Handel on the News

You're listening to Wake Up Call on demand from KFI AM six fortys.

And then come at six o'clock.

Neil and I joined the show right up until nine and deciding what we talk about, because well, frankly, I'm a pandy waste and I can't make a decision and women make the decision in my life.

And now handle on the news, ladies and gentlemen, here's Bill handle.

Oh yeah, it's a Homeday Wednesday, March twelve, and today it's going to be rainy. Yesterday intermittent. Today a deluge is coming down.

Let me say a quick hello to Amy.

Of course, wearing some kind of Disney something apparel.

Right you say, of course, like I do it every day. I haven't worn Disney gre for like two weeks.

Yeah, so let me see if I'm not mistaken. Oh oh, you picked that up. That's from Disney Tokyo. It's a sweatshirt the Ryan King.

The Ryan King, Bill, what are you serious?

And it's not from Disney Tokyo.

It's from Disneyland.

Okay, morning Amy, Hi Bill, Hi morning, and Neil you.

Be out of this.

Hey, you know that didn't take long, did it?

First sentence out of the box, Amy really quickly before we get hello to the other crowd. The weather today, I always defer to you because you keep right up to the second on that stuff.

Well, we've got a chance of rain this morning, and then rain is likely for this afternoon. The heaviest rain of this storm is expected to come tonight, but we could see one to two inches in the valley and coasts, two to four in the foothills and mountains. And they're saying that it's going to come down hard enough that there's a real risk of some mudfl mudslides and debris flows.

Okay, how about Friday afternoon, give or take five o'clock la around lax.

Forty chance of ring on Friday, but it's going to drow for the weekend, so the showers might be done by then.

Okay, Well, because I'm on an airplane Friday night, and this is my last week here before I go off running. And by the way, off and running has a lot to do with the story that I'm going to do.

At let me see, let me see, let me.

See, well oiled machine.

Yeah, seven thirty, yeah, seven thirty. Thank you as I go through this morning, and good morning, Bill, Good morning Will, Good morning, morning, sir.

Okay, can't see what that T shirt it says underneath the jacket.

Topokaalia beards from Georgia, hoult the Bulldogs.

Oh are you from Georgia? No, okay, excellent. That helps a lot. His shirt is clearly actually it's said. No, it's the same place where iHeart gets its T shirts, which is Pakistan.

And as we look through it.

It's twelve year old kids who make those T shirts for thirty cents an hour, and you can't actually get the shirts wet because the dye runs. So you're told don't wash them and certainly don't sweat in them, because you're it's going to be a mess if you do.

Cono, good morning, Yeah, Bill, Hello, good morning. All right, we're on the start.

We tell that you're on vacation already in your.

No, actually I'm yeah, no, my head is no, it's not true.

It's not sure that shirt shows he's a vacation.

O me my Hawaiian shirt. Yeah, I think it's a Tony Is this a Tony Bahama or is a knockoff? Yeah?

That too, it's a knockout. Yeah no, no, the Tommy Bahammad knockoffs are jacks ja x X. I do have a couple of Tommy Bahama shirts. A couple were given to me U's shirts, which I immediately grabbed because I spend fifteen dollars for a shirt, not a one hundred and fifteen dollars.

And then a few A couple of them were given to me as.

Gifts and those I actually have mounted and put on the wall as art pieces.

Okay, if tom gifted you that shirt, they don't like you much.

You know, I think you know what. Let me ask you, is this a I can't tell you know what.

I'll take that off during the break, might not wear well, I have a T shirt underneath there, Come on.

That doesn't matter. It's the fur that comes out.

That's true. I'm a little hairy. As a matter of fact.

There we have we have that picture sure of me doing that promo for that r V and I was making it didn't last very long RV because I took a picture of myself in coveralls with a straw hat and a straw through my teeth. I mean, there's no value judgment there about who drives an RV, and it was and basically I had an overall with no shirt, so a lot of my hairiness. I mean I have a pretty hairy back, much like you know Armenian women

I have had old strawberries in the back of my refrigerator that were less furry than you.

Yeah.

Yeah, okay, guys, let's why don't we start the show?

What do you think?

Huh, well, it's already over.

No Cono laughs at this He's the only one that does over there. You know, I think Will starting to.

You know, the rest of you are just embarrassed by me and waiting for me to get fired. Okay, guys, right, okay, you guys ready to do it? Handle on the news on this Wednesday morning, March twelfth, with Amy and Neil and me lead story. Well, the House did pass that funding bill, I had a Friday shutdown of the government, and Mike Johnson won this one. Actually, President Trump won this one overcoming a.

Far right opposition. Kind of interesting.

The far right of the Republican Party does not like a lot of what Trump is doing, and that is spending more money that's coming in. They would like to see revenues at least come within shouting distance of what comes in versus what is spent. So the stopgap bill was passed two hundred and seventeen to two thirteen.

You talk about just a minuscule, razor thin majority. Okay.

By the way, eight Senate Democrats are going to be needed to vote with the GOP.

To accept the bill. It will be accepted, I think. Okay.

All we are saying is give Piece a chance. Ukraine has accepted a thirty day ceasefire proposed by the United States that came after eight hours of meetings in Saudi Arabia yesterday. It covers the entire frontline of the fighting with Russia, not just the air and sea. And now the US needs to take this over to Russia. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio says that we hope Russia will say yes, that they will say yes to Piece. The ball is in their court.

Well, see what happens.

You know, this is you know the madness or the method to the madness. And what did Trump promise day one? He's gonna make sure that there's a piece between Ukraine and Russia. Obviously day one stuff is an exaggeration, that's sort of a given. But he's, what a little over a month into his first term and they're sitting down for the first time.

Now, what does he do? How does he do it? Well?

He cuts off all aid to Ukraine and says, no more American arms to you.

Without American arms, they won't have a chance.

Russia is instantly winning this war, and so Ukraine all of a sudden says, okay, we'll come to the table.

Coming to the table means that Ukraine is going.

To lose a good part of its land, like about a third of it, and we'll see what Russia does. Is Russia willing read Putin because he controls Russia one hundred percent, Is he willing to sit down?

And you know, is it going to happen? Is not going to happen?

Who the hell knows, But he's going to end He's going to end up winning in the sense that he invaded because he wanted that part of Ukraine which he views as Russia, which is hysterically Russia historically and hysterically but historically Russia.

So we'll see the.

Ball is now in Russia's court with Ukraine ready and willing to sit down. And this is Trump forcing the issue, forcing the issue, and you know, he said he's going to We'll see how successful it is.

You know, he's also did.

That thing where sitting down with Kim Jong un and somehow something was going to happen, and of course nothing happened as a result, other than I guess he got some Korean food out of that Korean barbecue.

You ever get to a Korean barbecue. I like Korean barbecue. It's kind of neat. You cook it with the little strips of beef. Whether it's beef or not is a different issue. Okay, let's go ahead and take a break. We'll be what and what.

Stop what it's true, it's questionable, all right, they're back. Case of measles has been confirmed in a Los Angeles County resident recently traveled through the Los Angeles International Airport. This comes from the County's Department of Public Health. They announced this yesterday. First confirmed case of measles in La County or LA County resident in this case in twenty

Here's here's an interesting factory that the majority of the measles cases are in one Texas. One county in Texas, it's a Mennonite county where Mennonites live, so and they're not vaccinated. Huge number of these people are not vaccinated, especially the kids. And it's not politics. It's not Robert Kennedy, it's not vaccines are autism linked. It's a question of we're not going to have the government tell us what to do. It's we live our own life in our own community.

Yeah.

How's that working out for you? Is your kids are popping off? Okay, yeah, maybe you want to rethink that.

Pink slips are flying At the Department of Education. More than thirteen hundred Education Department employees got termination notices last night. They went out starting at about six pm. In addition to that, more than five hundred and seventy employees accepted

Now, the problement of education is kind of interesting. It was created by Jimmy Carter, didn't exist before that. And as Neil and the rest of us pointed out, let's look at the education system in this country. Boy has that gone uphill right, done a great job since Carter was president. Test scores are low, are keeping dropping, and so what do you do with the department. Now it does have programs in which money is given to certain school boards and food programs and that sort of thing.

But prior to that, it was other departments.

And so Trump has said, we don't need the Department of Education, and Linda McMahon is tasked in Department of Education secretary to getting yourself out of a job.

So, you know, I mean, what do you do with that? I mean, do you need the department?

And there are thousands of workers there who obviously are going to get canned.

But there's an argument there.

You know, the FAA, for example, do you know when the FAA start started? Actually the founding father started it knowing the airplane was gonna be invented.

Two hundred years later.

Oh it's constitutional.

No, it's a little bit of history. I thought i'd share with you.

Thanks.

You're really on point this morning, all right. President Donald Trump imposed sweeping twenty five percent tariffs on all steel and aluminum imported into the United States. These tariffs on steel and aluminum marked the first time in Trump's second term that a set of tariffs has been applied to all countries.

And that's kicking in.

It did kick in midnight one am or twelve oh one this morning. And this is really going to hit Canada the most. You know, ninety percent of the aluminum that the United States uses comes in from Canada or comes in.

From foreign sources. The vast majority is Canada.

He's going to disrupt a few things, right, prices as promised day one, and not.

Quite, not quite.

You're hearing more and more. This is the Trump economy that he's dealing with.

What he inherited, by the way, he inherited a great economy. You know, inflation had dropped down to under three percent by the time he came into office.

Those those are.

People weren't living a great economy. If you go throughout America, they weren't like this. Every a good point. No, that's a good point.

Those are those numbers are are no, because they were already baked in inflation. Even with inflation having dropped, Let's say invation and inflation drops to zero, right, and nothing is no increase whatsoever. We're still paying astronomical on money for the a dozen eggs. We're still paying astronomical numbers for and so you know that's baked in already, like interest rates. You know, two and a half percent interest rates were sort of baked into our heads. When interest

Yeah.

It's like when they say they're making progress with the homeless situation here in la I look around and they go, no, you're not.

I don't care what your numbers are. You got to look and see what the other reality is.

It's a question of getting used to whatever's going on. There's going to reach a point where we're just used to eggs at eight dollars a dozen, and we tend to forget. You know how bad it can be as time goes by. All right, I think we have time for one more before we bail out of here.

California colleges are told that they better protect their Jewish students. USC Pomona, Santa Monica, and Chapman University are among sixty colleges and universities around the US. They got letters telling them they need to fulfill their obligations under Title six of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits any institution receiving federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, colored national origin, and that includes uninterrupted access to campus facilities

Now I'm going to do more about that at seven a m.

And it's tough to be Jewish and in a wealth and in a wheelchair and African American, and I mean just that's a bad combination. I'm going to talk much more about that because there is a history of.

That that I'm going to share with you.

Okay, So authorities announced the arrest of three suspected fentanyl traffickers and the seizure of fourteen million lethal doses of the drug with an an estimated street value of about fifty five million dollars. They also confiscated some heroin and amphetamine as well.

So these three guys are hopefully going to go to jail.

For a long time.

You ever noticed that, first of all, the amount of fentanyl that comes in it is pretty high, and effectively, in one bust, it's enough fentanyl to kill every human being on this planet, plus three people on the space station. And that's over and over again. We get these kinds

I mean, it's a big, big deal.

And so again method to the madness of Donald Trump arguing that we're going to do everything we can to stop fentanyl trafficking from going over the border from Exo, also fentanyl trafficking from Canada, which really doesn't exist. But yeah, that's and by the way, that was his primary reason for the tariffs, which now have switched over to financial reasons.

Well, the oil and Dodgers don't mix. Cent A majority leader Lina Gonzalez of Long Beach has asked the Dodgers, the owner Mark Walter Walter to end the team sponsorship deals with oil and gas companies, telling him that continuing to associate these corporations with our beloved boys and Blue is not in our community or the planet's best interest. Of course, one of the Dodgers' most visible advertisers is Phillips sixty six, which owns the seventy six gas station.

Jay, how long has the seventy six gas and the logo been around with its longer than most of us have been alive. I think they started right after the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles.

I mean around a long, long time early on.

I remember Vince Scully talking about seventy six and doing the pitch during the baseball games, and I was a kid, and that was a while ago.

So they've been around for a while. So this is not going to happen, by the way.

Not to mention it. It's ridiculous.

I know people like to demonize oil and you know, petrol and all these things, but when you look at the all the products, not just gas, all the products that we used, by products and everything, Yeah, it's I mean, you couldn't do anything. I mean they would all the products that they're going to advertise are going to have some tie because of transportation or whatever.

Yeah, I mean Taco Bell, because most Taco Bell fillings are you know, their meat is petroleum byproducts.

Okay? Is that another? Is that another one? This morning?

I don't know. Okay.

I stopped cow count. I had an abacus and I ran out beating.

Yeah. So this is not going to happen.

If this starts happening, then it becomes a slippery slope, slippery oil already.

Okay, Yeah, that's no ignoring, you know, all right, excellent.

The board UH for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power postponed a decision yesterday on a seven hundred thousand dollars private security contract for the department's general manager. Of course, the utility says that d w P CEO and chief engineer is it Genie c.

Yeah, it's probably sounds like.

She received numerous threats of UH criticism and departments response to the Palisades fire. This popos postponement rather UH decision may have been influenced by LA Mayor Karen Bass.

Hey.

I have a question, how many death threats. Does it take where's the line? Is it three death threats? Is it five death threats before you get this kind of security.

You've had death threats before, haven't you?

Damn right? And we have security, yeah, we have. We have security.

Whenever we do an event, whenever we do a public KFI event, there is security there.

Do you remember our old security that was.

Way way back, that was x ATF or former ATF or something like that. And that guy was no nonsense. He was the one who followed up on threats and I was threatened, uh one, Yeah, And he ended up calling me from the guy's apartment. He's like, he's not home yet, but I'm sitting here waiting for it.

No, not so much anymore, but still pretty serious stuff, Dana, of course, and all the all of security that we've had. I don't know if you've ever you know, bitten around me. When I get you know, someone comes up.

Here an a hole and I hate you, and I mean, you.

Know, good stuff you know that we like. And I turned and I turned to Dana, who's always armed. I go shoot him in the heart and he never does.

He never does.

He's prepared.

Yeah, oh yeah, no, you know they're prepared.

It's been a very long time since we've gotten any kind of a threat. But you know, it's uh we kf I iHeart does it prophylactically because the last thing they need is after a threat, after a threat, some one of us gets hurt or killed.

You can do the family.

The family will file lawsuit, and iHeart will simply give the keys to this radio station to the family and not even argue, here you go have a free radio station.

So they're very, very careful.

And especially now the threats coming after the fires and DWP being blamed for the exacerbation of the fires because the water situation, the water pressure, the.

Reservoir that was empty.

There is never ever a reason to threaten somebody or their life over business decisions or whatever.

It just yeah, there is. It's shut up, I'll kill you, Okay.

Some fans can't get their lids. A bunch of new merchandises out ahead of the twenty twenty five MLB season, which starts next week officially in Tokyo, but for a couple of teams, New Era Caps has already had to pull the merch off the shelves. There is new eras Overlap fifty nine fifty collection. It superimposes the logo of each team over the team's name. Apparently it's making some potentially vulgar designs.

Yep.

One uh is reference to women's winnebagos and that is uh, it can get pretty offensive.

That's the Texas Rangers hat.

Yeah, yes, yes, so they the big T goes over the X and ends up spelling data and ah and that.

Okay, so what's the one with the la Angels also have a hat. The design is no longer available. It's a N A E L S. So it's the Angel's logo over teams.

I don't know about it for a second. Amy, this is a and A S.

L anals anals Ah, you said it, actually you figured it out.

Hey, here's it. Here's a fun factoid.

When the Ford Pinto came out and they were selling it in Brazil, uh, the word Pinto Pinto is in reference to a Schwantz and Brazilians went completely crazy. They loved it so much because it was for the Ford Schwantz they were selling.

And then they had to change the name.

Well you remember the nova doesn't go yeah in Spanish, and so they had to change the name in Mexico and Spanish.

Yeah, doesn't go. Yeah, all right.

The proposed class action, filed Monday in the Eastern District of New York by a New York resident and other consumers, alleges that Girl Scout cookies are contaminated with dangerous heavy metals and pesticides.

So, Neil, you're the expert on this. Isn't that what makes them taste so damn good?

I think that's what makes them so filling. All those heavy metals.

I love it.

I have a I have for talking about though.

These pesticides UH, incredibly widely used and they're just about everything.

And what people don't understand is there's certain things that are in.

Food because of the great because this these metals and stuff are in the ground, so arsenic is in apples.

Yeah, but here's what they're arguing.

Thin mints, which I have five boxes, and the freezer the are the it's alleged they have three hundred and thirty four times more glyphosphate than recommended.

Well, I'm guessing none of it's recommended. But this only comes from one particular sting.

So I don't think it's even a go as a class action. So yeah, you have to okay and a judge has to okay it.

Yeah.

So anyways, moms across America are getting this information.

It's going to go in front of a judge whose daughter sells Girl Scout cookies.

That's going to work.

Yeah, some inmates may soon be making some more cash. Inmate firefighters in California's county jails and state prisons would earn an hourly wage up to nineteen dollars an hour under legislation being considered by state lawmakers. So here's something kind of interesting. More than eleven hundred inmates helped fight the Palisades and Eaten fires here in Los Angeles in January, and they currently earn five dollars and eighty cents to ten dollars and twenty four cents a.

Day a day. And these are trained firefighters. I mean they happened to be inmates. Chuck Lovers we bring on all the time when it deals with when we have a story about fires. He ran the inmate program under cal CalFire or LA County, the LA County program. And these are inmates that are about to go on probation, uh, that are have no problem with discipline and it's there's an argument, and this is a way that for them to be trained, and why should they get five dollars

Well, but they get room and board.

Oh yeah, you're right, they get You're right, they get room and board.

Uh, well said, and all the loving you could possibly want.

Yeah, you you bet so you don't all firefighters get room and board when they're on uh, when they're on a shift.

Yeah you got a point. Yeah there, But they have to have another home.

They can't. They can't an apartment or.

Right, and those half of the month, and those homes are so comfortable because they're in what we call dorms. Forty people on cots in a big room, and the food is so good.

Amy's heartless. I love it.

Damn right, I'm not being heartless.

I'm just brea.

Oh, we have to do your last.

Story inmates, and maybe they get a shot at doing this. They can get a job when they get out by getting this experience.

Yeah, that's it.

Well, so let's get interns that make five dollars a day. Oh, that's exactly what happens here at iHeart. Okay, let's finish up the story.

Our lasttop will become the first state band fluoride in public drinking water, despite widespread opposition from dentists and health professionals and people like that, scientists. So our biggest concern is with the wide population of Mormons, known for their smiles, this could do some damage.

Yeah, and it does.

I remember as a kid, this was in the fifties here in Los Angeles, there was such controversy about putting fluor eyed into the drinking water, into the water system, which have uh and kid's teeths instantly got better. And the argument against the fluoride in those days were it's a Communist plot. For real, we are in the middle of the Cold War and the anti communism, and the argument was, it is a Communist plot to put fluoride

They say it prevents through studies, it prevents about twenty five percent of tooth decay.

Actually, God forbid we do that. All right, We're done with the news. KFI am sixty 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