You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty and now Handle on the news. Ladies and gentlemen, here's not Bill Handle.
KFI. He come six forty Bill Handle show, mister bo Kelly in for Bill Handle one more day. And as I see it, I have two jobs. I got two jobs today. I mean, in addition to obviously working at KFI. I gotta get you to work and I gotta get you closer to the weekend. Those two things get you to work and get you closer to the weekend. It is Friday, and I don't know if there's a better day of the week. Let me say good morning to Amy King, the news queen. How are you today?
Good morning, I'm fabulous. Thank you.
I heard you in your most recent conversation remark about the TV show Paradise. I cannot love that show enough.
Yep.
If if I was still on your show, we would have done an Amy's on it on in your show.
Oh that shows one day and I watched that first episode and I said.
Exactly exactly, and then at the end of the first episode you went yes again.
It's a complete well. I don't ever want to give it away for anyone. I always say, just watch the first episode, and if you like anything about the first episode, it will take you through to the end of the first season. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Good morning. I have to say good morning to producer, and if only because we had similar concerns and thoughts on this Friday. I gotta
be very honest. I can't lie to you listening in your car right now, if you happen to be maybe you're getting out of the shower, getting ready to go to work. I can't lie to you. I appreciate you and I trust you, so I can share this with you. I have this recurring nightmare, and for what I'm told,
many people in radio have a similar one. I have this nightmare where I either wake up and I'm in a panic and I realize, oh my gosh, my shift is getting ready to start and I'm in bed or the phone is ringing, and in this case would be producer as she's like, MO, where are you. We're getting ready to go on air in fifteen minutes. It's a recurring nightmare I have, and I've had it for at least a decade or so.
Yeah, it's the worst. It's the absolute worst feeling.
With that in mind, that you might not wake up and have that hard right. With that in mind, I have this alarm which is meant to scare the but Jesus out of me, and unfortunately it also scares the Bejesus out of my wife. It's meant to wake me up under any circumstances. I have an alarm on my pixel watch that runs simultaneously which will vibrate and physically shake me and my law. I don't believe in snooze alarms. Whenever the alarm glows goes off, that beas it's time
to get up. It's time to go to work. There's no negotiation after that. That's my alarm, and it gets progressively louder the longer you let it sit there. So it's not meant to slowly rouse you in a peaceful way wake up. It's not trying to say, hey mo, it's time to get up a gentle nun. No, it's nothing about stuff. It's telling you get the half out of bed, you gotta go to work. Third and is waiting for you. So I'm up, I'm up. It's one of those things that could startle do I'm up, I'm up.
I'm I'm away, I'm on away. I got up at four o'clock today and got to tell the truth, I did not get to sleep until after one. I remember seeing my phone and it said one something. That's the last time I remember seeing it. And the next thing I know, you know, like you blink your eyes, and then all of a sudden, the alarm is telling me to get up, and it's four am. I get out of bed, and I'm in the car by four twenty. I'm here by four forty five. I'm walking in with
Will Colestreiver. Good morning, Will, and we're both commiserating about how early it is and how dark it is. But other than that, I'm great. Let's curry me get to the weekend. Gono, could to see you, my man. I heard that you lost all twenty three of your brackets in one day.
I mean, everybody loses, it's just try not to lose the most.
You wasted no time, he said, Well, I'm gonna lose anyway, so might as well be now.
I will say my brother in law went sixteen for sixteen yesterday.
Though.
That's a great start. That's a great start. Yeah, I can never say I've ever done it. I've never gotten out of the first round with more than maybe twelve. That's pretty correct.
I'm eleven right now. Eleven for sixteen.
That's not bad. It just depends on the games that you lose. Like if it's one of them, happened to be one of your final four predictions. Well as they say, that's your ass ya, that is true.
That is true.
So good morning, good morning, good morning. I think it's about time that we get to it. Handle on the news, lead start. True to his word, US President Trump has signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education. And I said yesterday it is fulfilling a campaign promise. It's one of those things that he talked about it,
he promised it, and now he's delivering it. There are some subtleties here, whereas the president can defund the Department of Education, actually killing the whole agency has to be an act of Congress. But you can recap the agency through lack of funding, where most of its services will no longer exist. And this is something I think people need to understand. It's not something that the next president
can just turn around and undo. This is something completely transformational, not necessarily transactional and President Trump, regardless of what you may think about him, he has been consistent with what he said on the campaign trail. He's wasting no time to get done as he is is i'll say, just a couple months in his presidency, and the White House has acknowledged that closing agency outright would require an Act of Congress. As I said, so this is just the
first part of it. Yes, it's going to be fought in court. There are legal challenges already, but the Department of Education, as we know it, is going away.
Fires and flying don't mix.
London's Heathrow Airport, one of the busiest hubs in Europe, is closed today and will remain closed all day because of a fire nearby at an electricity substation. So far, they're saying it doesn't appear that there's foul play. Of course they're still investigating, but the fire caused power outages at the airport and in a statement, whilst fire crews are responding to the incident, we do not have clarity on when power may be reliably restored.
I love that they start their their sentence with whilst.
Are they are they on any schedule at this moment?
No schedule. They're expecting significant disruption over the coming days. But it's like, so far, and this was from a few hours ago, thirteen hundred and fifty flights just canceled and they're showing scenes from inside Heathrow. It's like emergency lights are on and they're saying, do not go to the airport. And of course it's affecting flights in the US.
Two. On the rare occasions that I do get the privilege to go to Europe, I often am lucky enough to avoid Heathrow. I'm usually going through Gatwick and that's a much more enjoyable experience. No disrespect to Heathrow, but if you've never been, it's I would say I would liken it to Chicago. O'Hare the amount of traffic, the size of the airport, the things you got to do if you're connecting this. I say all that to say, this disruption will be significant and will impact thousands of
travelers for the next few days at the minimum. And you know the DWP, well, they've been having some problems with the fireheart hydrants, trying to fix them. They're saying that they fixed the vast majority of them, which have been flagged for repairs last year. And let me just say, in addition to this, part of the reason why some of these or many of these fireheard hydrants had issues was people were vandalizing them and stealing some of the parts off them for scrap metal in the way that
people were stealing catalytic converters. Believe it or not, Yes, LA Fire Department discovered the damage to the hydrants during inspections in the months prior to the January seventh Palisades fire. Once a DWP's staff received the list of thirteen hundred and fifty hydrants, the utility dispatched crews across the city.
As of earlier this week, the utility had addressed twelve hundred and eighty nine hydrants, replaced one hundred and forty eight, and perform minor repairs on eight hundred and five hydrants. Six hydrants. And this is something I didn't know. We're functioning but needed water to be turned on at a nearby valve. And I also didn't know that there were one hundred and forty three hydrants on this list which were privately owned and fell outside DWP's perview.
How do you have a privately owned fire hydrant.
Hello, that was my question. I didn't know that I was today years old.
Unlets say it's in an area that's like just outside Los Angeles City, or it's in an unincorporated area and they built a subdivision and so then they built their own fire hydrant.
Maybe that would make sense. But still I've heard of private fire departments. Yeah, but not private fire hydrants. You learn something new every day.
Bring them back.
US safety regulators have recalled about all the cyber trucks. There's forty six thousand of them than NTSB or actually the NASA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says an exterior panel that runs along the left and right side of the windshield can detach while you're driving, and that can create a road hazard for others and increase the risk of a crash.
Tesla has a real precarious position that they're trying to navigate. You know of Tesla in large part because of the person Elon Musk, and Elon Musk helped promote the brand through himself, Elon Musk, and now that Elon Musk is part of DOGE and what he's doing with the federal government is in many ways controversial. At least without getting into the minutie. Then you have Tesla put in a situation where if you don't support Elon Musk, then it
comes over to impacting Tesla its stock price. And I'm not talking about the vandalism month. That's just illegal, that's just crime. But I'm just talking about Tesla. The company is going to have a hard time trying to navigate this moment, if only because everyone knows Tesla because of Elon Musk. DEI is still an issue in the military, but for a different reason. And the military, if you didn't know, was instructed to search keywords including first and
history while they were purging Pentagon websites. And you might know the most the clearest example or controversial example, was with Jackie Robinson his connection to the military and how that was scrubbed from Pentagon websites. And military units were instructed to simply use keyword searches such as racism, ethnicity, history, and first when searching for articles and photos to remove.
And also the Department of Defense instituted an AI algorithm which helped with the purge and was very wide in its base, and so a lot of things were purge, maybe not intentionally, but also controversially. There were other keywords officials were instructed to search for, which included different type off firsts, such as LGBTQ, historic, accessibility, opportunity, belonging, justice, privilege, respect,
and even values. I don't know how the Department of Defense is going to navigate this going forward, but they're going to have a lot of pushback from different groups and also people who are knowledgeable about history.
Well, yeah, I mean they took down the code talk the Navajo code talkers, which helped us win World War Two, so unfortunately they put it back out.
But yeah, and some of these mistakes can be avoided, some of these when you're using the proverbial chainsaw, going back to Elon Musk and you saw the meme with him. When you're using that chainsaw and not the scalpel, you're going to have these unfortunate incidents. And I'm real big on history, and there's certain parts of history which may be uncomfortable, certain parts of history which may be unflattering, but it's necessary to tell the whole story, the full story.
And I believe this country is the greatest country on the face of the earth. It is because it's it's been able to overcome all these obstacles, over all these decades and centuries. You got to know America in this full context.
Yeah, and I love that AI gets it wrong sometimes.
Oh it's story it wrong.
It restores my faith in humanity. But we've talked to like rich Dedmiro about it. We're like, AI, I'll tell you this, and I said, but does it get it right? And He's like, oh, no, it makes mistakes all the time. So it looks like that's what it happened. It went through and mistakenly took out too much with its chainsaw. As you said, Mariah Carey got all she wanted for Christmas. A federal judge is ruled that she did not steal her mega hit All I Want for Christmas Is You
from other song writers. She was sued in twenty twenty three by songwriter who goes by the stage name Vince Vance and also Troy Powers of tennessee twenty million dollar lawsuit. They allege that Carrie's song from nineteen ninety four, which of course we hear every year and as it comes around faster and faster as time speeds up, that it infringed on the copyright of their country song in nineteen eighty nine with the same title.
I was working in the music industry when this song came out in ninety four. I was probably working for Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and getting ready to go to Virgin Records. If you know anything about music popular music, there are simple chord progressions that a lot of songs use. There is a songwriting formula, and if you really know music, most of the songs which are hits or written in major keys not minor keys, he use the same time signature.
He used a lot of the same notes in melodic progressions. That's a long way of saying a lot of the music is going to sound alike, and you're gonna have more and more of these lawsuits going forward because they're not being real innovative in creating any of these songs. If you live long enough, you will hear seven or eight songs which sound pretty much the same and probably
have no connection to one another. In other words, you may hear a song and the songwriter may have never had any connection to that other song which sounds like it, and it may not be an example of plagiarism. But we're gonna have more examples of these, because think of it this way, there are only so many ways that you can play tic tac toe, only so many outcomes that you can have. Music is very similar to that. There's only so many melodies that you can use with
an eight note scale in a major key. You're gonna have more examples of this. And it may not be intentional, but because of the math, it's unavoidable. And this next story i'll serve go back to it at seven am. But Germany has updated US travel advice after three citizens had been detained, and they updated as travel advisory for the US to emphasize that a visa or waiver allowing entry does not guarantee Germans to enter the US and this because, as I said, several of its citizens were
detained at the border. Now. This is according to an advisory on Germany's Foreign Office website at the country warned that entry through the Electronics System for Travel Authorization es TO system or a US visa is not guaranteed every time that the US Border Control has final decision, and also the office noted that a criminal conviction in the US, false information about an individual's purpose of stay, or even a slight overstay of the visa can lead to arrest, detention,
and deportation. And the new advisory comes as Germany is investigating the case of three of its citizens being denied entry and placed into detension. And when I talk about this at seven o'clock, I'm going to talk about how Casey Wasserman has assured that the IOC visa issues won't be a problem for the twenty twenty eight Olympics. I'm not so sure that Wasserman can make that guarantee.
Guess we'll find out soon enough.
Yes we will.
Okay, an accident waiting to happen. So before you cross the river, know that sixty eight bridges across the US should be assessed to see if they're at risk of collapse if they're hit by a ship like the Key Bridge in Baltimore. Transportation safety officials say they need to undertake immediate vulnerability assessment. It's part of the National Transportation Safety Boards ongoing investigation into the collapse of the Francis Scott Keybridge.
Included on their list, the Golden.
Gate Bridge doesn't surprise me. I think the US has done a poor job of maintaining its infrastructure, and I say that generally, with no respect to any party or administration or specific state across the board, our infrastructure has been susceptible and vulnerable to not only terrorist attacks, but just age and decrepit nature. There are going to be more issues with bridges and tunnels and waterways, if only because we have not paid attention to our infrastructure the
weight I think we should. And also here locally in California, California has I should say, the Ninth Circuit has upheld California's ban on large capacity ammunition magazines. California, according to the Ninth Circuit, has the authority to ban large capacity ammunition magazines. And also this reversed a previous decision that found the state law unconstitutional under its strict history minded limits on gun control measures recently established by the Supreme Court.
Writing for the eleven judge panel, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Circuit Judge Susan Graeber found that the state's ban on magazines wholly more than ten rounds fell in line with other historical weapons restrictions in that it restricts an especially dangerous feature of semi automatic firearms, the ability to use a large capacity magazine while allowing all other uses of those firearms. YadA YadA, yadah blah blah blah.
And this is something that has always been a hot button issue about where we should limit the use of guns or magazines, and a frequent refrain that I hear as well, this would not prevent this or that crime, this or that death, or mass shooting. And I try to remind people this or at least this is where I come from, that gun laws are not about prevention, but they do serve as a baseline for punishment and
maybe mitigation. Like if you were to think of I don't know, speeding laws, It's not like any speeding law is going to stop speeding. Hopefully, hopefully it may encourage people to slow down and will mitigate the number of speeding infractions and will be more mindful of it. But if a person's going to speed, they're going to speed. But it lets you know definitively the baseline as far as what is acceptable, what is legal, and what is illegal.
And also something else I think people may not remember, some gun laws are to help catch criminals and would be criminals in a net, so they don't go on and progress to larger crimes. You may have someone you may see a story that Amy Keymate talk about. Well, someone was also cited or arrested for unlicensed or unlawful possession of a gun or a felon in possession of a gun, and hopefully that will keep that person from committing other crimes. Not always, but sometimes.
Oopsie.
Social Security numbers of more than four hundred former congressional staffers and others were made public because they were part of that eighty thousand document dump eighty thousand page document dump files related to the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy.
The White House acknowledged the breach and says it's working to mitigate the harm. The way they're going to do that is they're going to scrub the files to find any more Social Security numbers, and then the Social Security Administration will give anyone affected new numbers.
Did anyone like look at the material, the data, the documents prior to releasing them.
Here's here's how we understand it. Because I was talking to who did I talk to? Stephen Portnoy, Karen Traver's, Yeah, and they said that it was we knew that Trump was going to do it. He'd been talking about it for quite a while, but then when he made the decision, he said, okay, let's just release them. And so the National Archives is like, oh, holy cow, we've got to try to scrub all of this before we put it up.
So I think it was because they didn't have the time to really kind of go through everything with a fine tooth comb.
Okay, all right, who am I to say otherwise.
Because you know what Trump does something he wants done.
Now, Okay, I just know my social Security number fortunately was not part of that document.
You know.
Oh no, no, no, I'm.
Sure because you weren't born then I was not born.
Then I was not born. Then, thank you, thank you very much. And to be serious though, before we close out this hour, you know about the child, the six year old girl who died from measles back on February twenty six, Well, her parents, these Texas parents of that child, are not moving. They are not budgeting around the idea that this was the way it was supposed to be. And her parents have said that they would still not take or have their children take the MMR shot. They
said that it was her time on earth. They believe she's better off where she is now, and that is a quote. They also went to say that the measles wasn't that bad. They got over it pretty quickly. Talking about their other children. They have four other surviving children who were treated with castor oil and inhaled steroids and recovered.
Here's what bothers me. I've been around long enough to know that the MMR vaccine has been around talking about JFK since nineteen sixty three, and it's ninety seven percent effective. And we do know that measles was considered eradicated in the United States since the year two thousand, with the exception of in previous and more recent years. Because the vaccine rates have declined and diminished, measles has been popping up around the country and actually around the world for
that matter. We've had some other incidents with polio. These deaths and infections are largely avoidable. This child didn't have to die. And I don't think it's too much to say that parents have a responsibility to protect their children. How that plays out probably and obviously varies from family to family. But I don't think you can say, on one hand, well, we want to protect our child, and also on the other hand say It's okay, this is
what God wanted. No, if you're going to protect your child, you're going to protect your child, and measles is not something that we have to suffer from. It's not like you can have a chicken pox party and everyone is going to be just fine afterward. Measles, although it has a low mortality rate, still has a mortality rate. This child did not have to die. It's twenty twenty five. It's the Bill Handle Show. I'm o Kelly and for Bill.
We're 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.