You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty.
On KFI AM six forty Handle Morning Crew on a Thursday, February sixth as we are actually enjoying a gentle rain coming down, which is exactly what we needed. And I hate the rain, but I hate this rain less that I hate other rain.
Rain's great. I like don't like getting wets. Why I don't shower?
This is why everybody just leaves me and I walk down the hall and no one gets near me.
Actually, you're not a smelly guy. Okay, fine, no you're not.
It's weird, I know because you you read like you'd be smelly. Excellent John Decker, who is joining this conversation, John, how often do you shower?
By the way, what was the question?
How often do I what exactly?
I'll always we're gonna get right into being in the oval office before we start that.
How often do you shower?
Oh? I shower at least once a day. You know, if I'm working out in the afternoon that I shower again. But typically I work out in the morning, So just one shower o day.
All right, Now, we don't know a little bit about John Decker, who is kfi's White House corresponding. John, you have been covering presidents for a long time, and you are in the Oval Office usually when the president is signing his executive orders, and he does it well, there's never been a president that had reporters in the Oval Office as much since FDR. Actually where he would sit there and you know, talk to reporters. I'm not interested
in policy. What I'm interested in is what's the flavor of the room.
You know, what's it like?
And I know you can't tell me what you think, but what's the buzz like in the in the press corps out there that you hear about the room and Donald Trump? And it's a small room, I understand as he goes on and everybody's screaming for questions.
Describe that, would you?
Well, I wouldn't say we were screaming for questions yesterday. It was a small group of reporters that were in the White House Oval Office yesterday. And the reason being is because Pam Bondi, she's the new Attorney General. She was sworn in yesterday in the Oval Office by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. President Trump obviously on hand for this.
He made some remarks. The new Attorney General, Pam Bondi, made some remarks, and then the President took two questions from the small group of reporters while in the Oval Office. I was one of those questions that he answered. And to get to your initial question, I think you could say it's there's a buzz. There's a buzz related to being in the Oval Office, but particularly for President Trump.
There were probably about two dozen at least people in that room yesterday, friends and family of Pam Bondi that wanted to be on hand for her swearing in. And this was the only event of a swearing in ceremony that has taken place so far in Trump's second term in the Oval Office. So I was fortunate enough to be there yesterday.
Now let me ask you, the reporters who are give credited to be in the Oval Office have done in a lot of time you've seen President. Is there an excitement level that doesn't exist or hasn't existed with other presidents there.
I'm sort of getting that feeling.
No. Well, for me, I can only speak for myself. You know, I'm always excited to be in the Oval Office. My gosh, all the presidents that have occupied that office. So whether it's a Democrat or a Republican who's in the Oval Office at the time, I'm always excited when I learned I'm going to go in there for bill signing, signing of an executive voter yesterday, I swearing in, or the president's meeting with his counterpart from another country. All of that is exciting and you get ready for it,
you know. As it relates to President Trump, I had about a dozen questions prepared for him, but he was not in a talkative mood yesterday, and really the only reason why he took my question was because it was on point. You know. It was focused on why we were in the Oval Office yesterday with Pam Bondi becoming the new attorney general.
Does he give a preference to conservative reporters or is he pretty even?
Stephen about that?
He's pretty I think he's pretty even, Stephen, you know. I mean, look, if he recognizes you and I covered him in the first term, he's going to take my questions. He certainly did so dozens upon dozens of times during his first term in office, and he recognizes me first on my interview. Donald Trump was way back in nineteen ninety nine. So I've got a long term relationship with him that goes back even before he was a politician, which is longer than most people that cover the president
right now. So I think it helps you know if you have that type of relationship with the president in terms of being called on, but he doesn't discriminate. You know, he'll call on anybody essentially as he's in other venues, like, for instance, if he's walking on the South lawn to board Marine one, he'll take some questions from reporters and he's not really focused upon whether or not the reporters from a conservative outlet or not.
Now everybody knows that he does not like the press very much.
It has described them as straight out enemies, and during campaigns being covered, he would look at them, point to them and go, that's the enemy over there, I mean, and was pretty adamant about it.
Has that changed.
Do you get any negative because you're a press person because you remember the press.
Well, it's a complicated relationship. I wouldn't say flat out that he doesn't like the press, because he does like the press. He loves the coverage. He actually enjoys when I've flown with him on Air Force one. He enjoys coming back to where the press sits on Air Force one and chatting with us, you know, for twenty thirty minutes off the record. So it's a mixed relationship. It's the best way I would describe it. He likes to be liked, He likes the give and take with reporters,
So it's not just as simple black and white. He doesn't like reporters. I think at times he doesn't like reporters and news organizations. But for the most part, I think he likes the relationship that he has with the press corps. And that goes back to his days when he was a developer in New York and he sought out the attention of you know, his hometown newspapers, the New York Times and the Daily News and the New York Post.
One last question, as you guys are in the Oval office and you're finishing it up, does he ever pass out or dervs?
No, No, he doesn't pass that. No, that does not happen. I've never had that experience. I don't know why you would have where Duras and the Oval office, because that doesn't.
It's a social thing to do.
It's okay all right, John, thank you as always. I mean he is pretty close to the present, you know, kf I is. You know, we're pretty lucky to have John as part of the team. All right now, the president is not a big fan of DEI, as you know, and he has eliminated DEI programs as quickly as he possibly can across the country. If we go back to
the murder of George Floyd. At that moment, I think our world changed dramatically in terms of how we view the police, how we view the way cities create policing, and the Black Lives Matter came out of it, and DEI to the extent that it was round before, exploded inclusion diversity.
We needed more minorities.
Google, by the way, had one of the strongest programs, the DEI program, and it has just joined other tech giants and going wait a minute, let's take a look at this. And it has to do not with let's take a look at this because of any sociological or moral reasoning.
It's the new.
Administration doesn't like this. We have contracts with the new administration. We don't want to piss off this president, who, by the way, is a bad president to piss off there are people in government, then it doesn't matter. Boy, you piss off President Trump, you're in trouble. So the killing of George Floyd in twenty twenty set off a whole target of increasing the proportion. This is goal, saying setting a target of thirty percent the proportion of leadership representation
of underrepresented groups by twenty twenty five, by this year. Now, even before the president became president this time around, a couple of things happened. In his annual report it has released that it just released, it omitted the sentence stating the company was committed to make diversity, equity, and inclusion part of everything we do and to growing a workforce that is representative of the users we serve. That sentence was included in twenty twenty one through twenty twenty four.
Twenty twenty five, sentence is no longer in there. And here are some stats. Remember that Google in twenty twenty said we have a target of thirty percent increasing thirty percent. Okay, the twenty twenty four report from Google, five point seven percent of the US employees were black, seven point five percent were Latino, and four years earlier, the figures were three point seven and five point nine respectively, not a whole lot of representation. And now Google says, okay, let's
let's look at not even releasing annual diversity reports. And it's been doing that since twenty fourteen. And why, I mean, they're up front about it. The Google's representative said, it's reviewing recent court decisions. It's reviewing executive orders by President Trump aimed at curbing DEI by the government and federal contractors, which the tech giants all have contracts with the government.
I mean, good for them.
At least they're honest about it, saying, hey, it's a different world. Life has changed. Where it was one politically mandatory to push the EI, especially after the George Floyd murder. Now it's gone the other way, where you have a Biden administration where inclusion is actually even more important than anything else. This is one of the reasons that Donald
Trump won the election. This is one of the reasons why the Democrats just completely misreaded because they thought this sort of thing, inclusion, LGBT rights, etc. Was more important than inflation, more important than immigration.
I mean, it's easy to look.
At hindsight and say this is what happened, but this is what happened. So Google is dancing and around saying would maintain its resource groups for underrepresented employees. And it's not a question of here's how they paint it too. It's not a question of we want more blacks, we want more Latinos. It's underrepresented employees that come from those areas. This is how the colleges get away with it in
establishing quota systems. It is illegal for a university to determine acceptance of a class or any student based on race. Cannot do it one percent. It's illegal. However, it's not illegal to look at poor communities. It is not illegal to look at an underrepresentation. And how difficult it is to get in college if a student comes from a
poor community, no matter white, red, blue, purple, whatever. Well, if you look at in this country the number of blacks and Latinos who live in poor or poorer communities, effectively dei happens, there's no question about it. And where it used to be sort of the flavor of the law of the land. With this administration, it's going the
other way completely. And the tech companies who Trump hated, and we're at the forefront of saying we believe in black and Latinos and not so much Asians because Asians are not particularly underrepresentative in tech or in school. But we believe in minority management and employees. That's off the table. Now, that's done, and you will see this Halloween. You know when the big corporations throw Halloween parties and they throw a big get togethers from morale. They don't give money,
but they give a big, big morale boosters. I guarantee you you'll see a picture from Google and Amazon. You'll see so many costumes, people dressed in white sheets and hoods. It's just going to be a very very different way. Okay, guys, we're done.
Now a word about.
EV's and I have one. California EV sales are flat in twenty twenty four. I mean last year it was great, but demand has flatline in California and all kinds of questions. Can automobile manufacturers meet the state mandates for zero emission vehicle sales? Other than Tesla, which only sells evs, no other manufacturer is going to meet the state's thirty five percent threshold for zero emission vehicles in the upcoming twenty twenty six model year. Demand just doesn't match, but the
mandate requires zero. Evs simply aren't selling that well. And why is that? Well, it's really easy. Let me tell you about my EV. I love my EV. I have a BMW. I've had BMW's for twenty five years. I love that car. I think it's the best driving car out there. And I'm not blowing smoke here. I just happened to love that car. And for as my lease was up on my last car for some reason, I obviously had a huge temperature and I was running a fever at one hundred and nine degrees, and I went out and.
Got a Tesla.
Lasted two weeks before I said I'm done with the Tesla, went back to a BMW, of course, and bought an EV.
But here's the problem. It certainly, in my opinion, I'm not alone.
The problem with evs, not hybrid straight evs is range anxiety.
I am matter of fact.
I live in Orange County and this morning I was figuring out how many miles I have to go to West Valley for an appointment.
And I'm figuring out.
Okay, twenty five I was there, and I have to go this and I've got these many miles to go home, and I'm sweating bullets because there aren't enough chargers out there.
There just aren't.
The manufacturers are doing a great job, but more evs are selling than they were able to put up chargers and that and people said, okay, we're done. And hybrids, by the way, hybrids have exploded. That clearly is the wave of the future. My next car that I get when my lease is up, I lease cars becuse every three years.
I want another one.
It's going to be a hybrid EV. And what are the chances of a BMW? Oh, I don't know about one hundred percent? Okay, that sound like a commercial for BMW, by the way, a little bit, it's not.
By the way, that's well, how long have I been talking about this, I mean twenty years, you know?
So?
Yeah?
Okay, Neil, it's like a Trump prayer breakfast. Yeah, it actually is when you think about it. Now, how do
you meet compliance? The manufacturers, how do they meet compliance? Well, it's an average over the entire fleet that they sell, So there aren't going to be enough EV sales clearly, and by the way, failing to meet the thirty five percent mandate means either paying penalties of thirty of twenty thousand dollars per every non compliant compliant vehicle sowed sold, everyone over the thirty five percent mandate or everyone under the thirty five percent mandate twenty grand per car.
That's the problem. So they got a couple ways of doing it.
Manufacture fewer buy state issued emission credits carbon credits that they can buy, or decrease the number of internal combustion engines that are being sold and manufactured sold, particularly because we don't do much manufacturing here. That's the way they're going to do it, which means that the mandate. And I thought the mandate was great because I love the concept of evs. I mean, they do use energy, but
they save a pilot energy. I'm one of those people that actually believes in fossil fuels, too many of them. I believe that emissions are causing global warming. That's who I am. And it's real simple. They're not going to make the mandate. They're not, And so buy an ev By the way, I did the math, and I have to charge my car downstairs twice this week in order to make it. Now, who does that when you have a internal combustion car? And I got twenty buys there
and I got thirty miles over that one. And then I've got to go over there, and I got to figure out what's my mileage? What kind of range do I have? It's range anxiety of the yin yang. Okay, let's move on. Okay, a couple of shockers for you and some uh all right before the rains arrived. And this is after the fire. There's a USC professor Seth John. He went through the Foothill neighborhood that was devastated by the eating fire and he gathered street dust to.
Test for lead.
Another USC professor visited public parks and preschool sampling sandboxes to test for lead because there was a lot of concern following the fire because thousands of older buildings where lead paint is present had burned down and raising a bunch of questions about how far ash laden with these toxic heavy metals spread across the region. Because now we're looking at ooh, the dangers of that. And here is the one that I'm glad they spent money on this.
The samples with the highest concentrations of lead were found right in front of burned homes. That's where the biggest problem was in terms of heavy metals and lead.
Gee, thank you for that.
So the two researchers tested nineteen samples gathered every half mile or so from locking you out of flint Ridge to Monrovia, some right in front of burned homes, others from neighborhoods where the homes were spared but were blanketed in ash. And they actually found a ton of viralbility variability, and not just the further away you go, the better off you are. So predictably the street does from the middle of Altadeno, which so the worst damage showed the highest level of lead.
Ooh, isn't that special. That's a shocker.
Samples ranging from just above the EPA soil screening limit of eighty parts per million to more than twenty times that. Now near blind neighborhoods had barely any lead present.
And here's what's interesting.
They thought that nearby neighborhoods would show a substantial level of thread of lead, but it really was limited. Neighborhood by neighborhood, there was less and less lead to war only half a mile or a mile away. Even though there was ash, it was also almost negligible in terms of heavy metals. They also went to no malasca and under the snow at a school they found no lead. Strangely enough, it's all a question of how close you were. Of the seven playgrounds that were tested, lead levels were
low to nonexistent. Now we don't know at this point how dangerous with the potential risks.
Are, but you have to find out. Testing has to.
Be done, and not just for lead either, but heavy metals, including chromium and arsenic. How do you find arsenic in a home who has arsenic? Well, arsnake is used in lumber to treat lumber. It's an anti rot what element mineral? Yeah, Actually, arsenic is found in food naturally, Yeah, apples.
You wear arsnake, especially if you wear old lace.
After debris and the ashurekill cleared, the researchers recommend test your properties multiple samples. You have to average everything that's going on. And the good news is the rain should help wash away a lot of the street dust. Well, of course it's going to so we now have rains. They're going to test after the rains, and this actually is better news than we thought in terms of the amount of lead and toxicity. And they got the heavy metals that's the big one because you also have batteries.
And we've had that big deal in Malibu.
At Roger Beach, Will Rogers Beach, Yeah, good old Will Rogers. I never met a man I didn't like and he well, he never met you, did he? I'm sorry, No, he never did. Okay, he never did.
Yeah. It was a very interesting guy.
You know who's uh, you know where he broadcasts from in his radio days, Will Rogers Kfi KFI mike. Some of his great statements were made in front of a KFI mike and that's his uh, that's his tombstone. I never met a male. A man I didn't like. Neil's tombstone is gonna read I never met a meal.
I didn't like. Amen.
All right, Uh, I guess we're done for this segment. Coming up, we have Joel Larsguard how the money? Uh? And then kind of a fun topic at the bottom of the hour eight thirty Biden has well it has to do with the federal use of private prisons and how that's changed from Biden to Trump. And then we're gonna finish show with Moe Kelly. Alec Paul has a new reality show. Alec Baldwin to talk about the trailer.
I saw the trailer.
Let me tell you some weird stuff about that trailer. Number one with a bullet that's right, very strong. We'll be back kf I am sixty.
You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show.
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