STEVE ABRAMOWICZ 8-5-26

Meet Keith, Loving Dad, board game champ, bus driving pro. I drive 65,000 miles in my bus each year. If people knew what I know, lives could be saved. Like how there are some things I simply can't see. On my route the other day, a car tried to sneak past me and ends up right in my blind spot. I turned slowly, so accident avoided. But no car should be in the blind spot for a 40,000-pound bus. It's our roads. It's our safety. Visit www.sharethe road safely.gov. Mike Drop, hosted by former Navy CEO, Mike Ridland. How would you characterize your prowess? I'd say my style is that I just kind of outwork everybody until I get there, because I'm not a quitter. It's just you, and that's yourself. Everything else is team-oriented. The motivation, it was a sort of anger at myself for being weak. That ends up being the driving factor. That anger, that pride, that ego, I think it's a muscle. It gets stronger. When you take that voice seriously, you start to change your life. Mike Drop, follow and listen on your favorite platform. Welcome back to Yaffe Live. This is Talk Radio 102.3. We're called the Talk Monster for a reason. We're live and local all day long. By the way, I want you to weigh in on the text Monster. Tell me if you have voted in the primary yet, if you're going to vote. Who you voting for? Who you got? One person already weighed in, said Monty Fritz. I'm sure a bunch of people weighing in saying Blackburn, what will kind of do sort of an informal poll on the show. But tell me who you're supporting. 423-267-1023. Joining me on the show right now is Steve Abramowitz. He is with the Heartland Journal out of Nashville. You can find out his stuff at heartlandjournal.com. Steve, how are you, sir? I am doing great. How are you on this election, election, Eve, or Eve, Eve, Eve, Thursday. Yeah, it's kind of weird. Do you know why they put it on a Thursday? No, I don't. I'm in California and never heard such a thing. Even my 20 years in Washington, it's always Tuesday. But Tennessee, the other thing, we've had like six elections since I've moved here four years ago. It's crazy. Actually, four years ago today. Interesting. Um, yeah, no, there's a lot of elections, which is kind of reason why I think there's so much apathy and exhaustion and people are like, come on. Can we just do it once in November and be done? I know, but we got the primaries. Got to do the primaries. Um, who do you think's going to win? Who do you think's going to win in terms of, uh, the governor? Republicans. Oh, I know. I meant the primary. Do you have a prediction? The good to get, uh, I think my prediction is, and we can talk about predictions in a minute, but I think Marcia has the money and the momentum and the name recognition, but Monty Fritz is a real spoiler. And when I look at other places around the country that actually do Tuesdays like you're supposed to, some surprises.

So it is possible. But I guess if I was a bet man, which I'm not, I would say Marcia is probably going to get it by 10 points. All right. And, you know, Andy Ogles, that race is kind of interesting. That's closer to you, but he's been backed by Trump, but you have Governor Bill Lee backing his opponent, and that's been kind of close. Any thoughts on that race? Yeah, well, that's my district. I don't know if you know that, but it didn't used to be. When I first moved here, Andy was about two blocks away from Nashville down to two blocks from my house, and I went down to vote the first time, and I saw Mark Green was on my... ballot and like, oh, okay. So I voted for marketing, whatever, who ended up quitting and being replaced by Matt Van Heps. But then they shuffled up this whole district thing. So now he's actually my guy. And yeah, we'll find out Thursday. I mean, Trump endorsed him. And that's usually has worked. But Governor Lee came out of a bit of a surprise, except for insiders, that he came out for Hatcher. who I never heard of. And that, again, is my district. So I'm pretty in tune here. Nobody had really ever heard of him. But the endorsement of Trump worked for Van Apps. So we'll see who is more liked here in Tennessee's U.S. Congress, District 5, Trump, and his endorsement of Andy Ogles, or Bill Lee, who's a lame duck on his way out and not running for reelection because he's turned out. But no matter what, Congress is going to look very different next year. Yeah, it's very possible. I'm speaking with Steve Abramowitz. He's with the Heartland Journal. All right, beyond that kind of stuff, I know you wanted to talk a little bit about gas prices, which has been affected by the war in Iran, kind of up and down. I mean, obviously hasn't gone back down since pre-war levels. But a little optimism this week as a potential deal, I guess, is in the works. I'm not that optimistic about a deal. I've got to tell you. But what are your thoughts on all this? Yeah, I mean, you can't trust the deal. There was a Gulf official that said there's like a 50-50 chance that Iran's going to reach this deal and open up the straits of her moves. And I just keep paying attention to like outcomes of the media on Fox last night. As a matter of fact, this woman Griffin, who's a Trump painter. And she told us that, you know, the U.S. has burned through nearly 80% of its interceptors. And so our enemies, you know, that listen to Fox and CNN, they all get to now know that, oh, my gosh, I know Pete Hegseth came out and said, that's not true, but that's exactly what I would say, too. I wouldn't want my enemies to know my hand in poker. But every time they talk about, like, oh, gas prices in America, you can just kind of tell the war is going badly or well or whatever. It isn't really the case. You know, AAA average is like 408, and that's just West Texas, Brent, which is what the rest of the world prices in in $1.99. Back in July, it was $100 barrel. Now it's below 80. So if that's the case, that would tell us that the war's over and straight to Hermes don't really matter. And they don't because, you know, the UK, our best friend, they get it from the North Sea and pipeline with Norway.

So about 1% of UK gas comes from Qatar. So our best friends can ride this out. It's always about Japan and China. They're the ones that have to pay up for Middle East oil and gas. Yeah, and unfortunately, when they're having to get it from other places, it still can raise the price because they'll get it from us. So the companies can. Exactly right. Our largest, we've had a record export to Japan last month, July, which is also our driving season. So that's big numbers for us. And of course, it's going to cost a bunch of gas and water to put out the fires in Spokane and everywhere else that they're going on. So those prices are reflecting something totally different than. the Straits of Hermuz, which again, doesn't matter to us at all, 90% of the oil that Iran exports goes to China. Africa, South Sudan, they had some electricity consumption issues, and Slovenia had some fuel rationing, but for the rest of the world, not a problem. Yeah, speaking with Steve Abramowitz, you know, I've heard as well because, I mean, you say we talk about that, it doesn't affect us as much as it would because we drill baby drill here now. But it has a marginal effect. But also I've heard that Ukraine, that that's really had an effect because you want to talk about the European countries, they're still getting oil and natural gas from Russia. And obviously Ukraine has done some damage to Russia. So I've heard that war is having an effect. It could. I mean, Saudi Arabia, they've got an east-west pipeline, so they can actually go around all this. So it depends. But I'm not sure Ukraine exists. I've been around a long time, and I remember CNN was covering 24-7 the Iraq War, the first Gulf War with George Bush Jr. as president. I haven't seen any war footage out of Ukraine for over a year. I don't really think that's a country. It may never have existed. I mean, I'm not a flat earth guy, but here is the footage that shows that there's a war in Ukraine and that they even use oil for anything. I mean, seriously, like after USAID disappeared, we never heard another word about it. So your point is you think it's weird that we're not seeing any media coverage on it. I mean, why is that really? Yeah, I mean, most channels love war. I mean, it put CNN on the map. They didn't exist before the Gulf War I. And then they embedded him with, you know, Gulf War II. But Ukraine has been going on for quite a while now, and we don't see any footage. So either they like selling commercials about, you know, Lindsey Graham passing away or where's Mitch McConnell and not war anymore or... There is nothing to show or else they'd show it. So I don't know. It's a scratch in my head. If I was a news station program manager, I'd be running some more footage. They used to show us the COVID counter, right? And that wasn't even an accurate. So I don't know. The Ukraine thing's a mystery to me.

Okay, I'm speaking with Steve Abramowitz. He's with the Heartland Journal. You can read all his stuff. Check out his podcast at heartlandjournal.com. You know, I don't know if you've noticed. You're on social media a bunch. And I've noticed this sort of debate among conservatives on whether there really is a crisis when it comes to affordability and grocery prices. Obviously, grocery prices are higher. But the economy has been pretty resilient in the U.S. despite Iran, despite inflation, everything else. And you talk about the inflation rate under Trump. I mean, we've had inflation and it's higher than I would like, but it's not even close to what it was like under Biden. What do you think about this debate and are Republicans really responding to this issue enough? No, I think that, you know, I remember Ross Perrault and his campaign as a third party for president talking about that great sucking sound that was taking away jobs down in Mexico and how all the jobs were going out there. And then we talked about that was a reason why we had so much debt. no Republicans or Democrats focus on the debt and how the debt that when you issue it and then you take that cash and spend it, that is inflation. And nobody is talking about reducing the deficit, reducing spending, reducing anything. They took away Trump's tariffs, which was a nice offset for exports. Can't do that anymore. We actually had to rebate it. So, but we've money supply has exploded. I don't think we want to get all into what that all means, but it just basically means a lot of dollars chasing a lot of stuff and people kind of adjusted. I was actually quite amazed at some of the starting salaries for last year's graduating class, you know, when I graduated something like, you know, if you're lucky, if you made 55,000 bucks and then you had to go earn it with commissions, these people are starting with six figures because that's what's out there these days. So you can. do pretty well on a cost of milk and eggs inflated if your salary out of the gate is up there as well. Things like rents and energy and electricity have been somewhat stable in certain areas. If you live next to a big city or a data center, yeah, you're going to pay more, but not everybody does yet. So long story short, I think we have... politicians in D.C. that don't focus on what they should, which is the spending and the inflation, instead they try to pander to their donors and their constituents, I guess, and spend, spend, and we get rising prices. But nothing we can't afford, like during the Biden years when it was really, you couldn't fill your tank of gas unless you lived in California. You still can't. It's like six or seven bucks a gallon. Yeah, I don't even know how they live over there. I got to be honest. They certainly don't do trucking. Oh, man, it has got to be crazy over there. You know, is that why it's interesting you bring up the idea of spending. I mean, the inflation came from too much government spending. Republicans definitely have not been perfect on that either. But it's interesting because you have a lot of these socialist candidates. You have one who just won in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, and they're running on affordability.

Who was president in 2022? Who was that guy? What was that? I'm not sure anybody knows. That's true. That's a good answer. But I mean, grocery prices have gone up. And they're up 33% overall since 2019. But this idea that the national debt has exploded under Trump. It's been exploding since COVID. And it's both Trump's fault and Biden's fault and the Republicans and the Democrats fault on all of that, which I've talked about on the show many times. So maybe I'll go over some of those stats later because there's apparently this big debate on whether grocery prices are a crisis in this country or not. Obviously, they're higher. I don't know if it's a crisis necessarily, but we'll talk about that and much more. We'll move on to sports as well in the next segment. You're listening to you if you live. This is the story of the one. The one who keeps multiple buildings running smoothly day after day. Plumbing that flows, HVAC that hums, cleaning supplies that keep surfaces sparkling. That's why she counts on Granger. With easy reordering online and 24-7 support, Granger helps her keep the product she needs on hand. So shells stay stocked, and buildings stay ready. Call 1,800 Granger, click Granger.com, or just stop by. Granger. For the ones who get it done.