ich might look like he's just following the Democrats, which is not a good look, I think he's mocking it out of existence. It looks like that's the next play.

So Trump says the word affordability is a Democrat scam. All right. So he's going to call it a scam. They say it and then they go on to the next subject and everyone thinks, "Oh, they had the lower prices." No, they had the worst inflation in the history of our country.

So I guess Trump's new approach, and maybe he's just testing it, you know, he doesn't know if it'll work yet, but testing it out, is that he did successfully call a lot of things they do fake and scams. I think he said climate change or at least the alarm over it was a scam. Got away with that. So maybe, yeah, I would say this is just a test to see how it goes. If he can make affordability sound like a scam, he might do it. But it would be better if he could just make stuff affordable.

Apparently gas prices are falling to below $2 in some states. Did you ever think that would happen? I didn't. I never thought any state would have $2 gas again, but apparently they are. That's a pretty big deal. In California, of course, I think we're still around $5 because we got a terrible government. Just summarizing, we have a terrible government.

Anyway, so affordability, the word is all the Democrats have for them. They don't have performance. They don't have success. They've got that word. It's a very attractive word because we all want some affordability. But it looks like Trump is just going to take the piss out of the word so that the next time you hear affordability, you're going to think, or is it a scam? Well, you know, I like affordability, but the way those Democrats talk about it, I don't know, maybe it's some kind of Democrat scam. So we'll see if Trump can sell affordability as a scam word. It's a tough sell because it's a strong word.

And Trump has actually predicted that gas prices will fall to $2 a gallon in some places. He blames Biden, Trump does, for emptying out the national petroleum reserves. Do you think that that's why the gas prices are what they are? I don't know. You know, maybe because refilling the reserves means that we're competing, doesn't it? I think that's how it works. Doesn't that mean that we would be competing in the free market to buy gas or oil? Is it gas or oil? What's in our reserves? Gas or oil? Can you even have a reserve of gas? That's weird. I feel dumb.

One of the things about doing this podcast where you talk about the news is it does a really good job of revealing your stupidity. If there's something you don't know, oh, it's going to come out like it just did. I'm seeing all. So a bunch of people in the comments. Are you telling me that it's gas that's already refined and also oil? Oil and gas both. Okay. But are you talking about gas that goes into your car or are you talking about gas that would be burned for energy? You know, the more gassy gas. Okay. I think you mean oil and the kind of gas that you pull out of the ground, not refined gas that goes in your gas tank, right? I think.

All right. Well, obviously I'm not the expert on that, but I don't know if that is enough to be affecting our gas prices this much. It might make some difference, but I don't have much of an idea.

Well, according to the AP, Trump administration says it's going to withhold SNAP food aid from the Democrat blue states unless they provide recipient records. So do you see the pattern? This would be yet another example where the federal government is trying to do something like an audit without it being exactly an audit. They're just trying to figure out where their money is going and to make sure that they don't give money to a black hole. But it kind of amazes me that there's any state that's receiving money from the government that's not willing to tell the government where the money is going. That feels a little sketchy, doesn't it?

Now, I don't know where this is going to end up, but I definitely am backing the federal government who wants to have some kind of control on where the money goes. I don't know if this would be an audit per se, but we need some kind of auditing process for our federal dollars. It would be much harder to get that approved at a local level, but it would be ideal if we never gave any taxpayer dollars to anything unless it was fully auditable.

All right, how about this? Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, are you listening? I call them out because they're in my opinion the common sense guys in the government. How about this? How about some legislation that says if you want to receive federal dollars, you have to demonstrate that you have an auditing function. Boom. What do you think? Show me in the comments. I want to see some legislation that says that in the future you can only receive federal dollars only if you've demonstrated that you've set up an auditing process that would allow the federal government to see where its money went. Huh? You like it, don't you?

Now, I like that because it's not overly prescriptive. It's not telling people they have to do a certain kind of audit in a certain kind of way, but it allows the federal government to say that's good enough or it isn't. That's pretty good, isn't it? Yeah. That's not just a good idea. That's a freaking great idea. Now, I need somebody who's smarter than me to tell me if that would work in the real world. I don't know if it'll work in the real world, but why in the world would anybody give billions and millions of dollars to anybody if they didn't know where it was going? But somehow we do that. So I think you could start with that model at the federal level and then that would give people at the local level something to argue for. So in other words, if you had this law at the federal level and it started working, then the people at the local level could say that we need to do that. We just need to do the local version of that. Much easier because if it works at the federal level, your argument for doing it locally is trivial. I mean, easy. Of course you'd want it locally.

Well, in other news, China's going to tax condoms for the first time in 30 years. And I guess they're doing this to increase the population because they know they've got a demographic problem. They're not creating enough babies for their future survival. So they're going to stop taxing condoms. I don't know how much difference that's going to make. Do you? Just that one thing? How many condoms do they use in China?

Now, they should also tax oral sex, obviously, because those people who are having oral sex instead of penetration, well, they're not having babies. And if you really want to encourage the Chinese to have babies, you should put a steep tax on oral sex. Something like $1,000. Because some people will still pay the thousand because you know it's worth it. If you have the money that at least that's the going rate in the United States. That's the going rate around here. How do I know that? I don't know that. I'm just guessing. Jay, don't clip this. Jason, do not clip this. This should not be a clip. I'm just messing with you. I'm just joking.

So the Chinese got to pay taxes on their condoms.

All right. Speaking of NATO, the chief of NATO, Rutte, says that next year countries need to give a lot more money, more than a billion a month to purchase offensive and defensive weapons from the US. All right. Long as they're buying our weapons, I'm happy about it. Yep. You Europeans need to vastly increase your weapons purchases of American weapons.

All right. Senator or Secretary Rubio was pointing out yesterday, I think, that Ukraine has pushed Russia back out of a lot of territory that Russia once held. Now, did you remember that? To me that came as sort of a surprise. I knew that some of the territory has changed hands. So I know it's not a static situation in Ukraine, but is it true that Russia once held a lot more territory than they do and that little by little Ukraine pushed them out of some of it and now they have reached some kind of impasse where Russia's gaining a little ground and Ukraine is not pushing anybody out of anything. Is that what's happening? It's fog of war. So I don't know exactly what's happening over there, but Rubio claim