Josh Filler- Hour 1

You've counted on Inside Maine for over 20 years for smart political talk and real conversations with the state's leaders on 985 FM, AM 560, and wgian.com. And good morning and welcome to another edition of Inside Maine on WGAN.N. I am your host, Josh Filler, in on this lovely Saturday morning we're having here in Southern Maine. Glad you could join us. We'll have open phone lines for most of the show. That means give us a call. 879-9-4-26-879-W-G-A-N. As always, there's a lot going on in the world, lots to talk about. And I'll get right to it. So I was listening now, as many of you were, to Governor Mills' weekly radio address. And, of course, she was just talking about... housing. And yes, it's always good news when people are able to afford and buy their own home. That's terrific. We're very happy to hear that. But I did notice there was one thing the governor didn't talk about at all, and that was property taxes for people who actually already own their homes, and particularly for older Mainers who've paid off their mortgage and want to live out the rest of their lives in their homes, the homes that they've paid for. Didn't hear anything about that because Maine has some of the, if not the, highest property taxes in the nation. And yet, it has done little to nothing in order to address it. And this is quite different, I have to tell you, from another state that also has high property taxes because home values have risen for a variety of different reasons. And that is Florida. But you see, the difference between Florida and Maine is the governor and the legislature in Florida had an emergency session. and pushed out a constitutional amendment for the voters to either accept or reject this November on dealing, at least partially, with property taxes. In essence, the Florida proposal would raise the homestead exemption to 150,000, and then 250,000, and then index it for inflation, basically over a five-year period. It's not a perfect solution. It doesn't solve the entire problem. But it is a step in the right direction, and it demonstrates that the governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, and the legislature, which is run by Republicans, takes the issue seriously and is trying to do something about it. And yet here in Maine, the Democrats who run this state, we have a Democrat governor, we have a Democrat legislature, what do they tell homeowners? They tell them to take out a reverse mortgage. That's their answer. Take out a reverse mortgage and stop complaining and be thankful, I guess, for still being in your home, you know, the home that you paid for. And so it really is a remarkable difference, a tale of two states, if you will, between Maine and Florida and how they are dealing with exactly the same problem. And the problem is literally identical. Both have high property taxes, some of the highest in the country.

and yet one is actually doing something about it and the other is not. All right, we've got Ethan from Sacco Online 2 here. Ethan, good morning. How are you? I'm fine. How are you doing, Josh? I'm doing well. What's going on? Not much. I appreciate you guys taking my call. Yeah, if it wasn't for the stock market, I think things would be a lot worse. I don't want to get into it. I don't want to ruin everyone's day with economic woes. There's plenty of people who are doing well enough. I wanted you were down at 9-11 is coming and this is the 25th anniversary. You were down there. You were down there, right? I was. I was down in the lower Manhattan area. I worked for the mayor at the time, yes. And is it correct that Giuliani had his office in Building 7? With a lot of other federal and other offices and stuff? No. The city's office of emergency management was in Building 7 along with the DEA, the CIA, and some other federal agencies. Now, you were down there, and I cannot even begin to imagine what it was probably like for you. So let's, I mean, it's just horrible. But. What's your impression of, since you were there, this is a rare opportunity for me to ask, and shed some light on this issue, is that what is your opinion of how Building 7 came down and that whole kind of question mark in some people's minds about? Yeah. Yeah, I've heard all the stories about Building 7 and that it was a controlled demolition and all of these other things. Look, I was there. I never heard or saw anything that would indicate that it was a controlled demolition. The building was at times... The rubble was at times surrounded by, I believe, federal agents may have been down there armed, in large part because that was where the CIA had its field office. Most people don't know this, but the CIA does have field offices in the United States to basically work with the FBI to combat foreign counterintellite, to conduct foreign counterintelligence operations. And so. They were in there, and it may well have been that they didn't want people going into the rubble to scour through any potential classified materials, and that, I'm sure, spawned all kinds of conspiracies. But look, to have any kind of controlled demolition or anything like that down there, you would have to have gotten around or you would have to include in the conspiracy.

The Port Authority Police Department, the New York Police Department, and the New York Fire Department. So I've never given these conspiracies much weight. I know they're never going to go away. We've got people here in Maine, our own Tucker Carlson, who keeps pushing it. But the evidence just isn't there. It just isn't there. Well, or is it... Is it omitting evidence? I mean, the evidence that NIST came up with really omit. And there was the University of Alaska did a study that showed that it, what was the study? It basically, you can look it up on your own, I guess, but it was basically that it fell in its own footprint after a few office fires. And, I mean, building one and two or, you know, the World Trade Center one and two. That's one thing, but to have another building that was not hit directly to fall after a couple office fires, you know, look, I don't know. I wasn't there. I don't know. You know, things, anything can happen, I suppose, but I just want to say that. When there's this ambiguity in the American people's minds and Tucker Carlson ain't helping it at all, it leads to this like kind of festering wound of not trusting. Yeah. And I really do believe whether it's that event or anything else like JFK or something. where we don't get the truth, it really does cause the people to who are the regular people. It causes us to fight amongst ourselves. And it's, it's, the fighting is really the. the cancer that grows in a state which, in a country which should be all about the truth and an open democracy. And so I think we're losing that with all my point is. Yeah. And look, I mean, you brought up JFK. Here we are, what, you know, 50, 60 years later. And we still haven't settled on what happened there. I think it's very, I'll say this. Do I think there was a grand conspiracy to kill Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? I haven't seen the evidence, although I can't say definitively there wasn't. But what happened there, I think is similar to what happened in 9-11, which causes this festering. And that is the agencies involved are not necessarily forthcoming about what they were doing in the lead-up. The CIA... for decades lied about how its operatives were interacting with different people, including Oswald. And it finally came out with the last release that the CIA had effectively lied to Congress about it, that they had been having contact with him.

beyond what they had acknowledged. Now, does that mean that they ran a conspiracy to kill the president? No, but it means that they were lying for decades about this. Fast forward to 9-11. And he was in, I mean, wasn't Oswald in the CIA? No, he was not. No, he was not a CIA operative. He had been in the Marine Corps. But the... Oh, that's right. Fast forward to 9-11, and the CIA and the FBI were less, particularly the CIA, was less than forthcoming about what they knew in terms of the operatives getting into the United States before the attack, the actual hijackers, specifically in California, specifically in San Diego. But again, this was more of a failure of them doing their job and working with each other to share information, which they didn't do. And so you have negligence, gross negligence, then morphs into a grand conspiracy. And I think the same thing has happened in both cases. All right, Ethan, I got to leave it there. I got some other calls I got to take. Can I get one word? One last word. Go ahead. So. This is the problem. You have no ability to really get the truth. Like the passport of the hijacker was found at the base of the tower on the day of. I don't know if that's true. And it's like Anthony Fauci is never going to go to jail. And this is the kind of thing that I'm talking about. We never get anywhere anymore. And people are. tired of it. They really are, and it will, I believe it will be the cancer that will do in this country if you can't get some truth and you can't trust your supposed leaders. Anyway, I appreciate your time that I went way over. All right. Probably my allowable time. Thank you. All right. Let's go to Steve and Westbrook. Steve, good morning. How are you? Very good. We don't need these far-of-field conspiracy theories anymore, considering what's already happening. Josh, six years into his presidency, Donald Trump has already piled up 30% of our $40 billion debt. Doing the math, this means that Trump debt accrual rate is over 300% worse than that of the last six presidents. So hyperventilating debt hawks like Bog from Portland can't have it both ways. You can't support Trump while lecturing us on the debt at the same time. Now, for my main point, after all the complaining about Trump having no workable strategy in Iran, Marco Rubio, four days ago, finally revealed what this strategy is. He declared that we have to get back to the place where we were, quote, before the Strait of Hormuz was closed, unquote. But Josh, that place and time is before Trump bombed Iran, when the Strait was open, which Iran then closed to stop the bombing.

And Rulio's plan for getting us back to an open straight, he said we have to bomb the hell out of them some more. Here's my point. You know, I don't understand how any self-respecting Republicans can swallow big government, double talk and propaganda like this. You know, and in fact, Republican election strategists all around the country are now going public in political and other venues. And they're saying that, quote, the bottom is going to fall out from under us in November, end quote. You know, this is a disaster. We don't have to start looking for 9-11 conspiracy theories. Look at what's going on right before our very noses. All right, Steve. We appreciate the call. Thanks. I've got to take another line here. All, let's go to Al in Portland. Al, good morning. How are you? Good morning. I'm great. Great call from Steve. And a good subject on property taxes. My parents went through that. A beautiful log cabin. My father built with his own hands and tops them. And had a big garage. And as he got older, on Social Security, he couldn't afford to keep that. So they sold it and bought a run-down farmhouse. It was a shack in Newport because the taxes were law. The taxes were a law because it was a dump. But we really have to do something about property taxes. But that's not why I called. I called about the needle waste. Not only in Portland, but in the whole state. I leave my beautiful apartment here in Portland the other day, and I use a walker that doubles as a chair. So I go up the street from where I live, and I pick my shady spot to sit. Al, I got 30 seconds, so you got to get to it, my friend. Well, we need to stop. We need to make the needle exchange and exchange. Needle for needle. Whoever thought giving an addict a hundred needles was a rational. I don't understand it. It's no wonder they're all over the street. You know? It's disgusting. It is. All right. We'll have to leave it there. Thanks for the call. Okay. Our phone lines are hot and they are open. We're going to take a break. When we come back, we'll take your calls. We'll be right back on Inside Maine right after this.

For over two decades, Inside Maine has been your trusted source for political analysis and candid conversations with Maine's most influential leaders, bringing you the issues that matter most, straight from the experts, on 985 FM, AM 560, and WGAN.com. 1036, WGAN inside Maine. Welcome back to the show. Kicking off with a little Led Zeppelin, dazed and confused, if I'm not? No, not dazed and confused. How many more times? Yeah, right album, right album. Yes, right album, wrong song. It's all right. I was about to say WGAN morning news. I'm so used to saying I haven't hosted inside Maine in a minute. That's right. You weren't here at all last month. Where are you? I don't, I don't recall. I don't think so. But I did host the morning news show for about a week. So I've got morning news on the brain. And I'm going to be hosting morning news Monday through Thursday of next week. So you guys can check that out. So, yeah, I'm a little scatterbrain here, a little schizophrenic between Inside Main and Morning News. And then you'll come back and you'll be saying Inside Main on... Welcome to... Wait, no, wrong song. Yes, there you go. Right song, right album. Reminds me when I was doing shows on both my college station and a radio job, and I'd get the call letters or the phone number mixed up all the time. Well, I have to remind myself the call-in number, 879 W-G-A-N, 879-9-4-26. There was a while where I could not seem to remember that number, but now it's ingrained in the brain. And speaking of which, those phone lines are open, 879-9-4-26, 879 W-GAN. Give us a call. Let us know what's on your mind. We had a number of calls in the first segment. And I do want to double back to... One of the calls that came in that raised the whole issue of the debt and the deficit spending and so forth. Look, there's no doubt about it. The debt and deficit spending are a bipartisan problem. Republicans seem to get real fiscal conservatism, fiscal religion where the Democrats are in the White House. There's no doubt about it, and it seems to... fade when they when they have the lovers of power. But there's one big, big difference. The Trump administration has actually tried to cut spending and actually has cut spending significantly administratively where it can. However, Real spending cuts have got to come from Congress, and it is the Democrats in the Senate that are blocking it. They are the ones that will not allow long-term spending cuts to go through. They're the ones that have shut the government down because we won't spend the money they want spent, whether it's a subsidy for this, a subsidy for that, or who knows what. But make no mistake.

There is one party that has tried to do something about spending, and that is the Republicans, and there's been another party that refuses to do anything. about it. Now, neither party wants to really touch entitlements. And that's the core of our long-term debt bomb. It isn't even the 40 trillion that's on the books. It's the hundreds of trillions in IOUs in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. So remember that when you hear the Democrats say Medicare for all. Medicare's broke. It's broke. It can't afford. We don't have the money to pay the benefits currently coming due. Social Security, same problem. Okay. And what do the Democrats want to do? They want to expand these programs. Medicare for all. Right. So if you didn't like Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky's control over your health decisions during COVID, what could be worse? What could be better than giving those same people complete control over all your health decisions? Give the government complete control. And don't tell me that Canada and Britain it works there. No, it doesn't. You've got to wait 28 weeks in Canada to see a specialist. 28 weeks. We have problems here. There's no doubt about it. Believe me, I'm dealing with my own health insurance company right now. It is not pleasant. But the root of many of the problems is they're so governmentally regulated. They can't make decisions or give you options because of the governmental rules. that oversee them. So what's the answer? More government. More spending. That's all you get from the left. So, yes, we have a debt problem. We have a deficit problem. But the culpability is not evenly distributed, not even close. Yes, Trump is in the White House, but Congress controls the purse strings. And as long as there's a filibuster, you need 60 votes to make long-term structural changes in the budget. and in the debt. And the Democrats simply won't allow it. They won't. They will not allow it. They will never cut spending. And so we're stuck. Maybe you say get rid of the filibuster. Problem with that is, once you do that, if the left ever gets in control of the White House, the Senate, and the House, they'll just undo everything that Republicans did. Flick of a switch. And you say, well, that's never going to happen. It happened in 2020, 2021. Biden won the White House. Democrats had the House. They had the Senate. And the only thing stopping them from really running the country over a cliff was the filibuster.

And they talked about getting rid of it, too. They didn't because a handful Kristen Cinema and Joe Manchin, both of whom are gone now, Mansion from West Virginia, Cinema from Arizona, who, by the way, is being sued for alienation of affection. She was apparently sleeping with her bodyguard who was married, just as a side note. But regardless, they're gone, and now I think the only one in the Senate who would probably hold out against something like that is John Fetterman. That's it. So getting rid of the filibuster may be one step forward, but it may end up being two steps back. Because if you think the Democrats are never going to have total control, as much as I rue that day, you have to assume it is going to happen. It happened as recently as 2021. And, you know, do I think that they're going to win the House and the Senate in November? Probably not, but it could happen. It absolutely could happen. Now, we'd still have the White House, Republicans, that is. But... The probability that Republicans are going to hold the House and the Senate are not good. They're not great. It's not impossible. But the odds of history are against us. As I've said many times on this program since 1936, the party in the White House has lost seats in Congress in every off-year election except for 1998, Clinton and Lewinsky in 2002 with Bush. post 9-11 so The odds are not looking good. And given how tight things are, particularly in the House, Republicans cannot afford to lose many, if any, seats and still hope to hold on to their majority. All right, you're listening to Inside Maine on WGAN. I'm your host, Josh Filler. It's 1043. Our phone lines are open. 879-9-26. 879 WGAN. Well, we've been talking a lot of gloom and doom, the property tax issue. We've talked about the debt and the deficit and inflation, but there actually is some good news out there. And that is the crime rate. The FBI recently released its 2025 crime statistics. For those who don't know, the FBI collects this data and has been doing it for decades. Starting in 2020, the Bureau changed its methodology and its numbers were a hot mess, particularly during the Biden years. But the Bureau has finally gotten its act together. 96.5% of all reporting law enforcement agencies are accounted for. There's over 17,000 of them in the United States. And so the data is comprehensive. And it's incredibly good news. So overall crime fell, violent crime, that is, fell 9.7%.

from 2024 to 2025. That is the largest drop since the Bureau started collecting this data back in 1936. That is an incredible accomplishment. An incredible accomplishment. Now, crime data, as I mentioned, is not always easy to collect. You've got to first get the agencies to report. And then there's the issue of the reporting to those agencies, those local law enforcement and state law enforcement agencies. Because not all crime victims report their crimes. They don't. Not everybody reports a stolen item. Not everybody reports a simple assault and so forth. But the more... Violent the crime, the greater the tendency to report. And obviously murder, non-negligent homicide where you actually have a dead body, those data sets tend to be the most accurate. Aggravated assault, shooting, stabbings, they tend to be highly accurate as well, although there is a higher degree of likelihood that some of those victims may not report. But still, if somebody gets shot or they get stabbed, they usually go to the hospital or seek some form of treatment, and it's going to get reported. And in those areas, murder in particular, it dropped over 18%. That's incredible. Aggravated assault drops 7.2%. So there's no doubt in my mind that crime is coming down and it's come down significantly. There's just no way with these numbers that it isn't. Robbery fell 18.5%. Again, robbery, is every robbery victim going to report it? No. Do most report it? Probably yes. But regardless, it's a huge decline. Property crimes are the most sketchy. Again, just because people tend not to always report it. But property crime also had an enormous drop. 22% in vehicle thefts, burglaries 15.8%, larceny theft, almost 10%. So again, across the board, very positive numbers. This is something to celebrate. It really is. I know there's a lot of gloom and doom out there, but we have some of the lowest crime rates since 1950s, the 1950s, 1956 to be exact. And I think one of the reasons why people may feel like, well, wait a minute, when I go out into Portland, if I walk down Congress Street, it looks like a hellscape. And it does at times. You got people passed out. You got the needles. Al called about the needles. And this raises a very interesting question. What is the cause of this massive decline? Because when crime first started coming down in this country in the 1990s, led by Mayor Giuliani and the policing revolution in New York, it was focused on quality of life crimes that if you enforced quality of life crimes, like urinating or defecating in the street, graffiti, shooting up drugs on the sidewalk, being passed out.

on a park bench in a drug-induced stupor or drunk or whatever, that this would do several things. One, the sense of lawlessness would dissipate. And secondly, a lot of people who commit quality of life crimes also commit violent crimes, assaults, aggravated assault, homicide, okay? And so by enforcing, you get that double-edged benefit. Okay. How is it then that in 2025, 2026, quality of life crimes in most major cities are not being enforced. And yet the crime rate is dropping. Now, I had this conversation with Matt on Thursday on the morning news show, and I'll tell you, I can't give you a single answer because generally speaking with crime data, there is no one single thing that causes it. But I won't hold you in further suspense. Immigration enforcement. And here's why. It is the one common denominator. Whether it's New York, Seattle, Portland, Maine, Portland, Oregon, Miami, or Houston, Texas, and everything in between, regardless of how they do things, and many of them do things quite differently, the one thing they're all feeling is the national unprecedented level of immigration enforcement and border security. So the difference is we've moved out more migrants in the last year and a half, illegal aliens, than probably at any time since Eisenhower. And even more importantly than that, we've secured the border. Obama used to deport a lot of people. But then he'd let even more people in through the ports of entry. So he'd kick one out and two or three would come in. Now we're removing people and we've secured the border. So they're not coming back. It's leaving to a net negative migration of roughly a million people. And the U.S. Census data backs this up. And the focus on immigration enforcement in the interior is on criminals. You've heard the Trump administration say it over and over again. Their primary focus are violent criminal illegal aliens. And so while normally the federal government plays an indirect role in street crime, violent crime in the United States, this is an exception. This is the exception because of its unprecedented securing of the border and it's enforcing the immigration laws in the interior. All right. Our phone lines are open. 879-9-4-26. That's 879 WGAN. Let's go to Lillian Bath on line one.

Lily, good morning. Hello. Well, good morning. God bless you and your wonderful team. How are y'all doing this morning? I'm doing well. What's on your mind? I'm from southern Maine, I can say y'all. One thing that's really amazing to me, I work two jobs. I actually do my best to live my life the right way. And it really bugs me sometimes when I see this elitist mirage that comes through. It's that really woke mentality. You see a rosifying of the stats in school districts. We see it in our local areas. You see the rosifying? What do you mean? Well, basically make it pretty. Well, if we aren't saying that there's, you know, that there's rapes and violent crimes going on, some of the stuff that looks, then it makes it look better. For instance, like Chicago pops in my head. Well, clearly, they've got a heck of a crime problem there. But if you get folks who are woke mentality, oh, oh, well, let's cut back on police. We don't need them. Let's cut back on these stats. That means they're doing a great job in their department as leadership so they get more money and more grants. In actuality, it's rough. I'm very blessed. I work at a grocery store at night, and we have amazing cops, amazing sheriff's department who do incredible work locally. But I tell you, when I run into some of these elitist woke types who come in, they have zero respect for the incredible work these men and women do. And it really upsets me because it's not right. All right, Lily, we appreciate the call. Thanks. Yeah, I mean, the police out on the streets definitely deserve credit here. They work under incredibly stressful situations, particularly in major cities like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and very often they don't have the support of their political leaders. But again, I think in this particular case, ICE, yes, ICE and the U.S. Border Patrol deserve an enormous amount of credit. And remember, the Democrats want to abolish ICE. Okay. I know they've talked about woke one versus woke two and whatever, all this other nonsense. No, no, no, no. They have not gotten off woke, as Lily said. Abolishing ICE is the new defund the police. Okay? And you heard it. You heard it at the Biddeford Field hearing. The witnesses, the members of the Democrat panel that held the hearing, they want to abolish ICE. That's what they want to do. They want to abolish ICE and they want to allow violent criminal illegal aliens to flood into the country. You think I'm making this up? Go look at the data from the Biden years. It's not that old. It's a year and a half ago. Record numbers. Ten million. Ten million. allowed into the country through the ports of entry. Two plus million gotaways, which means we had no contact with them. We don't know who they are, where they are, or what they were doing. And whether it was a mother murdered in Maryland, a child murdered in Houston, or a student, Lake and Riley murdered in Georgia, or police officers in uniform in Times Square and broad daylight, viciously assaulted.

We could spend the next three hours going over all the different crimes that were committed and are still being committed to this day. But thank God have dropped dramatically because of the Trump administration's immigration enforcement and border security. This is a byproduct of it. And never forget, the Democrats want to abolish ICE. All right, 879-9426. The time is 1055. Our phone lines are open. We're going to be coming up on a break here in a minute. When we come back, I do want to talk about Michael Cohen. For those of you who don't remember, Michael Cohen is Donald Trump's former personal attorney. Apparently, Michael Cohen is back in the news because he's shopping for a pardon. And he and the president apparently had their first conversation in years. Very interesting to see where that's going to go. I want to talk about Tucker Carlson's conversation with Hunter Biden. in the in the vein of you can't make this stuff up. That actually happened. That much and more. We'll take your phone calls. 879-9-4-26. We're going to take a break. When we come back, we'll be right back on Inside Maine.