to build some schools. You know, these bond initiatives are basically a government entity agreeing to

go into debt. And we have a massive budget deficit. You know, newsem made a bunch of cuts to stuff because of this unprecedented deficit that we're facing. And you will be asked to vote to borrow ten billion dollars to build some schools. Prop three reaffirm the right of same sex couples to get married. It wasn't that long ago in the history of California. I think it was two thousand and eight there was a proposition that was passed that said

marriage is between a man and a woman. So you can you can see how societies change over time, and it wouldn't be surprising to hear that one hundred years ago they said marriage is a man and a woman, but now we don't. But this was just in two thousand and eight that a majority of voters said, yes, marriage should be a man and woman. So the problem is have to amend the state constitution to fix that. So that's what Prop three would do, and then Prop four and we're right back to

borrowing ten billion dollars again. And this is for climate programs, wildfire, forest programs, one point two billion dollars for sea level rise. There's drinking water and groundwater money. Some of this I'm having trouble linking directly to the issue of climate. But let's borrow ten billion to build schools. Let's borrow ten billion dollars to save the planet. And let's also do this with Prop

five. Right now, if your local government wants to borrow money for say housing or infrastructure bonds, they have to get a super majority of the voters to approve it. So Prop five would amend the constitution of the state to make it easier for the local governments to borrow the money. Wow. So it's still also it's about, Hey, the state is saying the state legislature is saying, we want to borrow a lot of money for stuff, and then they're saying, we also we want to make it easier for your county

or your city to borrow money as well. Prop thirty two will raise the state minimum wage to eighteen dollars an hour. And this thing was proposed like three years ago. And when it was proposed, I don't know if you remember, it was a big deal. Okay. The people who supported it were like, this is the greatest thing that's ever happened. And the people who didn't like it said they're going to destroy the state. An eighteen dollars an hour minimum wage is insane. Well, here we are three years later,

and there have been some changes already. The minimum wage is already sixteen dollars an hour. You've got the fast food minimum wage, twenty dollars an hour. Healthcare our workers are on an already passed minimum wage plan that will get them up to twenty five dollars an hour, So eighteen dollars an hour minimum wage doesn't seem quite as crazy in terms of the numbers. You will be asked to vote whether you want that or not. Also would you like

rent control in your city or unincorporated area. Well, there's a state law that, for the most part, says your city or county cannot put in rent control. And Prop thirty three is asking you to say, yeah, I want them to be able to put in rent control. Great if you're a renter, terrible if you're a landlord. Here's an interesting one, because this one's personal. Prop thirty four. If I just tell you what it

requires, it doesn't seem personal healthcare provider. Certain health providers who get money from a federal prescription drug program must spend almost all the money on patient care directly on patient care. You know you're gonna have to spend a little bit on administrative costs, but if you're getting money from this program, most of it should go to actually provide the thing that the money's for, which seems like that's what should be happening with any government program. But in this case

it seems to be aimed at one place, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. If you follow the news, you know that the AIDS Healthcare Foundation does good work. They also get involved a lot in housing development and stopping developments from happening, and this sort of thing advocacy in the area of housing, and they will fund ballot measures and have funded ballot measures. I think they gave money

to that rent control proposition that I just told you about. So the idea here is saying, hey, you're not going to be able to use money that you were given by the FEDS for treating patients. We're not going to be able to use it for your political goals. And those are the main ones that you should know about. What's the difference between an initiative and a referendum. A referendum is when we vote to change a law or get rid of a law that already exists, And of course, an initiative is when

it's a new idea. All right, Hey, everybody is now a super informed voter, so I don't want to hear any bs about low information voters. I just solved that problem. Speaking of housing, after we get some news from Heather Brooker, who would have thought that Mayor Karen Bass, who was elected largely on a promise to build lots of affordable housing in LA and make it easy to do so, would end up being a big nimby.

You're listening to Bill Handle on Demand from KFI AM six forty, Danny Trayjo, actor, entrepreneur, public figure, was apparently involved in a fight at an Independence Day parade up in the Sunlintahunga neighborhood. He was in the parade, riding in a very cool convertible, this old convertible car, and somebody threw a water balloon at him. Now Danny Treyjo is eighty years old. He got out of the car, he went over and he threw a punch

at the balloon thrower. The balloon thrower punched back and knocked down National Treasure Danny Treyjo. Then other people got involved, and I guess they're saying that some woman ran over and tried to hold down Danny Trayjoe. But by the time the cops got there, everybody had dispersed, nobody was arrested, and there's no indication here that he was seriously hurt. So thank goodness for that.

Waenne. Can I tell you something really quick. I met Danny Trejo here at iHeart a couple of months ago in the in the elevator could not have been nicer. We rode up together at least five floors, and he was lovely and so kind and so I'm sorry to hear that, but I'm glad he's okay. Yeah. Now, look, it's sort of like, I mean, the balloon thrower started it, there's no question, but I don't I don't know if the smartest thing is to get out of the car and go escalate it. Yeah, I mean, even at eighty, I

had no idea he was eighty. I mean, he's really in good health. I would not want to mess with Danny Treyo. Oh no, I would never want to mess with Danny Treyo. All right, So anyway, let's hope that he's a totally fine and able to go oversee his empire of taco restaurants, donut shops, coffee shops, sex toys. You weren't here at KFI when he came in. He was promoting Man. I don't want to google it right now. It was some sort of a marital aid.

If my memory serves me, maybe I'll look it up during the break. Also, in terms of the way that Danny Treyhoe has been able to monetize his uh celebrity, as long as we're going on this detour, yeah, I know there is a there's a video game, a mobile game, it's called this is all in everything I'm about to tell you is so embarrassing. It's called Guns of Boom and it's one of these you know, cartoonish you

run around, you shoot people and there's different guns or whatever. And some years ago they had a special event in this game called trey Ho Tournament, and so he obviously they paid him money to be able to call it trey Ho Tournament. And then instead of the regular announcer voice in the game like kill, double kill, whatever, it was Danny Treyhoe's voice. That's amazing. It was really really crazy. So he he he is a great, you know, performer, and he's a pretty savvy businessman. Yeah, legend

legendary. All right. Now, let's get to the main topic at hand, and that is changes that La Mayor Karen Bass has made to the very famous, very controversial Executive Directive one ED one. You may remember this was a huge part of her campaign. In the first weekend office she signed Executive Directive one and this was basically the basic idea was, we're gonna make it

much easier for developers to build one hundred percent affordable housing developments. If you want to build an apartment building and it's all affordable housing, then you can get your approval within a few weeks. Previously, and I think still for

most developments months, sometimes years, it takes to get approval. And so housing advocates were like, this is fantastic, no more screwing around, and Karen Vass's office said over eighteen thousand units of income restricted housing have been proposed so far because of this executive order. However, as you might imagine, there was immediately yelling and screaming from homeowners from neighborhood groups who said, listen,

you can't. We don't want you to build lower income apartment buildings and the like everywhere, like we definitely don't want you building one next door to me, and so they of course started fighting back with all that got to slow down or even completely kill these projects now. So if you're Mayor Karen Bass, what do you do? Do you say, listen, I believe in a certain thing, and what I believe in is we must build affordable housing everywhere. Too bad, so sad for you? Or do you compromise?

And apparently there has been a compromise, and the mayor's office say that she has made changes to this Executive Order, and the main change is this, if you live now in a historic district, you will be protected from having these fast tracked affordable housing developments built in your neighborhood. Like for example, I'm trying to think of one off the top of my head. Windsor Village is one. Windsor Village is in mid LA. It's like Wilshire.

I think it's will Sure at the north and crenshot of the right goes down to Olympic and it's a designated historic zone. And the people who live there, as you might imagine, don't want to see some new low income apartment building going up, and so now they won't have to worry about it. Now this program already restricts building the low income housing developments in single families owned neighborhoods, which is over seventy four percent of the land here in LA.

They've taken away some more of the areas where you will be able to build these things. And I'm not I don't honestly, I don't have an opinion about whether it's right or wrong. What cannot be denied is the availability of locations to build affordable housing is shrinking. It's being taken away, and there's some of these people. The housing advocates are saying, you know, you have historic district, but within those historic districts, not all of it is

historic in any way. You've got like vacant lots that happen to be in a historic district. Why shouldn't you be able to throw up an apartment building there? And then the other thing is apparently she's clamping down on the number of concessions that developers will get because, let me tell you something, nobody

builds affordable housing out of the goodness of their heart. I mean, habitat for humanity, but you get what I'm Developers build to make money, period, and they don't mind including some affordable housing if they can do other things that'll make them some money. So a lot of times they'll a developer will present a proposal and will say, oh, yes, we will build affordable housing. However, you know in that area the height of the building would

normally be restricted to this Hi, we want to go higher. Can you please give us an exception? Also, normally there'd be this much open space that would be required in the development. Will you please allow us not to have it? Will you please allow us to have zero clearance from the property lines. Also, normally there'd have to be eighty parking spaces on this development,

would it be okay if we only had thirty? And so what ends up happening is you get a few units of affordable housing and then you get traffic problems and parking problems and crowding and blight. And apparently they're not going to be able to get as many concessions, but they also won't be able to build in as many places. So let's check in in another year or two or probably ten is a smart timeline for this kind of thing, and

see how much affordable housing we have here in LA and ten years. Okay, let's get some news from Heather Brooker and then why are they so old? How can this be? Who am I talking about? Oh you'll find out. You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty. Over in Britain, the Labor Party has won the number of seats necessary to make them in charge of their parliamentary government and they will therefore have a new

Prime Minister in a few hours. This after the current leader, Rishi Sunak called a snap election and his Conservative party lost Bigley over there, and we got some good news on the job front, another two hundred and six thousand jobs added in June. It was a little bit less than in May. May was two hundred and eighteen thousand, But almost all economists are saying this is a sign of the economy being strong, even given the problems that we

have, like the interest rates still being so high. For example. Okay, politicians, they're old. This is not news. This has been a main topic of discussion on KFI, in the news media, in interviews at the water cooler at the July fourth weekend cookouts. Old old, old old. Everybody's old. Biden is so old. Trump is pretty old too. Also, the median age in the Senate is almost sixty six. Now. It's not that sixty six is deathbed old, particularly not now in twenty twenty

four, with what we know about medicine and prolonging life and everything. But it's old compared to the country as a whole. In fact, there are a lot of people who call the United States of America a gerontocracy where the power is concentrated among the old people, and it's a concern. It's a concern for a lot of people I think it depends on what you know the specific old person that we're talking about. But you have situations like I remember

Diane Feinstein who would not resign from her Senate seat. She was coming up on ninety there were tons of concerns about her health. Mitch McConnell, I think he's eighty two. There was the few incidences where it looked like he was freezing up at some public appearances and people said, what is going on with him? And eventually he did say, Okay, I'll step down from my role as Minority leader. Then, of course Biden's performance at the debate

Trump. There's fifty million videos of Donald Trump seeming to lose his train of thought at campaign events. So we know that at least at the national level that are representatives skew older than the population at large. But why how did this happen? Well, it is true that the population of the country has gotten older. The median age now in this country is thirty nine. In

nineteen eighty it was thirty. Boomers are staying in the workforce, they're not retiring at the same rate that they used to, and this includes people in politics. So that explains a little bit why the politicians are getting older. But if you look at the fact that the median age is thirty nine and the media agent in the Senate is almost sixty six, and about twenty five percent of congress are over seventy, that doesn't match up. Another part of

the problem is the bar to access running for office. It heavily, heavily, heavily, heavily, heavily favors heavily, heavily. They're not I could say heavily for the next twenty minutes, and it would not be enough to emphasize how heavily it favors incumbents. There should probably be some advantage to being the incumbent when you're running for reelection. Name recognition would be one of them. Another would be if you've done a good job, you would have a

specific record that you could point to in your campaigning. But in this case it is skewed so insanely. For example, let's go back to twenty eighteen. That midterm, they're four hundred and thirty five congressional districts and there were only forty four of them that were considered a toss up. And a toss up they if it's if it's decided within five points. It's a toss up

forty four out of four to thirty five. Then let's go back a couple of years to the twenty twenty two, thirty six elections for the House were considered competitive out of four hundred and thirty five. Competition declines. There are so many races now where there's no opponent, particularly at the primary stage. There's no opponent. It's not that there's somebody running against the incumbent, but they don't have as much money, and they don't have as much name recognition.

Maybe they don't have as much access to the media. There isn't even one there. So as the competition goes down, the average age goes up, because you stay. Once you're in, you stay and stay and stay and stay. I mean Joe Biden was in the Senate for thirty six years and then became Vice president. Guys in government a long long time. Another reason, and this has to do with why the incumbent almost invariably wins, is because of how polarized we are. We're very polarized now politically, and

what that means in practical terms is very few split tickets anymore. It used to be people would split their tickets all the time. Meaning let's say they're a registered Democrat and they go and vote in a national election, presidential, general election, maybe they'd vote for the Democrat for president, but they'd vote for a Republican guy for state Senate or for House. That doesn't happen as much anymore. People just go i'm this, I'm an R, I go

R R. That's it. And so that means most congressional elections are decided by the primaries, and as I already said, in a lot of primaries, there's not even an opponent to the incumbent. So we've allowed the politicians to gin up the system through jerrymandering and also honestly by the fact that we put up with their insane level of rhetoric all the time, and we've allowed them to make it harder and harder and harder for new blood to come in.

It's not that new blood never comes in, but it's very, very difficult. So there's a big move now that there should be age limits, age limits to holding office. In fact, in North Dakota they passed a ballot measure to amend the state constitution that would say you cannot run for Congress in North Dakota. If you will be eighty one by the end of your

term, it's not much of an age limit. But that's something I don't know that age limits are the answer, because if you have an age limit, you might have a dynamite candidate who happens to be over the age limit. You wouldn't be allowed to elect them to represent you. It's giving us more choice, though it's making it less expensive to run for office, and honest to God, that alone would do a lot to help this issue.

You're listening to Bill Handle on Demand from KFI AM six forty. We're used to the idea that men control everything because of the patriarchy, but in the animal kingdom, there are many animals where it is the women who control everything, and let's talk about some of them. Also parental advisory for this segment, because there's some information about the bodies of some of these animals that you might not want to explain to your child. Let's start with the African savannah

elephant, which is the largest elephant. It's also the biggest land animal on the planet. Women call the shots. They roll around in these groups. Family units usually like ten adults and all the children, and then those units will get together and form big clans, several hundred elephants all working together with a single elephant lady as the boss. Where are we going? Where will we sleep? When will we sleep? I'm going to take everybody to the

food and the water. And by the way, being able to know where to go to get enough food and water for hundreds of elephants has got to be a high level skill, because apparently one of these elephants needs three hundred pounds of vegetation and fifty gallons of water every day as they're so big. Spotted hyenas, here's where I will repeat a parental advisory. The spotted hyena.

They're very smart, they're very social, and females lead the clans that they hang out in, and you can get up to like ninety one hundred hyenas all in a group led by the females. The females are not much bigger than the male, although they're a little bit bigger, but they're way more aggressive. See, we think of men as being the aggressive sex, and it's true in a lot of cases, but in some cases it's flipped and the females are very aggressive and the men are very docile, and that's

the case with the spot at hyaena. There's also another thing, one more parental advisory. You've been warned. Female spotted hyenas don't have the kind of genitals that we would think of of a female. They have something that called scientifically a pseudo penis. Now it's actually it's actually the cleatorus, but it's so long and big that it looks like a penis. And also they don't have a vaginal opening, so if you're just looking at a hyena, you

can't tell if it's if it's a man or a lady hyena. By looking there, you can't tell. This also gives the female total control over who they mate with. They choose, and they choose because there's no other way to do it. What will happen is when they decide I will reproduce with this guy, this pseudo penis retracts and it forms an opening, and then

and only then can you know what happen. Thenobos one of our closest living relatives, I think banobos and chimpanzees and bonobos live in these big social groups. There's dudes there, there's women there. But the banobo communities led by the ladies. And there's a very interesting thing, another parental advisory. I didn't intend for this to be this way. It just is so the female's lead. That also means the females resolve conflicts because you know, the bonobo's

fight any anybody food fight, I want to sleep here? No, I want to sleep here. They go at it. And what happens in these banobo's communities led by the females is when there's a conflict, uh, the female leader or one of the female leaders will will engage in sexual contact with the bonobos that were involved in the conflict. That's that's how the leader comes in and says, hey, hey, everybody, everybody calm down here, it does us no good to fight. They specifically they hug and they just

let's just say, they touch the private parts together. They don't actually have like sexual intercourse or anything, but they do a little bit and apparently it regulates stress in the binobos and it makes it does make them calm down. So there you go. Ladies can lead. All right, that was heavy

petting. We're gonna get some news from Heather Brooker and then a lawsuit has been filed here in California, about a new tax on guns and bullets, and I'll tell you what they're the people behind the lawsuit are saying, and it's all part of guns in the news. When we continue. You've been listening to The Bill Handle Show. Catch My Show Monday through Friday, six am to nine am, and any time on demand on the iHeartRadio app.

Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file
For the best experience, listen in Metacast app for iOS or Android