Rubio on Iran's Weakened State

The J Weber Podcast is presented by Creative Planning, helping clients simplify their journey to financial wellness one personalized plan at a time. The Jay Weber Podcast is a production of iHeartRadio Podcast s. Hello and welcome to the J Weber Podcast. Today we'll talk about how the economy has improved by nearly every measure over the last 14 months, and I'm finding it harder and harder to believe that most Americans aren't noticing, which is of course the claim from the left wing media. Also, the military action against Iran was never going to end cleanly, and we shouldn't expect it to. And some thoughts on Scott Pelley, a pompous pretender who I believe really just wanted to retire, but decided to make him self the story and pretend that he's the last honest journalist in America as he goes out. But first, uh producer extraordinaire Gregory John, I want to ask you to give me a ratio, you know, one in five, one in ten, one in twenty. Just roughly how many Americans do you think carry a concealed weapon pro protection pretty much every day or basically whenever they leave the house? Like one, two percent? One one two, percent. Yeah, it's more like a new survey of a thousand Americans says it's more of like thirteen percent. It's about one in ten. Wow. They say one in ten Americans, about thirteen percent, say they routinely are packing heat as they go about their daily lives. I thought you know one to two percent would be low, but I would have thought maybe seven, eight. So it's double that. That number number doesn't really surprise me all that much. This one does. According to the same survey, nearly one in three people, nearly one in three say they carry sometimes or somewhat regularly. Thirty percent of the people in this country, or at least in this survey conducted last month, it was a thousand people, say they carry a fire time uh firearm at times. I have a uh I have a nephew that lives in San Antonio, uh Texas, and he carries all the time. We were down there a couple of couple of summers ago, and uh he yeah, he's packing. We go to the the restaurant and and everywhere we went, we went we saw that we went in the caves, he's he's still packing . Is he carrying openly? Can you see the gun? Yeah, you can see it openly, yeah. Well, I I have a few people that carry concealed and do it regularly. They won't leave the house without their wallet, their car keys, their their gun. But uh this kind of these stats make it I think it's safe to say that basically any time you're in a crowd or at a larger event, it means there are at least a few people around you who are carrying guns with the normalization of carry laws as they are. I mean, this is something now that the vast majority of simpli of us simply never think about. Makes me feel more safe because I know that these people most likely have gone through training and uh and don't have the mindset a lot of these uh these thugs do. It's about the people who are carrying them or and or using them. These are people who are are concerned about their own safety and, you know, public safety in general. They're uh it I'm with you. It kind of uh is good for me, reassuring to me that well, if something really goes down in this venue or whatever, in the off chance that it would, you might have some people able to respond with like force. But you know what the average lefty, Karen or Kevin's response would be. They'd just be mortified at this. Yeah. So I you don't carry. I I I now we I haven't had a gun since we moved down here from up north, and that's like 1990. Uh I left all my guns up north uh because Dorothy didn't want them around the kids and then just never never got around to it. It's funny that you bring this up because we were just talking about this about a month ago saying, you know, maybe we should buy a gun just to keep in the house. I don't know if I'd carry though. I'd carry occasionally. I don't carry all the time, but I do carry occasionally and uh uh I will and I'll do something that that uh people say you shouldn't do and I'll just sort of put one in the car if I'm going in a place where I think that I think might be sketchy. But John Lott is this famous name when it comes to guns and crime research and he's linking this to the lower to the lower crime rates that we're seeing. I'd really question that though. Crime seems to have dipped since Trump got back into office, and voters in some of these cities replaced their woke DAs and demanded they do better. But there's no obvious correlation between people carrying guns for protection and lower crime rates. I think these same people were probably carrying in the Biden era too, right? So it's not like Trump got back into office in a third of the country said, okay, strap them up. I'm I'm a regular gun carrier now. In fact, this polsterl says thirty percent that thirty percent figure is only up about six percent since the last survey. So I don't see the racing connection connection to dip in crime, but it is interesting to know that more than one in ten Americans now say they don't leave the house without their wallet, their keys, and their sidearm. Also, they say about a third of the geographic area of the country is now working under constitutional carry, which means they don't even need a license or a permit to carry. Boy, uh that's a complicated question. It really kind of depends what you what you want, just small for protection. I like Glocks myself. Okay. I like something with uh uh better than revolvers. Some people carry revolvers . Well that it depending on the size is either five or six uh bullets. I would rather have a few more than that if something if I really need them. But you should look at the smaller clocks. Uh Dorothy the uh fathers day is just around the corner. I would also point out before we move on here, none of the anti-gun crowds predictions have come true. Remember, it's gonna be like the wild west in America if we start to legalize concealed carry or open carry . These are Americans who've decided they're carrying concealed just for some peace of mind. And the wild west has not been the result. So I'd point that out. But uh now the big transition to the the uh sponsor. Do you have peace of mind when it comes to your retirement? See how I do that every week? Here's where I pivot and promote the great sponsor to this program: Creative Planning. Have you heard of Creative Planning? They're one of the nation's largest independent wealth management firms, offering fully integrated financial and retirement planning, investment management, estate planning, tax strategies, business services, and international wealth management, all in house and coordinated through your wealth manager. Their fiduciary wealth managers are here to help you navigate every piece of your financial life . Visit Creative Planning dot com to schedule our introductory meeting. That's Creative Planning dot com. Your team awaits. Paid for by Creative Planning, an SEC registered investment advisor. The speaker's statements are not an endorsement of the firm. My segment about how pride events have crumbled over the last few years was a popular one, and I was explaining that the members of the Alphabet Army finally overplayed their hand with all the multiple genders, transgender stuff. A movement that started out as gays and lesbians demanding equal rights or to be included in political conversations has turned into a militant and socially poisonous freak show. This is a few decades later. Most reasonable people are rejecting it. Coming after our kids with drag shows and trying to twist their adolescent minds with gender treatments and gender reassignment surgeries was simply too much for most reasonable people to find reasonable or continue to support. Ex named Cynthia Holt posting something that I will clean up a bit. As a lesbian woman, I bleeping hate Pride Month with every fiber of my being, she says. It makes us look like absolute crap. The entire the entire LGB has been hijacked by groomers, men and cheap wigs with toilet paper tits, freaks duct taping their peanuts to their butts, pedophiles, fetish weirdos, and every other kind of gross filth parading down the street. She says real gay lesbian and bisexual people want nothing to do with the circus . We just want to be left alone. The LGB community condemns these degenerates and every organization pandering to them. These sentiments stood out to me because it's the sort of thing that gay and lesbian listeners to my radio show would share with me or email me every June or nearly every Pride Month. I did a conservative talk show for decades, and over those decades I had gay and lesbian listeners tell me this exact same sort of thing that the alphabet movement does not represent most gays and lesbians. Most gays and lesbians want to be seen as regular people who have all the same sorts of interests and feelings and hopes as the rest of us, and simply don't want to be vilified or shut out of society because of who they find sexually attractive or choose to love. And yet this group of people are never quoted or given any media attention because their comments on the movement don't fit the left-wing narrative. So I thought I'd pass that along. As another follow-up, I'd point you to a Gallup poll that seems to verify the points that I was making on the last podcast. This year's Gallup poll finds support for the so-called LGBTQ plus issues sliding backward. Polsters are calling this a cultural shift. The average gay or lesbian would probably call it proof that the perverts and the trans bullies have ruined their brand. But Gallup found while a majority of Americans still support legal same sex marriage, that's about sixty-five percent, that figures dropped six percentage points from its peak in 2022 and 23. Meanwhile, moral acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships has dipped to 62%, which Gallup says is the lowest point since 2016 . Public acceptance of gender transition has experienced an even steeper decline over the last five years. They say as of today, just thirty-eight percent of Americans believe changing one's gender is morally acceptable, down eight points since twenty twenty-one, and a fifty-seven percent majority view it as morally wrong. Wow. This cultural shift is largely driven by Republicans and then independents, they say, while Democrats' views on these issues have remained steady. Also interesting, on attitudes towards same -sex marriage. Among Republicans, support for legal same-sex marriage has plummeted to thirty-seven percent, down from fifty-five percent majorities recorded in two thousand twenty-one and twenty-two. That is a significant decline. Independent attitudes on gay marriage also saw a six-point drop to sixty-seven percent. Gallup says another stark contrast is seen on the issue of gender transition. Just five percent of Republicans view changing one's gender as morally acceptable compared to forty-two percent of independents and sixty percent of Democrats. I'd point to those stats as some of the most revealing out of the entire batch. Let's step back. When asked whether changing genders is quote morally acceptable. Now we're dealing on the morality plane here, not whether it should be legal or normalized or encouraged, or do you support gender transitioning? This is on the question of is changing your gender moral a whopping fifty-eight percent of independents say no, and even forty percent of Democrats say no. That is interesting. In a so called enlightened age, when it comes to how society should treat alphabet people and gender issues, sixty percent of moderates and forty percent of Democrats consider gender transitioning immoral. Now that's interesting. And it might explain why there's such a backlash to the trans bullying and the they-them wars and the pronoun bullying when the leftists who launched the effort clearly thought they'd have most Americans on their side. In short, this helps explain the backlash to so called pride month and pride events over the last several years. The trans and gender rights bullies absolutely co-opted the movement and turned it into an unappealing campaign that was nearly impossible for any well meaning American to support. This poll also suggests that our poster on X is correct. The entire Gabe movement has been hijacked by freaks and groomers that most decent people can't support even when they're asked to. Interesting. Next topic the American economy, which, by every measure, really does seem to be roaring now, even if the average American is telling pollsters they don't really feel it or see it, I'm finding this increasingly interesting and increasingly hard to believe, because by nearly every measure and certainly based on every monthly governmental report, this Trump economy is really humming along, and yes, gas prices have lifted the overall measure of inflation higher. Some prices of some items at the grocery store continue to creep up, but wages are starting to outpace the cost of living again. Paychecks are growing. The markets are on an incredible run. Layoffs are now rare. Heck, this week we learned that the number of job openings the country has is soaring again. There are suddenly around seven point six million job openings in America. Folks, that's the highest number of job openings in nearly three years, and it's evidence that companies are starting to hire again and the demand for workers has intensified. Moreover, the biggest chunk of new jobs available is in the manufacturing sector, meaning they're likely better paying jobs that actually add to a productive economy instead of jobs in government that only drain taxpayers and drain the economy. Or even in lower paying sector jobs like hospitality or retail. Folks, there are nearly half a million job openings in manufacturing as of now. That's great. This is good stuff. This is all good news. It had economic guru Larry Cudlow talking about this with his panel members, which included Stephen Moore. Both Cudlow and Moore have been advisors to President Trump and they helped create Trump's fantastic first-term economy. They're now beside themselves that according to the to the rest of the news media, no one can see the incredible improvement in this economy over the last year or so. I think the policy outlook is very yes, it's very, very positive. Yes. But I just think it's interesting to me, uh Steve Moore, that rampant pessimism, uh which is promoted by the media , promoted by Democrats, maybe some Republicans, because all prices have jumped up, they bumped up temporarily. But you d the numbers don't bear that out. And it you know, business is in But look at the numbers, Steve Moore. That's the point. People don't take the time to look at the numbers. Yeah, well we're blowing away the rest of the world too, Larry. We're growing faster than everybody else. And look at our stock market compared to China. Uh we are winning because of Trump and it's no question about it. I would just add two points to what Arthur Lapper just said and that you just said. Uh the investment numbers I just love those Larry. I mean we've never seen such an investment boom in this country maybe ever uh going on. And the second one is as you know at Unleashed Prosperity, we're monitoring each month the the the Census Bureau numbers on what's happened to fa family income. I'm gonna give you the scoop on this. So we just did the April numbers. Since Trump came into office in his second term, above inflation, the average family has three thousand one hundred dollars more of income. So even this affordability crisis is kind of overrated. People have more disposable income today than ever. Yep. People have more disposable income now than they did under Joe Biden , certainly, and every governmental and private sector measure is proving it. And yet in today's media, everything's got to be terrible news, even if they have to lie about it. Today's news media is just an arm of today's America hating left. It's one thing to have me saying these same things as a regional influencer. They're gonna sound familiar, but to hear Cudlow say them this bluntly at a national media level is fun to see. Cudlow said everything's got always got to be terrible for today's liberal and they have their priorities really out of whack. Today's Democrats don't mind Nazi tattoos. They want the southern border to be open. Everything's always about racism or DEI, cashless bail, biological men and women's sports, arrest violent felons and then put them back out on the streets, radical abortion on demand and virtually no place for God in religion. For some reason, these left-wing Democratic Jacobins have completely lost touch with working class folks. Working class folks, of all colors, of all shapes, of all sizes, which is why Donald Trump has whooped them two out of the last three elections, maybe three out of the last three elections. I love that last suggestion by Cudlow that Trump might have actually won in twenty twenty. That's what he's referring to. But when it comes to the economy, any honest examination of the question are you voters better off than you were four years ago has got to conclude yeah, you are. Clay Travis posted some stats from two thousand twenty two, which was of course Joe Biden's midterm. In June of twenty two, gas prices averaged over five dollars a gallon, inflation was nine point one percent, the murder rate was six people per one hundred thousand00,0. The SP five hundred was at thirty six seventy five. Four years later, if you have gas cheaper, inflation is roughly three, three and a half percent. The murder rate is down to four people per one hundred thousand, and the SP five hundred is at seventy six hundred, that's more than double four years ago. Those stats represent real progress. The editors of issues and insights also looked back and say, let's turn the dial back to June of 2022. Joe Biden had been occupying the White House for a year and a half, Democrats controlled Congress, they handed him his two trillion dollar bill back better spending extravaganza, and the economy had more than recovered the ground it lost from COVID lockdowns. The country should have been booming. Instead, 9.1% inflation and stagnation. They say in 2022, real hourly wages were falling. Four years later, workers' incomes have climbed out of that Biden hole and wages are up two percent. And unlike 2022, they're going up, not down. So they're continuing to go up. They say the latest jobs data shows that there are six million more private sector jobs today than there were a year ago. That's the good news. The better news is that there are 190,000 fewer federal workers than there were in 2022. In April 2022, the border patrol quote encountered two hundred and thirty-four thousand illegal border crossers, and of course they released almost all of them into the US. Was at about thirty-three thousand at the end of May of twenty twenty two and was moving sideways. This year it's at fifty one thousand. That's an increase of fifty-six percent, and it's been climbing for most of Trump's second term. And they say despite all the hue and cry over gas prices Because they're one of the few negatives that they can actually spin and make sound terrible to the average voter. A gallon until he s decided we needed to deal with Iran. We couldn't delay anymore because they're so close to creating a nuclear bomb. And so it was the Iran war that had gas prices skyrocketing back up to about four sixty a gallon on average before they've started to slide back down again now. So the honest caveat on gas prices has got to be Trump and his team knew gas prices were gonna jump again, but they had to do the hard work of eliminating the Iranian nuclear threat. Now they have and prices are already coming down again. And so if voters really want to hold a grudge against Trump and Republicans for that, it's kind of silly. But of course the Democrats will spin and lie as much as they can on that one because it's the one economic attack they think they can get voters to believe and get angry about. And yes, as these editors continue, there are still soft spots in the labor market, sure, but the economic turnaround that was so desperately needed after Biden trashed up things has begun. In fact, just fourteen months later, it's well underway. If you're upset about that, you're really being foolish. maintained that climbing out of the Biden hole would be an arduous journey. And while we'd argue that Trump could be doing a better job of communicating his wins and staying focused on issues that everyday Americans care about, who's willing to claim that they're better off in twenty twenty two than they are now. So the question voters need to start asking themselves is do they really want to hand control of anything back to the Democrats, knowing the misery they caused four years ago? The answer to that should obviously be no, and if we had an honest meeting, one that was both cataloging the economic wins that we've been seeing in this new era of Trump as they've occurred, and as also honestly asking and answering that question for voters, is this country better off economically than it was under Joe Biden . If today's news media was doing their jobs as any past era of news editors and reporters would have been, more fairly, the majority of the American people and fall voters would already know that there's no reason to vote Democrat in fall and put these clowns back in charge. You'd actually be a dope to do so if your own paycheck and cost of living are at all important to you. The truth is things are going good in America right now, and that Trump and his team have rather quickly turned Biden's terrible economy around with more growth and prosperity on the horizon. I just hope more of the message gets out before people start to early vote in September. You're listening to the Jay Weber Podcast, a presentation of News Talk 1130 WISN and iHeartRadio Podcasts. Jay Weber draws from his 35-year career in radio news and commentary with an irreverent wit that simply can't be matched. Right-minded alternative to media outlets that substitute self-serving narratives for candor and truth. Listen to the Jay Weber Podcast, published every Tuesday and Friday. You are listening to the Jay Weber Podcast. The Wall Street Journal had a fun blurb on Elon Musk, and since only a small sliver of people read the Wall Street Journal, I thought I'd pass it along to my podcast listeners. This comes up because Elon Musk is going to be the world's first trillionaire. The expectation is that this will come after the initial public offering for SpaceX , because as it is, Musk's net worth is estimated to be about nine hundred and seventy billion dollars. Nine hundred and seventy billion. Holy cow. So he only needs to see his wealth increase by another thirty billion dollars and he hits one trillion. Sounds weird to speak in terms of only thirty billion, but when we're talking about these sorts of numbers, it's fit, it's it fits, it's accurate. And given how difficult it is to even understand what a trillion dollars is for the average person, it starts to sound like fake money. The Wall Street Journal estimates that Elon Musk over the course of his career has made about $1,000 per second, $9 92 per second, more accurately. Musk's wealth includes SpaceX, which is valued at about $5 40 billion . His stakes in Tesla, of course, they're worth about $170 billion. And he also has another hundred and fifty billion dollars in stock options to those companies that he could exercise at any time. Then there's the cutting edge boring company, which drills tunnels. That's five billion. Oh, the brain implant firm that he founded, that's worth about a hundred billion. Then you've got to toss in the properties that he owns, personal assets like his plane, et cetera. You get to about $9 70 billion . To put this into perspective, the next richest guy in the U.S. is Jeff Bezos, who is worth about $276 billion . So imagine Elon Musk is so rich. He is so far ahead of any other wealth giant on this planet that he could buy out the next guy on the list three times over, easily. Working the math another way, the Wall Street Journal says that Musk has made about three point six million dollars per hour for the last thirty one years. He's made about fifty nine thousand dollars per minute or three point six million an hour. And obviously he wasn't making that much early in his efforts, but this is the average over the course of his working adult li fe. By the way, that works out to about $85 million a day, if you want that figure. Elon Musk makes about $85 million a day, $2.6 billion per month, $31 billion per year. And so as the Wall Street Journal article points out, it would take the average American who makes about eighty-four thousand dollars a year currently, it would take the average American eleven million years to match Musk's current wealth. That is mind-boggling. Unfathomable. That's how rich Elon Musk is. One of the thoughts that I had on this was Elon Musk is proving that you really can't hit a point at at which money's irrelevant. He's the perfect person to really prove that or display that. Musk by all appearances is a pretty average guy who doesn't put much importance in all the money that he has. He's not like Bezos or Gates or Zuckerberg, who've shown off how rational They're all so rich that they have clearly by now figured out that there's only so much you can spend your money on and that no amount of money makes you infallible or untouchable or immortal. Which led to the other thought I had. Musk's level of wealth is proving the cliche you still can't take it with you is true. He and all these other very, very rich men are still all going to die someday. In fact, in every era there seems to have been at least some sliver of wealthy people who were chasing immortality, trying to find ways to extend their lives or make themselves immortal. None have yet. They've tried sleeping in cryogenic chambers and blood doping, gene manipulation, they've all still died. In fact, Elon Musk has said more than once that he's convinced at some point humans will be able to essentially download their consciousness into a computer hard drive and that, would be at least a form of immortality. We've all seen science fiction movies in which that's the plot. Some dead villain's brain is downloaded into some other person's body or some blank that was lab grown. Musk would probably tell you we're closer to that first step of downloading someone's consciousness onto a hard drive than you'd think. But at least in this age, you still can't do it, and you still can't take it with you. Whether it's ten bucks or a trillion dollars, money is useless to you when you're dead. This Wall Street Journal story has a list of things you could buy with Musk's current $970 billion . You could buy 2.4 million houses in the US, using the average price of a house. You could buy 32 NFL teams and You could buy a fleet of over ten thousand Gulfstream jets and pay for five years of their operating costs. And one final stat, when adjusted for inflation, Elon Musk is wealthier than even John D. Rockefeller was in his day, easily. This means that even before SpaceX goes public or Musk hits a trillion dollars of wealth, this moment in history, already, Elon Musk ranks as the richest American who has ever lived. That's the sort of thing that I think is too good to stay behind a firewall on the Wall Street Journal website, so I thought I'd share it with you. Now, to longtime CBS anchor and sixty minutes hack Scott Pelley being fired after going on an explosive rant against the network's new news chiefs. This is fun. This has been the talk of social media over the last few days, and it probably proves that social media isn't real life. I don't know who actually watches sixty minutes anymore or who who knows Scott Pelley even is. If you're gonna poll the average American, I don't think they know. But it's been all over social media. And my takes on Scott Pelley include first, he's always struck me as Ted Baxter, a parody of a newsman . Pelle is clearly playing a role when he's in front of the camera. I assume he's a big fake and he acts and sounds completely different off air. I've always assumed that he's a less funny Ted Baxter, the fraud of a newsman that Ted Knight played on the Mary Tyler Moore show. And yes, I think Pelley is that fake, even if he's not that much of an idiot. My second take on Pelley's firing is and this is a complete guess, but I just think what I think. I think he just wanted to retire, but being the self-aggrandizing, performative jackass that he has always been, he decided to go down in a blaze of glory and pretend that he was taking a stand and defending journalism as a whole and defending his journalistic integrity individually. This is what I think at motivated his insane performance in that all staff meeting earlier this week. This was all ego, trust me. That much is for certain. Pelle wouldn't have done this if it would he wouldn't have planned it first correct. And so what we can say is that part of this is certainly intentional. What his motivations were, more questionable. Did he really think he could speak to the CBS execs that way and survive it? Or after thirty seven years and at the age of sixty-eight, was Pelle looking to go out in a blaze of glory and hope to go down in history as the last real journalist in a rapidly changing world? Put me down for that second option there. I would bet Podcast like Megan Kelly and Tucker or Mark Helprin did. Is he going to be another one of these media figures who either quits or gets fired from a larger media company only to feel that he needs to start some sort of substack or or start his own podcast and continue his work. Or is this essentially the last we see of Scott Pelley? Does he maybe pop up on a few Sunday shows or is part of some other network selection coverage but otherwise disappear? That would be the litmus test. This is a sort of move that would indicate to me that he really just wanted to retire, or whether he really did think he could just speak to CBS execs this way 'cause he has a contract. But either way, he goes down as a guy who is fired from CBS twice as, John Podaritz pointed out, quote: This is the second time Scott Pelley has been fired by CBS. The last time was for being a lousy anchor man, this time it was for being a performative jerk. And he didn't say jerk. He used a word that rhymes with trick , but I've decided to keep my podcast relatively clean because I assume all sorts of people will be listening to it in the car or in the house with little ears around. I might be a little looser with the language on the podcast now that I no longer have to meet FCC requirements for over the air content, but I'll keep it relatively clean for you. This explosion of emotion and invective by Pelle was directed at a guy named Nick Bilton, who has been hired as the new top producer of sixty minutes? And in that rant, Pelley trashed the woman who hired him, Barry Weiss, this is the relatively new head of the CBS news product overall. And he told Builton right to his face that he had no resume or qualifications for producing sixty minutes. He accused Weiss of quote murdering that show and told Bilton that he was basically a bad joke with no qualifications. And so is Pelley so arrogant and foolish that he thought he could speak to management that way and get away with it? Or was he trying to get himself fired? I would opt for trying to get fired. You might be asking yourself, well, who would want to go out that way or who would want to put a stain on his career right at the end of it this way? My answer would be because Pelle is not seeing this as a stain on his career or his reputation. He's seeing it as a capper on his career and reputation. He was the last great, honest, unbiased, fair journalist. In his mind, Scott Pelley is one of the last great journalists standing who spoke truth to power and stood up for the institution right until the bitter end. As a former journalist myself, and knowing how most guys like Pelley view themselves in that profession, I can guarantee you that that's how Pelle views this week's events. In fact, one good hint here is how Pelle portrayed himself at his time at CBS, acting as if he had seen combat. Did you see this? The statement Pelle put out right after his firing is mockable. Quote I have been in combat in Afghanistan, I've been in combat in Iraq, I've been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life Folks, Scott Pelley has not been in combat. He's been a reporter working in war zones, sure, and there's an amount of risk and romance that comes with that, but not much in the modern times. In today's war zones, the risk to reporters is very low, and I can tell you for certain that Scott Pelley was never anywhere near the fighting or in any real risk. Pelley might have been too Afghanistan in Ukraine while they were at war, but he wasn't embedded with any troops. He and his cameramen and producers were at a comfortable hotel in Kyiv filing reports once a day or once a week. And for Pelle to portray himself as having been in combat isn't only disingenuous, it's insulting to those who have seen actual combat, including war reporters in past wars that were embedded with troops and were on front lines with nothing except for their cam era and their notepad . This isn't really stolen valor because Pelley isn't pretending to have served a military role, but it's still a form of stolen valor to suggest that he put his life at risk on behalf of journalism and informing the CBS told him to put false facts and intentional biases into his stories now that they're in charge. That's nonsense. It's clearly baloney, and based on what other CBS employees who are close to Pelly and close to these projects are saying, they're verifying that. Most people don't know that it's really the producers and writers and all sorts of people behind the scenes who put together the stories that Scott Pelley voices. You know, he or Leslie Stahl, sure they might sit down and do a live interview to get some tape on a couple of uh interview subjects, but it's people behind the scenes that are doing all the hard work. Scott Pelley is basically the face of that story and the script reader. That's it. In fact, it sounds like the behind the scenes CBS employees are pretty split on the question of what Pelley did here and whether it's helpful. As one CBS insider put it, quote, what did he accomplish? He embarrassed the company and leadership. Worse than that, Pelle confirmed for the non crazy majority of the country that legacy journalists are narcissistic megalomaniacs with a wildly overinflated sense of their own importance. That's true. That is what Pelley did. And and maybe his fellow arrogant, self-important news people who are working at the big networks like along with him think that Pelley did a bold and courageous thing here, but the rest of America thinks he looks like a putt. Oh, and then there's the chance that Pelley's explosion was really just over a suggestion that his new boss had made that they'd all be working harder. Honestly, those who were in the meeting said that Pelle seemed to really get upset after this new guy, Nick Bilton, said that bas ed on the size of the staff and the new era of streaming, they would be producing more content. We can generate more product and have more success. That's what seemed to set off Pelle as much as anything according to people in those meetings. Well, consider it. Scott Pelley's sixty-eight. He's been coasting along for a decade or more, doing one story a week, if that , and getting paid millions of dollars a year to do it. Suddenly, right at the end of his career and when he's really been enjoying this coast, this great glide path for years, where he's not working hard but he's making all sorts of money. Now it's coming to an end. Of course he'd be upset. That's one of the things that has me thinking Pelley really just wanted to retire. He had worked himself into a great position at CBS in which he was making a huge amount of money for doing virtually no work. This is similar to an aging college professor or a brilliant brain surgeon. You have these professions in which at your oldest and your wisest, you have the most value so you can make the most money. Institutions will pay you a lot to do very little work. This is the position Scott Kelly and Leslie Stahl and these other ancient CBS hacks had worked themselves into. And suddenly management changes at the top and they're demanding more of you right, when you want to do less work? Management's outlining an energetic new era that's being launched, and you're a fossil from the old era. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want to work harder. Suddenly retirement looks pretty good. So this is my theory. Pelly wanted no part of helping to launch some energetic new era of journalism and storytelling, blah blah blah blah blah, and he formulated his own way to go out. In fact I can virtually guarantee you that's what really went on here in Pelle's head. So we'll wait a few days and a few weeks, we'll see if the Pelle Podcast is announced because by God Scott Pelle still has a fire in his belly for good stories. Or we'll see if he's done and we never really see much of Scott Pelley again . I'm guessing it's going to be that second option. You're listening to the Jay Weber Podcast, a presentation of News Talk 1130 WISN, an iHeartRadio Podcasts. Jay Weber draws from his 35-year career in radio news and commentary with an irreverent wit that simply can't be matched. Right-minded alternative to media outlets that substitute self-serving narratives for candor and truth. Listen to the Jay Weber Podcast, published every Tuesday and Friday. Be sure to subscribe. Listeners seem to enjoy my segment about how President Trump is beautifying and restoring our nation's capital and how he would be getting bipartisan praise for it in any other political era. And as a follow-up, I just wanted to pass along some new stats that I ran across that aren't likely to get much attention in the mainstream new news media. According to the Department of Interior, just up to this point in the Trump restoration effort, the Trump administration has restored twenty two fountains and cleaned up twenty-eight statues, as well as removed hundreds of instances of graffiti. They've restored several public ponds around DC, and of course are very close to completing the restoration of the massive reflective pool between the Capitol and the Washington Monument. And also included in this list from interior, rat proofing DC 's trash cans and clearing out a few homeless encampments from federal grounds. That's fantastic. And as Doug Bergum and Donald Trump have both been saying, decay is a choice. The Democrats are allowing and even seem to be encouraging the decay in Washington, DC, and in our big cities, and we shouldn't have to put up with it. With this line. In just fourteen months, POTUS has restored our nation's capital, making it both safe and beautiful. And Trump really has. That isn't one of these Trumpian boasts that is sometimes inflated or overblown in its characterization. Washington really is far more safe and now more beautiful than it was when Joe Biden left office, and really for the first time after decades of decline. And I'll just emphasize again, Donald Trump didn't even run on cleaning up Washington, D.C. cleaning up DC wasn't among the top priorities that Trump and Republicans were touting in twenty twenty four as they ran for office. Lowering crime was, yes, but Trump wasn't promising to restore the fountains and the monuments in Washington, D.C., he never mentioned the reflecting pool. This is just an effort that Trump decided to take on as a personal project once he got back into office, and after seeing the sort of neglect and decay that had been allowed to happen under past presidents in Congress So good for Trump. I have zero doubt that after he's out of office and some time has passed, only then will people on both sides of the aisle and their media outlets admit Trump did a good thing here. And it will happen, but it could take years. You know, the passage of time normally has nearly everyone admitting to a simple truth at some point. Two great examples are after the Clintons left office, everyone on the Democrat side of the aisle could immediately flip and tell you how awful they were, and in truth, how terrible their scandals were for the party in the country. Another good example, now that the Bidens are out of office and their political careers are clearly over, now already the truth about what corrupt liars they have always been is starting to be acknowledged. Folks, it says something that the harshest criticisms related to Jill Biden's new book and how she's trying to rewrite history are coming from her own side of the aisle. The average American doesn't care about her book. They're not going to read it. They're not really paying attention to what's going on in Washington. But over the last week or so, Washington, D.C. has been obsessed with how the Bidens are going to try to redeem them selves with one last rush of lies in book form now. It's the talk of the DC insiders and elites, and they're nearly all Democrats and legacy media members who are obsessing over this. Because now they feel like they can tell the truth. Joe and Joe Biden have always been scumbags. They've always been corrupt. They ran a corrupt pay to play family enterprise for decades, and DC insiders knew it. A lot of DC insiders were running some sort of pay-fory-pla or corruption scheme. But when the level of the Biden family corruption was really exposed, they were shocked that the Bidens were managing to collect millions and millions of dollars doing this. Anyone listening to Mark Halperin's podcast should note how cavalierly they're all now on the left admitting that Biden Inc. was a corrupt and perhaps criminal enterprise, and we can admit it now. They're admitting the Bidens are broke. They can't send Hunter and Jim around to ex tort money out of people and foreign countries and collect bribes for the family anymore. History will get this right eventually. And this is a good point to transition to the next topic because history will eventually get this right too. The fact that Don ald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu did a stunning, heroic, and historically unique thing by wiping out the military of another major foreign country in a matter of days and solving a forty or fifty year global problem and terror threat with virtually no loss of life and no wider warfare. This is another thing that in any other political era would have been marvelous and celebrated in a bipartisan manner. But because it's Trump and because it's this hyper partisan and bitter era, we're getting very different and very unfair coverage out of the leftist media. President Trump and his team have delivered an incredible military victory over in Iran, and it's one that can't be taken away or explained away by Trump 's political enemies, but they sure are trying hard to do that by obsessing over some quote peace deal that in truth Trump and Israel don't need. For months now, the actors involved and the Trump hating U.S. media have been obsessing ing over gett some sort of official deal in place that allows Trump to withdraw our military from the region and cleanly walk away. But that's not gonna happen because it's not a realistic expectation, and I've been telling you this since my first podcast in April. The truth is we don't need a deal with Iran, because these Iranian mullahs and politicians never ever live up to deals. They've never lived up to a past deal they've ever made with the West. Dealing with the Iranian regime is useless. We either need regime change or we need to simply keep them boxed in until their economy completely collapses and they're no longer a threat to anyone outside of their own borders. If these mullahs remain in place, that's how Trump has to handle this. This is what needs to occur here. And if that means that gas prices come down a little bit more slowly as the global markets shift away from oil out of the Persian Gulf even more, well then so be it. But the price of gas is already coming down, and Iran and its evil mullahs are still pinned in. So what actually needs to change when it comes to deal with Iran from America's perspective? In truth, we don't need some sort of clean but fraudulent deal between Trump and the Mullahs to end this and make everyone feel better about it. We don't need a deal with Iran. Why go back to some false Obama esque deal that means nothing? Why even empower the current batch of Iranian leaders with a deal. As David Harsanyi correctly points out over at the Washington Examiner, the fact that Democrats and isolationists have successfully demoralized the American public doesn't change the fact that the US and Israel decapitated leadership and institutional knowledge within the Iranian regime, set back its nuclear program, vastly degraded its ballistic missile capabilities, and stunted its ability to prop up proxy militias. He says Iran will never be in a weaker position. We will never have more leverage. If clerics refuse to strike a suitable deal while their economy is being pounded by a US blockade, what in the history of the regime makes anyone believe they'll be more amenable when given an economic lifeline? Correct . Hars anyi crystallizes things when he says in the long term, clerics believe they can eke out survival until a Democrat or a non interventionist Republican becomes president in 2028. In the short term, they're counting on the president not having the courage to resume widespread military engagement. Iran understands that American domestic patience is negatively correlated to high gas prices. They understand that Trump is under political pressure with the midterm elections coming, etc. But what they don't realize, and what most DC insiders and so-called experts don't realize, is that Trump doesn't really need a deal. President Trump shouldn't be stepping in to save any more Hezbollah leaders from Israel's wrath , for example. Trump should be encouraging Netanyahu to go ahead and deal with Hezbollah as long as we're doing this and so long as Iran's leaders refuse to capitulate. That would be the smarter way to play this. And as for oil prices, launch an even more overt campaign globally to get the other oil producing countries to pump more and ship more. It's not like Iran's level of production can't be replaced. Trump and his team are making a few simple demands. They should insist Iran agree to those before any pressure is relieved on them, and that includes turning over all enriched uranium and ending its nuclear and missile programs permanently, period. It should also be forced to end any funding or assistance to the groups like HET No talk of any sort of deal that eases the pressure on Iran and has the US ending our current ability to strike back at them militarily as they continue to throw little tantrums. Because the bottom line has to be as long as Iran's regime has the ability to create a nuclear bomb within a matter of weeks or months and deliver it via a missile, this conflict can't be resolved. No. That's the bottom line that the leftists, their accomplices in the media, and their accomplices on Capitol Hill are intentionally deciding to ignore so they can make up stories about Trump's weakness here and how this war has actually made Iran more powerful. That's the most idiotic narrative out of a number of idiotic narratives that the Trump haters have come up with over the last few months. And sadly, most Americans didn't hear or see any of Marco Rubio's performance this week in front of a panel of theater kid Democrat senators who thought they could call him in front of their panel in order to try I hope that at least some of you saw some of this. I have a two minute clip here of Secretary of State Rubio reacting to Senator Cory Booker, who trotted out this foolish claim that we've only made Iran stronger. And now we're begging to get back into a deal that you all trashed in the first place. There's no one begging. I don't know. Senator Booker, your time's up. Since he's some of these points because they go to the heart of the matter. No one's begging for anything here. The the Iranians might be begging because their economy is losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day. That they are losing understand Iran had street protests going on before all of this started. All of those factors, economic factors in Iran, are far worse today than they were six months ago when those protests were happening. They have hyperinflation, their currency is completely devalued, they're struggling to make payroll for their government workers. Iran is in a very s serious situation. And if it was up to the political class there, and I understand everybody there is sort of radical in some way, but if it was up to the people that actually like go to elections and wear the suits and you see on TV, they'd probably make a deal tomorrow. It's the the issue they're facing is that the Supreme Leader and the IRGC Corps are a little bit more immune from those pressures until they can be convinced otherwise. And I and I think that's the direction that they're moving in because the reality that Iran I don't know where you're getting this perception that Iran is stronger. Iran has no Navy left. They've lost a substantial percentage of their defense industrial base. Clear who's in charge or who we'd be making a peace deal with. As he said, if it was up to the politicians who are pretend elected to office over there, the deal would already be done. But it's really up to the evil mules and the leaders of the so-called revolutionary guard, the military wing of that regime. We have another instance here in which the left wing accomplices in the U.S. and global news media are pretending to not know what America's even asking for here. What are even Trump's demands they keep asking? They keep asking this even though Trump, Rubio, and Netanyahu have made those demands clear. It reminds me of the Bush era when President Bush went into Iraq and he would answer the same question three times a week, only to have the Democrats and their media whores insist, we still have no idea what the president's trying to accomplish here. The point of this war is still unclear. What's his mission? What's Bush call ing a victory? President Bush couldn't been more clear. Well in the Trump era, President Trump could be clearer, but it's not like he hasn't repeatedly said what we're after here. Give up the nuclear dust, end your nuclear and ballistic program s, stop funding terror, and stop harassing or blackmailing ships floating through the Strait of Hormuz. This is what we're demanding. And Secretary Rubio made that clear again this week in front of that Senate panel. Rubio said step one is getting Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end their harassment of commercial ships. Only after they agree to that will negotiators move to phase two or issue two, which is getting Iran to give up its existing stockpiles of enriched uranium. Because as long as they have that stuff, it's at least feasible that Iran could resume an effort to create a nuclear bomb in short order, weeks or months if they just organized it correctly and kept it hidden. Phases three and four are presumably ending any ability for Iran to deliver that nuclear bomb via a warhead on a missile, etc. But none of this is going to happen quickly. You know, one thing being missed here, and intentionally by the Trump hating media, is that any compliance of a deal is going to take an extended period of time. Turning over the stockpiles, verifying programs have been ended. Any compliance of a deal is going to take time and require a large amount of monitoring and verification. If we're going to ever ensure the mullahs are forced to honor any deal they make. And so either way, this doesn't end quickly. All sorts of Trump supporters and average Americans do too. Yep. But it's not going to happen quickly or cleanly. At least not if Donald Trump it really is a different sort of president who refuses to do what Barack Obama did and only pretend that he's actually accomplished something here, or pretend he has dealt with Iran. Obama and John Kerry were only pretending. Trump, with his military actions here, has already proven he's not screwing around. He genuinely finally wants to deal with a dangero us and belligerent Iran. And in that regard, he and BB have already dealt a few devastating blows and made the globe safer, but there isn't going to be a neat and tidy end to this so long as the evil and lying mullahs are involved. No . A regime change would be a clear and definitive end to this, but any genuine deal made with the same evil mullahs and West hating religious zealots in charge now won't. No . Then there's the possibility that regime change still occurs due to an internal uprising. Secretary Rubio wasn't lying when he said Iran's economy is in desperate shape. And it's now hit the highest levels in eighty years in that country, highest levels since World War two. In May, the annual inflation rate in Iran hit seventy seven point two percent. Economic problems have been a source of considerable civil unrest, obviously inside that country, and skyrocketing costs could lead to even more protests. And so as long as no agreement is reached, Iran's economy, which is based heavily on oil sales, is going to remain under the stranglehold of this US. block. ade in the Strait of Hormuz. Before any larger internal opposition can organize. It would be silly to ease up on our Western pressure points now and give the mullahs more breathing room, and Trump knows that . With delay and deception, and Trump needs to make it clear he has three more years in office, and you can't outlast me, and you can't deceive me. As Victor Davis Hansen says, Iran is unlikely to ever abandon its pursuit of the bomb voluntarily. He says as such, the Iranian regime has never viewed negotiations as a path leading to the an ultimate deal. At best, the regime's supposedly elected government plays good cop, while the bad cop theocratic henchmen periodically violate whatever understand ings have been reached with the Western world. So, yeah, of course these talks aren't going to go anywhere. As Victor Davis Hansen also correctly states, Iran does not necessarily regard overwhelming military defeat on the battlefield as a strategic loss. The regime believes its own advantage lies in the long term and beyond the battlefield itself. For nearly half a century, this wicked regime has revived through propaganda, blood curdling threats, slaughtering civilians at home and abroad, terrorist proxies and clients, and a mastery of the internal policies of its adversaries, especially the US and Europe. Hansen says Iran's leaders are like the crazy assailant on the subway who feels he can do anything he wishes, since most people either fear his antics or won't wish to stoop to his level to stop him. And so Hansen concludes the more left leaning American presidents like Clinton, Obama, and Biden, they reached out to dialogue and normalize with a He correctly says magnanimity they interpret as weakness to be exploited, never as kindness to be ciprocated. And so it is that playing field that Trump and Rubio need to navigate. This isn't one country's dignitaries dealing with another country's dignitaries. This is closer to a group of orderlies at a mental hospital trying to deal with a group of metal patients who've now taken over the T V room. How are we going to get these lunatics in line and back to their rooms? What do what can we bribe them with or promise them? Because we can't rationalize with them. That's a better analogy. Obama and John Kerry wanted to be