hey folks from egan minnesota and mckill tail no i'm sure that's not right washington uh maui that i can do uh georgia windsor california henrico virginia when i was a little girl my best friend lived in henrico virginia antioch californIA weirton west virginia i've not heard of that place which is interesting because a weir in leicester maine is like a fish net kind of, it's kind of a barrier that fish can go through. So I wonder if you're on a river or a stream or if that was just somebody's name. Port Orchard, Washington, new house, somebody bought there. Congratulations. Lansing, Michigan. Marysville, California. Bowling Green, Ohio. Good school in Bowling green. Where else? Raleigh, North Carolina, Missouri. Boy, you in Missouri are hopping these days. Ireland. I don't know what one big roo is. Has Heather started? Sort of. Yes, I have. New Albany, Ohio. This is far more fun than actually doing any work, isn't it? But Facebook is here, so I will stop wasting time. As you know, you must know by now, I am finishing this book, the first draft of this book. And I am so tired. I cannot tell you. I'm in that wonderful stage where I can see it all. And my only complaint is that I can't type fast enough and there aren't enough hours in the day. But as a result, I'm a little punchy and I am ever so tired. But there are some things that I did want to cover today that fit into some of the things that you have asked about. And I'm going to start here with a question that I get asked every single week and that you can't emphasize enough. And that is when this current Supreme Court of the United States with three people on it that were nominated by Trump and really was stacked with far right people over the course of a number of administrations decided the case of Donald J. Trump versus the United States, giving the president a certain kind of immunity, it is not entire immunity, okay? So that case, and by the way, I've said this to you before, you can find these cases online, and generally what they look like is there is a pretty readable beginning section that sort of says, here's the issue, here is what we decided. And then they give you the history which I love you know like literally it's every little you know Toto was walking I'm sorry the woman in Wizard of Oz was walking her dog Toto and tripped on a root and you know so you get really detailed historical accounts of what happened then there is the law the standing of the people who brought the case and then the reasoning that gives you the final decision so when you see a law case, and it's like 268 pages, you think there's no way I'm reading that tonight. And the answer is often you can simply read the very beginning of it to get a sense of what was going on there. In any case, if you want to look at that case, it's Donald J. Trump versus the United States. And in it, the justices, the right wing justices the majority decided that the president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties. Again, this is absolutely outrageous, first of all, but no president had ever asked for such a thing before. And the understanding of the meaning of American democracy was that nobody's above the law. And if you look back at the stuff I wrote that night, I just said, you have overturned the entire meaning of the country with this. But there's something else in that decision because a lot of people were like, well, then why doesn't Joe Biden take this out for a spin and do whatever he wants? Because that decision came down in 2024, if you recall, and Biden was president then. And the answer to that was the court went on to say, but because nobody has ever made this law before, nobody has every made this case before, we don't really know what is an official duty and what isn't. That's not, I'm exaggerating a bit because that the official duties of the president are outlined in the constitution in article two, but, um, but bear with me on that one because what they said is we don't really know what the official dues of the president encompass. So the decisions about whether or not what the president has done is part of his official duties will have to go to the courts. And by that they meant themselves. So it was really an extraordinary power grab by the Supreme Court. And that really makes sense if you look at the way we have gotten the development of the idea of what was called the unitary executive, which is what this kind of is the outgrowth of. Since the 1980s, the idea that because the president is the head of one of the three branches of government, the executive branch, he cannot be checked by either the legislative branch, Congress, or the judicial branch, the courts, which is crap. I mean, all the way back to George Washington, the presidents recognized that they had to answer to Congress and to the courts. But this is part of an outgrowth of the attempt beginning in the Reagan administration to say that really, we don't trust the people to make good decisions, so we have to take their power away from them. Anyway, all that being said, you've asked a lot of questions about how can Trump do these things? Can he get away with this? Is this covered by this decision? And so on. And the answer to that is it's a bit of a murk because the courts would have to decide whether or not the president can do certain things. And I'm going to be a real jerk here. Those of you who are supposed to be on vacation, who work for me, who just showed up, you should go back on your vacation. Yes, I see you. I'm teasing, obviously, the person who manages my stuff, and she is supposed to me on vacation. And that means not working. um she probably doesn't that won't say that um um so so the answer is a couple of things first of all we don't really know what that encompasses and of course this should be challenged and we as the american people should say this is absolutely ridiculous of course the president has to answer to the laws it also um you know there's there's plenty of things that the president is doing that are not necessarily covered by presidential duties. And a lot of that is the corruption that we're seeing, and a lot Of the corruption we're probably not seeing. You know, you've asked, is it okay for him to tear down the east wing of the White House? Well, the Supreme Court, some of the people say maybe it is, some people say it isn't. There's an awful lot of area where Trump could find himself in really deep trouble. And that you have to have in the back of your mind, because for all that he is throwing his weight around, like he's the emperor of the universe, he is also very clearly not just unwilling to give up power, panicked at the idea of giving up power. He does not want there to be investigations into what he has done during Trump 2.0, or by the way, during Trump 1.0. Remember, there are still two of those cases outstanding about January 6th and about his retention of classified documents. And those have been put on hold. They have not been dismissed because he became president again, right? So all of that is back there. And it informs where we are right now because the administration is in really deep doo-doo um i told you i'm so punchy i'm so tired all right um and what i mean by that is this first of all this trade war with canada is bonkers right there's no reason for it at all canada's one of our oldest friends and allies and there's there this is literally just trump being pissed off because he can't boss canada around the way he wants to. And by the way, this is going to completely explode not only in Canada's face and in our face economically. Canada, which has been a very loyal, strong ally to us for a very long time, is very openly making alliances with the European Union, for example, and with other countries. So, you know, we're the ones who are going to end up losing out here ultimately. So the trade war with Canada and with other countries as well has been sending prices upward, as you know. But then we have the issue out there of Iran and what's happening with Iran. And one of the things that I only saw one reference to that is crucially important is what has happened in Yemen since Tuesday. All right, what I mean by that is that, if you haven't been following the news on this, on, you know, Yemen has been, let me see if I can call up my information here, Yemen has been torn apart in a fight between the Houthis, who are a militia that is backed by Iran, and the Yemeni government which is backed by Saudi Arabia and they've been at it at each other for a while since I think about 2014 although don't quote me on when that was then they had sort of a really uneasy truce beginning in 2022 and that has fallen apart on occasion in certain ways that I'm not going to go into now because the reason I'm telling you about this is because since Trump started the war against Iran, right, in February of 2028, uh, 2026, uh February 28th, 2026. Um, remember Iran backs the Houthis against the Yemeni government that's backed by the Saudis And the Saudis work with the United States, right? So when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, one of the things that the Saudies could do to move traffic was to go to the other side of the peninsula and use the Red Sea. And the Red Sea is that body of water. It's about 1,400 miles long. It's connected to the Mediterranean Sea by the Suez Canal at the top. I'm sorry, the north. And then at the south, it drains into the Arabian Sea and from there to the Indian Ocean and to the rest of the world through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. So the Bab al-Mardeb is sort of the parallel to the Strait of Hormuz. On Tuesday, September 8th, the Houthis began to strike at Saudi positions on the peninsula. And today, they struck down the coastline on the Red Sea in Yemen, and they took control of much of that coastline, including the port, the city and seaport of Mocha, which, by the way, used to be the main seapourt for coffee beans. um yemen coffee beans actually come from yemen and um anyway i think that's cool not that it matters in this case but um the that city is about 50 miles from the bab el mandeb strait if the Houthis, backed as they are by Iran, and the Iranian military has been advising them, manage to shut Saudi traffic, which is what they're trying to do now, but however much traffic, but certainly Saudi traffic through the Red Sea so that they can't come out, shipping can't come out of that little teeny tiny strait that's analogous to the Strait of Hormuz on the other side, it is absolutely going to hamstring global trade. And it's going to just shoot the cost of global oil through the roof. And the cost-of-oil Brent crude today jumped to $106 a barrel. I've seen it, I've seen the number of prices, but that's the one that seems being most used most often. And I'm sorry, the New York Times had $109 a barrel, not 106. But that was higher than I saw in a lot of places. And gasoline rose today to an average, a national average of $4.28. But get this, according to GasBuddy, which are the people who keep their eyes on the cost of gas, the average price of diesel hits $6 a gallon, $6 a gallon today. For the first time in history, just a year ago, it was $3.70. And what does this mean and why does this matter? It matters because remember I keep talking about how diesel carries everything in the United States. So as Gas Buddy says, diesel powers freight trucks, trains, agricultural equipment, and construction machinery behind nearly everything Americans buy. And therefore, the costs across supply chains will come into groceries, they'll come into household goods, deliveries, every other product that families rely on is going to be affected by this price of diesel. And one of the things that they said is that people should be prepared for significantly higher prices, especially going into the winter when diesel prices tend to climb Anyway, so this advance of the Houthis toward the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea, which has gotten surprisingly little coverage today in the mainstream media so far, is a big, big, Big deal. And CNN has reported in an exclusive that the U.S. already has about 100 advisers on the ground working with the Saudis, not operationally. They're trying to make it very clear they are not, the American military is not engaged in this, but they are working with the Saudis to push back against the Houthis. And this is yet another front opening in Trump's war on Iran. And the effects at home, I think I've made it pretty clear, are going to be even higher prices going into the winter when a lot of us need heating oil. And that's going to happen This is really not a good scenario for the United States of America. And mind you, I'm very aware it's not a Good scenario for anyone, regardless of where you are, because this hits fertilizer costs and it hits the shipping of food. It hits all kinds of stuff that are really badly, as always, going to hurt people in developing countries. But the reason I mentioned the United states here is because I'm trying to give you a picture of where things might be for Trump right now. And what's interesting is that I've been watching pretty closely all day today, and I don't think he's made a statement about the Houthi advance, which I've been looking for because I'd really, really, really love to know what he's going to say. What you are seeing, interestingly enough, is an article in the New York Times talking about how J.D. vance that was against this whole thing from the from the get-go and um and that strikes me as being vance really trying to distance himself from what is increasingly looking like a complete dumpster fire all right so if this is the case and this is september 10th um And you got all these things lining up here against Trump. And you've got the midterms in September, October, a little bit under two months. I think what we are increasingly seeing is true panic on Trump's part and on the part of those around him who are equally determined not to lose control of Congress. And now remember, Trump's not on the ballot in November, just to reiterate that. So this isn't a question of him worrying that he's going to be turned out. He does not want the Democrats to control either House of Congress, either chamber of Congress. It's the House of Representatives and the Senate. why not why does that matter to him i mean it's not like congress has been doing any work under him for the most part anyway right but if democrats control either the house or the senate what that means is that the chairs of the committees in congress go to members of the majority party so like right now people get very frustrated because they're like what are the Democrats doing? They should be doing more. The Democrats control nothing because all of the chairs of the committees belong to Republicans. And they're the ones who determine what gets talked about, what gets done, and so on. They're the chairs. They can shut down the minority. They don't all, by the way, a lot of them actually work, the Republicans and Democrats work pretty well together if they are in the really important committees like Appropriations or Intelligence or whatever. And they often do work well together. But there is pretty much no chance that a Democrat is going to be able to force a Republican chair to do something that that Republican doesn't want to do. So if you think about the investigations that we have had in Trump 2.0, they are almost always of figures, and I'd actually say always, they're almost always of figures that either need to come before a committee because of their job, like Pete Hegsiff, for example, who is supposed to report to Congress, although he really hasn't done much since the spring, or they are people that the administration wants to go after because it'll goose the base. And by that, I mean people like Dr. Anthony Fauci, for example, who's retired after all and was well enough respected in the administrations of previous Republican presidents that President George W. Bush gave him the freaking Presidential Medal of Freedom, right? So if the House or the Senate or both, become dominated by Democrats, all of a sudden those chairs become Democratic chairs. And when they become Democratic shares, they set the agenda. And you can believe that the very first thing that they're going to do is start to investigate Trump and the people around him. And it appears anyway that members of the administration are extremely concerned at the idea of those investigations, and well, they should be, right? So Trump seems adamant that he does not want the Republicans to lose control of Congress. And he's not going to let that go easily. So let's go back to, you know, it's always sort of a game for me to see if I can put your questions into a coherent narrative. And one of the things that you asked about is is it normal to have a midterm convention? And the answer to that is absolutely not. A political convention, the whole reason we have political conventions is because it was an opportunity for people who were members of the party. Remember, the parties are not part of the governmental system. They're not in the Constitution or in the laws or anything. They are their own institutions, they wanted to choose a leader to run for an office. And they wanted to create a platform on which that person would stand. That's why it's called a platform. It's going to be the, and literally in the 19th century, they called the pieces of a platform, the planks. So sometimes even nowadays you'll hear someone say, well, it's a plank in the platform. And you're like, what's going on here? That's because literally they called it a platform and there were planks in on which the presidential candidates stood. And in order to do that, you need to get everybody together. I mean, this is long before the days of Zoom, right? You had to have everybody in the same place and you had to hash out what was going to be in that platform. And this is one of the reasons that people like me take platforms incredibly seriously, especially in the 19th. Well, actually right up until the 19... actually, we still take them pretty seriously. But they were in the 19th century, well, actually, really, you can really tell who's pulling the strings in the party because of what's in the platform. You know, so for example, 1980, the Republican platform comes out against reproductive rights. That was a really big deal. And 1860, no, 1856, the Republican platform supports immigration, which is a really Big Deal, because remember, that's when you had the anti-immigrant party rising and looking so powerful. So anyway, we look for these things, and the place they get hashed out is at the convention. And where a convention is held really really really matters and it mattered in the 19th century because if you it's expensive to go anywhere and so when Lincoln for example gets the 1860 Republican political convention in Chicago and by the way if you do that tour down the the river in Chicago with on the boat which I highly recommend I freaking loved it they will show you where that building used to be it's not there anymore um it burned i think it was a kind of a drafty old thing they threw up for you know in that era but um but the reason it's important in those days where the convention is it's because it's expensive to travel so like lincoln's supporters were not going to be hopping on a stagecoach and or a boat and heading out to new york city for a convention they you know It would have been all of William Henry Seward's supporters would have been out there, and he probably would have been the nominee. So where a convention is held really matters. What goes into the platform really matters, and then who the people choose, whom the delegates choose, really, really matters and there are a number of cases, certainly well into the 20th century, where it's not all clear who they're going to nominate because, you know, not everybody It's not like we have the television the way we do now and you don't really know who all the people running are. So a great example of this is actually many examples, but is the election of 1920 when Warren G. Harding is nominated. It's one of my favorite nominating conventions because they've just been through World War I and everybody is exhausted. And all that they know in the Republican Party is that they don't want a Democrat, because they've had Woodrow Wilson, and they all hate him for many interesting reasons. But they're just like, anybody who can fog a mirror, we don't care. And there are a whole bunch of nominees, and people get, by the way, you can read the reports of this convention online if you want. And I've certainly cited it in a number of my books. But there's this, in the convention, like people get up to nominate their favorite people. And they're like, well, my guy is Joe Blow. And he's been an attorney in Toledo. And, you know, and they are mind numbingly boring. Like none of these people is interesting at all. and you can tell people are getting more and more and more and bored and finally and I am barely exaggerating somebody could stands up and goes well we could nominate Warren G Harding I mean you know he's fine I mean it's like this long and they're all like oh thank God let's take Warren G Harding and that's partly how we get Warren G. Harding there had actually been a deal done to get him but anyway That was a long rabbit hole. I'm sorry. I're very deep in history these days. To say that nominating conventions are all about the presidential years. Like, why would you need one of the midterms? It has nothing to do with the president or with a new platform or anything. Those things are all state level at that point. That is, the states are going to decide who they're running for senators and so on. So this is entirely about Trump. And it's really interesting why it's about Trump and how it's about Trump in the sense that Trump, and by the way, there's a book in this, not by me. It doesn't interest me to write it, but I think it's really, the ideas are interesting in it, that Trump very deliberately has made the government about him, right? According to the Constitution, it's actually Congress that's supposed to set tariffs. No, no, no. He's going to do that himself. According to The Constitution, it's really Congress that supposed to declare war. No no no, he's going do that all himself. And he has taken all these different aspects of the American government that used to be spread out. And he has taken them all to himself. And again, in the past, when something went bad, like the Iran war, it might have been possible for a president to go, oh, it's the Democrats, you know, they said I could go to war or whatever. In this case, he has taking all that power to himself. And he has done so apparently believing that his own power over his voters is so extraordinary that they'll go along with anything. What it appears he is, or at least we are, I don't think he's discovering anything, we are discovering is that people liked the way Trump talked at a time when there were enough guardrails around the American governmental system that he wasn't going to destroy it. You know, and I've said this to you before, I always think of it like a toddler. Like toddlers pitch nutties with their parents because they know their parents have the guardrailes up. But you ever want to see a terrified child that's a child when there's no one there to have those guardrails up and trump made the mistake of thinking people really didn't want those guard rails and what he is discovering or we are discovering like i say what we are discovering is that people really don't like what he's doing they don't like the higher prices they don'T like the fact that we're in this mess in the middle east they DON'T like the fact their neighbors are being taken away in unmarked vehicles by people in masks, which, by the way, none of us should accept for a second. They don't like all that stuff. And yet Trump is locked into this idea that he's the only person who can turn this ship around. And so he has decided that he is going to make this election about himself. And he has said to voters, you know, please act like I'm on the ballot, even though I'm not. and the problem with that is he's extraordinarily unpopular on new approval ratings out today now he's at an average of 32 which is you know there are outliers make him lower and outliers that make him higher but this number keeps going down and down and so what is he doing he doesn't really have any quivers anything left in his bow right he's got no more arrows left in this quiver right There's nothing he can do. So what has he said at last night's Trumpapalooza or whatever they're calling, which by the way, is people aren't showing up for and seems to be extraordinarily badly organized. And one of the other things he's done is it made, it's made a lot of people really recognize that competency matters. It's hard to do stuff. And, and it takes a lot of really talented people to do things like pull off a convention. And this idea that somehow you can, you know, just roll in from wherever with no expertise and pull off the convention or pull off a reflecting pool or pull of a triumphal arch or, you now, or pull-off the east wing, that's not really the way the world works. Pull-off tariffs, pull- off a war, all that sort of thing. But so at this thing and he's insisted on speaking in both nights last night he went on and on and on i believe it was almost two hours long and one of the things he did is he said to the american people that if the republicans were re-elected to have control of the midterms the control of Congress in the midterms, he would make sure that every adult in America got a check for $5,000. This is absolutely off the charts bonkers. Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, it is gone for all these reasons. First of all, it ist literally against the law to give somebody anything, but certainly money, in exchange for getting them to vote or getting them not to vote. That's a crime, first of all. Second of all, the cost of this would be almost $1.3 trillion. Trillion dollars at a time when he has already sent the U.S. debt over $40 trillion. And today, one of the members of the administration was out there saying, well, we're doing so well,we can afford this. No, we can't. You've just cut all of our Medicaid, which is making rural hospitals close, and you're saying, well, we have so much money, we can cut everybody a check for $5,000. But also, the president can't decide to spend a trillion dollars on a whim. We actually have a system, and the only part of the government that can raise revenue and handle financial matters is Congress. So the whole thing was just bonkers to begin with. But then there is also the part of it that there is this sense in that, that Trump still sees all this like a game show. Like, you know, here's a car for you and a car für you and car für you? That's actually not governance. That's reality TV or unreality TV, as it were. And the fact that at a time when the economy is really struggling because of his tariffs and now this war in Iran, and there's this extraordinary unrest in the country, that his solution is to say, I'll give you a check for $5,000, but after you vote for me. And this is a man who has already promised us doge checks, remember those, and tariff checks, and what was the other? There was one other big set of money he was going to give us that, of course, never materialized. And the sheer desperation of that, the idea that we'll do it after midterms, just vote for me now, I just thought was off the charts, glaring about how nervous he is about this. And then similarly, he has started to say, well, the war is going to be over after the midterms, because the only reason there is this war is because Iran's trying to put pressure on us over the midterm. And the, you know, the idea that, you know, all we got to do is hang on and believe for another two years after the two years we've just been through just seems to me to be like just a fantasy, to be honest. All right, so people asked me a couple more questions, and I'll get to them quickly. The first is, how in the past have we dealt with this kind of threat of the rise of authoritarianism? And the answer to that is it looked in the 1850s and the 1890s in the 1920s and 30s, so much like what we're doing nowadays. That is, Americans felt like things were going pretty well. They fought amongst themselves over one thing or another. The issues are different in each era. And you get the ability of a small group of people to rise and gain control over the economy and therefore over the political system. And when that happens, and there's often something very dramatic that makes people see that that's happening. In the 1850s, it was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, for example, the 1890s, it's the rise of the robber barons, and especially the organization, never mind. There are specific things that make people wake up and go, hey, we got a problem. And when that happens, people come together, regardless of their past political affiliations, and they start to work together, and они начинают to recognize that it's their government. And they start to make demands of the people in power. And the people power are like, yeah, go take a long walk on a short pier. We're not going to do that. We run everything. But the people who want to see government respond to them start to put their people into office. And by that, I mean people who say to them, yeah. You want to make sure that the elite enslavers can't move human property into the territories yeah i can get behind that and they start to put or or in the 1890s you you don't think that um factories should be able to dump offal from butchered uh beef into your neighborhoods that are causing you know extraordinary disease and stuff yeah that seems reasonable and when that happens there's a tipping point at which the momentum of the country changes. And the same thing is very true. I actually looked this up the other day, and I might write about this. In the election of 1928, it's a landslide, of course, for Herbert Hoover. 1829, in October of 29, we get the Great Crash. And I wanted to know what happened in the elections of 1930, the midterm elections of 1930. And what happened in those elections, and i don't have the numbers off the top of my head right now, is that the Democrats win a lot of seats, but they are still one seat short of a majority at the end of the election. But because in those days, the elections in November and the seating of Congress doesn't happen until March 4th, that changes under FDR. What happens is that in those months, I believe it's 14 members of Congress die. And when that happens in the special elections that replace them or in the nominations that replace them, the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives. And then, of course, in the election of 32, they get a clean sweep. And that's we go from 28 to 32 and we go From basically a landslide for Hoover to a landslide for FDR in four years. You can see the momentum changing. And that is exactly what we are doing now. We are coming together in new ways and really trying to work together. And it is not always easy, let me tell you, with people with whom we used to disagree, to get to the point where we can get rid of those people trying to destroy our democracy, and then on the other side of that, to rebuild our democracy. And that, I think, is where we are right now. That's what's happened in the past. And you're seeing more and more fight among Democrats and opponents of the Republicans. They're increasingly stiffening their spines and speaking up. And you're increasingly seeing new ways to think about taking back the local elections and the state elections, and then, of course, the federal elections, and new ways of thinking about how we want the government to look. Do we want data centers? Do we want health care? Do we want vouchers in the educational system? Do we want, or do we want true public education? You know, do we want to protect our waters? Do we want to protect our public lands? And by the way, one of the sleeper issues that I don't think we're paying enough attention to is Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, at his confirmation hearings, kept talking about how everyone was all upset about the national debt, but we had the other side of the ledger, which was this extraordinary, valuable public resources that could be privatized. And I think we are seeing a lot of that going on now and there's just so much else going on. We haven't focused on that. But all of those things are now back on the table. And the thing that I want to leave you with today is everybody is saying, are we going to have elections? How is it going to work? Should we be afraid? And the answer to that is you cannot think that way. You cannot say, what are they going to do to me? We have the right to vote in the 2026 elections. And a lot of what Trump is doing is trying to create confusion and fear so that we decide not to do it, or that we get a little, maybe I don't want to be there, I don' t know. This is our right, and we get to exercise that right to vot. And anybody who stands in our way is the problem. We are not the problem, they're the problem so get involved with the organizations that are protecting the vote. Work as a poll worker if you can but make sure that you and your friends are all registered. You think you are but you may not be and do not go to Elon Musk's website. His website is votesafe.org. It's a way to gather your personal information so that you can then be targeted with advertising, especially political advertising, to manipulate the way you vote. Go to .gov sites, and I was able to check my registration at my state office, but go to official websites to check whether or not you're registered make a plan to vote you know if you've always voted by mail and you don't feel secure about that find where your drop box is find the ways that you can make sure that that goes in vote early lots of places enable you to do that and as i say work as a poll worker if if you can and make sure that your friends and your family have a plan to vote as well. And, you know, it's a funny thing. I think we make assumptions about who is going to vote and how they're going to vot, but sometimes just saying, hey, have you made plans to vote has surprisingly, in my life anyway, turned up people that I assumed were voters and who were not because they didn't think it mattered. And now they are all voters, let me tell you. So don't start from the premise of, are they going to let us vote? Start from the premise of do not get in my way, because I am going to exercise not only by right, but also my duty as an American citizen to protect American democracy. All right, I'm going back to it. Thank you for being here. And Joanne and I are not on on Saturday, which is a holiday. we are I believe on on Sunday but I'll let you know about that thank you for being here and please please please keep an eye on what's happening in Saudi Arabia and Yemen and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait thank you for being here