The Mark Arum Show 6-16-26 HR 2

Welcome, it is the Mark Aram Show. I guess we could talk about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches if you want to feel at home, but it's Eric Erickson here on the Mark Aram Show. He is out with Deborah who got a Gracie Award, a very prestigious award. Deborah got it, and they are coming back from the event, and so I am filling in today. If you want to be on the program, the phone number is 404-872-0750. We do have elections across the state of Georgia today. We've got a lot happening internationally with the president speaking. We've got this potential terror attack on the White House that was stopped by the FBI. We've got lots of details. Now, I actually want to take a phone call. Let's go. We can get this. Y'all, it's been a while since I've been in the studio doing this sort of stuff. I'm usually my studio. Michael from Atlanta, you're going to be the first caller on the Mark Aram Show. Welcome. Hi, Eric. How you doing today? Good. How are you? Good. I'm glad to hear you on the Mark Aram Show. I just wanted you to know first. And first off, I wanted to let you know that this year I am celebrating my 20-year anniversary of becoming Catholic. Fantastic. And every time I pray the rosary, I pray it for you and your radio ministry. Oh, thank you. I pray it for your wife. I pray it for your wife for everything that she's been through. I pray it for your daughter, who is starting college, and I pray it for your son that one day he might be like Happy Gilmore and out drive you on the golf board. You know, I'm signing him up for lessons. He's great at hitting me in the head with his golf clubs, but we'll see about the ball. So my question for you is, Oh, and by the way, thank you for all you do. I really like your program. I appreciate Michael. My question for you is, why do you think Governor Brian Kemp endorsed Burt Jay Jones? Because I personally think it's out of loyalty. Jay Jones is the lieutenant governor. And even though I think Rick Jackson is more qualified, I actually went to a Jackson event.

barbecue place, get some really good barbecue, and listen to Rick Jackson. And I'm beyond impressed with everything that he has been through. He has the success that I'm trying to work towards getting. But that's my take on it. I think it's out of loyalty. Why do you think he endorsed him? I will tell you the three things that I have been told. The three theories I have been told. Actually, there are four theories. So number one theory is, honestly, no one knows. I've talked to people very close to the governor. They're like, have no idea. Number two theory is the loyalty issue that Bert helped the governor get a lot of his agenda through. I don't know that that's the case because if that was the case, I think the endorsement would have come before early voting and not at the very end. The number three theory I have heard is that the governor believed that someone close to Jackson's campaign at the last minute persuaded the president to endorse Mike Collins. He had gotten the president to stay out of the endorsement race between Susan Collins and Dooley and kept him on the sidelines. At the last minute, the president came in an endorsed him. And the governor believed it was people in the Rick Jackson orbit who did that. And so he decided to endorse. Of course, Bert Jay Jones, a lot of people are gravitating towards that theory. And then the other big theory is that if you look at the early voting out there, there's actually a, there's been a big trend towards Rick Jackson. With the rain today in the forecast rural parts of the Georgia may not turn out for Jay Jones. So it looks good for Jackson. But tomorrow, a special session starts in the legislature. And the governor's going to need Bert Jay Jones's help to contain. some of the crazy elements in the GOP to get the election reform package he wants and the redistricting done the way he wants. And so by supporting Jackson or by supporting Jay Jones at the end of the race, it has a lot to do with the special session that's... comes on Wednesdays. Those are the four theories. I don't know that anyone really knows and I don't know that anyone will get the answer. What I have been told and what I do believe is that it was the governor's decision to do it. This was not an advisor or consulted decision. It was the governor made the decision and surprised a lot of people on his team. People did not expect it to come. Those are the theories you pick the theory that you want to pick and no one's going to be right or wrong here because there is, I think, no right answer on this. Now. As to the races, again, polls close at seven. The big races are, of course, the Senate race, Dulean Susan Collins, and the gubernatorial race between Jay Jones and Jackson. And there is, interestingly enough, I was talking to a small town newspaper publisher that he is picking up in his rural community, the lot of anti-establishment sentiment that people are very frustrated right now, the data center frustration, the economic frustration, and they're blaming the establishment.

Republicans, and he is a Burr-Jay Jones supporter and is a little bit concerned that there may be a backlash against Jay Jones just with this anti-establishment sentiment right now because of the economy, data centers, and things like that, and that could help Jackson, and he's not a big Jackson fan. It is very interesting. There is among a number of prominent Republicans, real animosity towards Jackson. And I suspect a lot of that comes from the way he entered the race. You know, he entered and it was kind of a surprise. But I think we can all be honest here among friends that this was clearly a long-term thought-out plan because he got Bert Jay Jones to do a video for him in December of last year that was praising Jay Jones, or praising Jackson, rather. And then after Jay Jones started attacking him, trotted out the video. of Jay Jones praising Jackson. It looked like there was way more thought and a lot more deliberation getting into this. At the same time, as someone who's run political races in the past, there's a level of savvy there that you kept it secret for that long and put in place all the things you needed to get going. We'll see how it plays out on the campaign trail today. But the governor, now you're hearing the ads. They were cut overnight on Sunday and dropped off at TV and radio stations around the state very quickly, the governor supporting Derek Dule. and now Bert Jay Jones as well. Then you've got, you're on the Republican side, so you've got the Senate race, the Governor's Race, the Lieutenant Governor's Race, the Secretary of State's race, the school superintendent's race, you've got the Public Service Commission 5 race, and in the 11th Congressional District, you've got that runoff. There are also some county runoffs as well and some state legislative runoffs. My buddy Will Wade is also running. He is up in the Delanooga-Cumming area. And Will Wade is running for the state senator. He's in a fight. The trial lawyers, Will Wade supported tort reform. And the trial lawyers have found a lawyer in a bunch of progressive donors, not even in the state of Georgia, but around the country coming and pouring money into this. This should be a small race. And it's become like a several hundred thousand dollar race up in North Georgia against Will Wade, the city and state senator, because... He voted for tort reform in the same way the trial lawyers nationally have poured money in against my friend John Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who's running for lieutenant governor. And, you know, one of the interesting dynamics is if you are someone who converts. in faith. You leave a faith for something else. You tend to be the most passionate hater of what you left behind. For example, Michael, who just called us Catholic, a lapsed Catholic tends to hate the Catholic Church more than anyone else. If you fell away from the Catholic Church, you tend to be the biggest critic of the Catholic Church. And... Conversely in politics, if you betray your tribe, well, it's kind of the same thing. If you betray your tribe, your tribe comes for you. So John Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who's running for lieutenant governor, is a lawyer. He's not just a lawyer. He's a trial lawyer. And he supported the litigation lawsuit reform, tort reform. The trial lawyers nationally have flooded the state of Georgia with money.

to defeat John Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. They started wild rumors about him as well with an intern until the intern who they outed, like named a female intern that worked for him. And she decided to file defamation law, because it's not true, not true. It wrapped into this because some of the trial lawyers came to my website and started leaving comments about, oh, don't you know John Robert F. Kennedy Jr. he was harassing this intern and they left her initials. And the intern's lawyer sent me a letter asking me to preserve all documents as they prepare to file a defamation lawsuit against lawyers because it's not true. They tried to destroy Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s reputation because they hate him because they feel betrayed by him for supporting the governor's litigation reform. So trial lawyers around the nation have poured in millions of dollars to try to defeat John Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because he's one of their own and he supported tort reform. So they feel betrayed by him. So in the lieutenant governor's runoff. Understand that massive liberal trial lawyers from Florida, California, Las Vegas, Nevada, they've all poured money into the state of Georgia to try to defeat John Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because he supported litigation reform to bring down costs for homeowners, insurance, small business. Same with Will Wade up in the Delano area. He was one of the leaders on tort reform. And so they found a lawyer to run against him and they have flooded the zone with hundreds of thousands in a state legislative race in Georgia. They poured money into defeat this guy, and he's in a runoff fighting for his life because he stood with the governor's agenda. Now, I think the governor is rewarding some of these guys and helping behind the scenes some of these guys who stood with him on tort reform. But hell has no fury like a trial lawyer scored, and they're coming particularly very angry at the Republican lawyers in the legislature. who stood up against them and supported tort reform, which was a great piece of legislation. You know, the reason we have tort reform in Georgia, which is more commonly called litigation reform, there was a, there was a shooting in a parking lot on the edge of a parking lot where a CVS was, a CVS pharmacy was. The deceased family sued the CVS. The shooting didn't happen at the CVS, didn't happen outside the CVS, happened across the parking lot from the CVS. And they sued the CVS and a jury gave them a bunch of money, made CVS pay him a bunch of money, claiming that CVS did not do enough for security. It wasn't even the CVS parking lot. It was across the parking lot. And they sued the CVS and the jury gave him a bunch of money from CVS. So you're seeing small pharmacies shut down, small businesses shut down. Doctors can't get medical malpractice insurance in the state. Commercial truckers can't get insurance in the state because the trial lawyers came in so aggressively. You see the Morgan and Morgan billboards all over the state. So the state decided we need to do lawsuit reform because it's crazy that a CVS can be sued because someone got shot across the parking lot from a CVS. And instead of suing the shooter, they sued the CVS. So they did trial reform in Georgia. And now the trial lawyers are mad because they treat these crazy lawsuits as a gravy train because in Georgia increasingly and around the country, a lot of juries are like lottery jackpots for people. So you go in and you sue and the jury gives you a little bit of money because they feel sorry for it. They're like, oh, this person's poor. This corporation is wealthy. Let's give the person some money. The problem is that happens so much. The corporations become poor and they start going out of business and it's a problem.

Welcome. It is Eric Erickson in for Mark Aram today. 404-872-0750 is the phone number. Should you wish to be on the program? I would be very happy. to have you. We've got a lot of rain in the metro Atlanta area. In fact, it's all across the state of Georgia now. We got rain until you get north of Canton. And on, you've got to go all the way north of Cartersville on 75 to get away from rain. It's even raining all the way up in Gainesville. Very heavy rain now out towards Brazzleton. There's a line that stretches from Kennesaw over to Brazzleton, almost due east. Now, I'm from Louisiana, so I always say due west. even though I mean due east. It's like my left and my right. In Louisiana, I mean, it's a gosh, a twat, you never know. Scott Slade is going to join me at the bottom of the hour. I'll take your phone calls as well, except when I'm talking to Scott Slade, 404-872-0750. We still have more to discuss, including... So I'm hesitating on the Iran deal because I know I'm going to spend a lot of time in the first hour of my show. You give me for six hours today. I would like to apologize in advance. I know I have a voice for print and you're stuck with me on the radio for six hours today. But I really want to do a deep dive on modism because I haven't really done the deep dive that I think I really need to do to kind of like. educate you, and I wish I had time to speak to the president about it, but he's surrounded by people smarter than me, and he's making this very transactional case for the Iran deal, and you can't transactional do business with people who are fundamentally ideological, and that is the breakdown on the Iran deal in my mind. is that you have a lot of people who are transactional in the White House. They view everything as transactional. Everything has a price. Every person has a price. There is no price on religious fundamentalism. If you believe that you have a messianic purpose, you can't be bought off. And those people are the hardest to negotiate with. You have to accept them where they are. And the Iranian leadership over the last 40 years has increasingly embraced something called Madiism. It is a cult-like belief within a branch of Shiite Islam that believes their purpose in life is to bring about the apocalypse. You can't negotiate with people who want to bring about the apocalypse. That's the fundamental philosophical problem. If you fundamentally philosophically believe that your job in life is to bring about the apocalypse, you're not going to be bought off if you think you're going to hell if you don't do it. And these people do. I'll spend a lot of time on that of my show. Coming up, Scott Slade, we'll be back.

It is Eric Erickson in for Mark Aram here on WSB. Those of you on the phones, be patient because I'm not getting your phone calls right now because I've got in studio with me, the man, the myth, the legend, Scott Slade. How are you? It's so good to see you in person. I mean, this is great. You know what? I'm like, is your microphone working, then I realize my earpiece was completely, like, unplugged. Oh, there you go. Well, you got the TV earpiece going there. Yeah, I've got the TV earpiece because I just, you know, they video me now, and I don't like to have the big cans on my ears because I'm very self-conscious. I've already got a fat face. How about that? You want to hear a true story about television broadcasting involving yours truly? All right. Yeah, wearing an earpiece. Back in the day, I actually did weather for Channel 2. Way back when in the 80s and early 90s. And I was there on a weekend fill-in. And I was busy standing in front of the green screen, gesturing and whatnot. Hey, here comes the front. Here comes the cold weather. Here comes this and that. And Chuck Dowdell, who is the sports director emeritus, had slipped behind the set and started whispering to me while I was on the air. And he'll kill me probably for telling a story, but why not? This is what we're about when we get a little older we tell stories, right? He started whispering, your flies down. And here I am trying to explain what the weather's going to do in the next day or two. And he goes, no, really? You've got to do something. This is terrible. And only I can hear him, right? And this goes off for two minutes.

So remember that the next challenge that you have in your broadcasting career. Somebody standing behind the green screen. Right. Whispering, yes. Whispering something. You know, so I got my start in doing TV before radio, and so I'm real comfortable with people talking to my earpiece. And in radio, everybody's so sensitive about it. I'm like, no, you can yell at me. I know how to complete a sentence because for years at CNN they would yell at you 30 seconds left. So you had to do it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So, okay, we got an election today in the state of Georgia. And tomorrow we've got the special session that starts with voting. And now I know we were talking off off air. You do polling work in Gwinnett County. And one of the big things they want to do in the special session is considered paper ballots among other things, which. I'm not sure we need to go back to the old inefficient system. You know, I hear over and over again, and it's not propaganda. They do these audits and then compare them to what a hand audit would be, and the machines wind up winning over and over again in the accuracy department. I mean, by factors of 100. And if you really want to go there, I guess you can. You can make a lot because an awful lot of states do use paper ballots, what's like 30, 35, maybe, something like that. And a lot of them are hand-counted. A lot of them are tallied by machines who read these things. But here's part of the problem. If you go there, you're going to have all kinds of trouble with printers. You know, every ballot marking device in Georgia has a printer attached to it. and it spits out a rendering of how you voted in real language to show you, okay, this is how you voted. But then it has that little QR code up in the corner, which is actually what the scanner counts when you feed your paper ballot into it, right? And some of the complaints are, and I realize this is a legitimate complaint. Look, I don't know what that thing says. I have no idea. Does that really represent how I voted? And that's the bottom line argument right now and how to change the system. Well, what happens is if you put it in a scanning machine that's going to scan the verbatims, you know, actually how you voted so you can read it, the printer's got to be perfect. And quite often they aren't. You know, they're smeared, you know, half the sentences there. The same kind of problems you have at home with the printer. Right. But for some reason, the QR code is always pristine, always looks good. And they've proven over and over again that it does work. It is accurate. But, yeah, I'm really anxious to see what they're going to do tomorrow because it bugs me. So, and the reason we got here is in 2000, the famous butterfly ballot down in Palm Beach County, Florida designed by local officials with the hanging chads, cast lots of doubt. So Georgia at the time decided it wanted to move to electronic ballot. And I was an intern for Kathy Cox at the time, Secretary of State's office, and helped actually write the guides on how to do electronic voting and helped write the laws on it for the legislature to kind of steer them. And we went because at the time, it was Republicans were casting doubt on paper ballots because why do these paper ballots? Because in Fulton County, they're hand counting in these Scantron machines and they could adjust them and smudge them and ruin them. So we need to go to electronic balloting. And now it's the Republican saying we need to go back to the system that in 2000 we said made it too easy to steal the election. I've talked to Brad Raffisberger a time or two about this. And I said, you know, what do you think about this? What's going to happen? He says, well,

They passed a mandate and didn't give us any money to do it. Right. And that's the problem. And just to re- Tell me if this is wrong, just to reprogram all these machines to do what we're talking about would be $25, $28 million somewhere in there. Yes. And he said, look, we don't have the money. We don't have the time. So maybe the sane result of what happens in this special session beginning tomorrow for the Georgia General Assembly is, okay, we're going to extend the deadline. Yeah. past the end of the month, past the end of June, to make this all take effect for the 2028 election. Right. And also the other thing they're going to be doing is the redistricting. And they're not going to do, my understanding, is state legislative redistricting, just congressional redistricting. Yeah, just Congress. And you have to wonder if they'll wind up drawing the dean of Georgia's congressional delegation out of the picture. We're talking about District 2 Congressman Sanford Bishop. who you and I spoke off the air about this moment. He wins over and over again. Yeah. And there's a reason. Probably because he stays in touch with his voters. He must have a heck of a constituency. It is extremely impressive constituent operation. As someone who was in his district was drawn at Austin Scott's district, I mean, your kid gets an award in the local newspaper, you're going to get a letter from the congressman. You need your passport taking care of. You're going to get a letter from the congressman. He's going to take care of it. In fact, we've got a friend who they couldn't get Medicare to sign off on their business license. He does orthopedic or prosthetic replacement. Medicare denied them coverage, and so they couldn't build the Medicare. He reached out his hand for Bishop's office, and 48 hours later, Medicare reapproved him. Huh. How about that? Yeah, it's really impressive. What are your sources telling you? I mean, what are they saying about, you know, just what the appetite is? He's the endangered one. The problem is that the Republicans in South Georgia like Sanford Bishop, the farmers in particular, and this translates into Republican members of the House who really have no appetite for this redistricting to begin with. Very much similar to South Carolina. The Republican senators in South Carolina did not want to get rid of Jim Clyburn. They killed redistricting. And on the grounds of that, the odds are the House is going to flip to the Democrats, having a senior Democrat like Jim Clyburn or Sanford Bishop in leadership for the Democrats that they take the House will be useful to the state. And you're starting to hear that argument among some of the Republicans that maybe there are some metro Atlanta seats to monkey with, but preserve Sanford Bishop because he works with the Republicans. He'll be in leadership. And he's big for the defense industry and farmers. Okay. Well, again, whether we see some districts look like human anatomy, you know, that kind of thing that comes out of this, that tends to happen. But at least, in my view, they took a very sane approach to this, even though, you know, I think every 10 years is probably enough, unless there's some big demographic shift, to say, okay, this won't take effect until 2028 campaigns. And rather than try to get that done.

exhibit of all the fossils and stuff. They should put something like one of the fossils in there from the state. That would be a cool thing to do. And maybe also a ball from the World Series. Uh-huh. Maybe a small chunk of fifth-sized chunk from Stone Mountain if it'll fit. Yeah, if it'll fit. That wouldn't be bad. It is Eric Eriksson, in for Mark Aram, six hours of me on the radio today. And then I've got to go to Tulsa. I'm doing a live broadcast tomorrow from Tulsa. And then on Thursday in Oklahoma City, we're now, I think at 86, 87 affiliates should be at 100 by August growing my show. I'm going to spend a lot of my first hour on what modiism is. I may give you all a preview at 11 o'clock here. Don't forget it is Election Day. If you're not sure who to vote for and you're voting in the Republican primary, Text the word engage to 33777. Now, let me get a phone call here real quick. Ruben Gallego from Fayetteville, you're going to be next on the Mark Aram Show. Welcome. Hey, Eric. I got a question on supply and demand stuff for our current situation. So the price of oil and gas is really crazy. Oil is not stable. It's high. It's low. It went low today, but it's been high all along. But according to our president, who I support, the supply, according to him, at least when I heard last, was that we have all the oil that we ever needed, and some, especially after the Venezuela thing. But the price of gas is still high. So what's going on? Is it, I need to be educated. I'm ignorant about the fact that we're not producing enough gas. to keep this inflation in check. Okay, so first of all, you need to know I'm looking right now on CNBC. Oil prices are down below 80 bucks now. They're down about 5%. I can actually explain this one. I actually do know this answer in large part because my dad worked in the oil industry for a very long time. Let me explain this one to you, Rubin. It's very easy. In the late 1980s, we tapped out all of our oil supply in the United States. And so we converted our refineries to what's called heavy crude, which is the very black... thick oil that you think of coming out of the ground. Sweet crude, which we get domestically... is a lighter color. It's easier to refine. It can't be refined at the same time as heavy crude. Well, we converted all of our refineries to heavy crude in the 80s because we ran out of light sweet crude. And then the fracking revolution happened in the 90s and 2000s, and we could go in and get that sweet crude. Well, we had already converted our refineries. So what we do is we import a massive amount of oil from Venezuela, from Mexico, from Canada, and we refine it for us, and we sell our... domestic crude to everybody else in the world. And so it's on a global market. If we were to hoard our sweet crude, we couldn't refine it. Rick Jackson, actually, the gubernatorial candidate, is actually investing in and building a sweet crude refinery in Texas. It's the first one built in this country. Donald Trump Jr. surprised a lot of people yesterday for praising him. He's building the first sweet crude refinery in the United States in large part so that we can take our domestic oil and refine it here domestically.

not having to send it abroad. But all of our stuff is shipped abroad and we import for us. So it's a very global market. So you can't detract from or take away what happens in the world. We're actually... exporting more oil now than Russia and Saudi Arabia combined. We're the world's biggest oil exporter right now. That's why oil prices are the way they are and gas prices are the way they are. But they'll start coming down with the price of the barrel of oil going down below $80. You'll start seeing it in real time at the pump in the next few days. Eric Erickson here in for Mark Aram. We'll be back.