Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael last evening, Tucker Carlson started his show talking about how the White House and maybe some other groups were awarded the International Woman of the Year Award to a man and he talked about what, what does that mean. And I thought about it, I know we’ve all heard the story about the fellow whose wife is out of town on business and he’s in bed in his own home with somebody else, and the wife comes home early and walks in the door and catches him.
And he says, honey, are you gonna believe what I’m about to tell you? Or are you gonna believe those lying eyes of yours? And that’s the world we live in today. You have the Biden administration saying that the southern border is secure. We have, what’s her name, the French woman?
Pierre says that fentanyl is now the least problem we’ve had in decades. And then you have Biden saying inflation is not a problem. Our economy is in great shape. The list of falsehoods goes on and on, and they’re just brazen. And so it is unsurprising that the White House in a very solemn ceremony would present a man with the award of International Woman of the Year.
And the thing that’s interesting to me is I wonder where in the world are women’s organizations. The ones that claim to have fought so hard for women’s rights, they’re now taking a backseat. And here’s what I predict will happen. Not that long ago, a few years, John McEnroe was on a television set and they were talking about Serena Williams and there was a female commentator on there who was a woman but not a tennis player, not a professional tennis player.
And John McEnroe said there’s no doubt in anybody who knows tennis mind that Serena Williams is the greatest female player to ever play the game. And the woman on there said why don’t you just say that she’s the greatest player to ever play the game?
And McInroy was startled by the comment and he said because she’s not. She’s the greatest female player. If she played against men, she’d be ranked about 700th in the world. He said she wouldn’t be a starter. She wouldn’t even make a men’s college tennis team.
But she is a great tennis player in her own right. And so that’s the tip of the iceberg of this stuff where somebody says something that is just brazenly false and then is incredibly offended when people don’t agree. And that’s the world we live in today. The stock market is not in good shape. The stock market is down off of where it was when Biden took office.
It’s been as high as 36,000. It’s down to 32,000; it’s really close. What I’m talking about in just the Dow, other stocks have fallen much, much more. And if you take into account the inflation, that 32,000 is really probably closer to 24,000. So stocks have lost, from a value standpoint, probably a third of their value.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the French lady came out today and claimed their stocks are currently at an all-time. And the press would say, hey, yay. Did you hear that? Stocks are at an all-time high! And so we’re living in a world where Biden now claims he’s a capitalist.
Then he comes out with a budget where he is taxing anything that moves at incredibly high rates and nobody in the media except the relatively few people who are rational and logical are calling Biden out for this. It’ll be fascinating to see what happens as Biden runs for reelection.
He will continue to make statements that are verifiably, 100% false, and he will still get away with it with the media. The question is whether or not the voters are going to believe him or believe their lying eyes.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this Crommentary:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Joe Biden” by The White House. Background Photo “Election Day” by Phil Roeder. CC BY 2.0.
Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed congressional correspondent for The Epoch Times, Mark Tapscott to the newsmaker line to comment upon the recent release of Biden’s budget proposal.
Leahy: We welcome to our newsmaker line, our good friend for many years, Mark Tapscott, who’s now with The Epoch Times. Good morning, Mark.
Tapscott: How are you, Michael? What’s up?
Leahy: Well, I’m delighted to have you here. You are an Oklahoma State graduate. You and I have so much in common in terms of the people that we know.
Tapscott: Yes.
Leahy: You were in a Ph.D. program and they snapped you up to go to work for Conservative Digest back in the 80s. That’s when Richard Viguerie was running it way back then.
Tapscott: You know, actually that goes back even further and man, am I impressed with your memory? That was in 1976. Richard Viguerie owned it, and Lee Edwards was the editor who hired me.
Leahy: The great Lee Edwards. What a great guy he was. And then you, you went on to the Washington Times and of course I back about 14 years ago. I spent about a year working with Richard as the editor of the ConservativeHQ. And, uh, yeah, was, we’ll spend some time in Washington.
And you’ve been with Heritage Foundation, The Daily Caller News Foundation, and now you’re with The Epoch Times. But I wanna talk briefly. In July 2018, you became the founder and editor of Hill Faith: Good News for Congressional Aids. Just tell our audience briefly about the importance of that project.
Tapscott: There are two things in it. Number one, from a spiritual perspective Hill Faith, is about sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, uh, with individual congressional aids, not the senators or the representatives but the aids who work for them and who do 95 percent of the work on a daily basis, tremendously influential and frankly, a very hostile environment overall but one that desperately needs to hear the gospel. That’s the essence of it. And it’s an apologetics ministry and anybody who’s interested in finding out more can go to hillfaith.org. And we’ll tell you all about it.
Leahy: And it’s interesting, somebody who’s involved in Christian Apologetics, who is also an old school journalist in Washington D.C. now working for The Epoch Times, boy that is a small but persistent group, isn’t it?
Tapscott: I suspect I’m the only guy that would reach that would satisfy that description, especially when you add the fact that I also served for five years in the Reagan administration as a Reagan political appointee.
Leahy: Crom Carmichael has a question for you, Mark.
Carmichael: How many aids that you all, uh, your group talks with is preaching to the choir, and how many are, are open to, let’s just call it, conversion?
Tapscott: Let’s be realistic about, uh, the congressional staff. There are about 20,000 of them overall. Um, the majority of them come from, um, and it’s a pretty smart group. I mean, they come from the top schools in the country, and they tend to be mostly liberal.
They tend to have a very secular outlook, and in many cases, they’re very hostile to anything having to do with spiritual things and particularly with Christianity because they view it as, a manifestation of white privilege. So right off the top, you’re looking at probably 30 percent of the total who are believers or they come from a still very much Protestant Christianity kind of culture, mainly from the south.
Leahy: Exactly. Let me ask, uh, uh, and we wanna hear more about that at some future time, but tell us about this budget, this, this ridiculous tax and spend budget that, uh, the Biden administration’s dropped. What’s in it and where’s it gonna go?
Tapscott: Well, I’ll tell you, I’ve been in D.C. as a journalist, and the other things that we talked about, since 1976, Jimmy Carter, or actually Gerald Ford was president when I first came up here. And I’ve tracked budgets by every president since then.
And I have to tell you, the one that Biden unveiled yesterday is by far the worst from the standpoint of the negative impact it’s gonna have on millions and millions and millions of Americans. It is full of tax increases, literally trillions of dollars in new taxes. It projects the biggest spending in American history in one year, $6.7 trillion.
It adds over the next 10 years if it’s approved about $19 trillion more to the already record level of national debt that we have. It’s gonna spend $10 trillion in the next 10 years just paying the interest on the national debt, and that’s more than we will be able to spend on defense and Medicare.
Carmichael: Why didn’t Biden bring this budget a year ago when he had control of the House and the Senate and he could have passed it?
Tapscott: Well, you know, we were still, and that’s one of the interesting things. That’s a really good question. This budget, if, you know, if it’s approved and it won’t be, it’s dead on arrival. But if it were approved, um, the, the annual spending would be $6.9 trillion. And that’s higher than it was; it’s about 55 percent higher than it was in 2020. This is a massive spending and taxing explosion that Biden is proposing.
Carmichael: My answer to my own question is that this budget is not a serious budget. It’s a political tool.
Tapscott: Oh, absolutely.
Carmichael: I don’t think that Biden would’ve brought this budget, uh, to the, to the Congress if the Democrats were in charge because the Democrats don’t wanna vote for it. Especially the so-called moderate Democrats are the ones that are in swing districts. Would it serve McCarthy’s interests at all to bring this budget to a floor for a vote and have just enough Republicans on the fence where Democrats are forced to vote yay or nay on this budget?
Tapscott: Boy, wouldn’t that be an interesting situation? (Chuckles)
Carmichael: Republicans need to be able to say that there’s bipartisan opposition to this stupid budget. Well, the only way to have a bipartisan opposition is to force some Democrats in the House to vote. And then now they’re on record either for it and they have to defend it. Or they’re against it and which gives the Republicans leverage.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, at the very end of your segment with Representative Barrett, he gave the things that for him, why he’s here. Do we need to spend this money? If we do need to spend this money, how are we going to pay for it? Why are we even doing it in the first place?
Those are all extremely valid reasons for an elected person to go through that process before deciding to spend money. But that’s not how it’s done in Washington now. In fact, in Washington, it’s pretty much the opposite of that. And the train wreck in Ohio, for me, is kind of a metaphor for the Biden administration.
The whole thing. Myorkas apparently was on with Chris Wallace and couldn’t even define a secure border as what it is that’s secure. He just says what it’s not, but then he calls the border secure. But you look at how the Biden administration has handled this train wreck, and the answer is they ignored it for two weeks.
Now they’re trying to figure out what to do about it. All of the damage that could have been done has now already been done, apparently by decisions from the Biden administration officials who were on the scene. And Buttigieg is completely absent from the scene. He’s absent from the discussion.
And his answer is, there are three derailments a day. I can’t be responsible for every derailment. Well, there are derailments that don’t matter, and they’re derailments that are catastrophes. A catastrophe is a catastrophe, not just merely a derailment.
And so Buttigieg has no sense of what should be a great concern. I look at the national economy, and that’s why the metaphor on the train wreck is so appropriate. The automobile payments are a really good indicator of how the economy is and which direction the economy is headed in.
And the quintile of lower income, more credit risk, car payment, that population, when that starts to spike, it’s not a good sign for the economy. The rate of delinquency in the worst quintile of creditworthiness is spiking at a rate that we have literally never seen.
It’s even worse than the rate of ascent. And ascent is bad when you get up to a 9, 10, 11, or 12 percent delinquency when it moves from 5 percent delinquency to 9 percent delinquency, and it does it in a period of 120 days, that’s much faster than the rate of increase in 2009 and 2010.
And so the signs for our national economy, the cracks are beginning to appear. Now, here are a few other little tidbits that are really interesting. First of all, first-time mortgage applications are at a 40 or 50-year low. So people are not applying for mortgages because they can’t afford them.
This is from a friend of mine who sends this out every Friday and would-be homebuyers. 87 percent do not have the income to afford the average home in their market. 50 percent of Americans say their finances have gotten worse, versus a year ago, versus 35 percent who say they’ve gotten better.
New car prices in 2020, a new car costs $33,500. This past December, $47,000. And then the interest rates on a car payment have doubled. And so what you have is you have these terrible trends within the economy, especially for the bottom half of income earners, and that has to do with car payments and even if they’re not delinquent in the amount, they’re having to pay home payments.
Young people are getting killed by the Biden policies. But what does Biden care about? What does he care about? Because he says, this is what he cares about, diversity and inclusion within his own administration. All he talks about is that his administration is the most inclusive, the most diverse administration ever.
It’s not about competence. It’s not about policy. It’s about what you look like or what your essence is that determines whether or not you have a chance to be beneficial within the administration. So automatically, as soon as you’re hired, automatically, the bar of low expectations is already there because you’re not hired.
Because Biden says, I’m looking for the most competent people. He says I’m looking for the most unusual people. I’m looking for people who fit all these unusual categories. Remember that fellow that really enjoyed using his spare time stealing luggage at airports?
He was in a very, very important position, but he was picked because I’m not sure exactly how you describe his essence, but he was a weird guy, but he just liked to steal bags. And as far as the Biden administration was concerned, they didn’t care whether or not he was competent.
And so if we look at what we have in store for us economically and nationally over the next six to nine months as we go into this next election season, the data and the trends are just not good.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this Crommentary:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Joe Biden” by The White House. Background Photo “East Palestine Train Wreck” by City of East Palestine, Ohio.
Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed United States Senator Marsha Blackburn to the newsmaker line to comment on the Chinese spy balloon that traversed the United States, the Biden family compromise, and economic effects of China.
Leahy: On the newsmaker line right now, Senator Marsha Blackburn, the senior senator from Tennessee. Good morning, Senator Blackburn.
Blackburn: Good morning! It’s good to be with you, and always good to have a conversation with Crom.
Carmichael: Well, you’re very kind. (Blackburn chuckles)
Leahy: Senator Blackburn, it’s another day. Has there been a separate sighting of some unknown object or balloon over Alaska or Canada or the United States recently, like today?
Blackburn: (Laughs) We have not been informed that there has been another sighting this morning, but it appears that every day they are finding more balloons. And this calls into question the coordination between the intel community, and the Department of Defense, and how closely they are watching our skies.
Here is what we do know, is that the Chinese Communist Party is intent on global domination by the time we get to the midpoint of this century. Anybody that doubts that should read Michael Pillsbury’s book The 100 Year Marathon.
The Chinese Communist Party sees this as the China century, and because of that, they’ve been very aggressive in their surveillance. You look at what they’re doing with TikTok and how that is affecting our youth and young adults. You look at the anguish that was caused to young people by the pandemic. We still do not know the origins of the pandemic. There are so many questions about the vaccine and the dangers this has caused to young people. And you look at the Chinese Confucius Institute that fortunately we’ve been able to remove from most of our universities and the Confucius classrooms that have been in many K12 schools. This is part of their propaganda, and so we know where they’re headed. What we need is for this administration, this Department of Defense, to get serious about this and to realize China is not a competitor. As the President said just a couple of weeks ago, China is an adversary. They want to dominate us. And it is not the Chinese people. It is the Chinese Communist Party.
Carmichael: What do you make of all of these balloons and these other things? I guess we’re shooting down something that I don’t know if it’s buoyed by a balloon, but I think there have been like three or four shootdowns in the last 10 days without revealing anything that’s classified.
Leahy: Four.
Blackburn: Four.
Carmichael: Do we know anything? And what do we make of something that’s kind of been going on obviously for quite some time? And now all of a sudden, the Biden administration is reacting.
Blackburn: And they are only reacting to this because a private citizen, saw something and said something and put a photograph up on a website there in Montana and said, who knows something about this? Now, bear in mind, this administration had said nothing until a citizen who was a reporter and a pilot took a picture, put it on the website, and said, what do you know about this?
This administration would not have come forward. Anthony Blinken would not have canceled his trip to China without this information. So the period of time this has been going on, we don’t know how many they have surveilled. We do not know. We have had a briefing, a classified briefing as you said.
I had a lot of questions that came out of that. Principally, why did they let this first balloon go when they spotted it and started following it off the coast of Alaska? And then they let it come back into Montana and then let it just kind of trapes across the country and then decided to shoot it down after it went to South Carolina.
But Crom, how did they know it was not going to stall out over one of our major cities and just sit there and collect intelligence? Why did they not choose to bring it down safely in Alaska when they could have done that?
Carmichael: Yes, there just seems to me to be more deal with the facts that we know, which are not very many, but they just beg many, many other questions. And it just almost appears to me that the Biden administration and as Robert Gates pointed out, Biden hasn’t made a good foreign policy decision in his entire career. He’s always been on the wrong side of every foreign policy decision and I think he sees the Communist Chinese Party almost as an organization he would like to emulate.
Blackburn: And one of the things that are of tremendous concern to me is the Biden family compromise. Why did they let this thing go and why is it that as you two know because you follow everything that is happening every day and you’re on top of it, you know that they could have made that choice to dismantle that balloon.
They could have decided that they were going to stand up to this. But the bottom line, the Chinese Communist Party sees Joe Biden as weak. They know he is not going to come after them. Whether it is that he is compromised, whether it is as Bob Gates said and as you just said, he can’t make the right decision on foreign policy because he is given more to appeasing than he is to showing strength.
I tell you this much, this would never have happened with President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo because China would have known, Xi Jinping would have known there would be hell to pay if they did this because they didn’t know what Donald Trump was going to do from one day to the next day.
And they knew that Mike Pompeo was not going to put up with this. And because of this and because of the fact that President Trump and Secretary Pompeo repeatedly held them to account and pushed the issues around the COVID vaccine and put sanctions on them and dealt with them on tariffs and trade, they knew that they could not push this.
Now, when you look at the economic side of this, you’re looking at a trade deficit that is the largest that we have had. China imported more stuff to the United States last year than ever, and we have a bigger trade deficit than ever. And that is because of the policies of this administration.
When you look at great power competition, you look at the Chinese Communist Party, you look at what they’re doing over. The United States had a balloon in Latin America. You had the balloon up in Canada. They’re surveilling people.
They’re practicing debt diplomacy. They are bullying Taiwan and all of the Pacific island nations. People are begging for our help and this administration is sitting on their hands and trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Marsha Blackburn” by Sen. Marsha Blackburn. Background Photo “U.S. Capitol” by Sandy Torchon.
Live from Music Row, Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Washington Times reporter and national security expert Bill Gertz to the newsmaker line to comment on the Chinese spy balloon and the intentions of current U.S. leadership.
Leahy: On the newsmaker line, our very good friend, the great national security correspondent with The Washington Times, Bill Gertz. Good morning, Bill.
Gertz: Good morning.
Leahy: I’m reminded of this Babylon Bee headline. I don’t know if you saw this. Chinese spy balloon shot down after it’s completed all the spying. You’ve written just recently that balloons serve multiple roles in Chinese warfare. Chinese military confirms snub of U.S. Defense Secretary Austin’s call over balloon. What do you make of this Chinese spy balloon?
Gertz: It’s really a sputnik moment going back to the days of the space race. I think it was a real wake-up call for most Americans to see that China is not some far-away threat, that it’s a here-and-now threat to the United States, albeit an intelligence threat. But let’s not forget that the Pentagon has identified electromagnetic pulse weapons as a threat.
And so they could have flown a nuclear warhead on a balloon and dropped it and detonated it over one of the large cities which would have blacked out all of the electronics over there. So I think the key takeaway from this whole incident is that China can reach out and touch us. And I think that’s really an important wake-up call for most Americans.
Leahy: To me, it seems ingenious that they use balloons for this purpose not just to gather intelligence, but they could use it for military purposes. Our leadership, from Joe Biden to Joint Chief of Staff Chair Milley to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, I’m going to use a word, they seem feckless to me. Your thoughts?
Gertz: I kind of agree with you. Clearly, the mishandling of this was evident in the fact that the Biden administration is launching what I would call a neo-appeasement approach. That means they’re getting ready to revert to the older policies where we look the other way for Chinese human rights abuses and nuclear arms proliferation in order to somehow avoid a future conflict with China.
It’s the opposite of the policy of Ronald Reagan, which was peace through strength. Instead, they’ve adopted what I call a war avoidance policy. And this is really dangerous. I think that we really need to stand up to the Chinese. They’ve made it clear that they want to dominate the world, and the main obstacle to dominating the world is the United States.
So they’re working very covertly through things like fentanyl shipments and undermining our system here and promoting communist ideology to try and undermine and ultimately destroy the U.S.
Carmichael: Bill, this is Crom Carmichael. My question is there are lots of folks in the media who are supportive, in fact, most people in the media are supportive of the Biden administration and his worldview. What would it take to wake them up, or is it even possible for them to be awakened? Are they kind of part of the communist plot?
Gertz: A lot of the mainstream liberal media just signed on to the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party has kind of been taken over by a lot of radical leftists and I think that’s really the main issue. So you have this reflection in the mainstream media that, oh, China is not really a threat.
In fact, I think the far-left in the U.S. looks at China as the ideological future. This is a communist system that they think works. Unlike the Soviet Union, which collapsed back in 1991, the Chinese have tried to find ways of forcing their economy to work.
Although right now, their economy is in trouble, which is one reason they’re trying to revert back to some of the more COVID policies of pretending to be a capitalist system, when in fact, they’re really a nuclear-armed communist dictatorship.
Leahy: Yes. And I look at this, and I think of what former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said about Joe Biden. They asked him, has Joe Biden ever been right on any foreign policy issue? And Secretary Gates said I can’t think of one time he’s been right. He’s been wrong; it seems to me. And he’s brought in dunderheads underneath him, Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin, who make the wrong decisions to advance the cause of our enemy; it seems to me almost as if they are covertly cooperating. Now that’s a little bit out there, but what are your thoughts when I say something like that?
Gertz: First, Lloyd Austin reached out to his counterpart in China immediately after we shot down the balloon last week, and the Chinese said no thanks. And yet the Pentagon issued a statement saying, well, we think it’s so important to talk with the Chinese. The Pentagon has had this military-to-military exchange program with China for decades, and the whole point is to try and “build trust.”
And they misunderstand the nature of the Chinese military. It’s not a national army like our U.S. Army. It’s a party army. His main job is to defend the Communist Party of China. On General Milley, we had the case where back during the Trump administration, he actually called his Chinese military counterpart and said, oh, we think you’ve misunderstood us, we think you’re going to attack us, and we’re going to attack you.
But we’re not. And if we do, I would warn you in advance. A lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill thought that was treasonous, but he defended it, saying there was some kind of intelligence. Yet I spoke with top officials of the Trump administration, and they said there was never any intelligence that China thought the U.S. was going to attack them. So these are the two top defense leaders that have really shown themselves to be woefully inadequate.
Leahy: I think you’re kind to just call them woefully inadequate. I look at their actions, Bill, and I got to tell you, and I don’t want to get you in trouble on this, right, but I look at it, and I think their actions are treasonous. Both of them. Both Milley and Lloyd Austin. And I think that a patriotic American president would fire them immediately. Your thoughts?
Gertz: Republicans have recently just taken over the House of Representatives, and they have formed a special commission on China. So, hopefully, I think these two issues, the actions of Lloyd Austin and General Milley should be part of that investigation.
They should do a thorough investigation, bring them before this committee, and have them testify on explaining what they’re doing and whether or not what they’re doing is wrong.
Leahy: Is that the special committee headed up by Mike Gallagher, the congressman from Wisconsin?
Gertz: Yes. I have great hopes.
Leahy: He’s a very sharp guy. I have confidence in him.
Gertz: Yes.
Leahy: You’ve been doing this at a high level of excellence for, what, three decades now? Maybe more than that.
Gertz: It’s been a good run. (Chuckles)
Leahy: You’re a great American and a great reporter, and we are honored to have you on The Tennessee Star Report. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Gertz: Thank you for having me on.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Bill Gertz” by Bill Gertz. Background Photo “U.S. Capitol” by Wendy Maxwell.
