Shownotes
Kicking things off, the guys take a look back at pivotal moments in history—the anniversary of the first atomic bomb test (Trinity, 1945) and the publication of "The Catcher in the Rye." Using these milestones as a springboard, they dive into complex conversations around historical context, the ethics of censorship, and the importance of critical thought, especially when it comes to education and banning controversial books.
The episode quickly turns to Ohio’s current headlines—Governor DeWine’s massive veto override showdown, the debate over eliminating property taxes, and what flat taxes or major spending cuts could mean for Buckeye State residents. Tempers flare over government spending and what it would really take to balance Ohio’s budget: Should taxpayers brace for higher sales taxes, or is it finally time to cut government excess?
On the national front, the hosts break down a recent Supreme Court ruling affirming the president’s authority to hire and fire executive branch workers, and what that means for government accountability. Plus, they call out the double standards when government vs. private sector jobs are on the line and reflect on the massive challenges of getting meaningful spending cuts through Congress.
Finally, they sound the alarm on the rise of deepfake videos and AI-generated content, sharing why this technology poses a real threat to public discourse and personal reputations. With stories that range from viral Clint Eastwood hoaxes to the long shadow cast by social media, the guys urge listeners to sharpen their critical thinking and not fall for every meme or emotionally charged headline.
00:00 WWII Atrocities and Espionage
10:07 Banning Fuels Unhealthy Fascination
14:28 Southern Racial Ideology Pre-Civil War
18:45 Medicaid Expansion Controversy in Ohio
24:13 Ohio's Legislative Power Shift
29:38 Ohio Property Tax Reform Debate
32:51 Managing Personal Finances
39:25 "Public Funding for Biased Media?"
45:55 "Debating Trump Derangement Syndrome"
50:30 Deepfake Concerns Rise
58:19 Fatal Police Shooting: Pregnant Woman Killed
01:01:45 "Minivan Driver Causes Highway Pileup"
01:04:15 Salute to Military Families
Recorded at the 511 Studios, in the Brewery District in downtown Columbus, OH.
info@commonsenseohioshow.com
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/
Copyright 2025 Common Sense Ohio
Stephen Palmer is the Managing Partner for the law firm, Palmer Legal Defense. He has specialized almost exclusively in criminal defense for over 26 years. Steve is also a partner in Criminal Defense Consultants, a firm focused wholly on helping criminal defense attorneys design winning strategies for their clients.
Norm Murdock is an automobile racing driver and owner of a high-performance and restoration car parts company. He earned undergraduate degrees in literature and journalism and graduated with a Juris Doctor from the University of Cincinnati College of Law in 1985. He worked in the IT industry for two years before launching a career in government relations in Columbus, Ohio. Norm has assisted clients in the Transportation, Education, Healthcare, and Public Infrastructure sectors.
Brett Johnson, My Podcast Guy®, is an award-winning podcast consultant and small business owner for nearly 10 years, leaving a long career in radio. He is passionate about helping small businesses tell their story through podcasts, and he believes podcasting is a great opportunity for different voices to speak and be heard.
Mentioned in this episode:
Transcripts
Live Studio C. Common Sense Ohio. You can check us out at 5 channel, 511 if you want a podcast or you can just watch us today. Common Sense Ohio. You can check us out at common sense ohio show.com. big stuff coming at you. Stop the whining. There's a big veto override effort in Ohio.
Steve Palmer [:Why do we care? Well, because it's Ohio. We're Common Sense Ohio. The Skoda says the boss actually has the power to hire and fire its employees. Who knew? Who knew? We'll explore that a little bit. A nice 6 to 3 decision and then finally rescissions. Rescissions. Are we actually cutting costs? Well, not really. It's like killing an elephant with a BB gun.
Steve Palmer [:But at least there's something. Thanks to the Vice President of the United States. You know, those who follow the show know that I always do a this day in history sort of snippet. I'm not. I'm going to do that again today. It turns out this day in history, Norm, 1945, we tested the bomb out in New Mexico, Trinity. And this was. It's interesting because there's still this debate about whether we should have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Steve Palmer [:But I heard a different. There's some interesting takes on this. But no matter what you say, we needed to end that war, we needed to be done with it. I happen to believe that it was the right decision. I think we saved lots and lots of American lives and we stopped the war in its tracks, basically.
Norm Murdock [:Well, if the one part of Japan that we did invade was Okinawa, and if that battle was any indication of what it would be like to go onto the mainland and invade that, yeah, it would have been a total bloodbath. And they were training children and women to come out to the beaches and meet the US Marine Corps at the sea. I mean, can you imagine the carnage?
Steve Palmer [:I mean, not only Americans, but Japanese.
Norm Murdock [:That's what I'm saying.
Brett Johnson [:Well, and you know, we have the perspective that we can look at at 2020 vision. We can look backwards. I think it would be. It's one of those time travel things that would probably be a destination kind of go, okay, that would be a nice stop to kind of feel what.
Steve Palmer [:Was the mood at the time?
Brett Johnson [:What was the mood? Yeah. And yeah, there was just a lot.
Steve Palmer [:Of indecisiveness and understand the Japanese and the Germans killed more people than any other country, I think, in history. I mean, and I mean, killed like civilians.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:I mean, go check out the rape of Nanking for the Japanese and Look, I'm not. I'm not dissing the Japanese people, folks. I'm not doing that. But this was a war. This was a war. And, you know, we were the good guys. I don't care what anybody says. We were the good guys.
Steve Palmer [:The Nazis killed more civilians than any other. I mean, this is like we had. They were. They were the aggressors. They may have had their reasons, whatever they are, but. But we had our reasons, too. So we had to stop it. We stopped it.
Steve Palmer [:The war ended. We became allies. And I think there's also this interesting history going back or looking back on it. We didn't share this technology immediately with Uncle Joe Stalin. And I think we sort of thought by that show of strength, we could maybe establish a little bit more peace. We were wrong.
Norm Murdock [:Totally wrong.
Steve Palmer [:We were wrong. But there was some of that.
Norm Murdock [:He knew all about it in real time because he had spies within the Manhattan Project, you know, and, you know, a lot of people also. Of course, we know about all the horrors of Nazi Germany at places like Auschwitz, where, you know, ethnic cleansing was industrialized. But the Japanese, they had a unit. I think it was Unit nine, and they were doing experiments on Koreans and Chinese, medical stuff, you know, just as. Just as crazy in some respects as what the Nazis were doing to twins, using one twin as a control while they torture the other twin and then try to figure out what the outcome is. Sick stuff like that. And the Japanese were doing the same stuff. And I don't think Americans know about that as much as.
Norm Murdock [:And they also were not signatories to the Geneva Convention. So we had things like the Bataan Death March and all kinds of inhumanity, kinds of things that were done to captured US and allied soldiers. So it was brutal. And the idea. You just think of a mom and dad that sent their son off to war, and if their son was killed because President Truman didn't use the atom bomb, well, how would people feel about that?
Steve Palmer [:Yeah, right, right.
Norm Murdock [:Like, you mean you didn't use all the tools in the toolbox.
Steve Palmer [:And this is not to say that we. We did it because the Japanese deserved it, but it is to say that at the time. To your point, Brett, if you go back and stick yourself in that situation in history, and I don't care what all the movies and all the writers, everybody says now, you put yourself in history. It's not like they didn't turmoil over the decision. They clearly did.
Norm Murdock [:Oh, yeah, it was debated heavily.
Steve Palmer [:And, you know, it ended the war. Yeah, it ended the war. And by the way it was time.
Norm Murdock [:To end the war on the calendar. So there's also, like, a racial aspect to this. Like, oh, you would drop the atom bomb on the Japanese, but you wouldn't have done that, you know, to the German people. Well, as of July 16, 1945, the war was over in Europe.
Steve Palmer [:Well, that's right. We didn't have it.
Norm Murdock [:We didn't have it to use on the Nazis. If this was the test at Trinity in New Mexico in July 16, the war in Europe ended in May.
Brett Johnson [:That would be an interesting.
Norm Murdock [:Well, that is debate.
Brett Johnson [:Getting heady is like, would we have turned this on our European descendants? Maybe our ancestors, I should say. You know, I think the hatred for the Nazis and Hitler were so deep, it would probably would have maybe strategically, maybe.
Steve Palmer [:I don't know what we would have done. And I think a lot of that might have depended upon how close we were to winning the war conventionally.
Brett Johnson [:Yeah, true.
Steve Palmer [:And here's the other thing. And here's what Germany, with all its flaws was not doing. It was not gearing up to fight to the last man with women and children on the beaches. You know, in fact, as the German army was retreating, they were like, talking to the Americans, saying, come on, let's go fight Stalin. It's different.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah. Well, then there was a plot to kill Hitler. There were signs that within the Nazi regime, people were trying to take him out.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah, yeah. So who knows what we did?
Norm Murdock [:It's a little bit more complex.
Steve Palmer [:And we had our people there, like, Americans were there in prison camps. So you would have, like, if you're gonna blow up, if you're gonna drop that there, you're killing your own. And, you know, people would say, well, if you're not willing to kill, like, you're not gonna go kill your own. It's a war. Right? So anyway, it ended the war. We can debate it. It'll always be debated. But it ended the war.
Steve Palmer [:And the test was this day in history. The other thing that happened on this day in history, and I actually remember the timeframe in my life when I read this book. J.D. salinger's Catcher in the Rye was published today in history, and that was 1951.
Brett Johnson [:Interesting.
Norm Murdock [:Okay. Not always an easy book to find in your public school library.
Steve Palmer [:There's some content that's young man oriented, little racy. A little racy. Holden Caulfield.
Brett Johnson [:Is that a band? Is that a band book?
Norm Murdock [:Not banned.
Steve Palmer [:I don't think it's banned.
Brett Johnson [:I don't have that.
Steve Palmer [:You probably couldn't find it in a. You probably couldn't find it in a third grade library.
Norm Murdock [:As you know, like, Ohio has 800 school districts. It would be a school district by school district policy unless a given state had a ban. But generally what people are doing these days is they're putting that behind some kind of firewall so that only children that maybe have their parents permission can get certain books. It's gotten down to where Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, you know, because they have the N word in it.
Brett Johnson [:Yeah.
Norm Murdock [:Like those are behind a firewall.
Brett Johnson [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:I remember I read both those books. Obviously not obviously, but I read both those books in my teenage years, if not even like young teen years. I mean, I think we were like 12, 13. I don't know when I read, but I remember I didn't even have to read Huck Finn, but I did.
Brett Johnson [:Because you felt like it was a sequel.
Steve Palmer [:It was a sequel to Tom Sawyer. And I remember, like, forgetting to get off the bus because I was so enthralled with that. I mean, that may be one of the best books ever written.
Norm Murdock [:Oh, for sure.
Steve Palmer [:Huckleberry Finn. I mean, it is phenomenal.
Norm Murdock [:For sure.
Steve Palmer [:Phenomenal.
Norm Murdock [:And people use those words. And that was reality.
Steve Palmer [:And you know what mean?
Norm Murdock [:He's approving of those words.
Steve Palmer [:We're going to go down this rabbit hole a little bit. I never understood banning certain words if used in historical context. You know, to me, like in criminal law, and everybody knows what I do in criminal law. You have to have two things, generally for a crime. And this goes, look, study your Western legal system. You need two things. You need an actus reus, an act, and then you need a mens rea, the mental intent. Now, this is an oversimplification for you law students and lawyers out there.
Steve Palmer [:Send me a comment. I'll debate it with you all day long. It's an oversimplification, but intent matters. And here's how I describe this when I talk to juries. It's like all you have to do. I love kids. And watching kids interact is sort of like this little bubble of human interaction. You know, it's like watching puppies in a cage, how they nip each other and they find their boundaries.
Steve Palmer [:But when one kid does something to the other and they come tell mom and dad, it's almost always, you hear this, and he did that on purpose. You did that on purpose. Which it matters that you didn't just throw the baseball. You threw the baseball and tried to hit his nose. You did it on purpose. Or you took that from me on purpose. And you knew it was mine.
Norm Murdock [:Banning things often leads to a very unhealthy fascination with it. It's elusive, so therefore it's attractive. And I never understood that about banning Mein Kampf, for example, in Germany, foolish. And they just recently have loosened up on that. But all these modern Germans, they know about the Hitler regime and they know about their country's horrible past. And there's museums where you can see Nazi stuff. If you're in Germany, you can see their airplanes and the Nazi symbols and stuff from Auschwitz. You don't have to go to Poland.
Norm Murdock [:You can be in Germany and there's all kinds of stuff about the Final Solution. But then to withhold the key document that outlines the reasoning, as sick as.
Steve Palmer [:It was, look, it was bad reasoning then. It's still bad reasoning.
Norm Murdock [:You should study it.
Steve Palmer [:You should study it, study it.
Norm Murdock [:Or created all these skinhead guys who worship Hitler. And it's like, well, maybe if you had educated them and made them read that.
Steve Palmer [:So the classic parallel. And all our eras are in high school, you always had the kids who were writing all the devil signs and everything and their notebooks and whatever, and all the bands that were like, these devil. These guys weren't devil worshipers. But it was the pushback to say, you know what? F you, I can do this. I'm going to do it. And, you know, what are you rebelling against? What do you got right?
Brett Johnson [:Somebody had brought this up. And I don't know if this is an old idea or it just keeps resurfacing, but it's Tipper Gore and her labeling of albums. Why don't we do that to books?
Steve Palmer [:Yeah, I mean, look, just rather than ban.
Brett Johnson [:Because banning actually helps sales. Authors love being banned.
Steve Palmer [:Well, sure, it's an immediate attention, and.
Brett Johnson [:That'S not a negative or positive. I'm just saying it really doesn't hurt them necessarily.
Steve Palmer [:You should ban our show. Maybe.
Brett Johnson [:But it's like, why not put a label on it then, rather than banning? I mean, at least it's an outward sign to parents or anybody reading it. Okay, it's got some problems potentially.
Steve Palmer [:I don't necessarily have a problem with that either. So if a school is going to say, take Catcher in the Rye or Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. What's another one that always catches the ire anyway, Pick one. Pick one and say, look, these are Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Norm Murdock [:That's another one.
Steve Palmer [:These are books that have. Maybe you have to have a certain grade level or a certain maturity or just Say, look, with parent permission, you can read them. That's not banning a book. Now, it's an infringement a little bit on the access to the book, but it's a time, place and manner type restriction. I'd be almost okay with that. But if you ban something like Mein Kampf, then you have buried the very essential seeds that you need to study in order not to repeat.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah. The keystone for the entire Nazi movement is in that book.
Steve Palmer [:That's right.
Norm Murdock [:And to not understand it and not to see how warped the logic is in the book, but if you don't read it, then you don't know how warped it is.
Steve Palmer [:I read that book. I mean, I'm trying to think, probably my first year in college, I read that book. I read.
Norm Murdock [:It's a chaotic book.
Steve Palmer [:Machiavelli, the Prince. I read Leviathan, Hobbes and a bunch of John Locke stuff. It's like, these are fundamental works. I hate to call Mein Kampf a work, but it's a jumping off point. You have to study this stuff.
Brett Johnson [:Things that happened.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah, you have to study this stuff.
Norm Murdock [:Absolutely.
Steve Palmer [:And I didn't read it to in reverence. I read it in academia. You know, you read it to learn. And it wasn't taught to me in, like, here, this is good stuff. And I'm not even sure it was taught in bad stuff. It was taught Socratically back in those days, back Even in the 90s, I was still like. Like, I remember having group discussions. It was taught in my freshman seminar in college.
Steve Palmer [:We'd have group discussions about this. What do you think? What do you think? What do you think? Now, clearly everybody knew to sit on your hands. You're not gonna stand up and say, I love Hitler. But it was discussed at least. Like, what's wrong with this? Thought, what's wrong with this?
Norm Murdock [:For sure. So if you want to discuss the Southern mentality prior to the Civil War and during the Civil War, and you want to understand what racial thinking was in the south and in the north for that matter, by a lot of people about the subhuman alleged status of black people, if you don't read the speeches on the floor of the House and the Senate from back then when Southern representatives were getting up and saying, you can't let black people marry white people, you can't let black people be free. They are a subhuman group of people. And yeah, reading that stuff today is horrible. But if you don't know what came out of their mouths, you don't really understand the Civil War and Think even.
Steve Palmer [:Beyond that and even more abstract. If you're given literature or content like this and you're encouraged to discuss it, think of the parts of your brain that it opens up. Because this is, folks, what we call and this is what we don't have anymore. Critical thought, right? Yeah, this is critical thought. You were able to look at something, analyze what's good, what's bad, why these people had this ideology. Exactly where did it come from? And. And explore it. Because until you explore it, if I just tell you, norm, that's bad, don't do it.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah, it never worked for me. Even in math, it didn't work for me. We had a math teacher, and he was one of these guys that. Why do we do this? Because I always had to know why. I'd be like, why? Because I say so? Yeah, because I say so. Is what he used to tell me is like, well, that doesn't work for me, dude. I need to understand why it works.
Brett Johnson [:There is some. Matthew, just remember that. It's like, just believe it. It is.
Steve Palmer [:It is.
Brett Johnson [:It is what it is.
Steve Palmer [:You understand?
Brett Johnson [:That's math.
Steve Palmer [:I need to actually write out five lines and say, okay, that equals five and count them. That's oversimplifying, but I need to understand it.
Norm Murdock [:Right.
Steve Palmer [:And you have to get to the bottom of this to understand it, and then you are not doomed to repeat it.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:Anyway, so with that, we should probably jump into the show. Dewiner. So. Dewiner. Dewiner's veto. So what's going. I mean, look, I've not held back on my thoughts on DeWine over the years, and most of it stems from his Covid nonsense. And I suppose everybody's got similar criticisms, but.
Norm Murdock [:Well, he's just a rhino. I mean, let's just.
Steve Palmer [:He's an establishment guy.
Norm Murdock [:He's a rhino.
Steve Palmer [:Don't even use that term. Just an establishment guy.
Norm Murdock [:But he's always been a rhino. He's been one forever. And I knew him when he was the lieutenant governor and a senator from Ohio. And. And he's always been one of those weak. He's not a conservative. He's just not.
Steve Palmer [:He's not a conservative idea. And, you know, I hear tell, and I don't know this to be true, but I hear tell when I was involved in, believe it or not, when, during the COVID shutdowns, I was talking to some of the lawyers around the country, and one, particularly in Ohio, who was challenging some of this stuff in court. And it was big picture stuff. And I hear tell, I have no Verification of this, but I think it's true. And this attorney advised me that there might have been some emails to establish it. I never saw them. So please don't take it that I'm not offering proof. I'm just offering innuendo and rumor.
Steve Palmer [:The COVID establishment, the Fauci's of the world, actually chose Ohio because DeWine would have been receptive. Like DeWine was a Republican governor, but he was receptive to sort of this, you know, bigger picture regulatory control over things.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:And they chose Ohio to be one of the early test cases for the shutdown.
Brett Johnson [:They did set the stage for it.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah.
Brett Johnson [:He had the dailies. He had what's her face coming on stage and talking about neighbors.
Steve Palmer [:Dr. No, it wasn't burst.
Norm Murdock [:Oh I think meant nationally.
Brett Johnson [:No. Shoot.
Steve Palmer [:Whoever the doc was, the doc was.
Norm Murdock [:He was a holdover from, you know, the Democratic.
Brett Johnson [:He did set it up.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah.
Brett Johnson [:And he would be open to it.
Norm Murdock [:Well, he was the guy to follow.
Brett Johnson [:That line of thinking.
Steve Palmer [:And I think, I think it's true. I think and according to it fits his pattern.
Norm Murdock [:He was Obama's guy on rolling out Obamacare. Like he completely, you know, accepted the idea that, oh, for people that can't pay, we're going to, we're gonna add them into Medicaid. And that's why you have between one quarter and one third of Ohioans on Medicaid now, which is it was meant for poor people, you know, like single young mothers that basically have to care for a child, you know, and can't work. So they get Medicaid or somebody taking care of their elderly parent with Alzheimer's. Yeah. And they quit their job to fully full time take care of their parents. They should be getting Medicaid. But you've got like working capable adults now getting Medicaid.
Norm Murdock [:And it's, you know, finally in the big beautiful bill, there's a work requirement or you gotta be going to school or you have to prove you're looking for work. And you know, like somehow that's too onerous.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah.
Norm Murdock [:And so DeWine had that reputation with Obama during Obamacare that he was going to cooperate and he was one of the implement it.
Steve Palmer [:One of the soldiers.
Norm Murdock [:One of the soldiers. And Obama said, well, I like this guy.
Steve Palmer [:Anyway, so he tried to veto and now we're trying not to veto.
Norm Murdock [:Well, he vetoed 67 things and he vetoed things like the rate of increase was under the bill. One of the things he vetoed is that there would be a 20 mil floor and if you went past the 20 mils on the budget on the property tax in your county, there was a 20 mil floor. And anything above that was going to be implemented by a much slower phase in period. Then the other thing was local reductions would have been authorized by each county's budget committee. Would be able to independently look at the needs of the counties and the fire stations and other things supported by the property taxes and reduce the rates.
Steve Palmer [:Big picture, what we're looking at here is an effort or maybe a groundswell in Ohio to get rid of property tax.
Norm Murdock [:And some big organizations are behind it. So the Ohio Chamber of Commerce.
Steve Palmer [:Vivek touted this too.
Norm Murdock [:Ohio Chamber of Commerce, I mean, is behind this. The Ohio Realtors association, which has 36,000 members in Ohio, are behind this effort to override the veto. But it's gonna be a close call. You need 60 votes in the House. And the Republicans only have 65 members in the House. So they're gonna need at least 60. And they already have three that have publicly said they're not gonna vote for it.
Steve Palmer [:I mean, look here, the big picture.
Norm Murdock [:Here is it'll be a tough override.
Steve Palmer [:Let's say Ohio. Let's just kick this around for a minute. What's Ohio look like without property tax? And you can't. I just refuse. I don't refuse to. I have a problem.
Norm Murdock [:So you're referring to the upcoming constitutional issue that'll be on the ballot, veto or no veto.
Steve Palmer [:Or it's like if Ohio gets rid of property tax. We've talked about this a little bit because I know Florida, like there's other states, but, you know, Ohio doesn't have a whole big significant revenue stream to cover its budget. So like we're screwing with one side of the equation but not the other. And, you know, sooner or later they're going to have to come up with money to pay for the stuff that the people want.
Brett Johnson [:Right.
Steve Palmer [:And if it's not property tax, what will it be?
Brett Johnson [:Yeah, probably sales tax.
Steve Palmer [:Sales tax increase. It's pretty high already.
Brett Johnson [:Yeah, I mean, that's what's one easy one, one easy one to go through.
Norm Murdock [:And they just reduced to a flat tax the income tax.
Brett Johnson [:Income tax?
Steve Palmer [:Yeah, the income.
Brett Johnson [:So really sales is the kind of, the only. Well, we were sort of joking as we generate some kind of tax we don't even can't even think of right now.
Norm Murdock [:So part of the override, the thesis is that people know, even though it's not on the ballot in 2025, people know that there is this Effort. And I think this is why people want to override. There's an effort to put on the ballot next year a total elimination of the property tax. Like make it a constitutional.
Steve Palmer [:Well, sure. And like we said, Vivek is coming in running on that platform, among others, I guess.
Norm Murdock [:But yeah, so I mean, you know, I think people are scrambling right now to do something because DeWine really, I mean, he appointed this like blue ribbon committee to come up with something he says is better than this override. But it's got Pat Teebury, the former congressman from Ohio, people like that. But like, hey, at this point it's gonna get out of their hands. And the public, like they passed the abortion and the recreational marijuana last year. You know, the people with just a 51%, you know, just over 50% can add to the Constitution. This is the problem.
Steve Palmer [:This is the problem. This is the problem. This is where I have been pounding this table now for years.
Norm Murdock [:Exactly right.
Steve Palmer [:For years and years and years and years and those. On whatever the independent issue is. And this is a relevant discussion for bigger picture stuff that this will lead us into our discussion of the latest Supreme Court case too. Because what you have is people choosing issues, not the levers of power that are at play. And what I mean by that is if we choose an issue that basically says we're going to amend the, we can make it easy to change or amend the Ohio Constitution. And basically what we did is that we created an alternative legislative branch of government and instead of the Ohio Revised Code, we've got the Ohio Constitution. So now if we don't have the votes in Congress or in the General assembly as we call it here in Ohio, no big deal, we'll just amend the Constitution and do it that way. The problem is you can't just easily change it back.
Steve Palmer [:These kind of changes don't. They are rarely retracted. Rarely. They just become law. And it goes way back even to the casino era when, you know, we just. These constitutional amendments we're establishing where casinos are going to be. Yeah, it's just lunacy. These are legislative issues.
Steve Palmer [:I don't even think that should be. But these are legislative issues, not constitutional issues. So now look, you reap what you sow, folks. You reap what you sow. So if it's easy to do it for this, for abortion, now it's easy to do it for this. And the next interest group is going to come along and make it easy for that.
Norm Murdock [:Sure. And it's eye candy on the ballot. You know, you look at that and you go in there, you know, you're voting, and here's a measure that you can vote for to eliminate your entire property tax. I mean.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah, I'm on it.
Norm Murdock [:Right.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah, I'm in.
Norm Murdock [:You know, like, oh, wow, I get to get 15,000 more dollars.
Steve Palmer [:It may be a good idea, it may not be a good idea, but the idea of, like, our governmental structure is designed to air this stuff out on the General assembly floor. And anybody. I've done it. I've gone down and watched, like, our state legislature in action on an issue. I was working on gambling machines years ago, so the skill games and all this other nonsense. But I do a ton of legal defense and legal work on those kind of games. And I went down when there was a vote in the General assembly, and. And it was like, it gave me chills because you literally had guys standing up and gals actually, too standing up.
Steve Palmer [:I don't mean to exclude the gals because I said guys. So anyway. Shut up.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:We had folks standing up, making speeches.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:And I don't remember what it was all about, but there was one guy, I think he was on the side that I was advocating at that point, and he goes, I'm going to use my five favorite words, I told you so, or four favorite words, I told you so. And it was like this really sort of compelling oratory.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:And the idea. They were presenting facts, they were presenting evidence to support their side, and then they were voting on it. And then they took a break and they went into the side rooms and argued about it and came back and did more. But you can't do that for constitutional stuff. You know, it doesn't work that way.
Norm Murdock [:No.
Steve Palmer [:So it's just voters saying, yeah, I don't want tax check.
Norm Murdock [:Right.
Brett Johnson [:And because of this table, because of our discussions, I was for the 51%. But when you put it that way, in regards to. It doesn't get flushed out, it doesn't get discussed. It's just, hey, candy, like you said, eye candy, vote for it. I'm now not. I'd rather see the 60, 40 or whatever.
Steve Palmer [:I would much rather see the 60.
Brett Johnson [:And now that it's kind of shown that way, because of our discussions, like, yeah, we don't get to. And we don't get to learn about it as well.
Steve Palmer [:That's right. We're deprived. All we get are tv, TV ads.
Brett Johnson [:Our radio ads, or. Yeah. Which is all PR or memes are memes. Exactly. That really don't dive deep into the repercussions of Whatever decision's made.
Norm Murdock [:That's right.
Brett Johnson [:It's always going to be the ying and the yang.
Steve Palmer [:Always.
Norm Murdock [:You need 60% to override a governor's veto. So there's this idea that you need a super majority to do something extraordinary. Right, Right. But our Constitution in Ohio isn't like that. In Florida, it's 60%. Ohio, it's just more than 50%, which makes. That's a very low bar.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah. And this is relevant to what's going on nationally with the federal government. It's like, look, you want to create a constitutional amendment that gives people a right to abortion? Well, go get the votes.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:And amend the Constitution.
Norm Murdock [:In the federal system, it's three quarters. It's 75%.
Steve Palmer [:It's 75%. Go get the votes and amend the Constitution. The idea here is it shouldn't be a majority rule. Right. We have these baselines and there's checks and balances on it. And by using the Constitution as a pseudo legislation or as a pseudo revised code, you end up with these. It's crazy. And people choose issues without concern about how the same power will be used the next time.
Norm Murdock [:Exactly.
Steve Palmer [:So look, if you're on one side of the abortion debate and you favored having a constitutional amendment, fine, you got your amendment. But now guess what? We're gonna get rid of property tax. And now we're gonna get rid of this. Now we're gonna have marijuana, now we're gonna have casinos. Now we're gonna. It's like it never ends then.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah. So where's the funding for pregnancy centers gonna come from? Whether they're pro abortion or anti.
Steve Palmer [:That's right.
Norm Murdock [:If they receive some kind of state of Ohio subsidy. Hey, man, you start a flat tax and you have any kind of reasonable sales tax and then you eliminate all the property tax. And listen, property taxes are way too high. Like there were certain property taxes. There are right now certain property taxes like emergency measures and continuation. And what they do in some cases, by virtue of how you voted previously on those property taxes locally, they build into the language an unvoted increase. And that's one of the things the bill that DeWine vetoed would have taken care of. Any increase would have had to be voted on.
Steve Palmer [:Gotcha.
Norm Murdock [:But right now, under the current law, if you built it in to the fine print of a previous levy, it's like it has a life of its own. And the voters have no veto power. So I get that people are mad about the property taxes and they are too high in many cases. But like we're gonna throw the baby out with the.
Steve Palmer [:Well, this is a perfect. Look, I'm not suggesting for a minute that I love property taxes, nor am I suggesting it's a bad idea to get rid of property taxes. But what I am suggesting is we've got half the discussion here, if any. Look, we have a budget in this state that's premised on property taxes. And if we get rid of that, where's the money coming from? And I would much rather have a debate about where are we gonna cut the spending. Right. As opposed to.
Norm Murdock [:Right.
Steve Palmer [:Or at least at the same time.
Norm Murdock [:So a lot of people that are frustrated about government spending because, you know, we'll talk a little bit about the rescissions, Bill. But because government almost never cuts anything and even a cut in the rate of increase is called a cut in D.C. talk like, oh, that's right.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah.
Norm Murdock [:Like, you know, let's say the budget's a million dollars and let's say inflation is 10%. If the government only increases, say a million, say a million fifty thousand, they'll say that's a cut because it didn't fully cover the 10%. It's not 1.1 million, it's 1.05 million. And somehow, even though you're increasing it, it's called a cut. And people are so frustrated with this crap, with the federal and state government and their local governments, that there's this idea, now let's just take their money away and that will force them somehow to make these cuts. But that is a brutal. Like, that is a terribly awful way.
Brett Johnson [:To short sight it.
Steve Palmer [:Who would run? Look, I mean, maybe I'm going to get.
Norm Murdock [:That's like your, your spouse shopping too much at Kroger and you just take away the checkbook from your spouse.
Steve Palmer [:That's right. So who would like.
Brett Johnson [:So then you get those.
Steve Palmer [:Exactly where I was going with this. We all deal with this on our personal levels, whether you're married, whether you're single, but we have a household budget and any young individual joining the real world, joining the ranks, at whatever age you did it, you have this, this issue that you have to tackle. I have living within your means coming in, and I have X amount of dollars going out, but I want to do these other things. I don't have that. You have to fix this.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:And you don't just say, well, I'm going to get rid of groceries or the revenue stream. It's like, wait a minute. This is a discussion that has to happen.
Norm Murdock [:We fund our schools largely out of property tax.
Brett Johnson [:Well, and that's where I was thinking too.
Norm Murdock [:So Steve, what are you going to do? Eliminate schools.
Brett Johnson [:Right. The grocery example is that the grocery example is probably the best way to say it's like everybody considers their part of the budget. Groceries.
Norm Murdock [:That's right. Essential.
Brett Johnson [:Essential.
Norm Murdock [:That's right. Whether it's true or not, they consider it.
Brett Johnson [:I get it. I empathize. I totally get it. Because once you are being fed by the government money, you kind of. You built your business or built your organization or you built the support services around that. And once it's gone, you didn't have plan B.
Norm Murdock [:That's right.
Brett Johnson [:You didn't think about it or didn't have to because I get it.
Steve Palmer [:Anybody who's done this, like, look, honey, we want to buy a house or we want to go on this trip, we need to figure this out. So somewhere we need to cut some money and we can live without this. Yes, but it takes. There's multiple things that you discuss with this. And the idea is if that's happening on the general assembly floor, at least there's some discussion.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah, there's negotiation, compromise.
Steve Palmer [:We may not like it, but it's better than just amending the Constitution.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah, yeah. So that kind of leads us into this rescissions bill that passed the Senate Yesterday. It's only $9 billion, but if you check around, it is the largest rescissions bill ever passed under this provision that they used in US history. So we're like 36, 37 trillion dollars in debt and it was a 50, 50, 50% for, 50% against. And JD Vance had to break the tie and vote with his tie breaking vote to approve the rescission.
Brett Johnson [:I feel so old when you say it was only 9 billion.
Norm Murdock [:It's only 9 billion.
Brett Johnson [:We can't even wrap your head around 9 billion. But we're talking about. But we have to say only 9 billion because we're in the trillion. Trillion in the hole. Think about that.
Norm Murdock [:It's a drop of water in the ocean.
Steve Palmer [:That's sick.
Norm Murdock [:And they couldn't even get a majority to pass that. They needed a tiebreaker. And this was largely over foreign aid like USAID and cutting back the amount they're giving to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, stuff like that. These were doge cuts in this residual.
Steve Palmer [:And we could barely.
Norm Murdock [:It's so, it's so minor, you know.
Steve Palmer [:And you can understand why Elon is so frustrated by this because he goes and does all this work. It's like, look, this is so obvious just do this because in our. Like, back to your household budget. Holy crap. We've signed up. You've got a Netflix account, and I have a Netflix account. We need to cancel one of those.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:And it's like saying no to that.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah. Like, so take one of the powerhouses of public broadcasting, Boston's wgbh. Right. It's gigantic. And, like, they've put out great stuff over the years. Well, they can go get sponsors. They can do what CBS and NBC and Fox do.
Steve Palmer [:That's right.
Norm Murdock [:Go get Pepsi Cola.
Brett Johnson [:Because. Because once you eliminate the funding from the government, that also eliminates the regulations on what you can or can't sell.
Norm Murdock [:That's right.
Brett Johnson [:I guess I was looking at it from the aspect of npr, National Public Radio, that their budget from the feds is much smaller than the TV side of it. But once that money is gone, you don't have to limit what you do. I'm not saying public radio will turn into a commercial radio station. I'm not meaning that. But it opens up the opportunities. You can do more and probably make up that budget.
Norm Murdock [:Probably. Take Bob Vila's this Old House as an example. So that started out on public television. Right. And then when he commercialized it and started working with Sears and Roebuck and he's endorsing Craftsman tools and all that kind of stuff, he had to go to a cable channel and. And he became a multimillionaire.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah. That show blew up.
Brett Johnson [:That show blew up because of his branding.
Norm Murdock [:It's still going strong even though Bob Vila's going.
Brett Johnson [:And this Old House on public television still going strong. Decades strong.
Steve Palmer [:I guess the point is, it's like you get. This is the classic, right. You get reliant on the government team. You do, and that's it. It's good enough. And my mentor used to say about this stuff about getting too caught up in if you work for the government or if you're a government attorney, you get on the opium and you don't like. You're to your point, Brett. And look, I'm not faulting government lawyers.
Steve Palmer [:Good. Good for you. You've made a great career. Great. But you get limited in your scope, that's all you'll do. And then you've set your budget for that, and you don't ever see beyond that horizon because you don't have to.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:And you know, there's a reason why the free market works. It's because it. It unlocks our human creativity and ingenuity to go do more and do better.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah. But I guess you have to.
Brett Johnson [:Yeah. And I guess I get that they want to cut it now, but why can't it be a graduated over the next five years that it goes down to zero?
Norm Murdock [:Well, they're dropping all the, you know, all the funding of corporation. They're cutting it back.
Brett Johnson [:Cutting it back. So at least, and at least it gives those that are receiving the funds an opportunity going, ok, we know our budget's gonna get cut over the next five years, graduate, whatever it might be.
Norm Murdock [:Hey, Republicans have been talking about how biased public radio and public TV are for decades. And if they didn't see this coming, they were negligent as managers of public radio and public tv.
Brett Johnson [:Yeah.
Norm Murdock [:I mean, there have been hearings after hearings and they've confronted these public TV and radio people with their own statements, with their own blogs, with their own tweets and they're like, you said this about this official or that elected person, and yet you say today that you're unbiased, clearly you're biased. And if you're biased, go out in the private sector like Fox or MSNBC and go be biased all you want. But why should the public be funding biased news?
Steve Palmer [:Well, this is. And look, I always use abortion to showcase this. So I have a buddy that we argue about this. He goes, well, half the country is in favor of abortion. I said, well, that means the other half isn't.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:All right, so look, or maybe he says 60%. I see. That means 40% aren't. So why would you force the 40% to pay for something they're not part of? In other words, at least don't fund it from the government.
Norm Murdock [:Exactly.
Steve Palmer [:At least don't do that.
Norm Murdock [:Like the Hyde Amendment.
Steve Palmer [:The Hyde Amendment, which they've gotten rid of. Yeah. So at least don't force taxpayers who don't agree to fund it. And like, what's the government doing in that business anyway?
Norm Murdock [:That's right.
Steve Palmer [:So these are the things that. I don't know where we got off on this tangent, but the idea here is maybe, here's my saying, it's always easy to spend somebody else's money.
Norm Murdock [:Always.
Steve Palmer [:And it's almost. And once it's spent, we're seeing it, it's almost impossible to roll it back.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah. Well, leading into that Supreme Court decision, Steve, if you want to talk about that a little bit on the president, any president, whether it's Biden or Trump or Obama or George Bush, being able to hire and fire executive branch department employees.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah. Again, I think this was merely. And again, I can't stress this enough. This is merely a review of an injunction or a court order of a lower court preventing Trump from implementing his executive action to fire a bunch of Department of Education workers. Yeah, right. The other side, somebody says, look, we can't allow this. This is unconstitutional. Or he doesn't have this power, whatever it is.
Steve Palmer [:So they go into court and say, look, we are hereby suing President Trump because we don't think he has the power to do this. We want you to declare that for us. And in the meantime, please issue an injunction that says he's not allowed to go forward with this until we litigate it.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:That's where the legal issue has come to a head. It's not whether he's allowed to hire and fire. It's whether there's an injunction that should stay in place. Now, that said, baked into the cake of making the decision on the injunction is one of the criteria that says likelihood of success on the merits. So you're never gonna get an injunction on something if you can't win.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:Because, look, irreparable harm, there may be big cost. There may be. It may ruin your life. And that probably is happening. Just people are getting fired. I get it. It may be. But if you have no chance of ever winning the litigation, the court shouldn't stop the implementation of the action you're challenging.
Norm Murdock [:I would just say to my friends who work for any government, like, where is your bitching and where is your sympathy when some private corporation like intel fires 15,000 employees?
Steve Palmer [:That's right.
Norm Murdock [:Like, who does a big boo hoo operation when in the private sector, you or I or Brett? We lose our job if we're working at a factory.
Brett Johnson [:It is interesting how that empathy level is just.
Norm Murdock [:A government employee loses their job, oh, my God. It's a catastrophe.
Steve Palmer [:At least I. And I think all three of us have small businesses.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:And during COVID none of the government workers gave a rat's ass.
Norm Murdock [:No, they didn't.
Steve Palmer [:About the fact that my doors were shuttered.
Norm Murdock [:No. The Department of Health shut down restaurants all over Ohio.
Steve Palmer [:I lost my job. I didn't get paid for a year and a half. Lost my job, and nobody cared. And I was howling at the moon. And nobody cared.
Norm Murdock [:No.
Steve Palmer [:Because, you know, safety. Well, those. Most of the people who didn't care were getting a paycheck, so. And they were working for the government. Look, I'm not unsympathetic to people losing their jobs, but as you. Brett, you made the point earlier. It's like, look, you signed up for this. You know, this is like, you know, it's like the NPRs are the, it's like, listen, you want the government money, but it comes with a condition.
Steve Palmer [:It always does.
Brett Johnson [:Always does.
Norm Murdock [:Right.
Steve Palmer [:And you.
Brett Johnson [:Every paycheck comes with a condition.
Steve Palmer [:That's right.
Brett Johnson [:Frankly, government or private sector, I mean.
Steve Palmer [:At one time, harsh it may be, but you signed up for it.
Norm Murdock [:I mean, at one time, the city of Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland had people out shoveling up horseshit in the public's roads and ditches. Right. Those jobs became obsolete when cars came along. So you fire the shit shovelers. Right?
Steve Palmer [:Right.
Norm Murdock [:Like, okay, you know that. That's your job. And when it becomes obsolete, you. You're obsolete. Well, that happens in the private sector all the time.
Steve Palmer [:All the time.
Brett Johnson [:I wonder if, and I know this scenario would have never happened, but let's play this out, that if it weren't Trump firing them, if it were Biden firing them or Obama firing them, or one of the Bushes, Clinton, would it have been such a, oh my gosh, what are you doing?
Norm Murdock [:Bloodletting. Right.
Brett Johnson [:Would it have been this type of a spotlight on people walking out of a building crying, carrying boxes? Would that have happened if it weren't but for Trump?
Steve Palmer [:I don't think so.
Brett Johnson [:I don't think so either. So I think it's getting blown out of proportion because of him.
Steve Palmer [:It is. I agree with you. And this is like, you can't. I think you're so right. If you look at some of the Doge stuff that they went in and did, like on paper, there's no way you can disagree with it. You just can't.
Norm Murdock [:Right.
Steve Palmer [:I mean, if we're spending, it's like the old thousand dollar hammer in the middle. It's like, and I get it, I'm not going to go into the weeds of what Doge was doing, but a lot of it was like that and, and Elon was like, we're employing 500 people here and they don't even know. They can't even tell me what their job is. Anybody who runs a business would say, ah, ah. Like, you can't argue with that.
Norm Murdock [:He asked them to write a paragraph describing their job and they couldn't. And they objected to doing that, or.
Steve Palmer [:They couldn't either way. And Brett, your point is this. It's like, all right, if Obama was doing this, and I think he did do some of this, if I'm not, I may be wrong.
Brett Johnson [:I think you're right. Some of this, I think he did.
Steve Palmer [:Do some of this.
Norm Murdock [:Certainly Clinton did some of this. Newt Gingrich, the era of big government is over. Remember that.
Steve Palmer [:It's this Trump derangement syndrome. Because Trump did it. It's bad. And the bigger picture here is Trump is doing quite a bit. I had this conversation. We were at a party the other night, and I had this conversation, and it's like, look, you can disagree with, and I do disagree with some of the stuff Trump does. Maybe not the same stuff that those who don't like him are disagreeing with, but look, there's certain things that are just sort of common.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:I mean, look, Iran doesn't have nukes, and we're not at war. It's hard to say that's bad.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah, exactly. Or.
Steve Palmer [:And even if you do find something, just because Trump did it, had Biden have done that, we'd been cheering.
Norm Murdock [:See, I'd rather talk.
Steve Palmer [:And I would have, too.
Norm Murdock [:I'm with you. I would rather talk about the issues. I'm not worried about whether it's Trump or Biden. Like in the big beautiful bill. There are some really terrible ideas in that bill.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah.
Norm Murdock [:You know, and I get it like it's making sausage. And last week's show, Steve, when you were not here, but Brett and I talked at length about this crazy thing they did for newborns where they're gonna give every newborn baby, establish an account for them, a Trump account, they're calling it, of $1,000. And we know where that's going. In 20 years, that'll be $50,000.
Steve Palmer [:Right. And once you open that can of.
Norm Murdock [:Worms, it's total socialism. You're giving people money because they were born.
Steve Palmer [:It's stupid.
Norm Murdock [:It's so stupid.
Steve Palmer [:First of all, it's not enough now to give anybody any substantial help, and it won't be enough later. And no matter how much you give it, just. It's the camel in the tent.
Norm Murdock [:Exactly. And guess try to get rid of that program.
Steve Palmer [:Right. Once that starts. Well, my kid got it. How come I can't?
Norm Murdock [:Exactly. And they're not going to go backwards because our children are liberated now. They're not going to give us that thousand bucks with interest. So where's the equal protection?
Steve Palmer [:Yeah. So if I'd have gotten a thousand, even if you adjusted for inflation, say, what is it, 500 when I was born, or 250 if I had 250 invested. Let's do some. I want that money.
Brett Johnson [:Yeah, exactly.
Norm Murdock [:And because it's such a pittance, as you say, it will inevitably grow.
Steve Palmer [:It has to, because it's not enough.
Norm Murdock [:Oh, well, that's not enough.
Brett Johnson [:That's not enough. Yeah, well. And I don't know if you brought up the big, beautiful bill. I don't know if you caught this or not, but apparently congressional staffers added to the big, beautiful bill.
Steve Palmer [:Oh, really? Okay.
Brett Johnson [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:Oh, the congressional staff, yes. They were making some changes, and Trump didn't like some of those changes.
Brett Johnson [:I heard one was, I thought this was really interesting about gambling, and I didn't even know this existed. So, okay, so bettors are currently able to deduct 100% of their gambling losses. So they only pay taxes on their winnings. But starting next year, only 90% of gambling losses can be deducted. So if a professional gambler wins $100,000, then loses 100,000 that same year, they're gonna have to pay taxes on that.
Norm Murdock [:Right.
Steve Palmer [:And that's been a law firm, and.
Brett Johnson [:It was added out of the 900. A staffer added that.
Steve Palmer [:It just is.
Norm Murdock [:Because they can.
Steve Palmer [:Because they can.
Brett Johnson [:Because they can. That's the more of 900 pages. They're just slipping.
Steve Palmer [:Shit. They slipping a little.
Brett Johnson [:Isn't that incredible? I just think it's putting light on this, you know, this whole process of putting these little instances of like, wait a minute, a congressional staff, and then.
Norm Murdock [:They have to go back and try to clean it up. But you got to get a majority to do that.
Steve Palmer [:This is like the congressional achievement of the year. There's always one, right?
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:One big budget bill and that's it. Right. That's all they do all year long. And then they have hearings that are just for show.
Norm Murdock [:And if you talk to your retail level congressperson, they will tell you that the leadership, whether it's Nancy Pelosi or Mike Johnson, they're negotiating all this with the White House and the Senate. And then, like you say, staffers are stuffing stuff because nobody knew about it. No, no, they don't get a chance to know until like, okay, the votes this morning.
Steve Palmer [:And what am I supposed to vote? No. Because of that.
Norm Murdock [:That's right.
Brett Johnson [:Even if they did know exactly, you.
Norm Murdock [:Know, you agree with 90% of it, 10% atrocity, and you got to take the whole bitter pill.
Steve Palmer [:Anybody who's like, go through a divorce, go through a divorce, and you go to court and this kind of crap gets thrown at you at the last minute, and you see it all. Wait a minute, you want that, too? It's like, all right, screw it, take it, whatever.
Norm Murdock [:Or a real estate closing.
Steve Palmer [:Or real estate.
Brett Johnson [:Real estate.
Norm Murdock [:Well, you got to pay the fee for the buyer.
Steve Palmer [:Wait a minute. It's 500 more. All right, all right.
Brett Johnson [:The table. Just do it. Exactly. Oh, perfect. Another too good. Great examples. Exactly.
Norm Murdock [:One of the topics, guys, if we want to talk about this, I'm a little troubled about these deep fake videos that are now really commonplace. And one came up about Marco Rubio, right. Where AI duplicated his voice and obviously his face, and he's saying the most outrageous stuff. And I can just imagine some foreign country, you know, seeing him give. Seeing AI give a completely fabricated speech. And it's just bs. And there's another one going around where Clint Eastwood is supposedly on Jimmy Kimmel's show. And it's completely.
Steve Palmer [:This is scary stuff.
Norm Murdock [:It's made up. And he. And apparent, you know, like what they did with Clint, is he in this made up, fabricated AI scene is they disagree. And Clint Eastwood says, f you, Jimmy. Except he says what the F is? And then he gets up and walks off the set. And I can't tell you the number of people that I have seen that, like, reposted that it's real and it's not real.
Steve Palmer [:It's not real. Yeah. This is a very, very disturbing trend. It is disturbing because look, we are on video weekly.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:People could make us say almost whatever they want.
Norm Murdock [:Exactly. Right.
Steve Palmer [:And what are we going to do about it?
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:Like, really? I mean, how are you going to prove it?
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:What are you going to do about.
Brett Johnson [:It without going through a legal and an expensive battle?
Steve Palmer [:We don't have the money for that.
Brett Johnson [:Your reputation is tarnished immediately. You don't grab that back.
Steve Palmer [:And you cannot. Even if you had all the money in the world, you can't call that back.
Norm Murdock [:You can't. Have you seen all the fake pictures of, like, Trump and Epstein, for example?
Steve Palmer [:They're.
Norm Murdock [:They're showing these guys, like in hot tubs together and all this stuff.
Steve Palmer [:Some of them are obviously fake and parodies and spoofs. So the courts are going to have to. The courts are really going to have to figure this out. Because on the one hand, you know, remember the. Who was the hustler?
Norm Murdock [:Larry Flynn.
Steve Palmer [:Larry Flynn did this with Jerry Falwell.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:And showed Jerry Falwell screwing a horse or a dog. I don't remember what it was.
Norm Murdock [:A chicken or something.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah, it was something just sort of foul. And that was a parody. And the court, I think, basically in that case said, look, Falwell's a public figure and this was fair game and whatever. So there's gonna have to be some line drawn. Like, look, we're in public. We put ourselves out in public. But it's clearly not a parody. The Clint Eastwood thing is not a parody.
Steve Palmer [:It's not obvious that it's a parody. It's not obvious that it's a joke. It's not obvious that it's not parody.
Brett Johnson [:Some of this is done just to prove it can be done.
Steve Palmer [:That's right.
Brett Johnson [:Right now.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah. You know the other thing I see on Rogue, I see this regularly where people will take a snippet from Joe Rogan's show and say, yeah, pull up that video. Let's look at that video. And then they play a video. But I've been watching this because it's the same, hey, pull up that video. Always. But it's always a different video. And that's like the simplified version of this.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:They've just cut in to make it look like Rogan's talking about what they want him to talk about.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:And, you know, I think about this from Rogan's standpoint. I'd be like. I'd be pissed. Be like, look, I didn't support what you're doing here. This is nothing I wanted to endorse.
Brett Johnson [:I think the AI Video thing could change the social media landscape over the next couple years. It could implode. Social media could implode.
Norm Murdock [:I agree with you.
Brett Johnson [:Because why are we watching this crap? You're finally going to realize, why am I watching this stuff? I don't even know if it's real or not.
Steve Palmer [:You don't even know if it's real?
Brett Johnson [:Yeah, I think it's going to implode and we're going to access stuff like we're creating in a different manner behind a paywall, behind something that's at least protected. It's like, I don't know how, but.
Norm Murdock [:So where you're going, Brett, is like, when we really do need to listen to one of our elected leaders, like the president or whoever it is, or a foreign. Like Putin or Zelensky, if somebody is faking them. And yet maybe that one time, like, it's real, we won't know it's real.
Steve Palmer [:Well, remember, Remember the. Like, I wasn't alive at the time, but there was huge contra. This goes way back. Orson Welles did this with the War of the Worlds. Exactly. He plays this radio show.
Norm Murdock [:That's a great example.
Steve Palmer [:And everybody thought it was real and it was fake. It was all fake.
Norm Murdock [:Even though. Cause they would miss the lead in. Ladies and gentlemen, this is A fictional broadcast for the next two hours. And then you tune in 10 seconds after that disclaimer and then you think it's real.
Steve Palmer [:You think it's real. And I wonder, and I have said here at the table, many, many times in our lives in the last decade, we have lived through what I think will be recorded in history as the two greatest scandals of all time. One is the government response and BS around Covid and how that was trumped up and how that was, no pun intended, and how that was suppressed even, and the truth was suppressed and agendas were promoted. I think when all that finally plays out. And it's still continuing to play out.
Norm Murdock [:Yes, it is.
Steve Palmer [:When all that finally plays out, people realize how insane that really was. And the second biggest scandal is Biden and his incompetence. And I don't mean. I don't mean incompetence in like the sense you're thinking. I mean like mental. Truly mental incompetent.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:Now this is coming out with his auto pen and the pardons. It's like, I don't think. And it reminds me, like, what if we had this technology during the Biden era as it is now, people would have him on stage giving speeches and making it look totally normal.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:Like we could invent a president.
Norm Murdock [:You could. Absolutely.
Steve Palmer [:And it's like, where did, like, think how scary that is.
Norm Murdock [:Totally. Yeah, right.
Steve Palmer [:That's Big Brother.
Norm Murdock [:Like put a hologram of him in the bowels of Congress giving a State of the Union speech and it's not even a real person.
Steve Palmer [:Well, you wonder.
Norm Murdock [:It's just a projected.
Brett Johnson [:Well, and I think the people that watch us and listen to us probably are smarter than most just because you listen and follow us. But it's that we have to stop looking at something and all of a sudden sharing because. Oh, my gosh. Because your emotions drive you to share. Because this is such crap. Oh, my God. Did you hear. Take a beat and really look at what you're trying to share because you're only adding to the cacophony of BS that's out there that it's not true.
Brett Johnson [:We have the control to stop this.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah, take a look and think. Think about it like this knee jerk emotional response, particularly from our youth, because youths are typically knee jerk and emotional. It's not a criticism, it's a reality.
Norm Murdock [:It's true.
Steve Palmer [:And I remember the George Floyd video came out and all this stuff and people were sending it to me and the first thing I thought was, wow. But then I thought, I wonder what's going on? Yeah, and I'm not saying it was right, I'm not saying it's wrong. But my first reaction even to that was I need information here in order to form an opinion. And that's my legal education. I think that's me spending years in a courtroom hearing stuff and analyzing stuff with a premise and basis of a Socratic education. We need to get to that. We need to get to that. So I wonder if that Clint Eastwood clip is real.
Norm Murdock [:We need to look at that.
Steve Palmer [:I wonder why he did that.
Norm Murdock [:And this was another really terrible thing that Obama did in particular when there were two people of different races involved in somebody's death.
Steve Palmer [:Well, the famous Boston break in like that situation.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah. What was his name? Zimmerman down there in Florida who got cleared and you know, Trayvon Martin and all. It just, you know, you have to pause the shooting in Ferguson.
Steve Palmer [:You have to pause because some of them are racist and bad. Some of them are not. Some of them you don't know. And you just, you can't jump to a knee jerk conclusion. It's sort of like what we're talking about. This comes right back home. It's what we're talking about the Congress or the General assembly floor. You need to debate these things and ask questions and figure out what's really going on rather than take the clickbait.
Norm Murdock [:Well, we have our George Floyd situation with that. What's her name? Tamara, can't remember her name. The pregnant 19 year old mother. She had children in her car out there in Blendon Township in the Kroger parking lot. She had stolen liquor as a six month old pregnant lady. If she had just surrendered to the police, she probably would have served no jail time as probably some kind of suspended thing and she would pay a fine instead because she floored the car at a cop standing in front of the car. He shot and killed her, which caused the baby to die, of course. And now that has to be considered by a lot of people.
Norm Murdock [:Well, it's instantly a racist thing because the cop's white and she was black. And like you're saying. Steve, slow down.
Steve Palmer [:Maybe it is.
Norm Murdock [:Let's hear the evidence.
Steve Palmer [:Maybe it is and maybe it is and maybe it's not and maybe it's.
Norm Murdock [:Both and maybe it's both. So slow down. We don't need people to racialize or pick one version of reality versus the other until let the facts come out.
Steve Palmer [:A very dear friend who sent me the Floyd thing and I'd already seen it, but sent it to me And I said. I said, I wonder. My question to him was, I wonder if this is racially motivated.
Norm Murdock [:Exactly.
Steve Palmer [:And I would need to know more. And he goes, I don't. Yeah, I don't.
Norm Murdock [:He was sure of it. Sure of it, sure of it.
Steve Palmer [:And look, I'm not saying he's wrong. I'm not saying he's right, but being sure of it, seeing a clip, seeing a meme, seeing Clint Eastwood, you can't do it anymore because there are so many agendas.
Norm Murdock [:Well, to your friends, you know, like I would say to him, well, pull back the lens on that scene, and you'll see there was a. One of the four policemen that went to prison. One. One was a guy with his knee on his. On his head. But there was also a black female, I believe, policeman, an Oriental, not sure, of Korean or Japanese descent. It was a diverse group of police, but the guy whose knee was on his neck was the white guy. So it had to be racial.
Steve Palmer [:It had to be racial. And look, maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was motivated by racial. I don't know. And I'm not saying it's not. I'm just saying you can't jump to conclusions, or many things can be true at the same time. And the problem you run into here is I think maybe it's this attention span that we've created that is so short.
Norm Murdock [:Well, we want to get right to the nub.
Steve Palmer [:Like, even me, there was never a time in my life until about three years ago that there wasn't at least two books on my nightstand. And now I get my. It's like it's not there. I rethought I had to think about this, like, I'm reading books on tape. So I'm not, you know, it's not the same. And I'm not spending the time really digging into stuff that I used to. And I think it's because of this 12 angry men.
Norm Murdock [:You got Henry Fonda saying, well, wait.
Steve Palmer [:A minute, wait a minute.
Norm Murdock [:Let's slow down.
Steve Palmer [:One of my favorite.
Norm Murdock [:I know y' all want to go home and drink a beer, put your feet up.
Steve Palmer [:It's so hot in here.
Norm Murdock [:Right? You know?
Steve Palmer [:Right.
Norm Murdock [:But, yes, slow down and analyze, because somebody's life is at stake here, you know?
Brett Johnson [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:Yep.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:All right. Yeah, we got to wrap it up. Well, good and bad.
Norm Murdock [:I want to do a real quick, if I can, and I'll do this real quick. So the loser of the week to me is this unnamed female driver of that red minivan. That caused this massive pileup of four cars behind her. She stopped at the i670 exit on i71. She stopped on i71 in the middle lane in a red minivan. And she came to a cold stop and there's four cars behind her that come sailing up. And the final guy who came up like he didn't realize that they were stopped and he piles in and people had broken ribs and all kinds of injuries. She fled the scene.
Norm Murdock [:And this happened on April 30th. And the Columbus Police Department, all they had was this fuzzy ODOT video and they could make out just barely a certain decal. And this Columbus police guy, probably using AI something called their Flock files, he goes into the Flock files and finds 254 red minivans in Franklin county that could have been there. They finally eliminated everybody but one minivan because of the placement of a decal.
Steve Palmer [:That's awesome.
Norm Murdock [:Scary on the back. And they contacted this lady and she said, yes, that was me. Now, of course she's pleading not guilty to the third degree misdemeanor of reckless operation. But yeah, so she's a total loser, you know. And so the winner for me was the police officer who was assigned that case. He did for him. He found the perp.
Brett Johnson [:Yeah. Good for him. Winner, I think finally Trump's turning up some steam on the Ukraine, Russia war.
Steve Palmer [:Yep.
Brett Johnson [:We gotta get this done.
Steve Palmer [:I was going there too.
Brett Johnson [:This has got to get done. And Loser Houston. Answer some emails, respond to press. I don't get this appointment.
Norm Murdock [:Senator. Senator Houston.
Brett Johnson [:Yeah, I don't get it. This dude's clocking in, clocking out, saying nothing, doing nothing.
Steve Palmer [:Zippity doo dah.
Brett Johnson [:Zippity doo dah. Dude, if you're a short termer and you're not going to go for the seat again, I get it. But you got to do your job.
Steve Palmer [:You still have a job. You've been hired to do a job.
Brett Johnson [:Come on.
Norm Murdock [:You know, anyway, and he's one of the guys that pushed Jobs Ohio, another one of our favorite programs.
Brett Johnson [:He just is non responsive to anything.
Steve Palmer [:So anyway, I mean, look, I don't necessarily have a thing I hate this week, but a thing I love. You know, I had. Norm, you were there. We had a little send off party for my son who's going off to the army. And it dawned on me this morning that, you know, I've got a few more days with him before he's off to serve his country and lots of other parents are probably going through the same thing because it's about that time you signed up after high school. It's like, if it isn't Monday or Tuesday, it's kind of like it's already happened or it's coming up. So hats off to all you folks who not only have signed up, but the families and the parents who are supporting that.
Brett Johnson [:And a big thank you for doing it.
Steve Palmer [:And a big thank you.
Norm Murdock [:Recruitment in the military is way up now.
Steve Palmer [:Yep. So, I mean, that's. And just having. Being around family, being around friends, and watching people celebrate not only grad. Like, we still have a community. Right. We still have it. And with all this, the memes and all the nonsense and all this other crap, nobody was on their phones.
Steve Palmer [:Nobody was arguing about politics, whatever. It's like there was just a community coming together and talking and catching it.
Norm Murdock [:I watched the first half of the Deer Hunter last night. It's one of my favorite movies, and it's about three. Three young men who go in and sign up to go to Vietnam. They didn't get drafted. They actually went in and enlisted. And it reminded me of your son and his friends at that young, tender age. And they're being silly and doing crazy.
Steve Palmer [:Stuff, and life's about to kick him in the backside.
Norm Murdock [:That's exactly right.
Steve Palmer [:Watch the second half of the Deer Hunter and then you'll see the first half.
Norm Murdock [:It's a serious decision.
Brett Johnson [:Yeah.
Norm Murdock [:So, you know, I honor your son. He is a magnificent young man.
Steve Palmer [:Well, you just don't know him very well. No. All right, look, common senseohio show.com, if you got a topic you want us to cover, if you want to be a guest at the table or even on Zoom, we can accommodate that. If you've got something that you want to say, or if you think you can hang with Norm and take on a debate, I would love to see that, too. Good luck. Anyway, coming at you right from the middle each and every week.
