Welcome to Common Sense Ohio, where rivers run backwards, day is night, and the unexpected is just part of the landscape.

It's April Fool's, after all!

Hosts Steve Palmer and Norm Murdock, joined by guest Troy, dive into a whirlwind of current events, hard-hitting legal analysis, and local Ohio news, all with their signature common-sense edge.

This episode explores the history and quirks of April Fools' Day, then transitions to a breakdown of significant Supreme Court cases, including challenges to birthright citizenship and a major free speech decision from Colorado. Our hosts debate constitutional intent, explore the evolution of common law, and probe the shifting stance of organizations like the ACLU.

They also examine Ohio's new legislation banning intoxicating hemp products, discuss federal-local law enforcement partnerships, and highlight the role of protests and democracy in our society.

Wrapping up with winners and losers of the week, reflections on faith, and a glimpse into Ohio’s sports scene, this episode is a lively, thought-provoking mix of the absurd, the serious, and the surprisingly uplifting.

Harper CPA Plus

Key Takeaways:

1. Free Speech Still Reigns Supreme
2. History Shapes Today’s Legal Landscape
3. America’s Role in Innovation and Security

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.

All right, here we are. Common Sense Ohio rivers are running backwards. Day is night, night is day. Norm was at a no Kings protest. I'm not sure why Norm, but Norm was at no. Now he's wearing a crown. I don't know what to say about any of it. It is April Fool's though, so I suppose that that is my weird as my weak version of an April Fool's joke.

So it is Common Sense Ohio. You can check us out at Common Sense Ohio show.com coming at you from 41 26. The first quarter is gone. It's in the books. For you business folks out there, that means that if you're on time, your business tax returns were filed, ours were. Your personal taxes are well on their way. Mine I believe was completed and I'm hitting go this week and all that's because I have Harper plus Accounting on my side. I know lots of people.

They're like, oh, we extend ours, we don't get ours till September. I don't even know anything about no extensions. We got our stuff on time, we got our stuff organized. And I'm already planning for next year. Harper plus Accounting. Our accountant. My accountant could be your accountant. Check them out@harperplus.com anyway, all, let's get to it.

So it is April 1st. I thought it was an interesting to do a little bit of history on April Fools. Apparently there's a couple theories about why we have April Fool's, norm. 1, it goes back to the Julian versus Georgian calendar. In 1582, when France adopted the Georgian calendar, some of those folks still celebrated the new year in April and eventually they were classified as fools. Others say it is about the ancient Roman festivities at the end of March honored Cybella involving costumes and mocking. And then some of course say it aligns with the change of the seasons which can quote fool the people into thinking the weather is done and the seasons have turned. Whatever your reason to celebrate April Fools, to at least be kind to your neighbors, I suppose.

Absolutely.

One couple other quick hitters on April 1st that I thought were interesting. Adolf Hitler was sentenced to serve five years in prison because of the beer hall pooch. He did six months or eight months or something like the nine months, I guess.

And that's where he wrote Mein Kampf.

That's where he wrote Mein Kampf. That's right. So Steve Jobs founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. Marvin Gaye was shot by his father. I remember that very well. And then just a few days ago in 1980, I can't remember the exact day. Was it March 20th? Whatever. John Hinckley Jr.

Shot Ronald Reagan. Sort of shook up the world a little bit.

To impress Jody Foster.

To impress Jodie Foster. Sort of crazy.

Insane. But anyway, he's out now.

He is out.

He's. He's living with his parents or he was released to their custody.

Yep.

Under some kind of parole agreement.

Yep.

He sells artwork and makes music.

I'm sure it's high quality stuff. I don't know. He's just Troy shaking it off. Sort of like Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden's artwork, apparently the value has dropped immensely. Who knew? I mean, just four years ago his artwork was worth millions and now it's worth nothing. I. I don't know what happened.

You guys maybe leave us a comment if you got an idea why Hunter Biden's artwork is no longer valuable.

Gee, it's a mystery. Also revolutionary, you know, founding of America.

Yeah. And why? Because we're 250 year anniversary.

250. April 1, 1776, a Continental Congress created the Department of the treasury, which, as you know, can, you know, that was included when they finally wrote the Constitution.

And they had millions of dollars to pay off all the soldiers. Not really.

And you know, if you read the resolution from 17 cities, it was like a paragraph. It was basically to, you know, maintain a checkbook, maintain accounts, you know, keep the books. And then they appointed somebody as treasurer

and they didn't have, they didn't have QuickBooks back then, but I'll bet you they had written ledgers. And I also bet you something else that if you'd have told them we're going to run the country at an extreme deficit, so don't worry about it. When your checkbook ledger goes in the red, we'll just borrow more money from.

Well, Steve, they actually did though.

Yeah.

So they. After the Revolutionary War.

Well, they did.

They owed a butt ton of money to the veterans. And the way that they paid them was to give them unclaimed lands that, you know, were available for homesteading, essentially. So they would have these military blocks of land that they granted mainly to Easterners. Right. And southerners in places like Ohio, which was, you know, still contested with Indian wars yet to come. And, and so you had people like in New York State, Dr. Oliver Bigelow, for example, owned almost all of western Licking county. And, and he, I don't think he ever visited it.

You know, he just owned it and then sold it off piece by piece.

And great history here in Ohio. I've talked about the Frontiersman Tales with Alan Eckert, Simon Kenton.

But that's how they got paid.

And those guys. I know it's, it's. But, but they did get paid.

They got paid.

They did get paid. And the government did not run a deficit very long anyway. Or at least can you imagine if the founder said, look, guys, we don't need to keep our books balanced. No biggie.

Well, you know, Washington's trying to keep people, you know, you know, in camp, you know, and he would hang deserters. But, you know, his argument is, hey, guys, I know you're not getting paid. I know you have fields at home that need to be harvested. But this is to get our own country. This is to throw off the yoke of the, of King George iii. And so, you know, please stay and you'll eventually get paid. And, you know, it took them a while, but they did well.

And this led, all this led to the. Was it the Whiskey Rebellion and a bunch of other stuff in the very near future from there because we were trying to settle up debts.

But anyway, anyway, good stuff. So I would say, Steve, other than Mission to Moon to the Moon and free speech in Colorado upheld yesterday at the Supreme Court.

I got it right here. Ready to break it down, give you the legal analysis whenever you're ready.

Before we get to that, because that's a Wiffle ball case. I mean, it was eight to one and only Katanji.

Wait a minute, wait a minute. The court is divided among. How could that be? Of course, she didn't know what it. Well, never mind. She didn't know what a woman was anyway in her.

I think the featured issue today has to be the Birthright Citizen hearing, which is happening today at the Supreme Court. President Trump says he will attend to hear the arguments. He's not allowed to say anything. He won't be miked up. And, you know, he's not credentialed to obviously be a litigant. But at any rate, in the case of Trump versus Barbara, which is before the Supreme Court today for oral arguments on birthright citizenship.

Yeah, this is, I'm going to be very interested in.

This is mega.

Because the court. This is, this happens at times. These legal issues emerge over the course of our history and they come up with different fact patterns that don't necessarily align yet the legal principle remains. And this is. I forget the case out in San Francisco, but it was the, it was.

You're talking about the 1898 case. Yeah, Wong Kim.

Yeah, Wong Kim. Ark. So, you know, I'll be very curious to see how this plays out because now, factually speaking, I think what a lot of people don't understand about birthright citizenship, and I didn't know this, is that there was a calculated plan by China to send people over to have kids.

Absolutely.

In the United States. Now think about this.

These are, we're talking communists.

These are Communist China. These are s. Is.

This is not Wong Kim Ark back in 1898.

No, no, no, no, no. And done. Calculated as a weapon against the United States. We are going to have people, our citizens, effectively born in the United States so they then enjoy dual citizenship. But we're not going to raise them over there. We're not going to contaminate them with those US Values. But. And we're going to take them back for 18 years to China and raise them the way we want them raised, and then we're going to send them back to the United States.

Now, I wonder what they're thinking when they send them back to the United States. And I've had people at our table in another setting argue with me, well, you know, after two generations, they're Americans and blah, blah, blah. It's nonsense. These people don't want to be Americans. They never were Americans and they don't have any interest in ever becoming an American. What they want to do is undermine America.

It's, it's, it's, it's official subversion by another country.

It is.

Right.

It's an attack on the country. So I will be curious to see how this plays out. You know, on the, on the other hand, you can see, like, if somebody's got a, they're validly in the country, they've got a green card, they're working, they're supposed to be here, they've got whatever, and they have a child here. That's a different story than if somebody comes over for the express purpose of having a child and then taking it back. So I, you know, I don't know how I would draw the lines. Fortunately, I am not sitting on the Supreme Court to have to figure this out. But there's going to have to be some give and take on this on both sides, otherwise we're going to end up with some, I would say, dangerous outcomes. So anyway, we shall see how it, how it plays out.

Well, the, the key language, right, is about the, the Article 14, the 14th Amendment passed in 1868. The key language that people are debating is and subject to the jurisdiction thereof. So in other words, it says all persons born or naturalized, which means you're granted citizenship after, you know, applying and, you know, taking the oath and passing the test and all that stuff. That's naturalization. So if you're born or naturalized through regular process, you are a citizen. Okay, subject. And this is right out of the Constitution.

You got a pocket constitution there.

Subject. Well, it's a full constitution. It fits in my pocket. And of course, the Constitution was written for merchants and farmers. It wasn't written for lawyers and, and auto part salesmen and auto part salesmen and people who stay at holiday ends subject to the jurisdiction thereof. So what does that mean? It. So, you know, if they wanted to just give it to people who are born here or who are naturalized, they would just have left that phrase out. But they added the phrase and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.

Well, this is, and that's the key. And in that case that Steve just cited, Wong. Was it Wong Kim Ark of 1898? In that decision, the concurring justices. That was a Supreme Court decision which allowed a Chinese man whose parents were permanently domiciled in the United States to be a citizen. Okay. US Versus Wong Kim Ark. And in that case, they pointed out that it was because his parents were permanently domiciled, that therefore they were subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. And so in that decision, there is also language that it is not for people who are, who are transitory for.

Or people who are here for under some other reason other than being permanently domiciled. And so the argument that an illegal immigrant could somehow transmogrify their status into permanent domicility and being permanently a resident without any legal process is absent in that case. And that is what the DOJ is arguing. The ACLU on the other side is saying, no, no, no, no, no. There were all these laws passed since the 14th Amendment by Congress which basically reinforce this vague notion that if you're born here, we. Or, you know, for any reason that you are automatically a citizen. And, and, and, and so the DOJ is saying, well, an act of Congress cannot modify the Constitution. That's not what the Constitution says.

All right, let me go.

Go ahead.

So first of all, the 14th amendment, this is the 13, 14, 15, I think 16 were these, these were the Civil War Amendments.

This is to. Over. The 14th amendment was specifically to address the Dred Scott decision.

Yeah.

And, and, and, and the idea that freed blacks are not citizens. So it, it blows that out of the water. That was the main intent. And, and, and when you, when you dig up the congressional dialogue in the state legislatures that, you know, concurred in this amendment. It's, it's very clear they were talking about freed slaves.

Yeah, that's what they're talking about. So I bring that up not because, I mean, look, everybody have says the Constitution is this fungible elastic. I call BS to that. But I do think that we had. The Constitution is designed to be applied with the times. They wrote it in such a way that you could take these standards that were written down in for the farmers and apply them in modern times. So I think it's a fair application to analyze the problem. But the Supreme Court, starting with a case called, well, maybe not starting with, but let's go Back to Heller D.C.

versus Heller, which was a gun control case in the Second Amendment case and then followed on its heels was a case called Bruin B R U E N. And I'm not bringing this up to talk about guns, but I'm bringing it up to talk about this. The Supreme Court has made a shift to, of their standards of review and we're going to get to this when we get to the Charles v. Salazar case too. But they made a shift in how they're looking at these types of things and they're now focusing on a test that we're sort of loosely labeling the history, text and tradition type test.

Yeah, Original intent.

So we're going back to the original intent of the founders. What was it intended? Now the, the, the detractors of that standard are saying, well, that's foolish because they, they could never have contemplated what we're doing now. And the others would say, you don't have to contemplate what we're doing now, but we can at least take the original intent and see if it fits into this scenario. So it may be semantical, I don't know, but I think we are going to see a history, text and tradition type analysis here, I think.

Yeah.

And then it will come down to a vague, unsatisfying, sister kissing definition of the terms that you brought up. Like what is a permanent resident mean? What does a permanent domicile mean?

What's subject to the jurisdiction.

Subject to the jurisdiction of. And that's going to come down to perhaps somebody's intent. So in the Chinese scenario, we came up with not the case, but the. When, the, when the.

Yeah, the government pattern was they were granted permanent residents.

So that would be different than the. That's different than people coming over only to be born, get citizenship and then leave.

Yeah, jumping, jumping across the Rio Grande. Maybe it's dropping a baby.

It'll Come down to this vague definition of intent. And here's where the common law takes off. This is why I love the common law, because then it'll be left to the geniuses throughout the land to figure it all out. Because, wait a minute, I'm here. It's my. I'm subject to this jurisdiction of. And this is my scenario. And the courts are going to have to say, well, in your scenario, Norm, you're not, but in this scenario, they are.

And it'll slowly weave its way through the legal history. And that is how common law develops. I love it. I think it's awesome. So it'll be unsatisfying for all, I think, because it won't be definitive. Sort of like law school. When you go to law school, like, you already know those like, like the, the, like the, the photographic memory type guys. Yeah.

Doctors. Everything's black and white to them. They remember everything. They're geniuses in their own right.

And they call that black letter law, where it's crystal clear. Right. You know, like, you have to file your taxes by April 15, but, like, it's crystal clear.

And those, those people that function, their brains, function that way. They usually don't see the second or certainly not the second year of law school, if not even the second semester, because the law is not designed to operate that way. We lawyers are devious bastards. And we look at this stuff and we say, wait a minute, you said domiciled. So I'm. So now we're going to come up with a different definition that we're going to try to cram in. And then the courts are going to have to figure that out, and they're going to give us some guidance on that particular scenario. And then the next lawyer is going to come around and say, yeah, but what about this one? And yeah, but, yeah, but, yeah, but how about that, Mr.

Fung? And now you're going to end up with a situation where the law is going to have to evolve. This is what our courts do. Don't get frustrated. Embrace it. It's lovely. I promise you.

My fear on this decision is that Roberts, who gets, you know, Chief Justice Roberts, who is so squeamish, you know, I don't know if it's a cocktail party invitations that he's.

You say squeamish or spineless?

He is. He is both. And you know, he called the Obamacare, you know, it was a tax and such nonsense. Congress has a right to impose a tax. Well, they, they compelled you to buy something, Right. And it's the first time I've ever heard of, you know, you must buy this, you know, as a, As a citizen of the federal government. So, you know, you know, states can compel you to buy insurance or be, you know, fiscally sound and demand proof of that in order to drive a car, things like that. But the idea that the federal government makes you buy insurance is novel.

And so Roberts, what I'm afraid of he's going to do here is he's going to be a latex backbone guy, you know, spine, no spine. And what he's going to do is basically say the executive order that Trump issued on day one, when he took office in 2025, on this subject, telling the organs of the federal government that you cannot acknowledge citizenship of people who were born here to illegal parents. He's going to say, basically, I think he's going to sidestep the constitutional issue and try to throw the case out on some kind of. And some kind of technical basis that Trump, Trump should have gone to Congress or he'll come up with some pretext. I think possibly this is my fear, to dodge what, basically all of America, including the aclu, who's on the other side of this. We all want clarity. That's what I want. I want to know.

Yes, no. If, if. If you come over here as a tourist and intentionally come here, you know, with bad intent, just to have your baby and then fly home to China or Denmark or wherever you came from, is that baby a citizen to be an anchor? Because if that baby stays in the U.S. what are you going to do? Expel the parents? And that's the whole point of the anchor analogy, is that if they drop the baby here, the baby's a citizen, the baby has a right to stay in America. Under that conclusion that the ACLU wants, therefore the parents of the baby and by extension, the brothers and sisters, because you can't break up the family. The baby is the anchor then for a whole raft of people to become citizens, and there's just no legislative intent. There's nothing in the record that says that is the purpose of the 14th Amendment. And I think Roberts may dodge the whole question.

You know, it's interesting. They, and this is sort of a dovetail, if you want to get into the Charles versus Salazar case.

Yes.

What Roberts will do, what he, what he has done historically, say, with the Affordable Care act, he does exactly what the dissenting judge pointed out in the 10th Circuit in Charles v. Salvador. He's playing a naming game. Yeah, we're just going to call it attacks. We're going to rename it this. And that's what Colorado did with their. That's what this. Decisions below in the Colorado case did in this free speech case, Charles v.

Salazar. You want to give us. This is like law school, Mr. Murdoch, would you like to give us the facts, please? Or we can have Troy give us the facts. He probably doesn't even know he's our. He's our budding law student.

Wake up, Troy.

Yeah, he's like, I'm studying for the bar exam.

So. So my understanding is that Colorado, you know, which has a whole string of anti free speech legislation. You know, it goes all the way back to the, you know, the bakery case where, you know, the. The guy refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding. And, you know, Colorado passed a law and. And took him to court and bankrupted him and all of that, and the guy won it the Supreme Court, not once, but twice. So at any rate, Colorado passed a

law

that said that counselors that want to discuss conversion therapy, meaning they have a child in their office, and they want to say. To say, a biological girl. You are, in fact, a girl. You're not a boy. So let's talk about some therapy to convert you back, get you off of this precipice that you're on where you think you're a boy and you're maybe contemplating surgery and you've got hormone blockers and all this stuff. We're going to convert your thought process through this therapy back to the idea that you're a biological girl.

Let me stop you there.

They made that. They made that speech illegal, okay?

And. But this is the first. Now, this is not what the 10th District or 10th Circuit judge says, but this is the first labeling game mistake that was made or that we have to recognize. We all hear the term conversion therapy, and it gives everybody a little bit of like, ooh, this is like, give people shock therapy treatments in order to convert them from being a homosexual to a regular. I mean, there's a lot of evil and I think to somewhat fair criticism about traditional conversion therapy. But Colorado did something sort of tricky. They. They re.

They included in the term conversion therapy talk therapy about somebody's gender identity. All right, so now it's not just converting somebody from being a homosexual to a straight male or female, but it's saying, like, if I'm a teenager, and I'm thinking, oh, you know what? I have confusion about whether I'm a man or a woman. I just don't know. And I would like to talk to somebody about and have some therapy. Now they're calling that conversion therapy, which we're all old enough to remember about five, six years ago. And that was on the dsm, whatever. Five as gender dysphoria. It's perfectly okay, however, to go ahead and treat that person medically by chopping off body parts and rebuilding their genitals.

But you can't talk to them about whether it's the right thing to do or not. It's sort of. It's lunacy to equate or to conflate those two things without least identifying that that's what you're doing because they're different. It's different to me to say, well, I'm going to go give somebody shock therapy because they think they're gay and convert them into being straight versus I think somebody needs to talk through this before we start cutting off their penises.

Well, so, so I love everybody, right? I love all my homosexual and lesbian friends, and I have a lot of them and I love them. But I would also tell them, quite frankly that if they seek conversion therapy as adults or if their parents would take them in there when they were minors, I don't see anything wrong with discussing homosexuality either.

Well, no, that's right. I'm not saying there's something wrong with discussing homosexuality because, Steve, if you do

a Venn diagram overlay between people who are gender dysphoric, who, who are questioning whether they should transition, and whether they're also at the same time having homosexual tendencies or thoughts or, you know, along those lines, it is an overlap that is huge.

I agree.

The, the issues are very tangled up. And I think medical professionals like counselors and doctors, nurses, priests and rabbis and, you know, I'm with you. They should have the right to talk to these people.

I am not champing against it, but what I'm pointing pointing out is that this isn't an extension of what people have already sort of developed their right.

They have this phobia of conversion therapy, that there's something inherently wrong about discussing this.

No.

And, and, and I'm like, well, wait a minute. If you get to discuss why transformation is normal, I also get the. I have the right to discuss why it is.

That's right. So there's an equal protection argument Bacon, that the court didn't really address. But the court made a distinction. That's why I'm making a distinction. That's why I did make a distinction between the modalities of treatment and talk therapy.

Right.

Modalities. Being like shock therapy or hospitalization. Like there are.

Yeah, this is a speech case.

This was a speech case. It fell on the First Amendment. So that's where the court came down. We're not taking on these other things. Yeah, right. So it.

One kook, one, you know, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest stuff, you know, like.

Yeah, you're not going to give somebody a lobotomy because they say they're not

what we're talking about that. Right?

That's right. So.

And it's an 8 to 1, Steve. Talk about that.

I mean, it was an 8 to 1, you know, the liberal justices basically,

and God bless them. Right.

Look, I happen to look at, I happen to, to see and follow. I don't. I'm not a constitutional scholar, but I do. You know, they come across my desk in the trade journals and, and through blogs or whatever, I see the Supreme Court decisions. And by and large, it's not as divided as people think. Now, it is on some of these key issues that make the news. But this is a free speech case, folks. This is fundamental to our, our society.

And I think it's also helpful to point out how it got up to the Supreme Court. Far too many cases or far too many. There's a lot of mis analysis of these types of cases, but this one does get to the merits a little bit. Sort of, but not completely. What it was is an injunction case, meaning the counselor here said, look, courts, I'm a Christian, but I'm also a licensed therapist and I supply counseling and I provide as part of my professional services, talk therapy to my patients of all sorts. And among those, the type of therapy I provide is to kids who are gender disturbed or gender confused. All right, fair enough. There's a law in Colorado that if that's applied to me, that's going to prevent me from talking and offering my speech therapy.

Yeah.

So I am asking you, court of Colorado first or the circuit courts, district courts federally, to say you can't Colorado apply this law to me. I'm asking for an injunction. I'm asking, I am suing. I am saying this law is unconstitutional as applied to me.

Yes.

Not as applied to other people, but is applied to me in this factual scenario.

Right.

And this is why it came up that we're not talking about shock therapy, we're not talking about the frontal lobotomies, we're not talking about hospitalization, talking to talk therapy in this case, as applied to me. Well, the district court said, no, we're not going to Give you an injunction, meaning we're not going to prevent Colorado from enforcing that law while we figure all this out. So Childs or says, or whichever one she is, says, no, we're now going to the district court or the circuit court of the 10th Circuit, Federal Court of appeals. They said, no, no, we're not going to give you the injunction. So now the first issue was, does she have standing, does the plaintiff have standing to go to the U.S. supreme Court? Everybody agreed she did. And she, she then challenged the case in the Supreme Court. So at issue was whether the law should, whether a temporary injunction should apply.

So one of the first considerations is, what's the harm that could happen to this woman? And the harm was she could be arrested and charged with violating the law. That's the harm. Everybody agreed that was reasonable. And then there's a couple other factors I'm not going to get into. But then the question is, what is the likelihood of success on the merits? And here's where people have to understand what really happened procedurally. This was not a situation where the court says this automatically violates the First Amendment. It's not what the court said. The court said is, you lower courts applied the wrong standard of review in reaching your decision.

And I get it, nobody likes this lawyer talk crap. But what they're saying is you didn't analyze this under the First Amendment. You analyzed it as like it's something else regulating therapy, regulating a profession, a professional licensure. Yeah.

You know, permitted actions, kind of like what they did to stifle doctors from discussing alternative courses of treatment or non treatment. To Covid.

To Covid. Yeah.

And they did this to doctors all across the country. They had pharmacies narcing on doctors who wanted to get Ivermectin or some other kind of drug. You had pharmacists quizzing doctors of 30 and 40 years tenure about what off the label uses they were making of Ivermectin, for example.

Right.

And, and so you had people losing medical licenses because they wanted to discuss with their patients alternative Covid regimes. And, and, and this is kind of.

That's a little similar. Similar.

It's. So it smacks of the same thing. We're going to control what you're allowed to talk about professionally. Right. And.

Well, this is why it's important to understand the standards of review, what we're doing and what, what procedure got us there. Because this is not yet a decision on the merits for those who are waving your flags. It's not quite there.

Well, it's like the cake thing, Steve.

Yeah.

So. So the cake case. Right. Which went to the Supreme Court. We're all thinking the Supreme Court stood up for this guy's right. Right. First Amendment. To practice religion that he wants and for his free speech.

You know, it's also speech not to say something, you know, to withhold things as well as to do things. And he decided, I'm going to withhold my speech in designing a cake for a gay wedding because it doesn't conform to my religious beliefs. You can't make me do this. Just like you shouldn't be able to tell a doctor he has to perform an abortion. Well, a doctor should be able to say, listen, find a different doctor who doesn't have a problem with this. But I have a problem. Anyway, they kicked the cake case back to Colorado for further review by the Colorado Supreme Court before it came back a second time to the Supreme Court.

Yeah. And that's what's going on here.

So what this is bouncing.

The Supreme Court has said, look, lower courts, you screwed up. You didn't analyze this under the First Amendment.

Yeah.

And if you didn't analyze it under the First Amendment, you applied a standard of review that. That is not nearly as strict as the proper one, that. Where cases or fact patterns implicate the First Amendment. And I'll break it down just quickly. There's something called rational basis review, which is basically the legislative branch of government can do anything that's even arguably rational as long as it doesn't implicate a constitutional right. And the First Amendment, of course, is it's first right. So it's a very important constitutional right. Yeah.

And the U.S. supreme Court said, you guys screwed up down low. That we agree with a dissent in the 10th Circuit that said you should have applied something called strict scrutiny review. And strict scrutiny review means it has to be narrowly tailored to the least drastic means to govern a substantial compelling government interest before you do anything that can even arguably impede upon somebody's constitutional right to free speech. And now I'm saying it's not yet a decision on the merits, but it may be a de facto decision on the merits, because there's only a handful of cases historically that ever, ever, ever meet strict scrutiny review.

Yeah.

Or survive strict scrutiny review.

And the real interesting, the real interesting opinion in this that came out yesterday was the sole dissenter, Ketanji Brown Jackson, who, who basically said, I mean, the way she views constitutional law is so unique and so different. And it's, forgive me for putting it this way, but it's, it's kind of, it's like a household analysis, you know, where she, she's just outcome determinative because the decision did not support the outcome that she's looking for, which is to deny patients this particular viewpoint that really you should work through the idea of accepting who you are and what you are and working through that, understanding what your biology is and getting comfortable with the body that you were born, born with. She, she prefers a different outcome, not that outcome. She prefers to, to suppress that speech and to have instead supportive speech that says, oh, if you're having these feelings that you're out of a body and, and you're not, you're not who you think you should be. We support you changing yourself and, and making it more of the slippery. This is, it's, it's, it's, it's the state affirmatively inserting itself into your health care, advocating a certain outcome.

Norm, you're a pedophile and you've got this predilection to go chase after young girls and boys and you're a, you're a creep. But you know, why don't you just go express yourself a little bit, you know, once you figure it out on your own and be who you think you are. Can you imagine? But beyond that point, the more, the more salient point or the more important issue here is this and this. What she is, what, what she is advocating for is exactly what the majority says is unconstitutional. This is content based speech regulation. We're going to permit this speech on this topic, but not this speech on this topic. And that is what we call content based regulation. And here's what the court has to say about it.

As a general rule, such content based regulate restrictions trigger, quote, strict scrutiny, a higher standard, a demanding standard that requires the government to prove its restriction on speech is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest under that test. Quote, it is a rare, it is rare that a regulation will ever be permissible. And they're quoting Brown versus Entertainment Merchants association, which is quoting United States versus Playboy Entertainment Group. I cite those cases because you can see how this stuff emerges. Charges, you know, somebody was trying to regulate Playboy at some point and this, this is where this stuff comes up. We have to protect the speech we disagree with more than any other type of speech.

Right? Yeah. And you know what's sad is the ACLU used to be on the, on the white hat side, right? And they've, they've turned to the dark side. The ACLU is now in favor of Suppressing speech. And you know it, they completely flipped where they were. The ACLU used to stand on the side of the nastiest sorts of speech. You had largely or certainly a large number of the ACLU lawyers, I think Steve, one of his mentors who were Jewish and they're supporting the right of neo Nazis to march down the streets of Skokie, Illinois. Right. With their, their, you know, burn the Jews and hate the blacks and you know, crucify the Catholics and all their filth and you know, kill the gypsies, all their filth.

Right. Right down the middle of an ethnic neighborhood in Skokie, Illinois. And the aclu, much to the chagrin of, I'm sure many synagogues, many rabbis were probably not thrilled that these young Jewish lawyers are standing up for the rights of Nazis. Right. But they did so for the reason Steve explained earlier. It is, it is you give rise to a Hitler when you suppress their speech. That's how you create the intrigue. That's how you create the subversive element in society is when you take a Hitler and put him in prison so he can write a book that then becomes a best seller.

Right. And, and all these Germans read about all this stuff and they, and they start becoming enthralled with the National Socialist Party and, and, and, and that, and that's the danger is suppressing speech. Let the idiots be idiots. Let them say the filth that they want to say and then argue with them. And then argue with them. I mean it's, it's not that complicated. But something happened to the ACLU in the last 50 years where they are now. They're like Ketanji, Jackson, Brown.

They're outcome determinative.

So there's a. When I was in college I learned this lesson and is it really informed me a lot like it's sort of like I think the Kenny's. You say they were educated at the dinner table like at college. The college experience, a lot of it. Is it getting educated in the dorm and bickering with your buddies and having arguments and there was a guy, I'm not going to mention his name. I used to.

That's true diversity.

Yeah.

When you can argue intellectually with your fellow students openly. No safe space.

No safe space. You're just going at it. That's the point of college, going at it.

That's what it's about.

We used to get in these heated debates over lots of probably Falstaff beer and, and they used to have little puzzles on the bottle caps. But you know There was always. There was a guy.

Every the fist, body, false step.

There was. There was a guy. And everybody knows this guy who no matter what, he was the loudest, boisterous and never agreed with anything, always shot you down, whatever it was. And I realized I used to. I'm going to call it the John Doe rule because I'm not going to mention his name. But there was a guy, he was a friend of mine and I called it the blank rule. It was his name. And that rule was this.

It was that. I am never going to convince him that he's wrong, but I'm going to. Everybody else in the room will know that he's wrong when I'm done. And that is what Norm is talking about. That is an exchange of debate. That is the ideas. And in logic, they call it reductio ad absurdum. You reduce the argument to absurdity.

And that can't happen if you suppress the argument in the first place. And that is what the government is saying here when they say, we have recognized as well that the even greater dangers associated with regulations that discriminate based on the speaker's point of view. When the government seeks not just to restrict speech based on its subject matter, but it also seeks to dictate what particular opinion and perspective individuals may express on that subject, the violation of the First Amendment is all the more blatant. That's what's going on here.

Yeah.

This takes strict scrutiny, review. And while it may not be a final decision on the merits, it is all but a done deal because nothing ever hard, not very. It's a rare bird that survives strict scrutiny. And this kind of. The court is signaling in no uncertain terms, no uncertain terms, go back down and analyze it under strict scrutiny. But if it comes back up here, we're going to strike it down.

And that's why it's being. Commentators are largely calling it a free speech decision, because as Steve points out, they're signaling big time.

Yeah.

So.

Yep. And it's eight to one.

It's eight.

It's eight to one, folks. So look, this is important. This is a win for the country.

That's right.

And if you think that your topic loses because you're in fit, you don't like this kind of talk therapy. I'm sorry, that sucks for you. But there's lots of stuff that goes on that sucks for all of us. That's why we have such a diverse country. That's true diversity. That is diversity of thought. And that is what we're getting at. That is why the KKK can walk down the.

Walk on the statehouse square with a permit and scream all their. Their as. As Biden would say, all their bile, as much as they want to do. And we would support that as much as we would support Black Lives Matter getting the same permit and hiking down High street and marching on the State House. Just the same as we would support the gays, the lesbians, the Kings, the. No Kings, whoever you are, get a permit, go protest. Do it, have the debate, do it in public. But don't you dare say that somebody can't disagree with you.

You know, and. And again, I just want to say thank you, Justice Kagan and Justice Sotomayor, because, you know, it would have. The easier thing for them to do, right, to be accepted by their political fellows. Right. Would be to throw in with Katanji, Brown, Jackson. And they did not. They stood for free speech. And.

And that's what classical liberals always did. And it's wonderful to see that two of the three continue to do so. You know, I thank them.

There's a story you told that my.1, I don't know if he's a mentor, but I got. I had the privilege of working with a lawyer. He was a couple generations ahead of me early on in my career. We were working on a death penalty case that was in federal habeas corpus litigation. We were trying to save the guy from the. From the chair, and we went over to his office for a meeting. And on the wall were several pictures, but two right next to each other. And the first was a quill and a decision.

So you argue in the Supreme Court, you get a quill. It's so. It's like a little thing you get as a lawyer. I don't have one yet. I'm working on it.

Listen up, people. This. This is an incredible story.

And he was Jewish, and he had the quill. And it was a KKK decision in the US Supreme Court that he worked on. Maybe I can't remember if he argued, but he worked on it and was part of it and got his quill. And right next to it was a poster of Auschwitz. And he said, look, I keep both there as a reminder. And one informed the other. Like, I have this here, the quill, which was a free speech case, to remind me how we never get to this over here, myheritage, where the government was suppressing all speech contrary to it. And I've never forgotten that.

Never. As a young lawyer, getting to meet a guy like that who saw it that way. He was an ACLU guy, by the way.

I mean, that's what they were like. And think of the intellectual powerhouse in that brain, of that attorney to, to digest the evil right that he is allowing to be expressed through the First Amendment, knowing that the ultimate prize is an open society where those ideas can be discussed in broad daylight and from a man whose family was victimized. I mean, we're talking 90% of the Jews in Europe, right? We're. We're. We're eliminated. Okay. I mean, it's. It's one of the.

It's. It's maybe the largest human crime in, in world history. What, what, what happened, you know, in ethnic cleansing of the Jews in Europe. And for that man to represent the right of, of those evil organizations to speak their filth, you wonder, okay, was he himself compromised? Well, hell no, he wasn't. He was three or four steps down the road ahead of that group, knowing, oh, let them speak. They are so outrageous and so dumb and so misinformed and that. That they are making laughing stocks of themselves. And, and you have to allow that kind of speech because if you suppress it, all the other bad things happen.

Yep.

And less than a generation ago. It's incredible. It's gone.

It's gone.

The ACLU is completely flipped now, because that's the scariest thing, really.

The left is not tolerant anymore. And I, And I say left. I mean, the extreme left. I just said Kagan and Sotomayor are tolerant. They did back this majority decision. So there, you know, thank God there are still some lefties that are not completely in the bag here. But what has happened is there is now an intolerance for diversity intellectually in America where we're not allowing everybody to have their say. And at the same time, right, you've got blogs and podcasts, and you've got this proliferation now of citizen journalists.

People like Steve and I, we're saying what we want, right? Until somebody passes a law to stop us. And then I hope there's a Jewish lawyer down at the ACLU who will represent us, but I don't have much hope.

Well, look, go back to our namesake anymore, Thomas Paine and common sense. For those who don't sleep. I don't sleep. Sorry. I'm with you. It's part of the job, I guess. But, you know, when I can't sleep, I. Sometimes there's some content out there.

If you can't sleep, listen to this history. It'll put you to sleep. It never does. I always listen to history.

Or in Steve's case. Do plumbing or electrical work.

Yeah, do something, keep your hands occupied. But there was one, there was a sort of a history of Thomas Paine and when he was doing this, right, he was, he was sending out in secret his common sense publications that reached lots and lots of people for those

days for which the king would hang you.

Yeah, for which the king would hang you. And that is like the modern podcasting era. So it's, it's interesting to me how as much as those out there would want to squelch a speech, there are those of us here that will find a way to speak. And Thomas Paine was one. Interestingly, he did. He sort of died sickly unknown in some apartment with like a neighbor who was sort of. Yeah, that used to be Thomas Paine. You know, it's sort of a sad death.

But he turned kind of socialist at the end too.

Yeah, so. But on the other hand, he sparked a revolution.

You know, lots of people get weird as they get older. What can I say?

Like a norm.

Yes. I'm wearing a bird Burger King hat, so something a little lighter here. This is interesting. It's been over 50 years since the United States has mounted a manned or human crew to the moon. And launching today, later today, they say around seven, eight o', clock, there's a two hour window for the Artemis 2 rocket, something like 230, 30ft tall, going to the moon. It's going to orbit the Earth to pick up some centrifugal force to shoot out towards the moon, go around the dark side of the moon and come back. And the idea, it's a proof of concept mission to see if all of this machinery works and the re entry tiles are they going to work and, and all of that. And then they're planning to land people on the moon and establish a lunar base rather than a space station that orbits the Earth, actually have some kind of permanent, or at least permanent until it's not base on the moon.

And I thought a little bit about this. There was an age of discovery and what sent people like Christopher Cohen, Columbus and you know, all the explorers across the oceans in these galleons and they basically had to go convince a prince or a king or a queen. You know, Columbus was Italian, but he had to go, he had to go to Spain, Right. And, and convince the Spanish queen and king that, that there was money to be made here. Right, right. I'll bring back some of the indigenous people that I find, I'll bring back some gold, I'll bring back whatever plants and seeds and all of these things. And of course, he introduced horses, the Conquistadors, to America. There were no horses in the Americas prior to the Conquistadors.

So why are we going to the Moon and establishing a base? And all I can imagine is that there must be, just like in the age of exploration, at the end of it, there must be some sort of profit motive. There must be some sort of thing or aspects of the moon, whether it's national security, whether it's mining. I don't know whether it's maybe a stepping stone for deep space exploration. But I think we're about to find out, as this rolls forward, why it took us 50 years to go back to the Moon. Why now? And what sort of exploitation of the moon are we, you know, commercial or military are we doing there?

Norm, norm, norm. We never went to the Moon.

It was in a sound theater.

The hat's not foil. But come on.

Troy decked a guy who's playing Hollywood basement.

We've been there.

Yeah, I've seen the shadows and the flags up, waving, and it shouldn't. And I know the argument. And then there's the James Bond where I think it's Moonraker. No, Sean Connery is like, I forget what it is. It might be Goldfinger where he's like running through the Hollywood sets and he crosses through these guys, staging. Yeah, it's fake.

It's beautiful.

So I don't know, it is interesting. I. I know we were all, like, locked down, talking about how people should have a right to change their genders. And China was on the moon a few years back and it was just like, without fanfare, with the robots, with the robot. So I think this is something. Look, people hate to hear this. Look, is America perfect? No, nobody says it's perfect. As I like to say, only the best.

And I would rather have the best than China in control of the moon. I would rather have us than Russia or some other country in control of the Moon. We need to be the people out front of all this because you can say we've done horrible things in our past. And I suppose, at least to some extent it's true, but not as horrible as others. And we have, I think it's the refrain that we have showed, or the constraint, rather, we have showed that people don't recognize. Like, we could have taken over Europe in 19, in the 40s, or at least half of it, and we could have become dictators.

Well, we had the bomb and we had.

We had the bomb and nobody else Did.

Yeah.

I mean, we could have, we could have taken over the world at that point. We didn't. We sent our boys home and we just wanted to be left alone. So look, it calls colonists, call us imperialists.

More than that, we rebuilt Japan and

Germany, and when then we gave more money to rebuild.

Right.

And, and I think just recently, pretty generous. In fact, the Berlin airlift may have started today too, if I'm not mistaken. On my. I would not doubt it on my little.

And American flyboys died doing that.

Yep.

I mean, they were being shot down by, you know, Russian anti aircraft and even fighter planes on rare occasions, flying this little alley, this, this aerial path that they were flying into Berlin to relieve people that we were at war with just a few years prior. Right. I mean, again, America, just like now, we are opening up the Straits of Hormuz through our military action against Iran. You know, whether it's the GPS satellites, whether it's Starlink, you name it, it's American government and corporations that in large part provide the infrastructure for the rest of the world, either at no cost or very small cost. And we give up our treasure and our military blood to do this for the rest of the world. And I get why Trump is ticked off and he's basically saying, go get your own oil. I don't blame him for saying it. Where are you? England.

When England wanted to defend its Falkland territory, America stood up for England. You know, when France wanted to go into Chad or maintain its kingdom in Vietnam, America went and helped France. But suddenly we're not good enough. We rebuilt Germany and Japan. Where are they helping us in the Straits of Hormuz? They're AWOL and so fine, you guys, go get your own oil. We've got a glut of it here in the United States. Drill, baby, drill. You can kiss my backside.

This might be the end of NATO.

Yeah, it might be.

I mean, we'll see. What are they doing to defend Europe? Nothing.

Well, they're letting us do it for them while they criticize what we're doing.

Exactly.

Right.

Isn't that comfy?

You need me on that wall.

That's right.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I pray that this, this whole mess is resolved as quickly as possible. And it looks like it, it's coming to a conclusion. But anyway. Anything going on here in Ohio?

Yeah, I think in Ohio, two quick stories and then we'll get to winners and losers. But there's something called Senate Bill 56, which banned ahead of a similar law or regulation out of D.C. so the feds did this in concert or Ohio did this in concert with pending federal legislation in regulation. The Senate Bill 56 bans consumer purchase of hemp products, intoxicating hemp products. You could still buy rope and jeans and jackets and that kind of thing. But the idea that you were going to infuse beer, for example, with 0.3% THC hemp byproducts, that's gone in Ohio. Other states allow it, But Ohio doesn't. DeWine took that out of Senate Bill 56.

It would have allowed that. DeWine vetoed that portion to allow breweries to continue selling hemp infused beer and wine. So where are we now? They're saying up to 4,000 businesses to include some farmers, as well as dispensaries and lounges and places where people would take in this low grade THC product, hemp. Some 4,000 businesses are rolled up now this month in Ohio. And I'm sure some of them are a mom and pop and some of them are.

A lot of them are. I know people.

Yeah, yeah. A lot of them are breweries, though, or, you know, like they're bigger entities. And so that is happening, Steve, as we speak. It used to be since 2019, farmers could grow hemp in Ohio for medicinal uses because that 0.3% THC was under the amount that was being regulated federally. And that has now changed. So farmers now need a USDA permit to raise hemp and they're allowed to sell it to factories, but not to consumers.

And the federal law is somewhat. I haven't researched it in a couple years, but the federal law is somewhat backed off on that. You speak, you only have hemp for like they would license. Colleges, universities and studies of scientists who are studying its value for hemp. I have a different viewpoint on hemp than I do on marijuana and thcn.

They're related, but not the same.

Yeah, they're not the same. So to. Hemp has its. Hemp is an interesting substance. And I have my own viewpoint on whether marijuana ought to be legalized or not. By the way, Trump has sort of let a cat out of the bag that he's trying to push that through. And those who say he quashed Biden's effort to do it, but then nobody's done it. So we'll see.

And you know, there have been some really incredible and obviously debatable, and I'm not here to settle the argument, but there have been some very incredible studies mainly coming out of Canada, where scientific assessment of cannabis is more easily done but in their laboratories because it's not scheduled like it is in the US and so universities and scientists have had access to cannabis for much longer than our scientists and they're saying that there are some, some long term hazards to cannabis use.

Yeah, I'm sure, Look, I'm sure there are, there's long term hazards to all sorts of stuff. My problem has always been let's study the stuff, figure it out. Yeah. You can't just regulate it with, with your, with a blindfold on. So yeah, we shall see what happens. Troy, what are the, what are the youngins saying about pot?

The youngest do a lot more of the dab pinning.

I think everybody's dab penning.

Dab penning. So you know those little vape ins.

Yeah.

They just put the oils inside of it. It's imagine just like we got rid of the marijuana, we're just doing straight thc.

It's like a caffeine pill. It's sort of like your, your energy drinks.

Yeah. Or nicotine pouches. Like we got rid of the tobacco. We just went straight to the good stuff. It's, everybody's pretty much for it. I'm fine with it being legalized. I don't do it, honestly. Most of my friends don't, but they're all fine with it being legalized.

Yeah. And I know, I know I have very good friend that uses it to treat his adhd. I have other. I have another very good friend who takes a gummy at night because he can't sleep and it works for him and he seems to function just fine. I think there's going to be valid uses for it. And I think that whether it's recreational, whether it's medication or whether it's something else, the problem I have that I guess on all these levels is that it's always about the money. Like all this stuff is about the money. Who's making money.

And the state happens to be making money on selling weed right now. And they're not going to let anybody in to infringe upon that. That which is my problem with it.

Yeah. The other like quick hit here in Ohio is the growing cooperation by counties and city police departments, you know, sheriffs and police and constables using a federal program, a Department of Homeland Security called. It's a program called Section 287G. For those that you don't want to Google this section 287G. And what this is is the federal government will pay local police departments, local law Enforcement agencies, pretty good money. Millions and millions of dollars if they cooperate and engage in a reciprocity process program. Things like allowing U.S. marshals jail space for their prisoners, things like allowing warrants to be issued to illegal immigrants while they're in custody of a local police department, allowing questioning inside local jails and prisons.

So there's a lot of money to be made. There used to be two counties out of the 88 in Ohio that participated prior to Trump. We're now up to 14 counties. So it is expanding. And it's one of these kind of hidden developments, you know, with the increasingly, I guess, prominent profile of ICE across the country, really starting ever since Trump was sworn in to enforce the immigration law. Regardless of how the hell you feel about it, it's happening. And that's all I'm reporting.

All right, you know, well, now we got some good and bad, Norm.

Yeah. So my losers are the no Kings protesters. Because from my point of view, the whole point of a democracy or representative democracy that we have is we're all kings, right? We threw out the solitary king, King George III we talked about at the beginning of the show. You know, a man's home is his castle. A woman's home is her castle. We're all kings. We're all queens. And the idea of people this is the Communist Party of America is basically who bootstrapped this Day of no Kings protest.

It was awful organized and financed for.

They all have the same signs.

They all have the same signs. I mean, and I think that somebody traced that to like some Communist executive in China, some Chinese Communist executive.

So back, back when I was in college, okay, back in my Troy days, what was going on down at Fountain Square in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I'm sure on the quad here in, in Columbus at Ohio State is the same old bearded Marxist Communist Party people. They were there 50 years ago, 40 years ago. They were there all the way back, you know, before World War II. They were there, you know, during World War I. The Communist Party of America is still out there slogging away, trying to brainwash largely kids. And yet at this no Kings protest, it's mainly oatmeal eating, Birkenstock wearing geezers. These are like leftover hippies from the 60s that are still angry at something. Maybe their parents.

Well, they're still looking. They're still looking for some sort of satisfaction in the world. And this is the only way to get it.

So that they're the losers. I mean, this been going on forever and the kind of violence that happened in la, where they're throwing rocks and firing tear gas at police who are there largely to protect their demonstration. They're attacking the very people who are allowing them to have their First Amendment rights, which is cockamamie. That, that's what happened at the BLM killings of all the cops down in Dallas when Obama was president. The police are there to accommodate the BLM and Antifa march. And how are they rewarded? They were assassinated. Five of them. So I mean, this, this is the disconnect.

If we had a true king, if, if Trump was a king, do you think he'd permit these marches? We obviously don't have a king. I mean, it's, it's ridiculous on his face. Now my winners are investors. So I don't know if you people looked at your 401ks yesterday. They have taken a big beating all through March. Right?

Bye. Bye.

Yesterday was a biathon. I mean, it was maybe the second or third largest rise in the Dow and other indexes for a one day rise in American history. I mean, it just skyrocketed. I know my personal account. I mean, I lost a lot of money in my 401k because of the fear about the Straits of Hormuz and Iran and we're in a quagmire. After four weeks, we're in a quagmire, which is a joke. So anyway, I, I believe Trump's right. I believe his economic team is right.

As soon as the straits issue is ironed out, either through a treaty or just ultimate military defeat of the IRGC that keeps firing these drones, we are going to see gas prices plummet, maybe below historic lows.

Yeah, I agree.

So, you know, the economy's coming back and if you're like John Roberts, a latex spine person, and you're squeamish and you pull your money out of the market to go buy gold or some other crazy thing, you're going to miss out because it's, it's gonna go, it's gonna rock it right back.

Yep. All right. So, Troy, you ready?

I'm ready.

I'm gonna, I'm tan it over. To Troy, our resident law student who never is prepared for the goods and bads, but I think he is today.

So my bad start. Low end on a high are. I'm a lifelong fan of the Aviators here in Columbus and we lost our home opener. Not. Sorry, home opener.

I don't know what an aviator.

Who are they?

Oh, it's the br. Brand new, you know, like UFL football team here in Columbus.

So we've got a. Is that Arena Football?

No, no, it's just.

It's outside.

Just knockoff NFL.

Is it. Is it 100 yard?

Yeah, everything exactly the same. It's just. Just a spring league instead. Okay, so Columbus, they play at the historic Crew Stadium.

Okay.

Oh, that's right. I did know this.

Yeah. So they're. They're brand new and maybe they want

to sponsor Common Sense. I doubt it.

I think. I think they need as much money as they can get. So I don't. If anything, I think they'd be asking

us for the sponsorship and have you gone.

But no, they're the actual. It wasn't a home opener, but that was my fault. I think they were in Tampa playing. But the home game is this Friday, so me and my friends are thinking about going. Yeah, I think that'd be kind of fun. So that was my low. The high, though, is I'm obsessed with space. Super happy we're going back.

I'll be in class today watching the launch, so I plan to do.

Sweet.

All right.

I got some good, bad and ugly all. All rolled up into a couple things. First of all, hats off to Jaden Ivy. I don't know if you followed this story. He was a basketball player for the Chicago Bulls, okay. Who came out on his own personal social media account sort of saying, what in the heck is the NBA doing getting behind Pride Week or Pride Month? You know, had his own. He's recently become to come to faith as a Christian and was sort of expressing his viewpoint on that. He was released as a result of that.

Wow.

Chicago Bears released him or the Chicago Bulls released him. This is a great way to sort of jump off. They can do that, guys. Now, there might be a contract problem. He might have a lawsuit. There might be something else. But it's not a free speech violation because it's not the government imposing its will on Jaden to say or not say certain things. But, you know, hats off to him.

And the bad, I suppose, the Chicago Bulls for releasing them on something personal like that. But I think more important, what we got going on this week, Norm, as you wear your crown, there is a king of kings. And in three days, we have Good Friday. So I will start. I will start with Isaiah. Ironically, some 850 years, maybe before the crucifixion, where it's. It is said, but he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our inequities.

Punishment that brought us peace was on him. And by his wounds, we are Healed, he says, some 850 years. Predicting, of course, the crucifixion.

Yeah.

And then Christ himself said it the best. It is finished. So with that, we will wrap it up.

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

They know not what they do.

So, I mean, as you know, there are a lot of religions. Let me say something about Christianity, right? How many other religions, monotheistic religions, have as their God, a God that would come to earth experiencing the pain as well as the pleasure of being a human being and then allow himself part of himself, right? The Trinity, the Son, part of God, to be put to death in the most excruciating, violent way and to be humiliated, stripped naked, put up on a cross between two criminals. Right. What other God? It's certainly not a Greek or Roman God where those gods are all powerful and nothing bad ever happens to them. Zeus. And you know this, the Christian God. I just want to say to my atheist friends, you are the luckiest atheist pagans that ever lived in. If the rest of society didn't believe in something like Christianity or Judaism or Islamism, you know, the good variant of Islamism, think what an awful world this would be.

Indeed.

So thank you, Jesus.

And a little, a little point of interest. Excruciating. You use that word, I don't know if on purpose, but it actually literally means from the cross or out of the cross.

Excruciating.

Excruciating. So that is the kind of pain that Christ endured and God endured for us. So with that, we are finished, folks. This is Common Sense Ohio, April Fool's edition. We've got Troy, we got Norm and I are, we are all here. We'll be here next week, too. You got a question, you got a topic? You want us to cover it? Go to common sense ohio.common senseohio.com send it to us there. Leave us a comment or do whatever you do to agree or disagree because we are free speech advocates and we come at you right from the middle each and every week.