I don't know how many of you caught this brewhaha from a week ago. Two weeks ago, but we had this whole thing with Governor Newsom doing this massive cya over whether or not Panera was exempted from this looming new California law. This California law that's set to take effect on April first, which I'm sure is going to have this massively inflationary effect on everything. It's to increase hourly pay hourly minimum wage for all fast food workers in California to twenty dollars
per hour, which is a lot for fast food. It's likely going to lead to a lot of fast food workers being laid off replaced with automation. And I already started to see this. I went to a McDonald's just about just about a week and a half ago. I was actually driving back and forth to la and there's the Laval Road exit. So when you're about to you're going south on ninety nine, you're about to cross the Grapevine, there's the big Laval Road exit. I went to the McDonald's there and very few
employees left. Basically all the orders were just being taken by the computer screens. So there's this huge looming twenty dollars per hour minimum wage, and it's a massive jump even for California, and people are scrambling with sort of how
are they going to deal with this? Well, the news story came out that it seemed there was this exception in the law for restaurants that had a bakery, which seemingly would apply to restaurants like Panera and lo and behold, there's a gazillionaire buddy of Gavin Newsom's who's a major Panera franchise owner, who owns several Panera franchises, who did, in fact lobby with Gavin Newsom's staff to be exempted from this. Now he said, oh, it was a
part of a group of people. I don't know how you get in a group of people to meet personally with Gavin newsom staff. I certainly have never been able to meet with Gavin Newsom staff. And then this led to Newsome having to do the cya and try to say, oh, no, no, no, the law doesn't exempt Panera, and everyone's like, well, yeah it does. It says right there, if you have an oven,
why wouldn't it exempt Panera? And there's this huge back and forth battle going on about was Gavin Newsom just openly nakedly carving out exemptions in this very onerous this law that's going to be very ownerous for business owners. Why was he working so hard to get some kind of exemption like that carved in? Was it purely just this naked thing of trying to help out his buddy who owns a bunch of Panera franchises. Well, now we're in this ridiculous setup where
we see how the California legislature's really working. This twenty dollars per hour fast food thing is supposed to take effect on April first. So here we are. It's March nineteenth, and the California Assembly today or yesterday rather had hearings on all these bills to have a bunch of a bunch more exemptions from this
twenty dollars per hour fast food thing. So we're going to have things about, well, the twenty dollars per hour thing was going to impact possibly like hotel workers and stuff like that, and so oh, we're going to get exemptions for this group, and we're going to get exemptions for that group.
We're gonna get exemptions for that group. Joe Patterson not Jim Patterson, Joe Patterson, different legislator, different member of the Assembly, whose last name is Patterson, whose first initial is Jay, is a really good follow on Twitter. Follow him at patter Dude, patt er dude, and he's tweeting about this. He said today the California Legislature Assembly will consider more exemptions to the
fast food legislation. These exemptions are determined solely by the governor, the majority party, and SEIU s CiU is the big labor union that is the most powerful labor union in the Sacramento. And this is one of the things to remember is that California is a labor union dominated state. Our legislature is dominated by the labor unions. He keeps writing, I wonder how you get exempted. Maybe the policy was just bad to begin with. Why pick the winners
in the users? And he's totally right. This whole process is ridiculous. Democrats are clearly trying to appeal to labor with twenty dollars an hour as a minimum wage for fast food workers, which I just don't know that that is a sustainable jump. I don't know that that's a sustainable increase. But if that's what you're gonna make it. Why would you be giving exemptions for all these other classes of people? You know? And it's also let's understand how
wildly inflationary this is going to be across the economy. If fast food workers are going to make twenty dollars an hour, how many people are going to become how many other kinds of employers are going to have to bump up their pay in order to make it fit on? Does it even matter if Panera is actually included in this bill or not? What Panera franchise is going to be able to hire anybody if they don't also pay twenty dollars per hour,
And it's going to be massively inflationary. It's going to be like, this is the problem with minimum wage increases. I understand the positive place that a desire for increasing the minimum wage comes from. You want people who are working to be able to have a livable wage. If you just let the economy be completely laissez faire, individual workers have a more desperate need for money and employment, then employers have a desperate need for workers, especially unskilled workers like
fast food workers. So if you try to say I think I'm worth more, mister McDonald's, mister, Ronald McDonald, I think I'm worth more than that. I think I should be making more than fifteen dollars an hour. I think I should make twenty dollars an hour. Then Ronald McDonald can just move on to the next guy and give him fifteen dollars an hour, and you're without a job because the next guy is maybe more desperate, or the next guy's a teenager's not trying to get a full time job, and you,
who are trying to support yourself need a full time job. You're out on the street. So I understand the motivation for wanting a minimum wage and for wanting to have that minimum wage be enough for someone to live on. And I understand that part of this desire to increase the minimum wage is to keep up with inflation. But I feel like that's this is even outpacing inflation.
And when you increase minimum wage, there's no sort of sense of stopping to look at on the left, what are the negative side of things that come from increasing the minimum wage. It's not like when you do something like that there are no downstream consequences. Food is going to cost more if you have to pay all the workers making it way more money. The food's going to cost way more, you know. I know fast food's not super important, but a lot of people do tend to rely on it, especially for
travel and ease and things like that. If you're going to bump up the minimum wage, the costs wind up getting passed on to consumers. And the other thing is it's a huge disincentive to hiring. And I think that balance is always a difficult thing for people trying to attain something adjust order in our economics have to struggle with, like, Okay, you jack up the minimum
wage. Businesses are going to try to find ways via automation whatever to just get away with hiring fewer people, and then you'll have more people who are actually unemployed. There's some stuff going on right now with I think it's in Minneapolis where Uber and Lyft are pulling out of I believe Uber and Lyft are pulling out of Minneapolis because Minneapolis is so outraged that Uber and Lyft drivers are independent contractors and not unionizing, not employees who can unionize, and so Minnesota,
you know, Minneapolis sticks with their guns. But at the same time, now, well we're standing up for the workers. Well, Now there are all these people who would be driving for Uber and Lyfts who can't drive for them now in Minneapolis, So are you really helping them necessarily anyway?
In short, I think this is the thing that stinks with all of this, as Patterson is Joe Patterson's point out the people who are going to get exempted from and by that, I'm not saying these are necessarily easy questions to decide. I mean, I don't. I have no great love for Uber and Lyft, for a lot of these mega corporations, we're making tons and tons of money. You know, they do it on the backs of people
being independent contractors. I feel like, if you know people should be paid just wages, is you know, is allowing them to be independent contractors more just than not? You know, you may your mileage may vary there. But what's happening here in California with these exemptions to the twenty dollars per hour thing is that it's just being controlled by the labor unions. The Democrat majority
sits down with the labor unions and with these industries. We're all pushing for them not to be beholden too a twenty dollars per hour rule, and they kind of asked the unil okay, Well, what can we get away with here? What would you guys be okay with? And that's who decides, that's how it's decided. It's it has nothing to do what we are playing
a very loose charade at some form of democratic rule here in California. All of these questions about the twenty dollars per hour minimum wage and who gets exempted are being decided by the leadership of the Democrats in the legislature, Gavin Newsom and folks from SEIU labor union. It's about, you know, four or five people in a room are going to decide who has to pay twenty dollars per hour for their employees and who doesn't. And that's kind of how so
much of California law is made. And it's often by those same people. It's the governor, legislative leadership, and the labor unions. They kind of decide what they want gets past and they don't have to listen to anybody. They don't. You know, a whole bunch of people don't like the gas tax. It doesn't matter a whole bunch of people. I recently heard people saying that we should try to do another impeachment of Gavin Newsom. Are you
freaking crazy after how the last one went? Give me a break? Nobody look this and this is part of the California Republican delusion. I swear there's certain there's a certain brand of Republican who genuinely thinks that, like, how are we going to fix California? As if someone can like wave a magic wand and snap their fingers and have one campaign that fixes California. No, California is so unbelievably screwed up. And it's because people vote for him.
It's because anytime a Democrat runs for a state wide office, they get almost two thirds of the vote they get, they win sixty to forty. Every single time. Gavin Newso wins sixty to forty. All these people and that's the proportions. Tons of Californians keep voting for worse and worse outcomes. It's just it, and they're going to keep doing it. That they insist on
continuing to do it because the Republican brand is so unbelievably toxic. Because Democrats have controlled their public schools now for forty years, and there's nothing it's not gonna change. It's not gonna change, not anytime soon. It's not gonna change in one election cycle. It might not change in six election cycles. When we return. I want to just kind of explain this reality again. How thoroughly labor unions run the state legislature. That's next on The John Girardi
Show. Gather around, children, It's time for y' all to understand how the government works, or at least state government works in California. State government in California is run by the labor unions. A lot of people tend to think that California politics is run by dope smoking hippies or radical San Francisco you know, AOC types or things like that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's not what it is. You'll notice AOC is not from California, and her her arch
nemesis within the Democrat Caucus, Nancy Pelosi, is from San Francisco. The main players in quote the squad are not really California people. California Democrat politics is governed by organized labor. The politics of California is the politics of organized labor. Their priorities rule the day in Sacramento. How So, how thoroughly. Does Organize the Labor run it? Well, anecdotally, almost every single time I have gone to Sacramento and I go to the state Capitol, you
see the purple SEIU shirts every single time. But that's anecdotal. Well, they're there, Okay, does that mean they rule the roost? I don't know. I could go there every week if I wanted to, I could go there and I could wear a bright blue Right to Life Essential California T shirt. It's not just that they're there, it's they're the single bigg In
the aggregate. Organized Labor is the biggest contributor to Gavin Newsom's campaign. In the aggregate, organized Labor gives more to other campaigns than almost any other source. When you also look at the kinds of people in the legislature. This
is the really crazy thing. What Organized Labor has done is that they own the state legislature so thoroughly that instead of you know, doing the normal thing of you just give a bunch of campaign contributions to someone and then you expect they'll do what you want them to do by voting for your policies that you like. Instead, what they do is they just run labor union officials.
For those seats in the Assembly and the state Senate. There are a bunch of legislators whose career before entering the legislature was labor union official, whose career after leaving the legislature is labor union official. Lorena Gonzalez, Lorena Gonzalez was one of the most powerful members of the California State Assembly. She was the chair of the Appropriations Committee, which basically means if it's a bill that's gonna spend money, she had to okay it. She was an Assembly member from
San Diego. She was a labor union official before she got into the Assembly. She was a labor union official after she term limited out of the Assembly. That was her thing. The labor union doesn't even need to pay her. She is them. She is the entity that would have done the paying. They know whence they came, and they know whither they are going from
organized labor back into its loving bosom, like that's that's what's happening. So they own the legislature AB five, which got passed a couple of years ago, which was Loraina Gonzalez, by the way, who introduced that. Loraina Gonzales, former labor union official, most one of the most powerful members of the Assembly went on to become a labor union official. What did AB five
do. It changed the rules in California for who could be a contractor versus a part time employee, making all these people who would have been contractors into employees. Why because employees con unionize and independent contractors can't. That's what AB five was about. It was about increasing the power of the unions. When do schools open in California after COVID? It opened whenever the teachers' unions decided
they would be open. Was Gavin Newsom going to have one single standard for the whole state, him negotiating against all the teachers unions as a whole to mandate a single standard for reopening for across the state. Nope. No, He let every single individual school district duke it out between the school between the school's board of trustees, the school district's board of trustees, and the individual labor union in that school district, which gave the union's maximum power. And
why would Newsom do that? Because the labor unions give him the most money. He's the servant of his political masters, as are all these democrats, as are all politicians in a lot of ways. So that's how California politics works. That's why all these exemptions that were now scrambling to give to this twenty dollars per hour minimum wage for fast food workers rule, it's only going to be granted as SEIU deems fit, as the labor unions deem it fit.
If they allow it, then it'll happen. But the decision is going to be made again, It's gonna be made in a room by about seven people, Okay, Gavin Newsom, the leadership from the Assembly in the state Senate, and leadership from SEIU and organized labor. That's who's going to decide. And it's going to have massive consequences for a whole bunch of different industries, massive consequences for a whole bunch of people, maybe getting laid off,
maybe not getting laid off. Inflationary effects on the California economy, increase costs, going to continue to make the cost of living difficult for lower income people in California. It's going to continue to hollow out the middle class in California. Like we're just going to keep going. We're gonna keep going down the same disastrous road we've been on in California for decades because people keep voting for
Democrats and this is how they govern with these results. When we return a blast from the past talking about COVID, is long COVID actually real or are people just insane? We'll be back on the John Girardi Show. So one of the things I've noticed is that certain lefties who still want to agitate about COVID. And by the way, it's only huge lefties and you may have it's very interesting to see the kinds of people still wearing masks in public.
I don't know what it is. I feel like it's certainly when we went to I was in Los Angeles for a bit over the weekend, and there's certain groups of places that seem to have more liberal tilt where you'd still see people wearing COVID masks, people walking outside wearing COVID masks, which I think it would I thought was ridiculous when COVID was raging and thousands of people were
dying. That was that was completely insane even then. But one of the things I saw it recently in the Fresno Bee and other released and things, these articles about long COVID. So it's this idea that certain people who got COVID have experienced long term enduring symptoms, long term enduring effects from their original COVID infection, which for most people was, you know, three years ago. I know I got COVID at least once. Did I get it twice?
I might have gotten it twice. And one of the times when I got it, I genuinely the stuff tasted weird. All kinds of stuff tasted weird. Coffee tasted weird, Onions are smelled weird, smelled weird. Rather coffee smelled weird, and and I kind of lost lost certain senses with smell, and my sense of smell and taste. I kind of screwed up for a little bit, and for a decent amount of time, like probably about five or six months, my sense of smell was off, like coffee smelled
weird, onions and peppers smelled bad or weird. I think a lot of it had to do with stuff that was like I think garlic might have smelled weird too. A lot of stuff in kind of that family of vegetables sort of smelled weird. But I can't say it was the sickest I've ever been. I mean it was not fun. I had a fever for about a
solid I don't know, thirty six hours, but I was fine. And looking at the data, if you were under the age of I don't know, forty and in decent health, your odds of getting very sick from COVID were extremely slight. The actual only real risk from COVID was with older people, or people with other co morbidities, or people who were morbidly obese or
things like that. Those were the people who were actually really at risk from COVID and that we needed probably to just focus our attention on, Like if we were going to have a nationwide vaccination campaign, you know, if you think that is wise, what it should have focused on If anyone was the
elderly, the people most likely to actually die from COVID. There was no need for children to be getting vaccinated, especially after we learned, which we learned fairly quickly, that COVID vaccination does not actually prevent you from getting cod nor even we realized, did it really prevent you from spreading COVID. So once we learned that, the whole theory for universal vaxxation completely collapsed and we
should have just shifted. But if anything. Liberals just found it to be some sort of like signifier of orthodoxy or of being a good liberal person to have gotten vaccinated, and so it began this insane insistence upon it to the point where, like there were surveys of Democrat voters where like thirty percent of
them, I'm not making this up. I just read this this morning, Like thirty percent of Democratic voters back when COVID was raging, when this issue was raging, thought that parents should be should have their children taken away from them if their children were not vaccinated. Like a huge percentage of Democrats were willing to like say that people who didn't get vaccinated should not be allowed to
leave their houses or should be to go to camps. I'm not making this up that these were like actual polls done of Democrat voters where these huge percentages, even if they were minorities of Democrat voters, still it was these huge percentages of Democrat voters believed these monstrous things should be done for someone for the temerity of not getting a vaccine. Anyway. One of the things, though, that keeps coming back is long COVID, and it keeps coming back as
a concern among liberal writers. Even today, when we're in twenty twenty four, we're years out from COVID being an issue. And this is a This is a piece that was in the Fresno b about just about almost two weeks ago, talking about this long COVID forgotten in new recommendations. The vast majority
of all long COVID will come from just mild cases of COVID. Long COVID, defined by the CDC as a COVID nineteen infection that lasts longer than one month, can cause patients to have debilitating symptoms for years, even if they only had a mild infection initially. Because vaccines and boosters can't prevent all infections, instead working to prevent severe infections, it allows those with mild infections to continue to spread the virus to others and could increase the number of those suffering
from long COVID in the future. And liberals keep bringing up this topic, and I keep thinking, I don't know a single person in my life who has long COVID, and literally the only people I ever hear talking about this subject of alleged long COVID are liberals. So what's going on here? Do only liberals get long COVID. I'm not a doctor. I have a doctorate in law, not a medical doctor. Now, I'm the kind of doctor who's not very useful on an airplane when someone has a medical event. So
I am not a doctor. I'm not an epidemiologist. But I'm pretty sure that viruses do not actually care if you are registered as a Democrat or a Republican. You kind of just get it. Regardless of that, it's not really a factor for them. And I was thinking about this, I'm like, I wonder if there's a thing I could read about long COVID. Is it actually a thing? Well? Behold the piece in National Review, written by Noah Rothman. A growing body of research suggests that the affliction of long
COVID may of long COVID may be psychological. So he begins by talking about Ayana Presley, who was a member of the House of Representatives, and Ianna Presley is I think she's one of the lesser known members of the squad. I know at any she's very, very liberal. I know that, And she posted this thing on Twitter saying long COVID is a growing crisis for our
communities and we can't leave our long haulers behind. On long COVID Awareness Day, I'm calling on Congress to take action to treat long COVID and provide our long haulers the support and care they deserve. That was on March fifteenth. She tweets that Rothman writes the congresswoman's post seems to suggest that the afflicted for
whom she speaks are a forgotten constituency in America. Anyone operating under that impression has gone to great lengths to ignore the research into this disorder or the journalism focused on those who report experiencing its symptoms. So the first thing he points out is there is no way to test for quote long COVID, and the manifestations of the affliction are so broad and varied that they also pertain to any
number of underlying ailments that alone is not dispositive. It's not uncommon for autoimmune disorders, for example, to present in ways that confound researchers, and yet supposedly data driven analyzes of this particular disorder still managed to produce authoritatively determinative conclusions about its causes and effects. One study indicated that precisely five point eight million
children suffer from the long term effects of a COVID infection. Another indicated that the afflicted suffer severe muscle damage arising from microclots that all but preclude the prospect of engaging in any strenuous activity like exercise. Hm. Hm. The malady is said to have worse effects on the quality of life experienced by its sufferers than many cancers. Wow, that's the wrong week for me to read that
little comment. Those who struggle with long covid' brain fog, it is claimed, experience the level of mental impairment equivalent to the loss of roughly six IQ points. Well, maybe you got to be pretty stupid to believe you that you're suffering from long COVID. And the number of sufferers is on the rise.
A Center for Disease Control and Prevention study found that six point eight percent of respondents roughly seventeen point six million people are self reported long haulers or people who have long COVID, an increase of one point five percent from the CDC's October survey. The problem is that for however many million of us, we can't just move on, said one Nashville based attorney. As Joe Biden prepared to lift the states of emergency implemented in response to the pandemic. At some
point the doctors that are researching it may just give up. Where does that leave all of us? Researchers did not give up. While that should leave this malady sufferers hopeful, they're unlikely to welcome the conclusion some medical professional professionals
are reaching. For instance, one study of over five thousand adults conducted by researchers with Queensland Australia's Public Health Service recommended abandoning terms like long COVID altogether because they erroneously lead people to wrongly conclude that they have reason to fear the specific complications arising from a COVID infection. I want to make it clear that the symptoms that some patient, sorry this was from someone from Queensland, Australia,
so let me read it appropriately. I want to make it clear that the symptoms that some patients described after having COVID nineteen a rail criche, said Queensland's Chief Health Officer, doctor John Gerard hey Paison in a press conference last week.
What way of syon is that the incidents of these symptoms is now great in COVID nineteen than it is with other respiratory viruses and that they use this term long COVID is mislighting and I believe harmful after riding on a kangaroo and skewing a crocodile the dat Gerard and his team are preparing to present it next
month's European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Disease in Barcelona. Found at the rates of ongoing symptoms and functional impairment are indistinguishable from other post viral illnesses. So basically, here's what's happening. Long COVID is not really a thing. Some people have symptoms, They're all over the map as far as what the symptoms are. Different people claim different things, but there's no real evidence that
it's necessarily connected to their COVID infection. The profile, by the way, of people who allegedly suffer from long COVID is a source of skepticism. Few patients who do get treated are overwhelmingly white and affluent, enough to be able to take time off work to go to multiple appointments, and spend time online finding care and support groups. Political Politico wrote the vast majority are seventy eight point five percent of the deaths attributed to long COVID were among white Americans.
Self reported sufferers are far more likely to be women than men, and they are more than twice as likely to be middle aged than elderly. Around the same time, the journal Jama Psychology published research indicating there was a high correlation between suffering long COVID symptoms and struggling with quote pre existing psychological distress, even
controlling for false negatives and the possibility of fading antibody responses. Research in med rxiv found that many long COVID sufferers quote never had COVID nineteen to begin with. So there you go, long COVID complete Belgney. It's liberals giving excuses for not wanting to go to work. When we return. Donald Trump's secret to winning all fifty states in the November twenty twenty four election will be revealed right after this. This is the John Girardi Show on Power Talk. All
right, folks, how does Donald Trump win all fifty states? How does he bring about the greatest Republican landslide ever? Well, Trump gave a hint at this in a recent interview. He hinted that he might deport Prince Harry if he's elected. And this is the kind of thing that I love about Trump is that he can't just like like say, he can't just like no
comment on something. But he talks about, now, we'll have to see if they know something, and so like Prince Harry talked about taking illegal drugs in his memoir, which actually might be an immigration issue, and Trump says, no, we'll have to see if they know. We'll have to see if they know something about the drugs, and if he lied, they'll have to take appropriate action. Trump is quoted as saying in a preview of the
interview, So here's Trump. Trump didn't provide a clear answer about what appropriate action would me. Oh, I don't know. You'll have to tell me. You just have to tell me. You would have thought they would have known this a long time ago, the former president said. So, yeah, here's Prince Harry talking about how he took all these different illicit drugs. And Trump's like, yeah, well may yeah, maybe we will deport him. I don't know. This is this is uh, this is the genius
of Trump. It's both the genius and the madness of Trump is that he can't just not comment so many things where he like he's getting destroyed right now, all these lawsuits that he's going through, like this defamation lawsuit he's facing from Egen Carroll, the woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her, which, by the further I get, the more I find her claims very difficult to sustain. She has such a scarcity of evidence, and there's a lot
of evidence that indicates she had this continuing interest in Donald Trump. That just did not to me seem to make sense with someone who had been allegedly raped by Donald Trump, that like she was a big fan of The Apprentice. I don't know, can't I again, I guess it's hard to judge a situation that I've never been in like that, but I don't see how that
would make sense. Anyway. Trump's been getting slammed on this Egene Carroll thing because he keeps talking about her lawsuit, and then she keeps filing adding more claims to her defamation claims, and the judge keeps putting on bigger and bigger finds against Trump for defaming her, and he keeps talking about her. He can't just shut up, and it's costing him now tens of millions of dollars. But anyway, good for Donald Trump. Hinting that he wants to deport
Prince Harry. That'll be the way to get all fifty states to vote for Donald Trump, because pretty much everyone's sick of Prince Harry. That'll do it for John Grady Show. Seey'all next time on Power Talk