Welcome back to Common Sense Ohio! In this lively episode, Steve Palmer and Norm Murdock ring in the new year on a fresh set, diving headfirst into a mix of history, law, and local affairs. They kick things off with a look back at the Treaty of Paris and the complexities that shaped America’s early days, drawing fascinating parallels between historical events and today’s debates.

From there, the conversation takes on the hot-button issue of transgender athletes in women’s sports, unpacking recent Supreme Court cases and the challenge of defining gender in law and society. Steve Palmer and Norm Murdock don’t shy away from examining the implications for equal protection, the perils of redefining words, and the importance of common sense when it comes to making and enforcing laws.

Shifting gears, they tackle the controversial ICE shooting in Minneapolis, connecting the dots between local politics, federal authority, and the practical impact on law enforcement and civilians. The hosts offer unfiltered thoughts on the responsibility of leaders, the risks of political messaging, and the lessons to be learned from recent tragedies.

Rounding things out, Steve Palmer and Norm Murdock dig into Ohio news—including fraud investigations, immigration policy, and a high-profile double murder case in Columbus. As always, they wrap up with their “good and bad” picks of the week, highlighting national defense, political maneuvering, and the unpredictability of current events.

It’s an episode packed with sharp insights, historical context, and the straight talk you expect from Common Sense Ohio. Let’s jump in!

00:00 "Commodore Perry's Lake Erie Legacy"

10:15 Traditional Values Under Siege

13:37 Defining Terms in Rational Debate

21:40 "Personal Choice, No Public Funding"

Lawyer Talk panel discussion

27:00 "Legal Insights on Police Cases"

32:35 "Police Stand-Down and Consequences"

35:48 Neglected Duty in Minneapolis Riots

41:53 State Police Power and Minnesota's Failure

44:39 ICE Enforcement and Local Responsibility

59:48 "Possibility of Death Penalty"

01:05:02 "Military Reform and Accountability"

01:11:12 "Trump Heckled at Ford Factory"

01:12:21 "Common Sense Ohio 2026"

Harper CPA Plus

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.

Recorded at the 511 Studios, in the Brewery District in downtown Columbus, OH.

Copyright 2026 Common Sense Ohio

All right, here we are, Common Sense Ohio. You can check us out @common senseohioshow.com brought to you by Harper Plus Accounting. Our accountant could be yours. We're just actually getting ready to send our stuff over to Harper Plus.

Yeah.

Make sure that we are ringing in the new year with all the right paperwork and all the right planning for 2026. Could be your accountant. I promise you. He could be. We have obviously a brand new set here at Common Sense Ohio. Hope you like it. We do. And we're going to jump right into it this day in history, Norm.

1784. Any guesses? You're looking at my screen, so you probably already know.

Well, gosh, wasn't that the year the. No, that was 1780. So something to do with the Constitution.

I think the Treaty of Paris ending the war for independence. What we would know as the Revolutionary War ended by treaty. The Treaty of Paris in 1784 on January 14. Interestingly, there was all sorts of promises made about paying back debts and letting people go and doing everything else. And as you might imagine, none of that worked out real well. And we ended up with the second Revolutionary War in 1812 to figure that stuff out.

Yeah.

The Brits, it turns out, wanted to impress our soldiers into service.

Yeah.

On their.

Even merchant Marine. Yeah. I mean, just regular citizens were impressed.

And they were supposed to give up some forts on the western, you know, the Northwest Territory. That didn't quite happen. And we were supposed to pay off some debt. We didn't quite do that. And we had this sort of weak constitution that didn't work out too well as. And that all manifested itself in something called Shays rebellion, I think 1786 maybe. I can't remember. But anyway, lots of cool history there.

I just got done watching. There's that. I think AMC initially aired. It was a. It was a series called Turn.

Oh, yeah, right. Yeah.

You know, not exactly historically accurate, but it sort of, you know, it got my juices flowing again on the Revolutionary War and all that history. So I'm diving back into it.

Well, wasn't. I think it was the. Dolly Madison actually saved a lot of the contents of the White house.

Yeah. In 1812. So what's interesting about that is old Dolly, she was ever the entertainer and she would have people in and out of the White House all the time. She was like one of the first. It really opened up the doors, I think, to the White House and had people for lunch and dinner. In those days you could just walk in and you would just hang out and say, hey, I'd like to see old James Madison here.

Right.

But Madison himself was sort of a sickly dude. And I don't know if you asked Old Hickory, he was a weak president. And. But Dolly, as. As the Brits invaded Washington and burned it was grabbing, like, Washington's portrait and some other stuff.

Yeah.

And.

Yeah.

And saved it and got out in the nick of time. And you know what? What I always find fascinating about this is that that was a war. 1812 was sort of a war a lot like probably the Revolutionary War, that we didn't want to fight it. We being the people, sort of like, what? Look.

Yeah.

Americans are always this way. It's like, look, man, just get off my cloud. I got my farm, I got my. My business. I don't need. Why are we going to do this? And then for whatever reason, the Brits thought it was smart to invade Washington and burn it.

Yeah.

And now. Now all the loyalists and the people who probably weren't necessarily on the side of the revolution, but went along were like, what the f. Are you guys doing? You're burning our White House.

Right.

You didn't need to do this. So now we're coming over the top. Last battle of 1812, fought, of course, in New Orleans after the treaty was signed.

Yeah.

They didn't have email back then, it turns out.

And our own Commodore Perry, I think it was, because we have the Perry monument up the ship on Lake Erie. Right. Defeated what I think it was a cluster of three British battleships on Lake Erie. And if you go up there to this day, it's kind of touching because they buried the regular sailors, you know, the enlisted recruited sailors. They were kind of put in a mass grave at the base of the monument. But the American and British officers are buried side by side, almost like they're brothers in arms. Like, the Brit officers are over here, and the dead American officers from that battle are. Are on the other side, like, within just a few feet of each other.

Yeah. It's.

You know, it's like we buried the hatchet. We're. You know, probably when they put that monument up, they probably had British representatives there.

And, you know, dare I call that a civil war, but almost. It's sort of like, look, we were brothers.

Oh, no, we were. We were Brits. Yeah, right.

We were Brits.

Now, we left all the Founding fathers.

Yeah.

There might have been one or two Hessians, but basically all the Founding fathers who signed the Declaration, they were all British by either direct birth or descendants.

In that turn series, if nothing Else. And I don't know if this is exactly, but it sort of. It focused me anyway on the notion that, holy crap. We were fighting, like, sometimes those guys are fighting each other. It wasn't in circus Colonists fighting a colonist.

Yeah.

Some were choosing different sides, and you had loyalists and you had rebels and patriots, and, you know, it was an interesting time in history.

Yeah. The Mel Gibson movie the Patriot is also, again, fictional, but it also is set in that period. And at first. Right. He doesn't want to fight. He doesn't want to be part of the revolution. But when they burned his farm down and killed his family, obviously he flipped. And there's some factual basis for that tension.

My history professors always said one third of the American populace was for the Revolution, one third was for England, and the other third didn't give a rat.

That's probably about true.

That's probably about right.

Yeah. Yeah.

A lot like today, anyway, when they're doing this rehab at the White House with Trump. I wonder if they'll find scorch marks from 1812 in there.

Yeah. Or maybe Dolly Madison left, like, a little time capsule.

Dolly was here.

Well, a fascinating lady, by the way. Dolly, man, go read the history.

Yeah, you know, so, you know, the First Ladies were really not exactly wallflowers throughout American history, you know, I mean, right up until the present day. So, yeah, there was this crazy case. I mean, I say it's crazy. So I went to law school, and part of the reason why I never became a lawyer is because there was a strong. And I don't know if Steve's experience was similar, but in my class at law school, there was a strong thread of lack of common sense amongst the students. And the older students that had been out in the world and then came back and went through law school were far more grounded in what real life was all about. But for many of us that went right from undergraduate school into law school, all of this like, how many angels on the head of a pin. So you have this case yesterday before the Supreme Court about transgender.

What I will say are boys born with male sexual identity. And obviously, there's some kind of crazy push, I think, in large part to infect the American ethic with socialism, with communism. Like, if you can change the definitions of things, you can change society.

Yeah, hold on. We're going to really chop this up.

We can chop. We can get into Jordan Peterson, and, like, there's a lot here.

There's a lot to go. So. But let's first identify what we're talking about. We're talking about West Virginia versus bpj, that is B period, P period, J period. And a lot of times, just so people know that the court will use initials like that because they want to protect the identity of whoever. And another case called Little vs. Hecox, both cases revolve around laws, one in West Virginia, another in Idaho, that basically prohibit men from competing in women's sports.

And Ohio has this also.

And Ohio has this.

We're one of the 29 states.

So what's happened is there are people. So a state passes a law here, West Virginia and Idaho and Ohio, that says, all right, you're a man. You can't compete in women's sports. And now what's happened is those men or people who used to be men that are now trans or women or whatever, however they identify are saying, hold on a second, this is unconstitutional. This violates equal protection of the law. And you can't, the state that is, cannot prohibit this. So what we're talking about, and I think this is important just to lay the framework, because this kind of stuff tends to sort of venture off into this, into all sorts of collateral debates, like we're about to do. But you have to understand what is at issue here, as the lawyers would say, is whether that law violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution, which says you have to treat everybody equally.

And if so, then it's unconstitutional. They're asking, these litigants are asking the Supreme Court to strike down the laws unconstitutional. And the Supreme Court has taken the case. They didn't have to take the case, but they took the case. And they're considering whether they're going to strike down these laws or pass on it. And they've got a couple of options. They can strike down the laws and say, yes, they violate equal protection. They can affirmatively say, no, there's no equal protection violation.

Or what I would probably be advocating for is some sort of other position that you're not going to like, Norm, that says let the states litigate this crap for a while, because we don't have a factual framework yet to figure it out. And that's between those options is where all the fun lies. So let's go ahead. Go.

Yeah, well, there's a huge lack of common sense here, which I think is deliberate. I think people are deliberately being obtuse because they want to destroy our society. That sounds real strong. But if you look at the, you know, the situation with ice, or you look at 100 other issues in America, America right now, clearly Traditional American values are under attack. And this is one way to do that is to basically say, as Justice Alito asked the lady from the aclu, Hartnett is her last name. He asked her very directly, well, what if I just wake up, basically, or a young man wakes up having had no surgery, no puberty blockers, no medication of any kind, just rolls out of bed in the morning and says, you know what? I'm a woman, I'm a girl. I'm going to go out for the girls track team. Can the states prohibit such a boy or man from playing in girls sports? And the ACLU attorney blew it because she fell right into Alito's logic trap and she said, yes, they can ban such a boy.

So therefore the entire case falls apart. Because basically now you're just talking about the degree to which somebody has transed. Because she wants to argue that a boy who has somehow undergone some sort of treatment or some sort of identity change, that he has the right to play in women's. In a girl's sport, but a boy who just rolls out of bed having done nothing, not even changing his haircut, that he doesn't have that right. So he blew her up. And I don't know that there's anything else to talk about.

Here's the problem. And this is, I think this is sort of what you were starting with. In law, you have to have definitions. In any logical, right, any rational society or approach, you have to have definition.

Words matter.

Words matter. And words and definitions of words matter.

Yes.

And there is, you know, there's a postmodern movement that says, look, nothing, it's all what we perceive. There are no firm definitions and there are no this. And it just sort of blurred the distinction between everything.

Right?

And Western values are the exact opposite from going all the way back to our musical foundations, to our historical. Like it's all logic, reason and experience.

Right.

And we can relate on common terms because we have common definitions. And it's not just the west in the. Or what I'll call the quote, you know, modern west, but go all the way back to Socrates.

Yeah.

And there's a famous dialogue. So Plato wrote a series of dialogues. Socrates, I think really wrote nothing at all. Came from Plato. But Plato writes this dialogue. I think it's Gorgias. And I'm not going to go too far into it, but one of the premises of Gorgias is that Socrates is debating somebody called a rhetoric. And rhetorics, like lawyers were these guys who just went in, I can debate you on any topic for any reason at any time, right? And there's a bigger problem there.

But Socrates was trying to pin down the rhetoric on definitions of terms and couldn't do it. And Socrates sort of says, look, I'm out. We've got nothing to discuss. If we have no commonality in terms, we can't go forward with a rational debate and we can solve nothing. And this is my long winded way of saying that has again come to fruition in this new movement of what is a woman? And this is what the justices, was it Alito asking? One of them was asking this acl, what is a woman? Give me a definition, right? And this is sort of the famous quote that's going around. I'm not going to take a, you know, I'm not going to advocate one way or another on that. But if you can't answer that question, what is a woman and what is a man? And when does a woman become a man? Or when does a man become a woman? If it's not at birth, then how can you possibly, how can you possibly legislate terms of equal protection if you can't reach a definition? This postmodern logic is self defeating because it isn't logical.

Well, let's say what it is. It's irrational. It's irrational per se. And it's reflected in the terminology used by the trans movement radicals. So they use words like assigned at birth. Well.

Or birthing person.

Well, assigned at birth. This is where I want to launch off at as an example of the irrationality. So a baby emerges from the womb. A doctor and a nurse note the presence of one of two sex organs. Unless it's a mutated baby, which is super rare. But it happens, right? Just like you can be born with your kidneys not in your abdomen, but outside of the abdomen. That's a mutation. You could be born with sex organs from both genders in a very rare case.

And in that case they perform some kind of surgery to correct that situation. But in a normal birth, right, the baby emerges from the womb. They note factually what it is. It's a boy or a girl. They don't assign diddly squat. That is a term that has been inserted by the radical advocates here as if the doctor is exercising discretion. Yeah, like he's deciding something.

I don't think they mean God, assign this person to be a man. So it's gotta be the doctor. And if it's the doctor, it's gotta be discretionary.

The doctor is assigning the gender is crazy. It's crazy to even view it that way. The doctor is simply making an observation of what the facts are, of what the reality is. The reality is that's a human being. It's not a giraffe. So he writes down a human birth. He writes down what the sex is of this new baby. He writes down, you know, if there's hair color, how much it weighs, and other facts that are indisputable.

Yeah, there's a logical. If anybody's taken logic and any, any formal course in logic, you don't need to go take a formal course. You can just go read about common sense. There are rules about logic.

This thing, common sense.

There are rules about logic in one of. One of a logical one. Argument of technique is something called reductio ad absurdum, where you reduce it to absurdity. And. Or maybe you could say this is. This suffers from being a slippery slope because when you can't define a term, it just. It gets slippery. Slippery, whatever.

Yeah, more and more slippery, whatever it is. And you can never get to the bottom of it. There's no bottom to it.

So there's no.

Wait a minute. Are you a man at birth?

Right?

And then what if my mother or my father says, I hereby ordain this boy a girl? Now, do I qualify for equal protection? And am I then permitted to go excel in women's sports? Or what if at 15, I say, look, I really feel like a woman today, so I'm going to start taking hormones? How far along in the hormonal process would you have it be before you can go play? In other words, there is no standard. You can't enforce law without a standard. And I think that's what you're saying is this is the chaos that the postmodernists injected into our society.

And Steve, we knew we were in trouble when Marsha Blackburn during the confirmation hearings asked future Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, what is a woman? And she said, I can't give you an answer because I'm not a biologist. Neither are you and neither am I. But we sure as hell know what a woman is.

Yeah, I do.

Duh.

I do.

Right?

An adult human female. It's very obvious.

And yet Ketanji yesterday is quizzing the West Virginia AG and asking him where along the line is this fictional transmogrification supposed to happen where a cisgender, meaning born as a boy, becomes enough of a woman to qualify to play sports? And he basically said, once you're born a man or a woman, that is what you Are and the most famous trans athlete in America, Caitlyn Jenner, formerly Bruce Jenner, won the decathlon.

Yeah. My youth he was like the very.

Male race car driver, decathlete, Olympian, has said, listen, it's insane to think that I, you know, in my prime could just put on a dress and lipstick and wear, you know, get an enhanced breast and go out and compete as a woman. That's ridiculous.

Yeah. So it's. You make a good point. And he's right, you make a good point. And that is this. I don't care. And maybe let me back up even further. The proponents of this nonsense have done a snow job of trying to meld together this notion that those who don't agree that trans men who are becoming women can play in women's sports are somehow bigoted against trans men.

Alito asked that very question, am I a bigot if you know, are people bigots if they let us do.

Or you're a racist?

She said no, she said you're not a bigot.

And that's what has blurred this debate. And often it happens all the time with racism. These terms like sexism or whatever it is, or xenophobe, it doesn't matter. But if I can and I will right here, acknowledge, I don't care if you want to be a woman. If you want to try to become a woman and take the hormones and do, I could care less. But I am not going to create an equal protection. You know, I can't say the same about if you want to become a woman, then you get to go compete in women's sports. The two to me are totally different.

I'm going to save Steve here because I know what he means. But I just want to clarify. I am sure Steve made that statement about adults. You would not. You do care about minors.

I would not. I am vehemently opposed to the state, the government, the state being the government, whether it's a state, local or federal.

Yeah.

Or parents forcing hormones down minors throats.

Let them become an adult cutting off and they can decide then.

Yeah, look, if you're a grown ass man or a grown ass woman or you want to be a one or the other and you're not, go do it now. I also oppose public funding for that. I don't find that to be a reason for health care. I don't think we should fund prison surgeries. I don't think we should fund private surgery any more than I think somebody should fund any healthcare that I choose to get that I didn't have to get. So if I want to somehow get. If I want to get a facelift because I don't like the look of my face. I mean, look, it's on you.

That's a private pay thing, right? That is a non essential. And this is not a healthcare debate. But you get what I'm saying.

If you were born without a nose and you need rhinoplasty in order to be able to breathe, that's a different kind of plastic surgery, Right?

So if you're going to have public health care for that, I mean, you can debate about whether you should or shouldn't, but that's a different scenario than if I just decide that's right. Look, I'd like to, you know, enhance my nose a little bit because I'm looking in the mirror and I just don't like the way it looks. I don't like my smile or I want to get lip injections, whatever it is.

Yeah.

You know, I don't find this to be valid healthcare. I don't. And these are the. I'm not bigoted against those who feel like they have a different gender. I could care less. I could care less. Go do what you want and I'll go a step further. I don't care who you sleep with in your bedroom.

I don't care. I really don't. You know, you can ask me, based on my faith what I think about that, but I don't care that you're doing it. These two, all these things are different. And I think, I think that's where this gets difficult because people are afraid of the shout outs, you know, oh, you know, you can totally. You're a bigot because you don't, you don't promote healthcare for trans people. And I'm like, wait a minute, I didn't say anything because they've done the same thing there. They've redefined what healthcare means.

And I think that has. We can turn to the other really hot story right now about this ice shooting in Minneapolis, but I think that drives a lot of the people who haven't really considered the merits of a situation, but they are so stigmatized by the possibility of being accused of being insensitive or being a racist or being a bigot that they're not willing to defend their common sense. Their common sense, their beliefs. And so they crumple almost immediately. And they even start parroting what they think will be popular on late night TV or whatever. And you see actors and actresses fall into this trap all the time.

Oh, the Golden Globe it's gross.

I mean, because they want to be perceived as nice, whatever that means. And what I like is just this past week, Pope Leo talked about Orwellian language and how dangerous that is and how it is actually the reverse of free speech when you stigmatize people from being able to express themselves, like Google does, for example. And Alexa won't do a search that you ask her to because Alexa, the AI programming, won't go there because of political reasons. What that ends up doing is it creates a false sense of what actuality exists. It's these people, and it destroys free communication between people.

We don't have. It's back to Socrates. We don't have common terms upon which we can communicate and. And actually function and make advancements and figure stuff out. And as my buddy always says, one of my good friends always says, these folks operate in the world of should be, not is. And they envision what they think everything should be, this utopian existence, that this should be this. So they just invent terms and operate.

Like cisgender and assigned at birth woman. I mean, this is Orwellian kind of talk. It's Newspeak that George Orwell talked about. And it's amazing that the Catholic pope, the Blues Brothers pope, the Pope from Chicago, has picked up on this and basically says we're oppressing people by not allowing them to discuss these issues.

Well, you said it. He's on a mission from God.

Yeah, he is on a mission from God. Well, Steve, do you want to take us into, you know, I mean, obviously I want to talk about the bigger social implications. We can get lost in the, you know, the parallels between the Takaya Young shooting that happened here in Columbus and the very similar shooting that happened in Minneapolis. You have a police officer, you know, near the front of a vehicle that's being driven away in haste. The police officer, or law enforcement officer, in this case in Minneapolis, ICE views that as a deadly weapon being brandished and in fact, being wielded against him and takes defensive action, shooting the person and whether they intended to kill the person or not. When you shoot somebody, there's pretty good chance you may kill them. And that's what happened.

So, yeah, I mean, there's so much to unpack with this. And for those who are really interested in the legal breakdown of this, we did a panel discussion in another podcast I'm involved in called Lawyer Talk. You can check it out. And it brought in some experts on defending police officers, people who have both sued police officers as well as defended police officers. In civil suits, as well as a local police officer. But you're right, Norm, there is a lot of parallels between a local case that happened here in Ohio, got national attention, where a suspect after a shoplifting incident was told to stop by the police and she didn't, she was driving forward in front of a car or and a police officer was in front of her car and he ended up shooting and killing her, sadly.

And in both cases, there was a little debate. The window was rolled down partially and the driver is debating with the LEO about whether or not to get out of the vehicle.

Yeah, there's some. So clearly both. There's some similarities and there's some dissimilarities. So there are things that are, are markedly better if you're defending a police officer in the local case here in Ohio than there would be defending the officer in the Minnesota case. But go check out the Lawyer Talk panel discussion for that. And we really break it down. But generally, here's what happens. The mistake everybody's making.

The mistake everybody is making is, and I'm not, I'm not taking a position on whether this is a good shoot or bad shoot. I am telling you what the law is. I do have an opinion on it. But the mistake everybody's making is they're sort of treating it like it is a, like it's self defense in a civilian type situation. So, Norm, it's different for you to pull the trigger in a situation like this than it is for police officers. Right or wrong, good or bad, that's what the law is back to. Our theme of the day is we don't get to operate as a legal system that's going to function in society. If we're going to change the law around to fit the facts that we have and this brings it.

This is why I love the law. Because, you know, as the law change, people change. We, there's a process for that. You go to the general assembly or the legislative branch and you change the law. But here, police officers, they have to show justification. And that is a little bit different. That means a reasonable officer in this guy's shoes, not a reasonable person, but a reasonable officer, what would he think? And there's, there's some factors that you have to consider and there's a whole lot of stuff that goes into this debate. It's not as obvious as people think.

It doesn't necessarily matter that this, that Ms. Good had her wheels turned, like she wasn't actually trying to hit the guy, hit the police officer because the officer could Say maybe legitimately, maybe you could argue with him that he felt like he was going to get run over.

Well, he did get hit. He did get hit.

I get it. But it's about what he perceived was going on, not what she was intending to do. Now, on the other side, I'll just throw some facts to the other side of the debate. It's coming out. Perhaps I don't know this for sure, but it may be that this woman, Ms. Good, got contrary orders. Somebody was saying, get the heck out of here. And another person was saying, stop.

That muddies up the water a little bit.

Well, her wife was standing outside the vehicle, telling her, coaching her up to leave. She said, get out of here, hit the gas, go. And frankly, she should probably be charged as an accessory.

Yeah.

Because, you know, now I can imagine the federal government doesn't want to charge this wife, A, because she's a sympathetic figure and B, because it'll really amp up. Then it draws in the, you know, the gay and lesbian community as somehow, you know, they're being picked on. But whether or not it would be her, let's suppose she's hetero and it was her husband amping her on. I don't care either way. Whether it's a man, woman, gay, straight, doesn't matter to me. Her partner is telling her who's taping this on her phone. She is telling her to go and she did. And she hit the officer on the way past him and he shot and he shot her.

Right. So it's tragic. First of all, let me say this. This is horrific. This is horrific for everybody in life.

Like it was to Kaia Young.

I mean, this woman lost her life and it's just, it's so mind boggling to get your head around it. And I've said this in another platform, people got all upset for me. It's also horrific for the officer because, look, no question.

Yeah.

I just can't accept that most officers, there's always the psychopaths out there. But officers don't want to go around shooting people and then have to deal with that.

Do you think he's at home, Steve, high fiving his wife? Hey, I killed a protester. Like you think he's happy about that?

This sucks for everybody involved. It sucks. And I'm not saying it doesn't suck. Worse. And it's not more horrific for Ms. Good and her loved ones. She lost her life. That's the worst thing that can possibly happen to you.

It is awful. It's awful for society because now it just. More fuel for the fire. But what I want to get into here. And look, here's what I. There's one more legal thing we want to talk about, is that Minnesota wants to indict this guy, of course. And there's some issues about whether they actually can do that. He may have immunity.

And what would happen is, generally speaking, go check out our other show for this. But generally speaking, the agent will immediately request the case to be removed to federal court for a determination about whether or not he has immunity as a defense to the local charge. And if he does, the case will die on the vine there. If he does not, the case would sort of proceed there, and he'll have to pursue the justification defense and see what it is.

But so more interesting to me than the specifics of how this shakes out is why is this fact pattern even. Why was it even in existence? Why were the ICE agents left barenaked out there in the middle of the street to effectuate an arrest? What they were in the process of doing at the time that this lady, the person who got shot, and her wife pulled up in their SUV right at the scene, right where the ICE agents are working their case. Why was she allowed to be so close in such proximity to an ICE operation? Well, I can tell you why. I could tell it's the same reason why Kyle rittenhouse is, at 17 years old, is out in the middle of a riot. It's because the police locally were told, in both cases during the riots where Rittenhouse effectively turned into a police officer without portfolio. And the same reason why this lady drove her SUV right up to an operational site is because the local police were told by political leaders in both cities to stand down, to not render aid.

And more than that, there was messaging across these, quote, sanctuary cities. There's messaging that, if not expressly, then the clear intent is obvious. Go out and harass these people. They're unwanted. What they're doing is fundamentally wrong. They shouldn't be allowed to do it. And you know what? All that may be true, except they have the federal authority to do it. So what? The messaging from the mayor, the.

The governors, these folks are out there telling civilians, go out there and protest it. And you know what? Shame on them, because this is what happens. And I'm not. You don't. You don't even have to agree that ICE should be doing what they're doing. Let me say that again. You don't have to agree that ICE should be doing what they're doing.

Absolutely.

Yeah. To reach this conclusion that it is not permissible to go out and prevent them, as a civilian, from doing what they're doing.

So I'm not anti protest, I'm not anti free speech. If you don't like what ICE is doing in Minneapolis, peacefully demonstrate against them, stand on the sidewalk with your signs, et cetera. But you cannot interfere with their operation. You can't pelt them with fireworks and frozen water bottles, which are lethal. If a frozen water bottle hits you in the head, it could easily cause a contusion to your. To your brain if it. I mean, it's deadly. You can't do that kind of stuff, right? But you have the right to protest.

You have the right to free speech, and I support all of that.

And you have a right to vote.

You have a right to vote. Here's the thing. The culprit here, and I want to be very clear, this is the same mayor during the George Floyd riots that told the third Precinct there in Minneapolis, abandoned ship, they burned down that substation. And the police were not in that precinct to defend and to protect the local innocent population that was being burned, that was being torn down, and that was being vandalized. So there were local people of all different kinds of skin colors, by the way, who were abandoned by their local police. And I will make the case right here and now that Ms. Good was not served by the local police department, nor Mayor Frey, nor Governor Walz. They owed her a duty to protect her by keeping her the hell away from an ICE operation.

And they would have done that in any other normal city where there's cooperation and you can call for backup by.

The local PD and not to support. They didn't even have to do it to outwardly support isis.

Not at all.

Just to do it to protect their civilians, to protect the public, to protect the people.

Exactly.

And this is maintain order. Maintain order.

That's what it is.

It's so frustrating to me. Now, look, you could say. And then the other side would say, wow, they're running around like Gestapo with masks on, et cetera. And then the ICE people would say, well, yeah, but when we weren't doing that, you were following us home. And then our kids were getting harassed and they would say, yeah, but we don't want you in your community. Yeah, but it's our job. It's like, look, folks, we have to figure out some harmony here. And I would say the law is a great place to start.

Federal agents doing a federal job.

I will give my liberal friends the following wake up message you all went full balls to the wall about January 6th and how these MAGA people broke into the Capitol and trespassed and how they were real bad and they caused this guy in the hospital to have a heart attack. That's your theory. His family denies that. This fan own fella who was laid in rest under the Capitol Rotunda like a war hero or something, engineered by Pelosi and Schumer. So you called on conservatives and MAGA people and red hat wearing people that they had to obey law enforcement and do what they're told by the police. And yet in Minneapolis. Right. You could care less.

Well, look, I would always say this.

So it's always so, Steve. It's always situational ethics.

That's right. Well, it's the same. It's the theory that we have. They changed the definitions based on what they want it to be. So look, if it were kkk, pointy white hats running around doing these things, the hue and cry would be overwhelming and it would be stopped by local cops. But so the cops don't get to choose against whom they enforce the law. That is an equal protection problem. So, look, I'm not.

I'm not this. You don't. I. You don't even have to get to a conclusion that you agree with the federal government's handling of immigrants, unlawful immigrants or whatever you want to call it. You don't have to get there.

That's right.

But you at least have to acknowledge that the federal government has a right under the Supremacy Clause. It's within their jurisdiction to do this.

And all these laws they were enforcing, Steve, were passed by Congress long ago. The idea that they're doing something like the Gestapo or Nazis. Well, I will just tell my liberal friends. Write your Congress, critters. Have them propose legislation, change the law, say that we have no borders. Anybody can come in, they can stay. They don't need documentation. They can be terrorists from Nigeria or terrorists from Sweden or terrorists from anywhere.

And that unlimited amounts of people from Mexico can come and Canada go ahead and pass those laws. But until you pass those laws, the men and women of the Department of Homeland Security are merely enforcing existing statutes.

Existing. So here's the difference, though. Existing federal statutes. Unless you call me a hypocrite, I do not agree. And Norman, we've had a debate about this. Whether we can send in federal troops or National Guard troops to enforce local law, that is the state's job. That's not the federal job. So sending in ICE officers to enforce, you know, street crime, it's not their job.

But sending in ICE officers to enforce federal law on unlawful immigrants is their job. That's their job.

Well, my position on that is a little bit more nuanced than that. Summary. So for example, Eisenhower, you know, he sent in nationalized state national Guardsmen to enforce civil rights law.

That was federal law though.

That's what I'm saying.

Yeah, that was federal law.

That was right. But to enforce their civil rights to go to school in Alabama, black young men and women to enter college and high school. So when I'm talking about the civil rights, I include the right to be alive. Okay? So if there is a federal building in Chicago and there are riots and there are street crime in and around that federal building, those citizens in Chicago, whether Governor Pritzker likes it or not, or Brian, Mayor Johnson likes it or not in Chicago, I think the federal government does have the right.

Well, that's a little bit different because you're protecting a federal building.

Well, that's the nuance I'm talking about.

There's a nuance. But the point of all this is to say, and I think you were making this point earlier, generally speaking for you constitutional law students or lawyers out there, we learn early on in constitutional law about state police power. And I'm not talking about like guys who wear the hats and badges. The state police power is a bigger term meant to say the states have the power to police their own local environments. And here Minnesota has fundamentally dropped the ball. They dropped the ball at the local level, they've dropped the ball at the state level. And as a result of that, we have these consequences. Because had they enforced local law, had they enforced the very simple notion that you should not be out there following around ICE agents and blocking them.

Now look, there's two things I said there. Following them around. I'm going to get a response that people say, well, they have every right to go follow them around. And you're right, they may have that right, but they don't have a right.

To block them or interfere with an operation.

Or interfere with an operation. Now let's talk about the following around part of it. So if you're following them around and then whistling and preventing them from apprehending a suspect that's interfering and that's going to be some, that's going to be a problem. So but following them around in their cars sometimes engaged in what we'll call like tailing or maybe even a high speed tailing, think about this. Just because you have a right to do it and Then we fall into this. Should you be doing this? Like, what are the risks of this? So I mean, look, I have every right if I want to to go out and get plastered drunk every single night, I can do it. But it's a high risk endeavor. So I have a right to do it.

I choose not to do it. Freedom, folks, comes with the inherent notion that we have to have internal governance of ourselves.

Well, and there are anti stalking laws.

Well, sure, but we have our own independent right to make choices.

I don't have the right, for example, to camp out in front of the local police station and then follow officers home to figure out where they live. That's called stalking.

So I can harass them or do.

Whatever and dox them and then publish where they live like they were doing to ICE agents. You can't do that kind of thing.

And it's high risk behavior. Right? So you can have two things going on at least once. If you engage in high, if you go out and get drunk and you have random sex with people and then somehow you end up in a problem as a result of that.

Like look, or you have STDs, it.

Shouldn'T have happened to you. It's horrible. And it might even been somebody may have even raped you. But. And it doesn't mean that person's not guilty as the day as long they are. And they ought to be castrated if they're rapists. But it's high risk behavior. And just because you can.

With freedom comes the obligation to make choices for ourselves that are wise.

So if I were the federal government and the state of Minnesota, city of Minneapolis want to charge this officer, I'm charging Mayor Fry and Governor Walsh also. And one of the very rational observations by Tom Homan, who, you know, works with DHS for Customs and Border Patrol Service, he made the observation and we saw this in Madison, Wisconsin with that judge who got thrown off the bench. And I think she has a jail term to serve when she prevented ICE from arresting in the courthouse, somebody in her courtroom, and she ushered the suspect out the back of the courthouse. And Homan makes the point that if the local when ICE has a detainer order on certain people who are dangerous criminals. And this is true here in Columbus, Ohio as well, when they put out that this guy, for example, one of their worst 10 that they published this week was a Mexican illegal who is charged with three murders and they put him out as wanted. And what they would say to Minneapolis or Columbus, Ohio is if that guy gets pulled over for let's say a traffic stop or he gets pulled over for some other reason, maybe an assault in a bar or whatever it is. And Columbus or Minneapolis notes that this guy's wanted by ice. They need to hold him.

So instead of this operation out in the street with SUVs and all this rioting and chaos, they just go down to the local Franklin county courthouse, they pick the guy up in perfect safety.

And people say, I had somebody, a very smart person attorney say, well, look, this isn't happening in red. I was like, no, it is, but it's not like this because what the red states are doing, the non sanctuary city states are doing, is they're letting ICE into their justice centers or their jails or whatever, and it's happening peacefully. What these other people are doing, these other sanctuary cities are doing is they're forcing it out onto the streets where this stuff can happen. There's always a consequence, there's always a reaction to an action, and this is the reaction. So what they're trying to do, I think on purpose is make this chaotic political statement so they can somehow defeat Trump. Look, there's a consequence to that.

Somebody's dead on the other side of this issue. You would think all of the anti ICE people, right, would be horrified and upset that this lady got shot. I will submit that there's a good number of them that are pretty happy about it. Not that she's dead, but that they have this issue now, you know, that they, you know, finally we have some violence that happened between an ICE officer.

Yeah, they're going to use it.

Yeah, they're going to use it.

They're going to use it.

They are using this poor woman's death as leverage in this political debate to win the. And that is sick.

Now, look, I'll say one more thing. And if I were in the Department of Justice camp, my messaging would have been a little bit different. So I will throw some stones at DOJ on this, come out and say, look, this is horrendous. This is a horrific tragedy of epic proportions. For now, we're going to go gather all the facts, we're going to get all the information, we're going to conduct a thorough investigation before we decide what to do. And look what DOJ said, and I get it, they advocated their position. They said this was a deadly weapon, this officer felt threatened and it was a good shooter. All that may be true.

They may actually feel that that's true. But I think the political messaging could have been a little bit better to tone it down.

Can I point of clarification? And I'm asking, because I don't know the answer. Are you sure these were statements by DOJ and not dhs? Because I haven't heard Bondi or anybody at doj.

I heard Kristi Noem and I heard JD Vance.

Okay. So those are not the people who will decide. It'll be the FBI the doing the investigation and then DOJ will decide based on the report whether to. Okay.

And I think Kristi Noem got over her skis on this early on. She got out of her skis. She's defending her department and she had some facts wrong. But I think as the leaders, these folks need to say they have to understand that while they may feel strongly about a situation like this, their job is to be a leader of not only their department, but perhaps emboldened some leadership into the country.

Sure.

And to say, I think the better messaging would have been something like I said, look, this is terrible. We're doing a complete and thorough investigation and in, in due time we will come out with our position on it. But for now, we're praying for everybody involved. We're praying for this Miss Good and all her family and loved ones. And at the same time, we feel horrible that our agent had to go through this. We're going to try to sort all this out and make sure that this doesn't happen again. I mean, look, that's, that's an easy message and it probably would have toned down some of the rhetoric.

We'll never know. But.

Yeah, anyway.

Yeah, locally in Ohio, just to follow up on something we talked about last week. Governor DeWine, you know, I was pretty strong. I still want him impeached, whether his response is factual or not, for a whole bunch of things. Okay. But there's so much evidence that he is in the tank for illegal immigration or at least for lack of enforcement that I'm done with him. And he says that even though Ohio has over 4,000 daycare licensed operations in Ohio, over 4,000 of them that qualify for, for nutritional subsidy for the children, he says there is not a problem in Ohio and what little graft or fraud has occurred is just the mere cost of doing business.

This is the same criticism I have, just a little bit different. If I'm in charge of Ohio, I would say something like this. I hope that we don't have that kind of rampant fraud in Ohio. But I tell you what, we're gonna do an investigation and we're gonna figure it out. And if we don't, then we're going to pound the table and say, darn it, we did it. Right. And if we do, we're going to pound the table and say, darn it. We're going to stop it and do it right from here on out.

That's. It's. Look, it's just so. It's so stupid.

Yeah.

Like just, just come out and say, what would you say? If on your watch, Norm, there's a. There is a huge potential problem, Any good leader would say, I'm going to look into it. Yeah, I'm going to look into it.

If that's true, I'm upset. I need to find out if it's true.

And if you've already done the investigation, then you show the results of the investigation. You say, look, we looked at this daycare, we looked at this childcare. We looked over here at this minute, we looked over here, we looked over here, and here's the results of it. There's a little bit of problem, but not like, don't just act like there's no problem, because that doesn't. Here's the issue. Even though it may be true in Ohio that we don't have that kind of fraud, it is not instilling any bit of confidence for those who think that we do. Just because DeWine is saying so.

Right. And maybe especially because he's saying so. This is the same governor when illegal Venezuelans who were drunk in the morning collided head on with a school bus in Springfield, Ohio. He put together a committee to study school bus safety when obviously the proximate cause of the accident were drunk illegals from Venezuela. It didn't have anything to do with the construction standards of the school bus.

Right.

For God's sakes.

Or you could say this. We're gonna prosecute those involved and we're gonna make sure that doesn't happen again. And we're gonna look into school bus safety in case it does. There's an easy way to message that. Of course.

You know, I still want to know from last week's show how we ended up with 60,000 Somalis in Columbus, Ohio. And I'm sure there's people, people in Minneapolis that want the same question answered for their city.

Yeah, what's that?

Who decided to plop this gigantic group of people who, many of whom are very decent people, very good people, but amongst them, there is a certain population that want to take, that want to abuse and defraud us. And the question is, rather than putting, say, 100 in Dayton, Ohio, and 100 out there in Youngstown and 100 in Wheeling, West Virginia. And spread it out. How did 60,000 concentrated population get dumped or assigned, if you will, to our city?

So if you're the person who signed.

The order, I want to know how.

Please, please leave it in the comments.

I want to know how it happened.

Look, there's a really juicy, I hate to say this about a murder case, but there's an interesting murder case unfolding here in local Ohio, Nationally.

Yes, Notorious case.

Case.

Yeah. So a young couple, Monique and Spencer Tepe, I think is how you pronounce her last name, were murdered by allegedly her ex husband, whom she divorced eight years ago and in the meantime had married this dentist. Her ex is a vascular surgeon in Rockford, Illinois. In the meantime, she married a dentist, Spencer Tepe, and they had two children. And sometime between 2 and 5 in the morning a week or two ago, somebody broke in, allegedly her ex, and shot them both dead in the same house as their little children. And the police arrived and there's little kids crying over their dead parents. Pretty horrible situation for anybody to think about. And you know, it didn't take them long.

And they had video from I guess, doorbell cameras or whatever of his car, the ex husband's car, parked on the street in close proximity to the house where the murders took place. Place somewhere off of 4th street just north of the short north area of Columbus, Ohio. So something about a half a million dollar or three quarters of a million dollar house. It's in one of those gentrified little strips that's trying to, you know, just.

The kind of case that I might be hired to defend, as it turns out. No, look, these are the kind of murder cases that really garner everybody's attention. I don't know why that is. It goes all the way back in his, you know, maybe even beyond Jack the Ripper. But it's like people love murder cases. Well, the trying to solve it.

And the victims were very attractive. And there's the young man and his.

Wife, maybe like the shepherd murder case. Right.

So if you look online at this couple that were murdered, they could have come right off a TV show. I mean, they're a beautiful young couple and I'm sure that's driving a lot of them.

And I guess I should say this, this is horrendous. There are two people that are dead in the prime of their lives. So look, it's a horrible thing, but people love to follow murder cases. So this will watch this unfold and if it goes to trial here locally.

So Steve, can you explain the strategy here, he has defense counsel. He was. Even though he lives in Illinois, he was apprehended in Wisconsin, is my understanding. And he waived extradition to Ohio. Why would. As an attorney, why, if you would. Why would. Under what circumstances would you have a client waive extradition?

Well, here's the deal. Extradition is like this sort of nebulous term that means I was arrested in another state in this situation. We'll just take it from here. I'm charged with the crime in Ohio. I was arrested in another state. If I don't waive extradition, I'm going to force the other state to have a hearing to prove that I'm the guy that they're looking for. And let me tell you how often that matters. Never.

Unless you think they have the wrong guy. So think back in the Old west days where you didn't have like, fingerprint, fingerprints, identification emails. Like, you're on. You're everywhere.

DNA.

DNA. I mean, look, they can easily. They being the government, could easily prove that this is the guy they're looking for. It's not the same as saying it's the guy that committed the crime, only it's the guy that's been indicted here. Yeah, and if you don't waive extradition, you're going to delay how much time you spend in cuffs in some local lockup in Illinois and only to get nowhere.

Okay?

The idea of waving as tradition is, let's get the case back here. Let's get it going. And I may disagree that I'm the guy who committed the crime, but I'm not going to disagree with. I'm the guy that you're looking for.

Okay?

That's what.

Plus, he's got to pay for two sets of attorneys, I guess, if he doesn't.

Yeah, but that's usually. I mean, look, a lot of times if I've been hired to do extradition hearings and I almost always would tell people, you should waive extradition, and they're like, I'm in a fight. You should waive extradition.

Okay.

And they're like, wow. How's the local lockup treating you here? Yeah, well, it sucks. I only get a bologna sandwich once a day and I'm in with all these other people. It's like I'm getting beat up and I, you know, I want to get home to my. Then wave. Extradition will get you home as fast as we can.

Okay?

And then sometimes what happens is in non. Not a case like this, but if you waive extradition, you can get a bond set in the foreign country or the foreign territory, the different state. And you can. If Ohio doesn't come get you or, you know, if you post that bond, you can come back on your own.

Oh, okay.

But, you know, here they. Ohio's gonna go get them and bring it back because of the nature of the charge.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, it makes sense.

That makes sense. Yeah. But I'll figure out who the lawyers are and we'll. We'll. We'll follow this one as it unfolds. My guess is, you know, it's funny. Paul Scarcella, dear friend of mine and a colleague that we worked together upstairs in the law practice, he's been on our show a couple times. Yeah, we heard these facts and we're both.

We always sort of. Look, is my phone going to ring on this? It didn't. Yeah, but, you know, we both said the same thing. But I'd be really interested in the ex. That's where they look first. Now, that's both good and bad one, because often that's where who's committing the crimes. But it also could maybe skew other possible suspects and. And give you a little bit of advocacy.

He's in a lot of trouble from a capital point of view. Right. Because, I mean, ostensibly just big picture, 30,000ft above this case, not knowing anything else, he drove in the middle of the night from Rockford, Illinois, to Columbus. So there's premeditation.

Well, so look, very likely. I think what you're asking is, could this be a death penalty case? It perhaps could be. We'd have to see. You have to have something called prior calculation and design, but that's not the real question because clearly, if he's the one and he drove down here to do it, they have purposeful murder. So they're going to have something called aggravated murder with firearms or how they kill him. How was it? Yeah, that's not the question. Question is, does the government want to pursue a capital case? And there hasn't been one in Franklin county for 20 years anyway.

Oh, wow.

And there's a reason for that. Is it because it costs a lot of money both to defend the case as well as to prosecute the case? And all too often, juries are not imposing the death penalty in Franklin County, Ohio, for whatever reason. Okay. It's a difficult.

This is by far not a slam dunk that he's going to get charged with a capital crime here.

It is not a slam dunk that he's going to be. Even if he could Be. And it sounds like he could be charged with a death penalty type case. It is up to the prosecutor in Franklin county to exercise discretion to make that decision. And I would almost always, if I'm a prosecutor, look, I mean, if he's convicted of aggravated murder with firearms, he's doing 30 to life or something like that, or maybe even life without parole.

Yeah.

Isn't that enough?

Yeah, that's almost a death penalty. Almost.

Because then, then you've avoided. I always wondered, I haven't defended a capital case in years, but let's take the O.J. case. There was this decision in the O.J. case and I remember thinking, I talking to one of my late great mentor, Bill Meeks, and he goes, it'd be stupid to pursue the death penalty because I think it makes it harder to get a conviction if somebody's sympathetic to the individual. Wow. And never thought of that because you have to convict. If you're worried that if you convict somebody in the guilt phase that they're going to get killed or imposed, it adds a layer that you got to worry about.

And locally in Franklin county, if you're mostly dealing with jurors who are opposed to the death penalty, you know, it may make your, you may be complicating a situation that doesn't need complicating.

So during the voting process, back in the jury room, when they're deciding guilt or innocence or guilt or not guilty, I shouldn't say innocence. Do they know the consequences? Do they know what the putative penalty.

Will be in Ohio anyway, it's a two step process. We have what we call the guilt phase. And if I'm defending these, I would say the innocence phase. I'd be like, don't dare call it the guilt phase. These bastards still have to prove it, Right. So we would call it the, you know, they have the trial on the facts. Can the prosecutor, can the government prove beyond a reasonable doubt that my client committed this crime of murder? And if so, and the answer is yes to that, they prove it. There's deliberate.

Well, that's a separate trial. They deliberate on that. Then the same jury, if they find this gentleman guilty, would then convene again for a second trial or phase two, which, where mitigating circumstances are presented against aggravating factors and there's a weighing process.

But do they know when they're voting on guilt or not guilty, that if they vote guilty, this guy could, could, yeah, they do hang or get appointed poisoned or whatever.

Jurors are told from the outset during this voir dire jury selection process. And usually in that it's a capital case. Yeah. They're told it's a capital case because what happens is, and this puts it, when I've defended these, it turns it on its ear because I'm saying, look, juror, I want to know what your stance is on the death penalty. Not that my guy's guilty, but if he is, it's really awkward. On the other hand, if you don't do that, you may find, you know, the government's going to say we want to smoke out the card carrying, anti death penalty folks. And I want to smoke out the people who are all in favor of death penalty and try to find people who are neutral to it.

Gotcha.

Such a politically charged mess. And even that takes sometimes weeks.

Oh, I cannot blame the mansion.

So you can imagine the cost, the time investment. Even getting a jury in a capital case is difficult.

Yeah.

So there's reasons because they have to.

Live with that decision.

And this is a rel.

A juror, a civilian who's not a police officer or not used to dealing with life, death decisions has to live with it.

They have to live with it. And you know, that's pretty heavy. I have my own opinions on whether we should or shouldn't have a death penalty or whether it's.

We did a whole show with moral or not moral. Yeah.

But the implementation of it has always caused me problems. Wow. So anyway, that's my two winner of the week.

Do you have one?

The good and the bad? Yeah, you first.

Well, my winner now this is off the wall a little bit, is Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War. They used to be in the Department of Defense. Now it's the Department of War, which is hearkening back to World War II when it was called the Department of War. His budget proposal under the president is increased 50%. So $1.1 billion was what Congress thought they were going to be asked for. It's actually now going to be 1.5 billion. And a lot of that is to upgrade our navy. And so for Secretary Hegseth, it's been a hell of a week or a couple of weeks.

You know, the drug boats being blown up, the operation in Venezuela. Two hours on the ground and they leave with the kingpin drug dealer, illegal president of Venezuela, the end of wokeness in the military, his big meeting with the admirals and the generals some months ago. And just this week, a big announcement by him and the president that they're disappointed in the defense contractors, people like Boeing and Lockheed and Hughes Aircraft and Hughes Aerospace and et cetera, that they're not doing a good enough job for the money that they're paid and it's not coming in on time. And I like all that. I like people being a little tight with our tax dollars, and I like upgrading our military. And I sure as heck like getting rid of the social experimentation, you know, with the military is very dangerous to us and dangerous to our soldiers and sailors, whether they're men or women or whatever. We should not put them in this test tube situation where we find out that something is a disastrous idea once they're in combat. This kind of stuff, we know what works and what doesn't work.

And we shouldn't be experimenting with their lives because it's fashionable. And I sound like Clint and Dirty Harry, but, you know, it's a hell of a price to pay.

Yeah. Well, look, here's my good and bad is I'm going to jump off here a little bit. Iran, we've got. We are on the brink of something. I mean, I think in the last 10 years, 10 to 15 years, we've lived through so much history that it's almost like too much to comprehend. Yes. But what's going on in Iran is hugely significant. And my good about that is good for you protesters, you know, do what you're going to do.

You know, you've got to. It's incredible.

Yeah.

And the bad is. No. Like, where are the protesters here?

Yes.

Who are out in droves to support.

Hamas, who want freedom of speech, want gays and lesbians to have civil rights, you know, instead of being thrown off the top of buildings, you know, where are they supporting the Iranian people, the secular, by the way, the people in the streets are not marching for a religious state. They want their secular state back.

They want their secular state back where they can be gay, if they want.

To be gay and not have to wear a hijab without getting your head chopped off.

Right. They just want some basic freedoms. And where are the protesters now? And what I have found, I did some thinking about this, and of all people, I saw Fetterman making statements about this and other things that are happening here. And here's what's going on. If anything good happens right now as a result of foreign policy or even not just in the world or locally or in the federal government level, the other side absolutely refuses to acknowledge it. And not only that, hates it only because it's Trump.

I think Fetterman, didn't he say if he cured cancer and wanted some funding, and we could stop it tomorrow with some magic pill. They'd be against us.

They'd be against it because it's Trump. And look, it says something more. There are people wishing Trump to fail at the expense of the country. And it should be quite the opposite. We want success for the country. So if your policy is. If you don't agree with Trump's policy, fine. But don't hope and wish and celebrate things just because Trump did it.

So I'm not the biggest Trump flag waiver. I think I've said several times he's not a conservative. And, you know, he's come out with some crazy stuff this past week.

Oh, one of my bad.

Yeah. Like he wants to prevent corporations from being able to buy homes or lowering.

Interest rates for credit cards. And now investigating Jerome Powell. I mean, that's another bad idea.

Well, we can get into that. I think investigating that rehab project that's over budget by a billion dollars is probably warranted, but at any rate. And Powell's taking that as a personal attack, but that's fine. The other wacky thing Trump came out with, it's almost like Mayor Mom, Donnie kind of stuff, is he wants to limit the amount of pay that a CEO at a corporation can earn. Look, that's up to the shareholders. If you want to pay me $40 billion for being the head of Disney, I think you're crazy for doing that. But it's up to the Disney Company.

You know, what we're gonna get is a lot of crappy CEOs. That's what we're gonna get.

So Trump is no conservative. And I think I've just demonstrated my disdain for. For some of that. But let me give Trump credit for something he did just a few days ago. Elizabeth Warren, who he calls Pocahontas, he can't stand her. She made a speech that the Democrats have gone way too far left. They need to get back to the middle. They need to start doing things to help the middle class.

Trump called her up even though she said, hey, Trump's awful and he's a worse guy. And in the same speech, she said all this critical stuff about Trump. He called her up later the same day and said, that was a great speech. I agree with you. Let's work together on this thing that you and I think is crazy on the credit card interest thing. But, hey, it just shows you, like, he can take a shot, so to speak. Like, he go ahead and criticize me, but he still will do a deal with you.

Oh, like, he had madani in the White House. He didn't care.

No, he doesn't care. Like it bounces off of him.

Yeah, really. I don't want to say incredible in the sense of good, but really interesting, personal.

So, you guys, you'll love my loser of the Week. My loser of the week. Yesterday, Trump was at the Detroit, the Rouge river factory, which is where ford makes the F150, and he's touring it. And Bill Ford, the chairman of the board, is there, and Jim Farrell, the president of Ford is there, and the UAW is even there. And they're all patting each other on the back about how the tariffs are forcing more production in the US and more jobs, more factories. And the car business in America is really on the uptick right now for conventionally powered, not EV powered at any rate. One of the UAW workers on the line heckled Trump and said something about the Epstein case. Hey, you're protecting pedophiles or some bullshit, right? Trump flipped the guy.

This is on video. You can watch this. He gave the guy the finger. He, the President of the United States.

Flipped the bird at this. I hate to say it. It's awesome because I kind of, I.

Think it's kind of cool. I think it's kind of cool because it's what you, it's like what a dude would do.

It's, he's not the typical guy, for sure. All right, well, with that, we're going to wrap it up. Common SenseOhio Show.com we are coming at you each and every week of the brand new 2026 year, new set, new look, all new content. We're coming at you. If you've got a question, you got a comment, go ahead and leave it in the socials or go to common senseohioshow.com and shoot it to us there. We'll get it. See you next week.