October 1: White House Targets CNN Yet Again

0:00Fall flavors are waiting for you at Whole Foods Market. Cozy picks all through the store, like maple leaf cookies from 365 brand. Swing by the bakery for pumpkin cheesecake, here for a limited time, and pumpkin turmeric bread freshly baked every single day. Sip the season with 365 brand Cinnamon Spice Coffee and Pumpkin Spice Creamer, while you still can. Spice Up Fall at Whole Foods Market. Where some see heroes and other see egos, Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. Hello and welcome to DSR Daily. I'm David Rothkoff. I'm joined by Riley Fessler, who's that handsome guy in a hockey jersey, a little weird.

1:00And Minestine, moments ago, off camera said to us that she doesn't like donuts, which I have to say Riley and I both thought was un-American and possibly treasonous. She would never be allowed in Pete Hicks' S military. Guess I have to be careful what I say off camera. You're going to air me out. I didn't think you were going to say something like that. I mean, every once in a while, you've got a hot take where you say some terrible movie is good. And I'm like, okay, fine. But this, you know, donuts are like fundamental, they're American. And also given the current war with Canada, it's kind of a slam on Canada. Also, which is terrible. I mean, Canada is like national bird is the donut. Oh, I hadn't considered it in that context, but I love dessert. I love dessert. I will not catch me eating a donut as dessert or anything else for that matter. But Riley made an excellent point, Riley. Ask your, your question. I think it's a good question. I asked, do you like cake?

2:01Because what are donuts if not tiny round cakes? They're dry. They're always dry. It's just, it's not good. You got bad donuts. You have a, had a fresh donut? Yeah. Where are you getting your donuts from? I mean, to be honest with you, I don't really go out of my way to eat them. So I'm not like, see that's what I'm happening around DC, trying all these different donuts, but like, well, DC donuts are also good. It's just, I, I, some listeners, please come on. Let's help hook her up. I mean, give us your good donut wrecks if you're in the district or DMV area. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's true. But I mean, I haven't heard such a bad taste since I listened to Pete Hegs' at speech yesterday, um, in which Hegs at the peers on stage, he, this is his state of the force speech. And he goes on stage and he literally says one in same thing. At first of all, he looks completely orange. Secondly, he like starts spewing stuff about no weirdos and no beardos and no diversity.

3:04And we're just about a fighting force. And oh, I'm going to set up an office of religious contact that goes directly to the, the secretary because, you know, if we're fighting for one god, we're undefeatable. And, you know, on and on and it was such lunacy and the, the readouts of it was just terrible, terrible. But what can you either have you explained this in Pulse of His that he, like everything's got a rhyme. I mean, who is he? Secretary M&M? He's a warrior poet, David. Warrior poet. You did a snap at the end of his speech. I did. Oh, no, I did. I was just like, oh, yes, brilliant, brilliant. If you live in the DMV, tell us where you're getting good donuts and also tell us where you're getting a good spray tan because I know some, I know three guys off the top of my head who needs some direction in that department.

4:06Yeah, you would think the president of the United States would be able to get a better spray tan than the one that stops like right here on the side of his foot. Like, I mean, we've all been seeing this now for six years. It looks like somebody put a mask on him and it stops. It looks like a bad child's Halloween mask. It's like, it doesn't Natalie say Mr. President shouldn't your ears also be orange. Although his ear, his, his ear was wounded by a rightful time. So you can't spray it now. You know, he can't spray it because it was hit by an AR-15 bullet. Which he needs help. RFK Jr. needs help in the spray tan department. And now he's also, I don't know, he's going to the same place as them. It was, it was a demented speech. We're not going to cover it in great depth here, but go read about it. Go see it. It was, our United States military is in the worst hands. It's ever been it. Ever.

5:07And, you know, that's where we'll start, but maybe, maybe, let's, let's mix it up. Their bad stories from all over the world. Meta, I know you've got one. So it's, and it's weird and bad. And, but let's start. It's. Yes. Yes. A fly Dubai flight bound for Tel Aviv made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia after the coal pilot attacked and stabbed the captain, sending the plane into a 15,000-foot nose dive. Passengers and off-duty pilots stepped into subdue the attacker, assist the injured captain and safely stabilize the aircraft, despite structural damage to its tail. Saudi authorities are investigating the incident as a deliberate crash attempt, prompting fly Dubai to suspend its flights to Israel. Original security tensions remain high. Yeah, and the guy who did it, who somehow made it through their screening process, was, an Omani religious extremist. And it seems quite clear that what he was trying to do was crash the plane, because,

6:08you know, there are flights between Dubai and Israel, and he objects to that. Scary as hell. But the other pilot was quite heroic, and even though he was stabbed, he managed to subdue with the help of some other people, this guy, and get the plane down on the ground safely. But harrowing, harrowing incident reminder that this stuff is not behind us. And even though the United States has cut back funding for all sorts of anti-terror in order to focus on deporting people illegally, and running TV ads for the president, it's pretty heroic. The Pentagon has made it last minute revisions to federal absentee voting forms, removing a checkbox that allowed US citizens living abroad who have never lived in the United States to identify their status ahead of the midterm elections. While the DOD claims the updates aim to eliminate confusion regarding voter eligibility,

7:10voting rights advocates, and former officials warn that the abrupt changes will disrupt the voting process for overseas citizens. The policy shift aligns with broader Republican legal efforts to restrict voting access for never resided citizens, though state election officials are currently still permitted to process older versions of the form. Yeah, and first of all, it's up to the states, and secondly, the federal government doesn't have the right to do this. And thirdly, the fact that they're doing it right before the election is the big story here, right? Because I think we can expect all sorts of shenanigans in the next four and a half weeks, things that they will do, knowing that a court might stop them, but they'll do it first, and then they'll do with the court consequences later. And we've got to be very, very vigilant heading into these elections because it is highly likely that we're going to see new things, things we've never seen, whether it's troops and polls or whether it's new DHS roundups of people or whether it's claiming that certain

8:17voting machines are tainted because they have foreign parts or declaring martial law because there is some national security issue involved. The Republicans know that if there is a free and fair election, they will lose badly in the House, they may lose the Senate. The president will lose his ability to advance his agenda. There will be oversight, there will be hearings, and it will be bad news for them. And they're frightened. And frankly, they're, you know, frightened nature is getting worse because they don't seem to be capable of making any right moves with this election. You know, they're not bringing prices down, they're doing stuff that'll push prices up. And yesterday, I mean, there's still an interview with Trump in which somebody said, hey, you said no more long wars. And you know, this war is longer than the four to six months people said it might take. And Trump said, oh, that's fake news. All wars take years. That's what happens. The Vietnam War took years. This war will take you all these wars take years. Total, total,

9:21total. Well, do you think the American public elected Donald Trump to get into another war that's going to last years and years? Of course, they didn't. But he's delivering these messages because he has no filter. And because frankly, he doesn't care. His main concern here is that he preserves his wealth that he preserves his freedom and that he can blame the election results on other people. Anyway, it's a, it's, it's a very, very precarious moment in US electoral history. If you want people to get on board with your war, compared to the Vietnam War, yeah, this is just, this is, this is going just as well as Vietnam. And what about our 20-year war in Afghanistan that we lost? But anyway, but again, he doesn't care about, personally, he didn't know anything about history. The only thing he ever cared about Vietnam before was avoiding serving in Vietnam. But secondly, he just, he doesn't want to get blamed, you know,

10:22he wants, he wants, you know, to focus on burnishing his reputation such as Natalie harp whispers it into his ear every night. Gross. Well, on a different side. Sorry. Is that a, is that a sexist? I'm sorry, but, you know, that's what her job is. Her job is, you know, he found this woman who is a stalker who apparently was kind of stalkerish with a Christian pastor before this and has now become stalkerish with him and said, that's what I need. I need a stalker in the Oval Office. That's, you know, the kind of love and devotion that I want is just the kind that's provided by a stalker. Natalie, you're hired.

11:29Learn more at Bloomberg.com. Thank you and back to the show. The different note, the White House has removed CNN from Thursday's presidential press

12:31pool, excluding the cable network from covering President Trump's visit to Texas and Oklahoma. The exclusion follows a federal judges ruling that blocked the administration's White House media ban, though the injunction was limited to White House grounds. It did not cover travel, like Air Force One or Offsite pool events. CNN's legal counsel reaffirmed that restricting access violates the First Amendment, while major news organizations continued to back CNN's legal challenges against the administration. Yeah, back them, but not actually do anything to hold their feet to the fire. The response of major news organizations to this is weak. Hopefully a court will step up. The White House, you know, legal team is showing their usual maladreatness with all of this saying, well, they said it couldn't be the White House, but it could be someplace else. They don't seem to realize that the president of the United States is a public figure who works for the people of the United States and that the people of the United States are

13:34entitled to coverage of that person by, you know, all media organizations, you know, in a fair way that does not persecute those who are critical of the president. Anyway, it's, it's, you know, this will also continue for as long as Trump is there because as long as he's been there, he's been against free speech, he's been against a free press, he's been against anything that, you know, can produce criticism of him, but also anything that's going to challenge his lives. The most egregious lie that I saw the other day was that he said that Trump TV has massive global audience and that they don't need this anymore because they've got Trump TV and and everybody everywhere is watching it when the actual ratings of Trump TV seem to suggest that six to 800 people will watch it. But he doesn't care, you know, he would because the world in which he lives,

14:39the filter where his eyes and ears are natally harp and, you know, Mike Lindell and Stephen Miller and all those, they don't, they just don't challenge the facts with it. A global sell-off in government bonds accelerated as the 10-year US Treasury yield reached 5.34%. It's highest level since 2002 alongside rising yields across Europe and Brent crude topping $100 per barrel, surging borrowing, cost of being driven by heavy public debt, AI driven economic growth, and inflation pressures exacerbated by the war with Iran. In response, major central banks are rising interest rates, compounding fiscal strain for heavily indebted nations like France, whose bond yields have spiked relative to regional benchmarks. Yeah, this is real, real bad news, folks, and you may not invest in bonds, but, you know, the, you know, the financial community looks at bonds and this is what really triggers them because they see rising interest rates and possibilities

15:41of more inflation, of economic slowdown, possibly a market crashes as these rising interest rates and pressure to the heavily indebted. It's, it's, it's, it is a very worrisome situation. These bond rates are at the highest levels they've been, I think, since 2002, which was, you know, at the end of first.com crash, and, you know, if you were going to come up with a scenario in which to conduct a US election, and you were to say, well, the, and Cumban's party that controls the House and the Senate and the White House is going to see rising inflation, rising bond rates, the possibility of a global market crash, an endless war that decays no chance of ending anytime soon that's pushing these things on. But you would say these are the conditions that lead to massive defeats. And they

16:47should, if it's a free and fair election, we talked about that earlier. The Senate voted 47-41 along party lines to confirm, to confirm Keith Saundering as the permanent secretary of labor filling a cabinet vacancy created earlier this year. Saundering a former EEOC commissioner and labor official during Trump's first term drew strong support from business groups like the Chamber of Commerce for his employer, friendly stance. However, Senate Democrats unanimously opposed his confirmation, criticizing his past decisions to rollback overtime protections, and voicing broader discontent with the administration's labor policies. Yeah, I mean, let's be honest. The, for the minute that men have said something like Secretary of Labor, Department of Labor, you like tuned out said, I don't care about the Department of Labor. But if you work in the United States of America, and you've gotten administration that doesn't care about workers, doesn't care

17:48about minimum wage, doesn't care about worker protections, is trying to eliminate those that exist, that has every corporation in the world singing their praises because they're making fewer and fewer requirements of those corporations to treat their workers fairly, then you need to see this as a move that has consequences for millions and millions of people, and it's going to make people's lives worse. And that's, you know, sometimes you're watching the story, this guy's approved, that guy's not a pro, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you don't sort of say, well, what are the consequences? And in issue after issue, an area after area, an economy, a national security, an environment, an healthcare education, and in cases like this with regard to labor, the decisions of this administration on a universal basis make people's lives worse. That's what drives elections. How it affects me? Are you better off now than you were two years ago? Are you better off now than you were four years ago? And the answer for virtually all

18:51Americans, unless you're one of the 1100 billionaires, is no. Peter Teal may be happy, Jeff Bezos may be happy, Elon Musk who, hexath announced was going to be part of some new effort to remake the Pentagon, because since he did such a great fucking job with those, these people all feel better about the world. And they're the only ones that the president sees, so he thinks the world feels better about it. But the rest of us, we're hurting. And that's the story of the next four and a half weeks. What does a hurt in America do? How are efforts being made to suppress the expression of a hurt in America and what happens next? We're going to talk about these things on our podcasts, going forward. We did a good deep state radio yesterday talking about what could go wrong in the final two years of the Trump presidency on a massive scale globally, to what wars we can expect and a really urge you to listen to it. And we will continue discussion in that vein, both in national security,

19:56but also in a conversation with Professor Timothy Snyder who's one of the leading proponents of defending democracy on words matter a little bit later. So we've got that. We've got the live show tomorrow and hopefully we'll join us for all of what time is the live show? It's going to be a bit later at 3 p.m. this week, so we can be joined by Norm. Norm is going to join the show. Norm wants to know all of you love Norm. I don't know why you love Norm. I feel jealous they met of love that Norm gets, but Norm is going to be there to offset Mina and my lack of charm. Now everybody loves Mina too. What's the problem? Be more yourself. Yeah, exactly. No, they love you. They love you. I understand it's like going to my shop, liver. Anyway, everybody loves you, David. They thought you looked very handsome yesterday in your students. Because I was wearing a suit. Yeah, they'll be more of that in the future. All right, everybody. Thank you very much for listening

21:02in. We'll see on all these different podcasts at all the places that you know to go look for us, like YouTube, like D.S.R. at some stack. We need to know it's up stack, like Instagram, like TikTok, like all the podcasts to place, like all those places. You can go any of those places and there you can get more of us. So please join us and please help us cure Mina's donut allergy. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot stop your new clients from emailing you at 3 a.m. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you be in three places at once. And while we can't help you organize your calendar, LinkedIn can help you

22:03land more clients so you have a calendar to organize. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com slash small business. We're some C heroes and other C egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at bloomberg.com.