Tim Wildmon: Hey, welcome back, everybody, to Today's Issues on the American Family Radio Network. Thanks for listening to AFR. I'm Tim with Wesley and Fred, and joining us in the studio now is Steve Paisley from Georgia.
Steve: Hey, everybody.
Tim Wildmon: Morning, brother Steve.
Steve: Hey, how are you all doing?
Tim Wildmon: We're doing excellent here for this Monday. We're looking forward to daylight saving time.
Steve: Oh, yeah, I can't wait.
Tim Wildmon: That means it's going to be next spring.
Steve: We're looking forward to daylight saving time next spring, and we can get our sunshine back.
Tim Wildmon: So it's going to be brighter earlier?
Steve: Yeah, darker earlier.
Tim Wildmon: Right, earlier. Darker earlier.
Steve: Bright earlier in the morning.
Tim Wildmon: So I get up and finally, my house at 5:50, or 5:30 like I usually do, is a bit dark. It's going to be closer to light.
Steve: Yeah, maybe a little bit, but you'll pay for it because by the time you go home, it's dark.
Tim Wildmon: Anyway, before we move on to the hard news of the day, you do have the World Series going on in baseball. For one of the rare times in history, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees, the big, well-known teams with the big pocketbooks, are not there.
Steve: Yeah. The World Series gives hope for the little guy here.
Tim Wildmon: There you go.
Steve: Two so-called small-market teams have made it to the finals. You basically have two of the least-rich teams in Major League Baseball playing for the championship.
Tim Wildmon: You've got the Tampa Bay Rays. They used to call them the Devil Rays. They just call them the Rays now.
Steve: They're no longer the Devil Rays. Just the Rays. Maybe they didn't like that image or something.
Tim Wildmon: And the Milwaukee Brewers.
Steve: The Milwaukee Brewers are up two to zero. There is a fellow who's a pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers who's from the Tupelo area, from a little town called Wheeler. Brandon Woodruff pitches for them.
Tim Wildmon: He's been hurt, so I don't know how active he is, but it's pretty cool for us to have a local young man on the team that might win the World Championship.
Steve: Yeah.
Tim Wildmon: Wesley, you pay attention to this. There is another pitcher on the Milwaukee Brewers. What's his name, and tell us how hard this guy throws the ball.
Wesley: Jacob Misiorowski.
Tim Wildmon: No, you're not going to be able to pronounce it, I don't think.
Wesley: Misiorowski. Jacob Misiorowski. They call him Mies for short.
Tim Wildmon: Okay, you can see why. Misiorowski. How fast does Jacob Misiorowski from Missouri throw, Wesley?
Wesley: He tops out at about 104. He stays around 101 or 102 miles an hour on average.
Tim Wildmon: It's 104.
Wesley: Yeah.
Tim Wildmon: Can a human being even see a ball that's coming that fast?
Wesley: No. No, that's why his numbers are where they are.
Tim Wildmon: I mentioned this, too, about him. You have what I just described as the radar gun, which says 102 on average. If you ever got his perceived speed, what's interesting about him in particular, and other guys have this same attribute as well, is that they also have a way to calculate it. They don't call it “feels like this fastball,” but they have a term they use. I can't think of it right now. What it appears to be is 108.
Because he's 6'7", when he releases a 102-mile-an-hour ball, he's already two or three feet closer to home plate.
Steve: Yeah, it makes it seem like 108 to the hitter.
Tim Wildmon: And I think Johnson has that same advantage, right?
Steve: Yeah, 6'6".
Tim Wildmon: But here's the thing. I want to know how long a batter has to decide to swing at a pitcher throwing 104 miles an hour. That's what I want to know.
Wesley: Well, just on an average Major League Baseball fastball, which is around 92 or 93, they have 0.15 seconds to decide if they're going to swing at the pitch.
Tim Wildmon: They're not even given a second.
Wesley: No. It's less than half a second if you calculate the fact that they have to see the ball, decide if it's a strike, and decide whether they're going to swing at it. Then they have 0.2 seconds to swing.
Tim Wildmon: So basically, if you're a batter and a pitcher's throwing 104 or 103, you just hope that you swing the bat and somehow it makes contact with the ball, which is about 10 miles an hour higher than the average in the major leagues. The average is around 90.
Steve: That's why I didn't make it. Once you hit 100, I just had a hard time hitting the ball.
Tim Wildmon: If it was a pitcher throwing 103, I would rather face a pitcher with accuracy.
Steve: That's right.
Tim Wildmon: I don't want to go up there against a guy who's throwing that fast and not know where the ball is going to go. It's just terrifying. Maybe I'm the only one, but I don't want to get in that batter's box.
Steve: The physical demand on his arm is incredible.
Tim Wildmon: Oh, I know. That's why these pitchers get hurt a lot. They're throwing it all the time, and that's why, in today's world, they don't let these pro pitchers go more than six innings typically.
Wesley: It's also a pitch count.
Tim Wildmon: When they get started, they'll have around 60 or 65 pitches, and then they build up to where they'll allow them to throw 80 to 85. But that's about the maximum.
Steve: Yeah.
Tim Wildmon: All right, you're listening to Today's Issues, not ESPN.
Steve: I was watching NASCAR on Sunday, where they're driving 190 and 200 miles an hour.
Tim Wildmon: Cars, man. Are they really going that fast?
Steve: Yes. When they get to the superspeedway, they do get up to 200 miles an hour, close to 200 miles an hour, at full speed, in the draft. You don't want to get an edge while you're driving.
Tim Wildmon: Kyle Larson won the race. He was sitting in ninth place coming into the final dogleg and made up all of those positions.
Steve: After the show, I'll show you his clothes. It was amazing.
Tim Wildmon: Steve is an NASCAR friend. You can tell he keeps up with it. Talladega was this weekend, right?
Steve: Oh, yeah.
Tim Wildmon: All right, what's your story, Steve?
Steve: I've been watching my X feed, the X posts that come up on my computer, and I've been seeing a whole lot of stuff that makes me question the Democrats and their party. That's formerly known as Twitter, X, formerly known as Twitter.
I want to play you a little bit of a commercial. This is a commercial by a political action committee called Rebellion PAC. It's linked to the Young Turks guy. He's very liberal, very communist. This is on behalf of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. I've got to tell you, it's about as antisemitic as they come, and they're playing it on TV.
Audio clip: What about the bananas?
Audio clip: Yeah, I got them too.
Audio clip: But, honey.
Audio clip: What?
Audio clip: You're going to have to put those eggs back.
Audio clip: They don't like eggs anymore?
Audio clip: No, they like eggs, but we have to set that seven dollars aside for killing Palestinians.
Audio clip: What? I mean, don't we give Israel four billion dollars a year anyway?
Audio clip: Yeah, and now we're giving them another 26 billion dollars. Do you know how much that is per American taxpayer?
Audio clip: It's like 161 dollars per person.
Audio clip: Apparently, it's costing us a lot of money to drop bombs on Gaza.
Steve: That is a commercial campaign on behalf of El-Sayed. It's not his campaign. He didn't endorse it, but it was a PAC, and it was blatantly antisemitic. They are playing on their hatred of Israel, and that's where the Democrat Party is.
Tim Wildmon: Wow.
Steve: This is a civil war that's going on inside the Democrat Party over support for Israel and where the Jews fit in the Democrat Party.
Tim Wildmon: Wow. There are a lot of things wrong with what she said right there in that skit. The first thing is, “Is Israel bombing Gaza?”
Steve: We could go into this.
Tim Wildmon: It's such a lie that they are bombing Gaza as part of some genocide.
Steve: I agree with you completely.
Tim Wildmon: They are dropping bombs, but Israel is dropping bombs to defend itself against terrorist attacks, like what took place on October 7. Hamas will not lay down its arms under any conditions. They just want to kill Jews and take back so-called Palestine, and they want to hide behind their own women and children.
Steve: Yes, and nobody talks about that on the left. They don't talk about how Hamas basically runs Gaza by military force, with guns.
Tim Wildmon: They don't vote in Gaza.
Steve: They may vote, but it's a formality.
Tim Wildmon: Israel is dropping bombs on Gaza, but they're in a war with Hamas. That's what happens in war. You fight to win, and Israel fights to win. Sometimes there is unintentional damage, what some people call collateral damage. Sometimes noncombatants die because Hamas stations itself in hospitals, underneath mosques and schools, and in places that they dare Israel to fire at.
They know that if Israel fires at a school, for instance, where Hamas is, then the world condemns Israel for killing children in a school. You see how this works? Then you get skits like that.
Steve: Exactly. And guys, don't forget, Israel gives notice that it's going to bomb an area.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah, they actually notify people by cell phone or by leaflets. They say, “We're going to do this, so if you're an innocent civilian, you should leave the area right now.” That's a little different from October 7.
Steve: I don't think they got any type of warning.
Tim Wildmon: All right, next story.
Steve: Again, from my Twitter feed, our congresswoman from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, or maybe we should call her Ilhan Elmi, I don't know, is under investigation for a couple of things.
Tim Wildmon: She's under investigation for her finances. She put some numbers down on a form and then changed them. She's also under investigation for questionable immigration paperwork. How did she get to the country? How old was she? Who did she bring with her?
Steve: She's getting tired of it, so she decided to put a nice video up on her page of her and her husband, her real husband, not her former husband.
Tim Wildmon: Please tell me you got the audio.
Steve: I do. This is a time cleanser. This is what she intended. “I'm tired of the politics. This is just me and my husband walking.”
Tim Wildmon: She's sharing her heart right here.
Steve: She is. She's walking with her husband, holding hands on a bridge, arm in arm, lovingly looking at each other. This song is playing in the background.
Audio clip: No, it's a song from her country.
Steve: So you can understand, let me tell you what the lyrics say. I had these independently translated by Grok, which can do this.
“If I confront you in the afternoon, by evening I will teach you a lesson. Yes, you will suffer, and crying and seething, you will scream like a demon. After all, you're not Arabs. Let the enemy die of seething. We are the ones who rule this land. We do not wait for anyone else. We gather in whatever part we want. We will dance to the hot toe and sour. Let me make clear who I am. We will impose taxes on our enemies. We will punish them and fill them with resentment. We will subjugate and humiliate them.”
Those were the lyrics of the song that she put on her video.
Tim Wildmon: Karen Carpenter made those lyrics.
Steve: I remember that back in the '70s.
Tim Wildmon: A lot of people don't know that that hit was right after “We've Only Just Begun.”
Steve: Yeah.
Tim Wildmon: Then she came back with that one, but it never got off the ground.
Steve: Probably for good reason.
Tim Wildmon: Then came “Rainy Days and Mondays,” and they went on a roll.
Steve: That was the song she played in response. It was on her official channel.
Tim Wildmon: All right, you're listening to Today's Issues. I'm Tim, here with Wesley, Fred, and Steve. Next story, Steve.
Steve: Let's go to New York, where we have Zohran Mamdani.
Tim Wildmon: We have to. We can get off this and move on to some other things. We haven't had any discussion of Mamdani.
Steve: He released a video in Spanish, which I'll play a little bit of, and then I'll translate it. This is telling illegal immigrants in New York how to avoid ICE, how to get away with being illegal. This is the clip.
Audio clip: What you're saying is, if you encounter ICE, these are your rights. First, ICE cannot enter a private space without a judicial order. These spaces include your home, a hospital, a church, or a private place at your work. In the document, look for the words “United States District Court” and the signature of a judge.
Steve: So he's telling illegal immigrants how to get away with being illegal, how to avoid ICE.
Tim Wildmon: What's wrong with telling them that?
Steve: I think it's wrong because you're helping residents break the law.
Tim Wildmon: I'm just putting forth an argument that the other side would make. They would say, “We're just informing people of their rights so that they aren't run over by an unconstitutional process.”
Steve: I think the backdrop here, though, is that Mamdani has said publicly in English, “We don't want ICE in our town.”
Tim Wildmon: Right.
Steve: They don't believe in immigration enforcement.
Tim Wildmon: Not only Mamdani. It's the governor of New York. The Democrat Party, for the most part, doesn't want ICE. They don't want borders. That's just the way they view the world. They don't want borders, and they don't want ICE.
Steve: I would submit to you, and I know you were playing devil's advocate, that it's not unconstitutional.
Tim Wildmon: I know. What I'm saying is that they would say, “We're just telling people here what ICE can and can't do constitutionally.”
Steve: You're right. I'm just telling them. I don't know. I don't think the Constitution grants illegal immigrants these rights.
Tim Wildmon: We'll see. All right, next story. The Trump administration is considering mass pardons for its junior staffers. This is according to the Washington Sun.
Steve: The Democrats have made it very clear that they are going to go after the Trump administration, anybody that supports them or facilitates them. Some have indicated that private citizens should watch out, too. There are people saying, “You better watch out wearing your red MAGA hat.”
Tim Wildmon: The Washington Sun says, “A pardon for all junior administration personnel is viewed as unlikely,” one source said, “but the president could issue blanket pardons for all employees involved in particular policy areas, such as deportations, war, or trade.”
“Trump has previously said he would be interested in pardoning some administration officials, but discussions happening now would apply to a far greater number of House staff and White House staff.”
You know who opened the door for this, right?
Steve: Joe Biden.
Tim Wildmon: Joe Biden gave blanket pardons to his son for all crimes.
Steve: Hunter Biden.
Tim Wildmon: And Anthony Fauci, too. There were people he preemptively pardoned, correct?
Steve: Which we've been over. It begs the question, what did they do, or what could they do, that you're thinking of that you need to preemptively pardon them from?
Tim Wildmon: You should not be allowed to preemptively pardon somebody. That's a get-out-of-jail-free card before you even start to investigate.
Steve: If you want to look at people who have already been indicted, Michael Flynn, for instance, was railroaded badly by the Justice Department under James Comey.
Tim Wildmon: That guy was about as bad as any American I've seen.
Steve: So what I'm saying is, President Trump, if you were to do something like this, which I agree with you, I don't like it, I wouldn't like pardoning somebody if they had been charged with a crime. But I guess Trump is thinking about it.
Tim Wildmon: There has been no decision on whom he would pardon before he left office yet, right? Most pardons when presidents leave office are for people already incarcerated.
Steve: Yeah.
Tim Wildmon: Right. But a preemptive pardon, I don't even know how that works. If you haven't even been charged, how can you be given a pardon?
Steve: I don't know. Anyway, next story.
Tim Wildmon: The New York Knicks won the World Championship of the National Basketball Association at the end of last year. They were given their rings the other day, and it's interesting because generally what happens is the players get rings studded with massive amounts of diamonds. The farther away you get from the court, the coaches get one with fewer diamonds.
I once worked with a former chief financial officer of the Oakland A's, and he had a World Series ring, which was beautiful, but it didn't have all the gaudy diamonds. He was the CFO. He wasn't on the field.
The longtime Madison Square Garden employees traditionally get a ring, too.
Steve: Really?
Tim Wildmon: Yeah. By the time you get down there, they're mostly silver. There are some stones, but they don't have all the diamonds.
The Knicks had their ring ceremony, and they gave all the players their gaudy rings. These rings are spectacular. They are massive rings that you can take apart. You can take the top off and see the inside of Madison Square Garden. You can push a button and the ring pops up.
Steve: You can even move your hand with these things.
Tim Wildmon: The players got theirs, but the Knicks assistant coaches were given empty boxes.
Steve: That's disappointing.
Tim Wildmon: Madison Square Garden employees thought they were getting rings, but this is what happened. Back in September, as a means of testing the organization's cybersecurity, Madison Square Garden employees received an email asking them to reserve their preferred ring style.
The email, however, was reportedly only a phishing test. Have you ever done that where your company says, “This is what a phishing email is”? You're not supposed to click on any links, especially suspicious emails or emails from somebody you don't know.
Wesley: I think that's like the twelfth commandment for Americans now.
Tim Wildmon: The New York Knicks sent these emails out as a test. If you clicked on it, you had to attend a mandatory cybersecurity class. You didn't get a ring. You got a class.
Steve: They got an email saying, “You're world champions. Give us your ring size and what style you want.” They clicked on it because they were so eager to get their ring that they clicked on an illegitimate phishing email.
Tim Wildmon: The cyber security team at the New York Knicks organization sent those out as tests.
Steve: So are they going to get their rings or not?
Tim Wildmon: The story is out, and they're not going to want to live with that. But as of now, they don't have rings.
Steve: That's a new way to do it.
Tim Wildmon: How far down do they go with these rings?
Steve: Longtime Madison Square Garden employees.
Tim Wildmon: So it had to be somebody who had been there for 20 or 25 years.
Tim Wildmon: All right, we are out of time. Thank you for your time and for listening to the show today. My thanks to Fred, Wesley, Steve, Chris, Grant Creeley, our producer, and Cole Green, our video man. I guess we didn't have any guests, did we?
Wesley: We did it all ourselves, people. Pretty proud of us right here.
Tim Wildmon: It took four of us, though.
Wesley: That's okay.
Tim Wildmon: All right, we hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Keep listening to American Family Radio, and we shall see you back here tomorrow.
Tim Wildmon: Hey, welcome back, everybody, to Today's Issues on the American Family Radio Network. Thanks for listening to AFR. I'm Tim with Wesley and Fred, and joining us in the studio now is Steve Paisley from Georgia.
Steve: Hey, everybody.
Tim Wildmon: Morning, brother Steve.
Steve: Hey, how are you all doing?
Tim Wildmon: We're doing excellent here for this Monday. We're looking forward to daylight saving time.
Steve: Oh, yeah, I can't wait.
Tim Wildmon: That means it's going to be next spring.
Steve: We're looking forward to daylight saving time next spring, and we can get our sunshine back.
Tim Wildmon: So it's going to be brighter earlier?
Steve: Yeah, darker earlier.
Tim Wildmon: Right, earlier. Darker earlier.
Steve: Bright earlier in the morning.
Tim Wildmon: So I get up and finally, my house at 5:50, or 5:30 like I usually do, is a bit dark. It's going to be closer to light.
Steve: Yeah, maybe a little bit, but you'll pay for it because by the time you go home, it's dark.
Tim Wildmon: Anyway, before we move on to the hard news of the day, you do have the World Series going on in baseball. For one of the rare times in history, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees, the big, well-known teams with the big pocketbooks, are not there.
Steve: Yeah. The World Series gives hope for the little guy here.
Tim Wildmon: There you go.
Steve: Two so-called small-market teams have made it to the finals. You basically have two of the least-rich teams in Major League Baseball playing for the championship.
Tim Wildmon: You've got the Tampa Bay Rays. They used to call them the Devil Rays. They just call them the Rays now.
Steve: They're no longer the Devil Rays. Just the Rays. Maybe they didn't like that image or something.
Tim Wildmon: And the Milwaukee Brewers.
Steve: The Milwaukee Brewers are up two to zero. There is a fellow who's a pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers who's from the Tupelo area, from a little town called Wheeler. Brandon Woodruff pitches for them.
Tim Wildmon: He's been hurt, so I don't know how active he is, but it's pretty cool for us to have a local young man on the team that might win the World Championship.
Steve: Yeah.
Tim Wildmon: Wesley, you pay attention to this. There is another pitcher on the Milwaukee Brewers. What's his name, and tell us how hard this guy throws the ball.
Wesley: Jacob Misiorowski.
Tim Wildmon: No, you're not going to be able to pronounce it, I don't think.
Wesley: Misiorowski. Jacob Misiorowski. They call him Mies for short.
Tim Wildmon: Okay, you can see why. Misiorowski. How fast does Jacob Misiorowski from Missouri throw, Wesley?
Wesley: He tops out at about 104. He stays around 101 or 102 miles an hour on average.
Tim Wildmon: It's 104.
Wesley: Yeah.
Tim Wildmon: Can a human being even see a ball that's coming that fast?
Wesley: No. No, that's why his numbers are where they are.
Tim Wildmon: I mentioned this, too, about him. You have what I just described as the radar gun, which says 102 on average. If you ever got his perceived speed, what's interesting about him in particular, and other guys have this same attribute as well, is that they also have a way to calculate it. They don't call it “feels like this fastball,” but they have a term they use. I can't think of it right now. What it appears to be is 108.
Because he's 6'7", when he releases a 102-mile-an-hour ball, he's already two or three feet closer to home plate.
Steve: Yeah, it makes it seem like 108 to the hitter.
Tim Wildmon: And I think Johnson has that same advantage, right?
Steve: Yeah, 6'6".
Tim Wildmon: But here's the thing. I want to know how long a batter has to decide to swing at a pitcher throwing 104 miles an hour. That's what I want to know.
Wesley: Well, just on an average Major League Baseball fastball, which is around 92 or 93, they have 0.15 seconds to decide if they're going to swing at the pitch.
Tim Wildmon: They're not even given a second.
Wesley: No. It's less than half a second if you calculate the fact that they have to see the ball, decide if it's a strike, and decide whether they're going to swing at it. Then they have 0.2 seconds to swing.
Tim Wildmon: So basically, if you're a batter and a pitcher's throwing 104 or 103, you just hope that you swing the bat and somehow it makes contact with the ball, which is about 10 miles an hour higher than the average in the major leagues. The average is around 90.
Steve: That's why I didn't make it. Once you hit 100, I just had a hard time hitting the ball.
Tim Wildmon: If it was a pitcher throwing 103, I would rather face a pitcher with accuracy.
Steve: That's right.
Tim Wildmon: I don't want to go up there against a guy who's throwing that fast and not know where the ball is going to go. It's just terrifying. Maybe I'm the only one, but I don't want to get in that batter's box.
Steve: The physical demand on his arm is incredible.
Tim Wildmon: Oh, I know. That's why these pitchers get hurt a lot. They're throwing it all the time, and that's why, in today's world, they don't let these pro pitchers go more than six innings typically.
Wesley: It's also a pitch count.
Tim Wildmon: When they get started, they'll have around 60 or 65 pitches, and then they build up to where they'll allow them to throw 80 to 85. But that's about the maximum.
Steve: Yeah.
Tim Wildmon: All right, you're listening to Today's Issues, not ESPN.
Steve: I was watching NASCAR on Sunday, where they're driving 190 and 200 miles an hour.
Tim Wildmon: Cars, man. Are they really going that fast?
Steve: Yes. When they get to the superspeedway, they do get up to 200 miles an hour, close to 200 miles an hour, at full speed, in the draft. You don't want to get an edge while you're driving.
Tim Wildmon: Kyle Larson won the race. He was sitting in ninth place coming into the final dogleg and made up all of those positions.
Steve: After the show, I'll show you his clothes. It was amazing.
Tim Wildmon: Steve is an NASCAR friend. You can tell he keeps up with it. Talladega was this weekend, right?
Steve: Oh, yeah.
Tim Wildmon: All right, what's your story, Steve?
Steve: I've been watching my X feed, the X posts that come up on my computer, and I've been seeing a whole lot of stuff that makes me question the Democrats and their party. That's formerly known as Twitter, X, formerly known as Twitter.
I want to play you a little bit of a commercial. This is a commercial by a political action committee called Rebellion PAC. It's linked to the Young Turks guy. He's very liberal, very communist. This is on behalf of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. I've got to tell you, it's about as antisemitic as they come, and they're playing it on TV.
Audio clip: What about the bananas?
Audio clip: Yeah, I got them too.
Audio clip: But, honey.
Audio clip: What?
Audio clip: You're going to have to put those eggs back.
Audio clip: They don't like eggs anymore?
Audio clip: No, they like eggs, but we have to set that seven dollars aside for killing Palestinians.
Audio clip: What? I mean, don't we give Israel four billion dollars a year anyway?
Audio clip: Yeah, and now we're giving them another 26 billion dollars. Do you know how much that is per American taxpayer?
Audio clip: It's like 161 dollars per person.
Audio clip: Apparently, it's costing us a lot of money to drop bombs on Gaza.
Steve: That is a commercial campaign on behalf of El-Sayed. It's not his campaign. He didn't endorse it, but it was a PAC, and it was blatantly antisemitic. They are playing on their hatred of Israel, and that's where the Democrat Party is.
Tim Wildmon: Wow.
Steve: This is a civil war that's going on inside the Democrat Party over support for Israel and where the Jews fit in the Democrat Party.
Tim Wildmon: Wow. There are a lot of things wrong with what she said right there in that skit. The first thing is, “Is Israel bombing Gaza?”
Steve: We could go into this.
Tim Wildmon: It's such a lie that they are bombing Gaza as part of some genocide.
Steve: I agree with you completely.
Tim Wildmon: They are dropping bombs, but Israel is dropping bombs to defend itself against terrorist attacks, like what took place on October 7. Hamas will not lay down its arms under any conditions. They just want to kill Jews and take back so-called Palestine, and they want to hide behind their own women and children.
Steve: Yes, and nobody talks about that on the left. They don't talk about how Hamas basically runs Gaza by military force, with guns.
Tim Wildmon: They don't vote in Gaza.
Steve: They may vote, but it's a formality.
Tim Wildmon: Israel is dropping bombs on Gaza, but they're in a war with Hamas. That's what happens in war. You fight to win, and Israel fights to win. Sometimes there is unintentional damage, what some people call collateral damage. Sometimes noncombatants die because Hamas stations itself in hospitals, underneath mosques and schools, and in places that they dare Israel to fire at.
They know that if Israel fires at a school, for instance, where Hamas is, then the world condemns Israel for killing children in a school. You see how this works? Then you get skits like that.
Steve: Exactly. And guys, don't forget, Israel gives notice that it's going to bomb an area.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah, they actually notify people by cell phone or by leaflets. They say, “We're going to do this, so if you're an innocent civilian, you should leave the area right now.” That's a little different from October 7.
Steve: I don't think they got any type of warning.
Tim Wildmon: All right, next story.
Steve: Again, from my Twitter feed, our congresswoman from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, or maybe we should call her Ilhan Elmi, I don't know, is under investigation for a couple of things.
Tim Wildmon: She's under investigation for her finances. She put some numbers down on a form and then changed them. She's also under investigation for questionable immigration paperwork. How did she get to the country? How old was she? Who did she bring with her?
Steve: She's getting tired of it, so she decided to put a nice video up on her page of her and her husband, her real husband, not her former husband.
Tim Wildmon: Please tell me you got the audio.
Steve: I do. This is a time cleanser. This is what she intended. “I'm tired of the politics. This is just me and my husband walking.”
Tim Wildmon: She's sharing her heart right here.
Steve: She is. She's walking with her husband, holding hands on a bridge, arm in arm, lovingly looking at each other. This song is playing in the background.
Audio clip: No, it's a song from her country.
Steve: So you can understand, let me tell you what the lyrics say. I had these independently translated by Grok, which can do this.
“If I confront you in the afternoon, by evening I will teach you a lesson. Yes, you will suffer, and crying and seething, you will scream like a demon. After all, you're not Arabs. Let the enemy die of seething. We are the ones who rule this land. We do not wait for anyone else. We gather in whatever part we want. We will dance to the hot toe and sour. Let me make clear who I am. We will impose taxes on our enemies. We will punish them and fill them with resentment. We will subjugate and humiliate them.”
Those were the lyrics of the song that she put on her video.
Tim Wildmon: Karen Carpenter made those lyrics.
Steve: I remember that back in the '70s.
Tim Wildmon: A lot of people don't know that that hit was right after “We've Only Just Begun.”
Steve: Yeah.
Tim Wildmon: Then she came back with that one, but it never got off the ground.
Steve: Probably for good reason.
Tim Wildmon: Then came “Rainy Days and Mondays,” and they went on a roll.
Steve: That was the song she played in response. It was on her official channel.
Tim Wildmon: All right, you're listening to Today's Issues. I'm Tim, here with Wesley, Fred, and Steve. Next story, Steve.
Steve: Let's go to New York, where we have Zohran Mamdani.
Tim Wildmon: We have to. We can get off this and move on to some other things. We haven't had any discussion of Mamdani.
Steve: He released a video in Spanish, which I'll play a little bit of, and then I'll translate it. This is telling illegal immigrants in New York how to avoid ICE, how to get away with being illegal. This is the clip.
Audio clip: What you're saying is, if you encounter ICE, these are your rights. First, ICE cannot enter a private space without a judicial order. These spaces include your home, a hospital, a church, or a private place at your work. In the document, look for the words “United States District Court” and the signature of a judge.
Steve: So he's telling illegal immigrants how to get away with being illegal, how to avoid ICE.
Tim Wildmon: What's wrong with telling them that?
Steve: I think it's wrong because you're helping residents break the law.
Tim Wildmon: I'm just putting forth an argument that the other side would make. They would say, “We're just informing people of their rights so that they aren't run over by an unconstitutional process.”
Steve: I think the backdrop here, though, is that Mamdani has said publicly in English, “We don't want ICE in our town.”
Tim Wildmon: Right.
Steve: They don't believe in immigration enforcement.
Tim Wildmon: Not only Mamdani. It's the governor of New York. The Democrat Party, for the most part, doesn't want ICE. They don't want borders. That's just the way they view the world. They don't want borders, and they don't want ICE.
Steve: I would submit to you, and I know you were playing devil's advocate, that it's not unconstitutional.
Tim Wildmon: I know. What I'm saying is that they would say, “We're just telling people here what ICE can and can't do constitutionally.”
Steve: You're right. I'm just telling them. I don't know. I don't think the Constitution grants illegal immigrants these rights.
Tim Wildmon: We'll see. All right, next story. The Trump administration is considering mass pardons for its junior staffers. This is according to the Washington Sun.
Steve: The Democrats have made it very clear that they are going to go after the Trump administration, anybody that supports them or facilitates them. Some have indicated that private citizens should watch out, too. There are people saying, “You better watch out wearing your red MAGA hat.”
Tim Wildmon: The Washington Sun says, “A pardon for all junior administration personnel is viewed as unlikely,” one source said, “but the president could issue blanket pardons for all employees involved in particular policy areas, such as deportations, war, or trade.”
“Trump has previously said he would be interested in pardoning some administration officials, but discussions happening now would apply to a far greater number of House staff and White House staff.”
You know who opened the door for this, right?
Steve: Joe Biden.
Tim Wildmon: Joe Biden gave blanket pardons to his son for all crimes.
Steve: Hunter Biden.
Tim Wildmon: And Anthony Fauci, too. There were people he preemptively pardoned, correct?
Steve: Which we've been over. It begs the question, what did they do, or what could they do, that you're thinking of that you need to preemptively pardon them from?
Tim Wildmon: You should not be allowed to preemptively pardon somebody. That's a get-out-of-jail-free card before you even start to investigate.
Steve: If you want to look at people who have already been indicted, Michael Flynn, for instance, was railroaded badly by the Justice Department under James Comey.
Tim Wildmon: That guy was about as bad as any American I've seen.
Steve: So what I'm saying is, President Trump, if you were to do something like this, which I agree with you, I don't like it, I wouldn't like pardoning somebody if they had been charged with a crime. But I guess Trump is thinking about it.
Tim Wildmon: There has been no decision on whom he would pardon before he left office yet, right? Most pardons when presidents leave office are for people already incarcerated.
Steve: Yeah.
Tim Wildmon: Right. But a preemptive pardon, I don't even know how that works. If you haven't even been charged, how can you be given a pardon?
Steve: I don't know. Anyway, next story.
Tim Wildmon: The New York Knicks won the World Championship of the National Basketball Association at the end of last year. They were given their rings the other day, and it's interesting because generally what happens is the players get rings studded with massive amounts of diamonds. The farther away you get from the court, the coaches get one with fewer diamonds.
I once worked with a former chief financial officer of the Oakland A's, and he had a World Series ring, which was beautiful, but it didn't have all the gaudy diamonds. He was the CFO. He wasn't on the field.
The longtime Madison Square Garden employees traditionally get a ring, too.
Steve: Really?
Tim Wildmon: Yeah. By the time you get down there, they're mostly silver. There are some stones, but they don't have all the diamonds.
The Knicks had their ring ceremony, and they gave all the players their gaudy rings. These rings are spectacular. They are massive rings that you can take apart. You can take the top off and see the inside of Madison Square Garden. You can push a button and the ring pops up.
Steve: You can even move your hand with these things.
Tim Wildmon: The players got theirs, but the Knicks assistant coaches were given empty boxes.
Steve: That's disappointing.
Tim Wildmon: Madison Square Garden employees thought they were getting rings, but this is what happened. Back in September, as a means of testing the organization's cybersecurity, Madison Square Garden employees received an email asking them to reserve their preferred ring style.
The email, however, was reportedly only a phishing test. Have you ever done that where your company says, “This is what a phishing email is”? You're not supposed to click on any links, especially suspicious emails or emails from somebody you don't know.
Wesley: I think that's like the twelfth commandment for Americans now.
Tim Wildmon: The New York Knicks sent these emails out as a test. If you clicked on it, you had to attend a mandatory cybersecurity class. You didn't get a ring. You got a class.
Steve: They got an email saying, “You're world champions. Give us your ring size and what style you want.” They clicked on it because they were so eager to get their ring that they clicked on an illegitimate phishing email.
Tim Wildmon: The cyber security team at the New York Knicks organization sent those out as tests.
Steve: So are they going to get their rings or not?
Tim Wildmon: The story is out, and they're not going to want to live with that. But as of now, they don't have rings.
Steve: That's a new way to do it.
Tim Wildmon: How far down do they go with these rings?
Steve: Longtime Madison Square Garden employees.
Tim Wildmon: So it had to be somebody who had been there for 20 or 25 years.
Tim Wildmon: All right, we are out of time. Thank you for your time and for listening to the show today. My thanks to Fred, Wesley, Steve, Chris, Grant Creeley, our producer, and Cole Green, our video man. I guess we didn't have any guests, did we?
Wesley: We did it all ourselves, people. Pretty proud of us right here.
Tim Wildmon: It took four of us, though.
Wesley: That's okay.
Tim Wildmon: All right, we hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Keep listening to American Family Radio, and we shall see you back here tomorrow.
Tim Wildmon and company discusses a Rebellion PAC advertisement supporting Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, which they criticize as anti-Israel and antisemitic. They examine Democratic Party divisions over Israel, Hamas and U.S. support for Israel.
The hosts also address a video from Zohran Mamdani explaining legal rights during encounters with ICE, along with allegations and investigations involving Ilhan Omar. They debate immigration enforcement, constitutional rights and the political consequences of those positions.
The program also considers reports that President Trump may explore pardons for administration personnel, then turns to the New York Knicks’ cybersecurity test that left employees expecting championship rings with mandatory training instead.
Live
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