ActBlue’s Alleged Foreign Donations Exposed

0:00If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Hi, I'm Sean Evans from Hot Ones and I want to tell you about YouTube Premium. It has offline downloads, so you can watch without Wi-Fi. Background Play. So you can lock your phone and it still plays, baby. Oh, and it is completely ad-free. Yes, I said it ad-free. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. Hell eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime. Welcome to the 3 Martini Lunch. Grab a stool next to Greg Corumbus of Radio America and Jim Garrity of National Review. 3 Martini's coming up. So glad you're with us for the Friday edition of the 3 Martini Lunch. Yes, we've made it to Friday. I think we're all happy about that. That's a good Martini. One thing we know Republicans have going for them this election cycle is they have a lot more money than Democrats, which is good for them because there's a lot of things that

1:00they don't have going for them this cycle. And we'll talk about that a little bit more today. The money the Democrats are getting seems to be a little suspicious too. A new report from the House Judiciary Committee has just dropped and there are screenshots on townhall.com about this. According to townhall.com, they show staff knowingly waving through foreign donations using verification methods that are very shady. Whole thread at townhall.com there says, act blue told Congress its passport verification stops foreign donors, but their own policy says otherwise that it only checks that the number has the right number of characters. No database check. No real verification ever. Here's the actual statement in the text thread. We use some very basic validation number of characters to ensure that the number entered as a valid passport number, but we do not verify the information in any other way. We do not, for instance, check the information provided against a government database. We merely store the information and continue with the contribution flow.

2:03So what actually gets a foreign donation approved at act blue, a supervisor's own words, quote, the donor is foreign, but correctly entered their billing address approved. Another one, donor sometimes has an IP in Hong Kong, but none of their other signals raised any eyebrows approved. Here's one that should end the debate. They say a donor's information pointed entirely to Canada. Act blue though approved it anyway, because, and this is a real quote, Twitter seems to confirm that they are a real person. And so that goes on to say it happened more than once. Another foreign flag donor got waived through because they had a LinkedIn account. Some media profiles now count as campaign finance law compliance. And when their own legal counsel tried to flag this, they kept deleting his requests from the thread and just basically ignored him. So Jim, it's Democrats, so, you know, who knows if they're ever going to face any consequences for this. I know Jim Jordan and others have tried to dig into act blue a lot upon Capitol Hill.

3:03And that's where this report is coming from. So we'll see if there are any consequences, but it's good to know just how brazen this is, even if it is horrible. I was going to say this is good work by the Congress, the legislative branch. Hey, executive branch, what you doing? Anybody at the Department of Justice want to investigate this sort of thing? Seems like pretty good. So I remember hearing about similar allegations about foreign donations being accepted Greg during the Obama 2008 campaign, which, you know, listeners with long memories, that was so long ago, Greg, it predates our podcast. So the Obama 2008 campaign was, you know, breaking all kinds of campaign records for campaign fundraising. And no doubt there was a lot of genuine enthusiasm for Obama back in, you know, if the period leading up to the 2008 presidential election. But did that mean that everything coming in, the gobs and gobs of money, that all of it was coming from legitimate sources? And there were always lingering questions about, was there enough verification as you're seeing in these anecdotes of act blue there? So one of the things that jumps out at me, Greg, now people know that I go to a lot of different

4:05places, usually on reporting trips and they're not the most scenic countries you could possibly go to. I don't donate to presidential campaigns or political campaigns at all. In part out of a principle that people questioned my objectivity, Greg, and also because I'm really cheap. And I don't want to. So stop spamming me and stop spamming Doris and Donna as well for long time listeners just catching that in joke. Okay, would you travel abroad to say Hong Kong and then choose to donate to a political campaign? It seems like odd timing. You figure you'd just wait, they can wait until you come home and kind of like, oh, I'm, I'm, I'm svinging the Taj Mahal in India and I just had this urge to donate to AOC or some other Democrat or something like that. Secondly, when you do this traveling abroad, Greg, can you go to the security line and say, look, I don't have my passport. I don't have my ID, but Twitter seems to confirm that I am a real person. Is that, is that sufficient identification for? No. Okay.

5:05Then why is it okay for political donations? Because we're supposed to, I like, I could hear the typical low information Democrats saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, foreign donations to Democratic campaigns is a proud tradition going back to Johnny Chung and the donations in Al Gore's fundraising at the Buddhist temple back in the 1996 campaign. So there might be, they, oh, it's totally normal for foreign campaigns to donate to, to Democratic campaigns. No, no, it's not. It's against the law. And there have long been suspicions about that. There was also some earlier report where like a guy in a trailer had donated like $90,000 to a variety of Democratic campaigns and they'd all been automated and they'd all been in a certain, you know, look like somebody basically used this guy's name and ID wasn't using his own money because the guy didn't have the money to funnel massive amounts of money to particular campaigns. Shockingly the Democrats entirely possible that this is happening on the Republican side to Greg, but I would point out my sense is based on what I've, and I've writing about, you know, grift in conservative, sorry, conservative air quotes for those who are only getting

6:10the audio version organizations for a long time. It's always Americans for a better America. But in those cases, what they do is they collect the donations and then they don't spend them on the Republican candidates. But I don't know about you, Greg. I think if amongst the right of Senator Grifters, there's an honesty there. It's honest grip. They're keeping the money for themselves. They're not passing it along to help their candidates. And this is a real legitimate disadvantage to Republicans. I'm saying that only half tongue in cheek because Act Blue clearly sends along the, you know, significant portion of that donation onto the actual Democratic campaigns. No, absolutely, right. And so again, like you said, the Justice Department should be on this. A lot of people related to Act Blue have refused to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, which doesn't necessarily mean they've committed crimes, but it certainly doesn't look good. As we saw with Anthony Fauci and so forth. But you mentioned the Clinton fundraising scandal. And I remember when the investigation of that was going to make Fred Thompson, the leading presidential candidate in the year 2000, as he was chairing that investigation on the

7:10Senate side. And you know, you had Johnny Chung and John Wong and Gal Gore at the Buddhist Temple and Americans were like, oh, this is like whitewater. This is complicated. We need something simple and then, you know, oh, Clinton in the intern. Oh, wow, you know, then we can understand that scandal. But everybody's glazed over at Chinese fundraising, which should have been a massive scandal. But in the end, they got away with it. Way back in the day, Greg, I was the public relations employee of the Capitol Steps, a musical comedy troupe. And they did a song about Johnny Chung. And the name of it was, give you a sense of how comedy and political correctness standards have changed, Greg, to the tune of secret agent man that's been in the 1960s. Secret Asian man. And I'm surprised. You know, back, it's a whole different world back then, kids. You could make fun of all kinds of things. And nobody, you know, but you know, we could, you know, on the one hand, like, you know, I, I want to say fond memories. They fired me. I had it my job.

8:11But I also want to point out that there was this sense that like, you know, trying to, the Chinese government's funding a presidential campaign. Oh boy. That incorrigible Bill Clinton. Yeah, they got one song out of that. That's my locks. Yeah. I think they got two or three albums out of the Lewinsky scandal. So, yeah, we're going to easily, you know, those will be hard days. In any event, will there be consequences? I'm not holding my breath. In the meantime, while they're trying to get the house in order when it comes to campaign fundraising, let's make sure your house is in order and as inexpensively as possible when it comes to making sure you're ready for major repairs. You never know when that waterline sewer line HVAC is going to go down, but you can definitely be ready to not pay a lot for those repairs when they are needed. And that's where home surf comes in. For just a few dollars a month, starting as low as $4.99 a month, you can be ready. So that way, when one of those big ticket items does go down, you're not paying thousands of dollars. So, one call to home surf and they take care of everything after that. You know, your air conditioning did not warn you before it stopped working in the middle

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10:15Because we all know airplane Wi-Fi is the worst. I get to add free, I get back room play and there's like a ton more in there. You should try it. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Try it now for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Hi. I'm Evan from Hot Ones and I want to tell you about YouTube Premium. It has offline downloads so you can watch without Wi-Fi. Background play. So you can lock your phone and it still plays baby. Oh, and it is completely add free. Yes, I said it, add free. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. Trial eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime. All right, Jim, Hassan Piker is still in the news. I do allow sci-ed. It keeps getting asked about this all the time and his response is always the same. It's like, why are we talking about a Twitch streamer from California and what he said.

11:18And the answer is, well, because you invited him onto the campaign trail numerous times. And we're joined at the hip with him. We've all seen the picture of you guys bump and fist there at one of the campaign events. And he said some horrible things, including America deserve 9-11 and things like that. And so Abdul Al-Sahead refuses to distance himself. And let's face it, if he did, we'd still call him out on it for being hypocritical because of how close they were before. So he's between Iraq and a hard place. But Piker loves Piker even more than he loves Abdul Al-Sahead. So he's more than happy to do major media interviews, including this one with Alex Thompson of Axios. You might remember Alex Thompson working with Jake Tapper. They were shocked, shocked. Joe Biden was cognitively impaired in the most of his presidency. Let's be honest. Here is Hassan Piker talking with Alex Thompson and suggesting that America is a worst terrorist entity than Al-Qaeda. You once said that America is the top dog in terrorism. Yes.

12:19Do you think America then is worse than Al-Qaeda? Pound for pound as far as the number of deaths. Yes, we've caused tremendous terror all around the world. I think that that is not only terror that we are waging on regular civilians and nations in the periphery, but it's also having consequences on ourselves. It's having dramatic consequences on the home front. One clear example of this is what we did in menop, right? There's no distinction between blowing up a school, tripling it with Tomahawk missiles. If you're killing 140 schoolgirls, that is an act of terror. This doesn't mean that all Americans are terrorists, but the reality of the matter is we have to create an environment of accountability to ensure things like that never happen again. Jim, we've talked about this a lot. If assuming that happened, it's not because we intended for it to happen. It's a way different than terrorists flying commercial airliners into skyscrapers in the Pentagon and that sort of thing. This false equivalency or whatever he's doing here is not only insane, but it's also

13:24got probably I'm sure a lot of people on the left just going, stop doing interviews. We just talked about donors in our last Martini. We've seen lots of times where a candidate for office or an elected official gets in trouble because of one of their donors and the traditional defense as well. I don't know that donor. I can't control who donates to me. I didn't know that this person had committed terrible financial fraud or had only fans or any of these other scandalous things. The next step is when, well, actually, here's a picture of you with this donor. The traditional expense is, this was at a rope line at an event. I shook a million hands that day. I take pictures with a lot of people. It doesn't mean I know anything about them. In this case, as you mentioned, Hassan Piker did several events on college campuses in Michigan for Abdul-Asaid. Abdul-Asaid is described to him as a friend. They are pictures of them fist bumping and I believe they attended an event the day before the Democratic primary. The idea, and now all of a sudden, he's just this Twitch streamer in California.

14:27All of a sudden, he's like, he's like Voldemort. You won't even say his name out loud, which doesn't really hold water. Abdul-Asaid has no one to blame by himself for this. If you hadn't invited him, you might see Republicans trying to tie Hassan Piker. But Hassan Piker would basically be the left wing equivalent of like Nick Fuentes. You don't see Republican candidates for office inviting Nick Fuentes to speak with them at events and stuff like that. There's a point that I think is getting missed in all of this controversy, Greg. It is that Hassan Piker is a moron. I don't just mean he's a moron because of his viewpoints, which I think is a certainly sufficient evidence to come to that conclusion. But why not? He says that pound for pound, the US is more destructive than al Qaeda is. He doesn't understand what pound for pound means because that would assume, he means, like, by size, how much terrorism have you committed? More destructive capacity per capita. Well there are 330 some million Americans out there. And al Qaeda at its total was like, what, 10,000 guys, 15, 20,000?

15:29Never more than 100,000 guys, right? So for sheer amount of money spent or number of... By all of those capacities, the US is actually not as destructive as al Qaeda. When you particularly look at something like the 9-11 attacks, al Qaeda pound for pound using that phrase accurately, is probably one of the most destructive organizations that has ever existed in human history. The second thing that comes to mind, he says, well, not all Americans are terrorists. Thank you for that generous concession, Mr. Piker. But I... By the way, no, the other meaning of Piker, it's kind of funny to say that he's been generous, but generous. But anyway, the other thing... So you're right, not every American is a terrorist. In fact, I think very few Americans are terrorists. It really takes them effort to get into that. You don't accidentally stumble into terrorism. However, do you know what every member of al Qaeda is, Greg? A terrorist. A terrorist. So once again, pound for pound, al Qaeda is much more of a terrorist organization than the United States of America, which means Hassan Piker frequently uses words that he doesn't really understand or concept or stuff like that.

16:32And the part of it also is, I was on Hugh Hewitt's program yesterday, and Hugh Hewitt's program is about three hours a day. And I said, Hugh, if you had to speak for like 12 hours a day, five or more days a week, how often would you get in trouble? And Hugh said, thank God for the Federal Communications Commission that prevents him from saying terrible, you know, and we're just kind of this recognition that we should not be surprised that Hassan Piker says stupid things. I would argue, though, that in a world full of podcasters, as we've mentioned many times, Greg, any two shmows can get a podcast. If you talk long enough, sooner or later, something's going to come out and it's going to sound stupid. If you do it for 12 hours a day or more, one, not as, you know, you're going to say stupid things, controversial things, out of just, you know, the need to keep saying things. What's more, you're going to, first of all, I don't think it's very good for your mental health. And it was just kind of this recognition that like sooner or later, Hassan Piker, like what makes him, like there are lots of left-wing podcasters and streamers out there. What makes him stand out is he's willing to say things like America, deserve 9-11. And America is a worse terrorist force than Al Qaeda is. And Hamas is morally superior to Israel and things like that.

17:36Otherwise, you and I would not be talking about him. He would not be so controversial to be on the campaign trail, but Abdul-Azayat. And nobody would really care because the world is full of left-wing streamers and top pocket that nobody cares about, right? This is what makes Hassan Piker unique. This is what makes Hassan Piker newsworthy. And if you know, if Abdul-Azayat really wants to win this race, he's got to come out and say, he says a lot of crazy stuff. I'm not responsible for that guy. I don't agree with the stuff he says. Instead, he's like, I barely heard of this Twitch streamer who there's a lot of pictures of me campaigning with. Yeah, kidding, kidding. And so in a Twitter meeting of people I don't want to spend any time with, Jill Follip of Edge says to Piker, I truly don't mean to sound like a reactionary right-winger, but if you genuinely hate the United States and think it's the worst, most evil country on earth, but you're a wealthy person with a job you can do for many where, why do you live there? And he says, beautiful question. Happy to answer. I'm an American citizen. I love this country in spite of its dark chapters because I believe in its promise and its people. It's up to us, people of good conscience to continue the struggle to unlock its true

18:39potential. Jim was just days ago. He went on a rant because his internet connection wasn't working that great. I realize this will be about 90% bleeps, but here's his reaction to just that. Because I'm in the United States of America, the most dog country on the planet, the absolute worst country on the planet, straight up bar none, a capitalist whole. Jim, I can just feel the love oozing from that. Greg, I really wish you hadn't played that in the past. In large part because you and I have occasionally had internet problems at Casa D'Gerradi interrupting our attempts to, and I got to say my reaction, not as different from Hassan Piker's as I'd like it to be, not nearly blaming capitalism, just blaming my internet service provider and or when the power goes out after a storm or something like that. But I just his broader argument of, oh, why do you still live here if you think this place, this country is a worst terrorist force than Al Qaeda is? Guys, if you think that Hassan Piker has a plausible and strong argument, when you go home

19:42tonight to your loved significant other, your wife, your girlfriend, some other tell her, I don't love you as you are. In fact, you have many dark chapters in your history and many glaring flaws, but I love your potential of what you should be. If you're lucky, you'll be sleeping on the couch. In all likelihood, you're giving out of the, you may get some object hurled at you, not that I would never justify that. I've just got to observe, like, and we've seen, it's not the first lefty we've heard this from. And people have always said that like the conservative mindset, ideally, conservatism is rooted in gratitude. Conservatives look at America and they see everything that's going right and they say, God, I love this country. We are so lucky to be here. We're lucky to be born here. We're lucky to have immigrated here. This is too early. Folks in the left, look at the country and they see what's wrong. And we should point out the country has problems and they look at the flaws. They look at the ways we don't live up to our values. They look at our times when we're too materialistic or we're not doing to help out the people who are really struggling in life. And that's an important element of it. But they look folks so much on that they can't see anything that's going right and they

20:42only see dark just like, well, America really stinks, but it could be someplace worthwhile someday. And when you do that, you want to hurl rotten fruit at them. I would suggest if you're running a business, you do not say any of the things that we've heard Hassan Piker say you should be focused on your customers needs and meeting those in a way that makes them very, very happy to do business with you and want to come back and tell others to be customers of yours. And so to be in the best possible shape to do that, you want a great business communication system that makes your current clients happy and attracts new ones as well. So today, we're sponsored by Quo. Quo was spelled Q-U-O, the business phone system built so you never miss a call. All your calls, texts and voice mails will live in one place so anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history, and respond fast. Remember Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2. It's trusted by more than 90,000 businesses who rely on it to stay reachable and look professional every single day. Money is on the line. So always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free.

21:43Plus get 20% off your first six months. When you go to Quo.com slash 3ml, that's Q-U-O dot com slash 3ml. Hey, what's up guys? It's Hayley Bailey. Okay. I need to tell you about something. I just got YouTube Premium. It's got tons of awesome features like offline downloads so I can download my favorite videos before I travel and watch them whenever I don't have Wi-Fi. Because we all know airplane Wi-Fi is the worst. I get to add free, I get back room play, and there's like a ton more in there. You should try it. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Try it now for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Hi. I'm Evan from Hot Ones and I want to tell you about YouTube Premium. It has offline downloads so you can watch without Wi-Fi. Background play. So you can lock your phone and it still plays baby. Oh, and it is completely add free. Yes, I said it, add free.

22:43Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. Hell eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime. All right, Jim, onto our third martini now. I don't really know how to qualify this one, but our regular listeners know that Jim was not here on Wednesday. He was hanging out with a bunch of Cubans and we can't talk a lot about what exactly happened. But he was with the Cubans here in Washington, D.C. They invited him. So Jim, why didn't they invite you? I know you're not allowed to talk about it, but what did you learn that you can talk about? And I know you've written about it today for the blind jolt. So when I got the invitation, there was a, like I called up my Ukraine buddies and said, this is not the Russians trying to grab me, right? And they're like, yeah, it's probably not. Oh, they're like, I let go less than 1% chance of that. It turns out that another very distinguished long time conservative journalist was also attending this meeting and recommended me to be included.

23:45And despite having strong and bile in the back of my throat producing feelings about how the Cuban regime treats its people, when you get a chance to meet with foreign officials in a situation like this. And it's obviously a newsworthy country, a country that's of great interest to American readers. Sure, I'll sit down and have the meeting. I'm bringing ways to make sure that can get out of it. What is technically Cuban territory as well. By the way, fascinating. I did not know this until I went there. Late April 2020, some nut in the middle of the night goes to the Cuban embassy, raises a AK-47 and shot like 20 some rounds into it. And they still have the pock marks on the columns. And by this is in 16th Street in Washington, D.C., they have a gate there, but you can still see the pock marks in them. And they apparently went through windows and into the walls up there. Thankfully nobody was hurt. This guy had been born in Cuba, naturalized American citizen.

24:46I know it's going to shock you, Greg. He had mental issues. He had gone to see a psychiatrist. He'd been given anti-psychotic medication, but decided he didn't need it. And hey, what's the worst that could happen? Well, it turns out this incident is what happened. The cops catch him. They arrest him. He pleads insanity. And after the under federal law, if you declare, if you're found insanity, they basically hold you until they determine you're no longer a threat. I assume he's taking his medication now, therapy, whatever other things are going on. And after four and a half years of being in a psychiatric institution in prison, he's a free man. Shot up a building, could have killed somebody. Thankfully, he didn't. Now walks the streets of free man. Also in April 2023, somebody, I'm sorry, February 2023, somebody threw two Molotov cocktails over the fence at the Cuban Embassy. Thankfully, no one's again. No one was hurt. Damage for that one was pretty minor. That perpetrator has never been caught.

25:46Now Greg, you and I are not fans of the Cuban government. But I think we believe that you should not shoot at them unless you're the CIA at Bay of Pigs, or you should not throw Molotov cocktails, diplomats deserve to be protected, whether they're in say, Tehran, or any other country, you know, the people, the nice people with the Cuban Embassy are not the people you're really have a problem with, let them go about their business and peace. I don't know, nice they are, but they shouldn't be shot at. Well, I was going to get, yeah, like, you know, that's a minimum bar. And let me say the other thing that the fact this guy was led out are for four and a half years after, you know, emptying his clip at a building, Greg. Look, I really don't like lenient judges that let people out on the streets because, oh, we decided you're cuckoo for Coco Puffs. We think you're safe now. Good luck, you know. But it really is bad when you're embarrassing us in front of the commies, right? Like we really want to look tough in front of these guys and here you are, letting these guys go. Anyway, as I'm at the most of the meeting was off the record. So I really can't talk too much about it. The Cuban deputy foreign minister was there. He's in town for the United Nations General Assembly meeting next week.

26:46The, the one on the record statement he's done other interviews with other publications and I provide some links to that. Probably the most interesting thing in this is that Cuba is enacting a whole bunch of economic reforms. You might be like, wait, I've seen this movie before. It didn't really change very much. And there's understandably a great deal of skepticism about this. Having said that, Cuba is in about as dire economic streets as you possibly could imagine. Blackouts from anywhere from 20 hours a day, some parts of the entire country is basically nearly 24 hour blackouts. They no longer have Venezuela as an ally sending them oil because it's under new management. And there's just generally a sense that they, you know, no longer have, you know, the embargoes crushing them every conceivable way. I, you know, unsurprisingly, the Cuban government believes it's never done anything wrong. And all of this is the fault of the Americans. All of this is the fault of us war mongering and economic warfare and we're collective punishment and all these things are violations of international law and things like that.

27:49Greg, you won't believe how politely I could sit and listen when I, someone saying something that I vehemently disagree with. Cuba is not, Cuba is basically abandoning communism. It's willing to try to be more free market. Whether this is going to work is a very open question because in a lot of cases, what they're saying they want a private type, they want to have private competitors in certain fields. Tourism, certain parts of agriculture and food processing, banking, they're describing at some point like you could have Cubans owning stock in private companies. That may really revolutionarily like in castorous country for that to happen, that would be a really big sweeping change. The idea of having a Havana stock exchange, probably unthinkable 10, 15 years ago, the fact that they're thinking about these things and talking about these things, I mean, you could point to this and say, well, this is a sign the embargo is working. This is a sign we should be squeezing them even harder, that the more they can't, may have enough revenue coming in to do that, the more that we can actually go. On the other hand, there are a whole bunch of Cuban Americans, Cubans out there who are not outright communists who are not, who don't like the regime and they're getting hit by

28:52the embargo as well. This is not me arguing for lifting the embargo. This is just kind of recognizing the human cost there. Either way, I'm glad I got to have this conversation. I color me very skeptical of this, but that having been said, the Cuban regime is now functionally recognizing not just like the advantages of free market economics, the necessity of free market economics. The state cannot do what it needs to do anymore and it needs to open it up for the, at least theoretical private ownership. I'm not, you know, there's a long ways to go on this and there's every reason the world to be skeptical and in the end, what they're trying to do is basically become more like China or maybe Vietnam, right? The system of basically to be, well, we're going to give you some economic freedom, but we're not going to let you have any political freedom. By the way, Greg, guess what percentage of members of the National Legislature are members of the Cuban Communist Party? All of them? 100%. Very good. That's yeah. There are 470 members. Hey, Greg, guess how many of the 470 voted for this package of economic reforms?

29:57470. You got everyone. And I want to point out just for contrast, back in 2014, the Russian government, the Duma, their legislature voted on annexing, formally, legally annexing Crimea. Could you guess how many voted against that, Greg? Zero. Two. Two. One voted no and one abstained. Now, actually, talk to the guy who voted no. He was over in Ukraine. He was exiled from the country. He's now leading the Russian Legion against the rum and about a year after I chatted with him, Russia tried to kill him by sending a drone into his house. So I'm not saying that voting no worked out great for him. I'm just going to point out that in Russia in 2014, there was more political dissent about the annexation of Crimea than there was this year in the Cuban National Legislature for like 177 economic reforms in a pack. Gee, it's funny how you guys always come up 100%. There wasn't a single person who had any doubts about any of these reforms at all.

31:00Nonetheless, they had really good coffee and I appreciated the invite and I'd be happy to go back again. Well, if they're following the China model, then the average Cuban citizen has not a lot to look forward to. The government's going to get rich if this actually happens and maybe some certain hand-to-hand figure corporations just like China does that are basically affiliated with the government, but the average Cuban. You can be rich. You just can't ever do anything we don't want you to do. That's that freedom where I come from. All right. Well, let's talk about trees.com. We've talked about fast growing trees before, but they've got a new name now, trees.com. Basically, your local nursery, but it's online with more than 1600 varieties of trees and plants delivered right to your door. Your Rumbus family has been a very happy customer of trees.com, whether it's the current snake plant or the lavender plant, we've also had lemon and spices and so much more. It's fantastic. Let's say you're like, okay, I'm not good at this. I don't have a green thumb. I don't know what I'm doing. Don't worry. The experts at trees.com have curated thousands of plants for every climate and growing

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33:05in there. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Hi, I'm Sean Evans from Hot Ones and I want to tell you about YouTube Premium. It has offline downloads so you can watch without Wi-Fi. Background play. So you can lock your phone and it still plays baby. Oh, and it is completely ad free. Yes, I said it. Ad free. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. All right, Jim, real quickly in our chaser here. Our eyes kind of bulge this morning when we saw that not only a Republican struggling in some of the swing state Senate races, there's one out in Idaho that shows that in a head race, the Democrat is 11 and a half points up on incumbent Republican gym ration.

34:09If you throw in the lower candidates, it's down to about a six point lead and you're thinking Republicans are in trouble in Idaho. That could be a significant thing nationwide. But as we've dug into this and by us, I mean Jim, this group that did this poll, advanced targeting research, there's some questions about their methodology. In fact, Chuck Todd, who's gone from pretending to be a normal journalist to absolutely left wing on Twitter, has basically said pretty succinctly here. Nearly 90% of respondents on this poll were surveyed via text to web. This year's surveys that over index on that methodology have shown GOPers performing quite poorly. Either it's a sign of something with young voters or perhaps this methodology is missing key pieces of the actual electorate. My hunch is it's the latter, but election day will be the ultimate barometer, obviously. So Jim, the track record here is from what you discovered is a little bit shady. Greg, first, I didn't recognize the name. I started digging into it because I remember American Research Group, ARG.

35:11Yes. And I'm guessing if you didn't like the results, you'd see the results. And that's why they called it no. But that advanced targeting research, first of all, that sounds like a military contractor. That's kind of an odd name. Okay, fine. You're targeting research. I didn't find a lot, the website of the company does not give you a great deal of details about its background. I asked one of the AI programs is how long has this company been in existence and it couldn't give me any good answers on that? I did find a reference to it in a newspaper article in Wyoming, in, for Wyoming Senate primary back in 2024. So they didn't just get created this year. So apparently they've been around since at least 2024. Still not a particularly long time. And it was that one poll of registered voters in which they said that, you know, Reed Razner was going to unseat Senator John Barrasso. Basically, the idea was that Razner had decent name ID. Barrasso is still the senator. So I, that clearly did not shake out the way Razner wanted to happen there.

36:14Beyond that, not a lot of references to this pollster. So it's very hard to evaluate them based on their past performance and stuff like this. I'm very skeptical. Now here's the thing. I would point out though that like my colleague Dan McLaughlin just did a really comprehensive Dan McLaughlin is one of those guys who lives for Excel spreadsheets and loves to plug in data and do all kind of stuff. And, you know, but he's like, look, the polling for Republicans look bad. If Trump's approval rating is around 40%, you would expect Republicans to be polling pretty badly. But not necessarily an Idaho, not necessarily in a bunch of other cases. And then the other thing is that, you know, in a case like Texas and we've talked about Ken Paxden versus James Rianna made it. How do you do to do all? Telleriko, plenty of times on this podcast. You know, that one's going through that. But Ken Paxden is a uniquely flawed Republican nominee. I don't see any reason my wish would be a uniquely flawed nominee. And we've seen a bunch of these kind of fly by night pollsters show up show us. Oh, look, the Democrats are way ahead. And in one of the primaries was the Michigan for starters.

37:16What there's Michigan, but there was also the Wisconsin governors race with Francesca Hong, where somebody just came out and said, yeah, we just made up some numbers. And what's he, we want to see how widely they would get cited on social media. And they got for you know, cited far and wide. So because the hunger for polling numbers greatly outpaces the ability to do reliable polling numbers, one, you get these people will make them up entirely. But also you see a lot more. And you and I have joked about not just the fundraising campaigns for Doris and Donna. But the fact that you know, like I'm getting constantly pull spam text towards me. I normally don't. I usually react the way Hassan Piker reacts when he's not getting his internet service restored quickly enough. But nonetheless, my add, like I, you know, so my sense is that, ah, so you're, you're getting the responses of people who have nothing better to do than to answer a bunch of questions from somebody who texted them out of the blue. And again, we talked about not being able to verify the donation, the donor responses.

38:16All you know about a person is their phone number. So how do you know that they're living in the right house district, senate district or, or a senate state or something like that? So that's, I find, I find it very hard to buy this, you know, buyer beware at this time of year. There's a hunger for polls that will, you know, like people, people, most, particularly when people see good news for their side, they will eagerly share that poll and not care if it's a survey of like nine people. That's exactly right. So be careful and make sure you vote regardless of what the numbers say. So Jim, in fact, if you're in Virginia, if you're in Virginia, you can vote today. Also, I believe Minnesota and South Dakota, utterly ridiculous. Jim, you're in national review. I'm Greg Carumbus of Radio America. Thanks so much for being with us today. Please be sure to subscribe to the three Martini lunch podcast. If you've done already, tell your friends about it as well. Thanks also for your five star ratings and your kind reviews. Please keep those come and get us on your home devices. All you have to say is play three Martini lunch podcast. Follow both of us on X Jim is at Jim Guarantee.

39:17I'm at Greg Carumbus. Have a fantastic weekend. Join us again on Monday for the next three Martini lunch. Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergeizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire. Try them all only on my toes. Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergeizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire. Try them all only on my toes. Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergeizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire. Try them all only on my toes.