Honest Abe Hamadeh on the Race for Arizona Attorney General 01:00:25

Welcome to Broken Potholes with your hosts Sam Stone and Chuck Warren. Another great program for you today. Thank you for tuning in. In studio with us, I've heard some people say he got into the AG's race a little too late, but he has a pretty good reason for that. We'll let him tell you about it. Abraham Hamadi.

Abe? Honest Abe for AG? Thank you, Sam. Oh, I like that. Honest Abe for AG. That's not bad. Sam will invoice you. You'll be getting that next Tuesday or Wednesday. Venmo, PayPal, R-Taked, maybe crypto if we ever understand it. Yeah, I don't. So I'm going to leave that aside. But if you want to pay me in gold, I will do that. And I charge a lot. So, you know, get out your carry case.

So, Abe, I want to talk a little bit. You just jumped into the AG's race pretty recently. Yes. And I have heard some people say, hey, we've got a lot of good candidates in this race. We've had a couple of them on this program. I would agree with that. A lot of them have been in it for months now. Now, that's not a great thing. I mean, personally, I think it's kind of ridiculous that our elections are now stretching into two plus years. Right.

But tell us why you just jumped in. So I just jumped in. I was on an Army deployment out to Saudi Arabia. I just got back in September. So it was – I didn't think it was late, like you said, but I think some people have been running since March or April of this year, and it's just a perpetual campaign. But I think – you were talking about the field of candidates –

We just announced that we raised $100,000 in seven days. So I think there's still, you know, people... That's impressive. Yeah. So I think for a first-time candidate, and I think we're just, you know, shocking the political establishment right now. And, you know, there's...

there's an appetite right now for someone new and, you know, someone energetic in this race. So I don't think the field was set. And, you know, we ultimately jumped in and the response has been really good to see. Well, I have the recent data orbital polling numbers in front of me. And since there's 74.6% undecided primary voters on the AG race, I'm not sure. I think you could have probably waited six months or so. So that's sort of silly talk by people who think they know stuff and they don't.

Yeah. Politics is always about the insiders when you ask the insiders. Right. Right. If insiders were to choose, Donald Trump would have never been president. Good point. Yeah. Yeah. Just to touch really quickly, you have a really interesting background. It's different than the other candidates in this race. And folks, don't lie to this man.

That's the first thing I got to tell you. Don't lie to this man because you were an intelligence officer. Yeah. So when they lie, you're going to smoke them out. We'll see. That's why they call me Honest Abe still. But on top of that, you negotiated military sales and managed the training for Saudi Arabia's domestic security forces.

implemented a first-of-its-kind enhanced security vetting in response to the 2019 Pensacola terrorist attack. That's right. And I'm going to ask you to tell us a little bit more about some of this stuff because this is, I think, pretty fascinating. You're a former prosecutor in the Maricopa County Attorney's Office, board member of the Dean's College of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU.

previously served on the Board of Advisors for the Center for Political Thought and Leadership at ASU, undergraduate degree in political science from ASU. And JD, you turned. I was a turncoat, yeah. But I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Bear down because you went to the University of Arizona. Yeah, Tucson's a fun town, but I wised up and came back to my senses and came up to Phoenix. No, you have to separate the U of A from Tucson. The U of A is fantastic, but-

Well, outside of its politics. But, you know, the U of A is fantastic, much better than ASU. You made a good decision there, no doubt about it. Well, whose team are you on, Chuck?

Yeah, no, I am totally outnumbered in this studio. But I'm not running for statewide office, so you should say they are all fantastic universities and community colleges in the state of Arizona. Kudos to the governor and the board of regents. Yeah, but except I'm not a politician, so you're going to see me say a lot of things that probably I should say, but I don't. See, that's the problem I have because I'm running in the city of Phoenix and I still can't stand ASU folks. I try. Right.

But no, actually, I don't. I can't do it. Tucson, though, is a dump. I mean, you can't say that, but I'm going to do it. It's got its charm. I like Tucson. Pothole charm. It's perfect for this program. So, Abe, tell us a little bit, because this is actually really fascinating. What is it like training Saudi Arabian security forces? Because that's

Certainly never had anyone on the program has done that before. Sure. So, you know, honestly, when I left to go on this deployment, it was July of 2020. And, you know, I was, you know, the height of COVID and I was pretty excited to leave

this country and this state at the time. I mean, I was at Scottsdale Fashion Square when the race riots were going on and they were looting everything. I was at the waterfront, you know, see police helicopters circling overhead. Very scary times. You know, it was a relief to, you know, go do, serve my country overseas. So,

Ultimately, going to Saudi Arabia, at the time, I didn't realize how much of an important strategic ally was the United States, right? So they're actually the number one purchaser of all US training and military sales equipment in the world. So there's 130 billion of active foreign military sales cases with Saudi Arabia.

But my job primarily was to focus on all the domestic training of the security forces out there. So the ones who protect the oil and gas fields, as well as our special security forces. But we did that and also by sending them to the United States for training at Ranger School and training at Navy Bud School as well. So that plays into what you mentioned, the 2019 Pensacola incident, the terrorist attack.

And obviously back then. Refresh people's memory real quick. What happened in that incident? Because it's been a few years and unfortunately we've had more than a few of these terrorist attacks over the years. Very unfortunate situation, but it was, you know, tragedy. A second lieutenant Saudi Arabian pilot was radical and he got through the vetting process and he killed three of our sailors out there in Pensacola.

So it was a tragic situation. So that was December 2019. It kind of got a little bit buried. I mean, there's a lot going on in January, then obviously COVID. But the response was ultimately to provide these new enhanced security vetting measures. And I can delve...

into it as much as I can, but it's mostly the biometrics piece of it. So you're taking their fingerprints, iris scans, as well as going through a rigorous background check. If anybody's ever worked in the federal government, they would know what SF-86 is. So it's very rigorous. So we look into their past history, and we're just trying to combat, trying to protect future Americans and our sailors, Marines, and Army, and Air Force personnel from any type of incident like that from happening again. What

There's just no 100% certainty on that, right? No, nothing is bulletproof. Is there anything you think going through the process that the military could do differently?

Regarding to protect, to prevent another terrorist attack. I mean, right now, the enhanced security vetting is a good step. Before, we weren't doing that. So what happens when it gets uploaded into a system in a database for the CIA, FBI, all of our intelligence agencies, and we're already seeing that with the Afghan refugees. I wrote an article in the Arizona Republic with that.

they were they were rushing a lot of these afghan refugees to um you know to come out here and it was very surprising because if you know the you know they talk about the siv visa holders so special immigrant visa holders those take years to get so suddenly you know because they have to do rigorous checks on them so now suddenly you're having this massive influx of 60 000 afghan refugees coming over

and the federal government's saying, oh, you know, they're all clear to go. That's not the case. If that was the case, why did it take years just to do a few hundred or a few dozen of them, you know, back in the day? So, you know, there's definitely a discrepancy going on. So the federal government is claiming that they're, you know, doing these vetting processes correctly. But, you know, it's something that the state government definitely needs to coordinate through our fusion centers with the federal government to ensure their security. Abe, so we have, I understand, this is nothing about the AG race, but I understand there's like 50%,

50 Afghan pilots, helicopter pilots, are in Arizona now. So would they be going through that type of rigorous background check here? Or they were helping us and we just rushed them out and now we're doing it? I mean, what is the situation on something like that? Yeah, I haven't heard about the 50 Afghan pilots. I know a few years ago there were some deserters even when they were actually conducting our training. They just never showed up for training once they got to this country.

but I haven't heard about, I don't know, these Afghan, 50 Afghan pilots. I'm assuming most of them have gone through some sort of vetting in order to come to the United States in the first place. So the ones who have helped our military, obviously we need to help them out because those are the ones who are the most at risk. - Correct. - There's 60,000 of them, so a lot of them are just, they're here

you know, on humanitarian grounds. It's not necessarily that they were assisting the United States military on anything. So, you know, I haven't looked at that, but, you know, it is, we definitely have to do enhanced security vetting on everybody coming in. And this is just more fallout of the Biden administration's precipitous pullout in Afghanistan and the fact that they didn't think the process through. No, but I appreciate you bringing up Biden because that's a good segue to this question I have now. So Abe, let's say you're AG. Yes. And it's 2023. Yes.

What do you feel about, and this all started really with when Trump was in or even Bush, that state AGs just started suing the federal government all the time. It may have happened before, but I don't remember it as much as it is now. Now it's just like, I'm a file. Every week it seems like there's 12 different AGs lining up to sue the federal government. Is there a role in that or should it be done more selectively? Because it does seem like, and of course this

You know, I mean, this is an exaggeration, but it just seems like it happens every month at a minimum. We're going to sue on this today because it's infringing upon states' rights or something of that nature. Would your office be aggressive like that as well? Do you think that's necessary? Absolutely. What I intend to do is I want the Biden DOJ to create a separate unit just for Arizona because we're going to sue the hell out of them.

And I tell you this because, you know, people say, hey, you know, we need to be more cordial. Listen, the states are the ones that created the federal government. And I think having AGs now reclaiming that power is a good thing. And what COVID has shown when I was in Saudi Arabia is actually funny talking to some Saudis to get a different perspective. Right over there. They're like, you know, why is Miami open?

But New York City closed. So I have to explain to them concept of federalism, right? And states having rights. So, you know, I think that with COVID happened, it was really good to see that, hey, the state of Arizona can see the federal government. We can, you know, make it more open. I mean, I was just in San Francisco, New York. Those are different worlds. I don't know if you've ever been there recently, but I mean, it is like different countries right now. You know, the United States has, you know, as...

For all our faults, you know, with this COVID situation, you look at Australia. I mean, what's going down over there? Oh, this is horrible. We talked about that quite a bit. Right. I mean, it's terrifying. And even when I was in Saudi Arabia, you had to have a QR code for everything and this app that tracks you and all that. But we were luckily exempt because, you know, we thought that the Saudis were spying on us. But no, I mean, the state AG definitely has a role to sue the federal government. And I would...

aggressively take that on. And I know the current Attorney General Mark Brnovich created a federalism unit. I definitely want to see that expanded upon when I'm Attorney General in 2023. Marc Thiessen: You know, it's something that I think we haven't really delved into before, Chuck. But if the federal government relinquished a lot of the power it's accrued to itself back to the states, I think that would actually de-escalate a lot of the political tensions in this country because we're fighting over things.

that could be decided at the state and local level, and we could have our differences. Right. I mean, you're saying this OSHA ruling, right? I mean, they're making a mockery of the law. They're using a random regulatory power that was never intended for this, for this emergency use that doesn't take effect until January, right? So we're seeing that the federal government is definitely overreaching into the state of Arizona. And this is where we need a strong Republican governor, we need a Republican secretary of state, and we need a Republican attorney general in order to push back against the federal government's overreach. Right.

Awesome. When we come back, we're going to continue with Honest Abe, Abraham Hamadi, running for AG in Arizona. Fantastic discussion so far. Folks, make sure you stay tuned in. Broken Potholes coming right back. It's the new year and time for the new you. You've thought about running for political office, but don't know where to start. Before you start any planning, you need to secure your name online with a yourname.vote web domain.

This means your constituents will know they are learning about the real you when they surf the web. Secure your domain from GoDaddy.com today. Welcome back to Broken Potholes with your host, Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone in the studio with us today. Honest Abe for AG. We just changed the tagline completely in the studio right here, folks. We'll ask him how he feels about that later. Abraham Hamadi running for attorney general in the state of Arizona.

You've got some issues that you're talking about that maybe some of the other folks in this race aren't. And I really wanted to touch on that. One of the things that's really going on in this country is you have this, I call it a sort of unholy alliance between big government and big tech that is really becoming extraordinarily intrusive on the lives of everyday Americans. Talk about that a little bit and talk about what you see and what maybe we could do there. Right.

Right. I mean, we saw it with COVID, right? When Facebook censoring any posts criticizing China with the virus, right? We saw it when you couldn't even mention that, hey, this virus could have started from a lab, right? And now it seems like, oh, maybe the conventionalism now it is actually coming from the lab. So you're seeing this, and it's really damaging to society because Facebook has become the new town square. So, you know, there's the free market in all of us, right? We're all Republican conservatives that say, oh, we need to see the businesses go. But

Right now, what you're seeing is that these companies are trillion-dollar companies. They're worth more than the GDP of most countries. What you're seeing is that we need to have the government in involvement. You're seeing the Ohio Attorney General, I believe, just was trying to see if they're going to regulate it as public utility companies. So we have to get creative with what we're going to be doing with these big tech companies. So this requires outside-the-box thinking that we're in a different world right now.

Nobody could have imagined COVID. Nobody could imagine big tech's power in the last five years. So we have to definitely, you know, they censor the president of the United States. You know, just think about that. The 45th president of the United States is no longer able to have a voice online through Facebook or Twitter, and it's damaging. But the Taliban has a presence. Vladimir Putin has a presence on Twitter. Look, what's wrong with that?

I think the First Amendment needs to be protected, and I definitely think that we should be going after these big tech corporations in order to uphold our constitutional values. It's one of the arguments that a lot of, frankly, conservatives have made, that these are private companies and they have the right to regulate speech on their platforms as they see fit. But I'd argue the other direction, that they are so pervasive that they are a necessary thing to function in modern civic life.

And therefore, freedom of speech on those platforms is essential. I agree. I mean, you just see it with Twitter, you see it with Facebook. And we're seeing these, you know, the Republican right trying to create these new platforms, but then they go after the hosting services. So there's always, you know, there's always gonna be a challenge for us. So we have to, you know, fight with what we got already. So, you know, it's very damaging to society in order to be silenced. And you're seeing that beyond just, you know, the big tech

We're having this silencing of all speech, critical race theory, gender pronouns. I mean, you're seeing Dave Chappelle trying to get canceled right now. So a lot of what I'm running on is to fight back against this cancel culture. And my biggest advantage that I have from the other candidates, I'm not like the others. I'm not typically an old white guy or girl. So I've got that. They can't really call me a racist. Well, actually, they have been, but I don't think it's okay. They will. Oh, trust me. They will call you a racist. Honestly, Chuck and Sam, like,

I was already called a homophobe, a racist, and I wanted to bomb the Middle East. And that was from my campaign video. I'm like, I don't know how they got that from my video. Coming from the first, according to the left, Jewish Hitlerite in Arizona history, I thoroughly understand. Right.

And, you know, they they claim that they're, you know, all about inclusivity and, you know, they're not racist. But man, once you go against their their norm and once you go against what you're supposed to be boxed in, they attack you. And what's I what I love about Virginia with that lieutenant governor race. I mean, you saw her, you know, you know, Sears. She's just one. And she she's holding that rifle. You know, this, you know, powerful black woman who is a Marine. I mean, that's the.

embodiment of America. She's an immigrant, so it was beautiful to see. Well, the amazing thing, I read something this morning which I did not know, that she ran in the previous election against the past nominee because he was too extreme, and she ran as a write-in.

So they're trying to put this woman in a corner as being extreme. And she actually ran against the previous LG nominee because he was too extreme as a write-in. But, you know, you would never know that. What I love is that she is tough without being extreme, right? I mean, you don't have to be crazy to stand your ground. Definitely. No, you can also be kind and strong. People don't seem to understand that. You can have your principles, you can have your backbone, and you still can be kind.

And for some reason, that has slipped people's minds. And I think, unfortunately, things like Twitter have become such a cesspool that people only know one way, call names, do things of that nature and so forth. Let's talk about the border. Yes. We have a problem down there, and it's gotten worse since President Biden's been elected. They could try to spin it however they want, but there's clearly a crisis on the border. Yes.

What can the Arizona AG do to help alleviate that problem, at least for Arizona's border with Mexico?

Right. I mean, we got to get creative, right? And I think that's my biggest advantage in this race. I'm an outsider. I'm younger, so I'm willing to take more risks. And that's what the army teaches you, to take calculatable risks. So I think we can look at states like Texas, right? So you have Attorney General Ken Paxson out there. He's prosecuting illegals crossing the border as trespassers. And that's a misdemeanor crime, but he's doing that. And there's been some challenges I've been reading about through the legal process with that. But

But that is one way where the states, we can't just assume the federal government, when they're not doing their job, the state has to come in and protect our citizens. And so I think you just think also Greg Abbott, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, you saw him building his own wall on the southern border. He's using shipping containers. I don't know if you guys saw those images.

But he has the National Guard out there. But this is why it's so critical to have an attorney general, a Republican attorney general, along with a Republican governor, Republican secretary of state. We need to have this unified front to push back because, you know, as miserable as COVID has been, could you imagine how much more miserable it would have been under a Democratic leadership? I've said, well, I know we wouldn't have a vaccine. Right. I mean, no, I know that. I mean, that's that's the funny thing about this whole vaccine dispute. We would not have a vaccine.

Without a Republican administration, they could say all they want, but there is nothing to back up their point that we would. No, Operation Lightspeed, it should be viewed as one of Trump's great successes. We'd still be talking about it. Whether you like the vaccine or not, I'm against mandates.

But the ability to have it is extraordinary. Right. It talks about the American ingenuity, how quickly we're able to come up with a vaccine like that. I'm against mandates as well, but I mean, it is a testament to, you know, the private sector and the government really putting this effort out there, um,

So what else would you do in regard to the border? We talked about Texas is using the trespassing strategy. What else do you think that as an AG in Arizona you can do with our border crisis? Well, right now, I mean, you have to go against these drug cartels. I mean, just the other – I mean, Sammy, I think you're in from Ahwatukee, the district over there. You saw when the drug cartels had a shooting out there, right? Right. With the DEA and the – I mean, that was –

They're coming to our suburbs. We had a shootout between multiple people with high-powered weapons in the middle of an Ahwatukee street. This is the quietest neighborhood in all of Phoenix, probably in all of Arizona. Right. And that was a few years ago. But people have very short-term memory. But the drug cartels are in our communities already.

So that's why we have to protect the border. I mean, we can even team up with sheriffs, right? We can create sheriff posses to go a volunteer force down at the border to help with stopping illegal immigrants from crossing. And you're seeing that come. There's another caravan coming from Yuma, right? We saw the horrible situation in Del Rio, Texas with the Haitian immigrants. So.

There's definitely a lot more the attorney general and the governor can do on the border. What do you think is AG would be a good plan for, I mean, look, it's a supply and demand problem too, right, for drugs, not for those. What can we do for people in Arizona who are taking and using these illicit drugs and buying them? I mean, they never seem to put two and two together that you're helping fund this. Right. Well, I mean, the fentanyl problem is obviously important.

a big deal and it's gotten worse in our communities, especially our rural communities. This is where the education aspect of the Attorney General going out there, educating them about the fentanyl that's coming in. It is very high dosage. It's not just the typical ones that you get at a pharmacy. So we definitely have to push back on the drug enforcement

I know marijuana just became legalized while I was in Saudi Arabia, actually. So there's one drug that's off the table at this point, but we can definitely enforce more on our drugs. Broken potholes will be coming right back. It's the new year and time for a new you. You've thought about running for political office, but don't know where to start.

Welcome back to Broken Potholes with your host Sam Stone and Chuck Warren.

On the line with us for the second part of our program, Dominic Pino. Dominic is a writer for the National Review from Wisconsin, currently lives in Virginia, William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at the National Review Institute, former intern with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a bachelor's degree in economics and a master's degree in economics from George Mason University. And if you're not following his work,

Dominic, we want to make sure you tell folks how they can do that because you are writing some really interesting pieces right now on our economy, the supply chain, and Build Back Better, everything that's going on that is frankly putting Americans' economic future at fairly considerable risk.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate it. And yes, you can find my work at nationalreview.com. You can also follow me on Twitter at DominicJPino. And yeah, I've been...

Doing what I can to cover the supply chain crisis and also the debates around Build Back Better, infrastructure build, things like that. So thanks for having me on. Dominic, this is Chuck. You wrote a piece last week of October called How Government Stands in the Way of Infrastructure Improvements. Can you tell our audience what did you find when you were researching this and writing this article about what is the government doing that is causing the delays in infrastructure and not allowing us to improve upon it?

Sure. So that article specifically was about the area in Southern California around the Port of Long Beach. And about 40% of American imports come in through the Port of Long Beach or Los Angeles. And part of any port complex is rail infrastructure, freight rail infrastructure.

And freight rail infrastructure in the United States, unlike infrastructure for trucks or for planes, is mostly privately owned and operated. So the freight railroads build their own rails, they maintain them, they operate them. BNSF, one of the largest freight railroads in the country, wanted to build a new intermodal rail facility in Southern California, in Long Beach.

They wanted to spend $500 million of their own money building it. No government funding, no subsidies, just their own money, because they wanted to invest in the infrastructure of Port of Long Beach. And they've wanted to do this since 2005. And for 16 years, California's environmental regulations have stood in the way of them being able to build that facility. What it would do is

significantly reduce the transit times in drayage, which is short truck trips between the port and the rail facility. It would cut those from about 25 miles to about four miles, which would allow the port to operate much more efficiently in general and BNSF to operate more efficiently in its entire national network.

But California's environmental regulations have stood in the way of that. So when the Biden administration talks about how we need, you know, a trillion dollars in new spending to fix these problems, well, the NSF has been willing to put up its own money to solve these problems, and government has been standing in the way.

And BNSF isn't alone, and that doesn't apply just to Los Angeles and Long Beach and the ports there. It's all across this country, isn't it, that these same environmental rules and regulations, even though they differ by state to state, you're always dealing with the federal government. They have

mechanisms that allow environmental groups to sue you using taxpayer money, all these companies, to keep them from going forward. And whether it's rail or oil pipelines or any of this stuff, they're standing in the way of everything.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And obviously, you know, there is a need for basic environmental regulations, and it's very important that we take care of the environment. But when you have situations where it's taking 16 years to do a project that could be built in three, I think we can all agree that that's probably going a little bit too far. Dominic, this is Chuck again. If you were king for the day,

and you had to plan out our infrastructure and stop this supply chain crisis, what would you do, Unilateral? What would you say, look, there's four or five things we just need to do, and why don't you just give us one or two, then we'll do the next three after the break? Sure. I would say, first of all, is making sure that our federal government officials understand

that they are not the king for a day. And that there is no silver bullet. There is no, you know, 10-point task force report that can fix this problem. These are things...

And the best way to think about the current crisis that we're facing is that the pandemic has not caused these problems, but it has exposed the vulnerabilities that we've had for, in some cases, decades. We were getting by on Band-Aids and hope is what it comes down to. Broken Potholes coming right back.

The 2020 political field was intense, so don't get left behind in 2021. If you're running for political office, the first thing on your to-do list needs to be securing your name on the web with a yourname.vote web domain from godaddy.com. Get yours now. Welcome back to Broken Potholes with your host. I'm Sam Stone. In the studio with me today, Chuck Warren has always the irrepressible Kylie Kipper.

Also in studio, Abraham Hamadi. Honest Abe, he's running for AG here in Arizona. But on the line with us right now, Dominic Pino from the National Review. We're talking L.A. ports. We're talking the supply chain. We're talking a brewing and ongoing crisis that likely isn't about to abate anytime soon, is it, Dominic?

Yeah, that's right. The DHL puts out their global shipper. They put out alerts to their global network about ports all around the world. And they actually just put out their report for this week right before we started recording this. And it shows that the situation in Los Angeles and Long Beach is terrible.

staying the same. It is not improving. Despite President Biden's best efforts, it is not. The situation is not improving. What we can hope for is that this is sort of plateau and that it's not going to get worse and that hopefully soon it will begin to get better. But right now it is not getting better.

You know, I wouldn't expect this of L.A. and being California and being as liberal as they are and as devoted to government as they have become. But we're under COVID emergency mandates right now. You can really cut through a lot of red tape as the governor of a state if you want to. Is that something that the governors in these states with these ports could do is essentially knock aside some of these regulations using government?

the COVID emergency? I'm not sure about governors, but the city of Long Beach at the local level did do something like this, which was a very good move on their part. And these are the kind of boring regulatory fixes that will help us to move beyond this crisis. And what they did at

The city of Long Beach has a local ordinance that says you're not allowed to stack containers higher than two. So you can stack one on top of the other, but you can't stack them any higher than that. And the reason they have that regulation is for aesthetic reasons. So they think that higher stacks than that could be an eyesore to the city, and they don't want to have that. Now...

you know, say what you will about that. I think that's kind of a silly regulation to begin with. But in times when you can handle the volume of containers that are coming through, only stacking them too high, maybe that's a reasonable thing for them. I don't live in Long Beach. I don't know. But...

When we have record cargo volumes coming in, as we do right now, in the wake of the pandemic where people are ordering more goods than ever before, that regulation is getting in the way of the entire country receiving goods.

And so after a couple months of this going on, again, better late than never, they finally waived this regulation. They now allow you to stack containers up to four high and in some cases five high. And just by doing that,

you have now doubled the container capacity in Long Beach's container yards. Because if you could only stack in stacks of two before, and now you can stack four high, you've doubled your capacity. So those are the kind of fixes that they did do. Common sense. So how do you feel about the Transportation Secretary's comment that the lack of child care caused the supply chain crisis?

I don't think that is a primary cause. Maybe on some margin that is the case, I'm not sure. But the fact that that is the Transportation Secretary's first instinct is a little bit concerning, because that's obviously not a transportation-related issue.

And we have a lot of transportation-related issues that we can work out. And part of that will be, you know, federal government showing some leadership, especially in dealing with labor unions, which have prevented a lot of efficiency improvement. Right. I mean, it just seems like that's representative of this administration. I mean, he could not figure out that.

stacking three to four containers upon each other instead of just two will help make a difference. He'll just say, well, that's not happening because we don't have child care for forklift operator. I mean, it's just insane. This is the problem when you're appointing people for political purposes only who have no real background in an area like transportation where you really there is real expertise out there. Let's go quickly to the build back better

legislation. How much debt is this going to add to our country? And B, is it going to be helpful at all for our infrastructure of our country?

Sure. The debt question is really hard to answer right now because the Democrats have pursued a strategy in the legislative process of keeping this bill constantly in flux. So we don't really know what's ever in it at any given moment. And as a result of that, it makes it very hard for the Congressional Budget Office to score it and to figure out how much it will add to the

to the debt. On top of that, Democrats have done a lot of different budgeting gimmicks, playing with the

rule that the Congressional Budget Office has to analyze these things, and as a result of that, have been able to really, really muddy the waters on what the impact of this is actually going to be. I think we can reasonably say it will add to the debt. I don't think we have any reason to believe President Biden on a lot of the claims that he's made about this.

In terms of how it will help infrastructure problems, most of it is either non-responsive or it will make the problem worse.

This is not – this infrastructure problem – excuse me, this supply chain problem is not something that can be fixed by just spending more money. And a lot of what Build That Better is is typical Democrat tax and spend policy. And not infrastructure. It's spending more money.

Yes, yes, correct. And not infrastructure. It's spending more money, giving it to interest groups that support support Democrats like like labor unions and and that sort of thing. And so a lot of it is just not responsive to the problems that we have, which, like I said, are really going to be solved by all.

boring, you know, really gritty kind of regulatory fixes, not by big, sexy legislative signing ceremonies out in the Rose Garden. We're with Dominic Pino of the National Review. Dominic, how did you get into journalism? Was this something you always wanted to do or something that just by circumstance or chance you fell into?

Yeah, I went to college for economics and in the process of doing that, got involved with my student newspaper at George Mason University and was, got

got up to be the opinion section editor there and really enjoyed that, really liked that. I've been a reader of National Review since high school and I applied for their internship a couple of times. On the third time, I was able to do a little breakthrough

And I did that last summer, and then was able to turn that into this William F. Buckley fellowship with National Review Institute, and it has been a great experience. I really enjoy it. What has surprised you about being a journalist? Well, one of the things I like about it the most, especially compared to school, is that...

you can talk to the people. You can just, you can talk to people. You can get information from people that know more than you and learn from them. Whereas, you know, when you're writing for school, that's unacceptable. You have to do all the work yourself. And so, yeah, I think just the amount of learning opportunities that there are from talking to experts

And just listening to what they say, I think that that is something, and that people want to do that, right? People want to share what they know with you because they want you to write better about what they know about, right? Nobody likes reading news stories about things that they know about and being like, oh, they got this totally wrong.

And so that's always frustrating. So, you know, people want to share that information with you, and there's so many opportunities to learn. Dominic, you know, as we're talking about this, and you're talking about reaching out to all these people, what is the one thing, or if there is one thing, that stood out in your mind that they've told you about this supply chain crisis that is just...

That's crazy. The thing that makes you go, oh, come on, that can't be real. Yeah, I would say I actually just had a piece up today about we have a tariff right now on truck chassis. Now, truck chassis are the trailers that allow trucks to carry containers. We need a lot of them. We have about 700,000 of them in this country right now, but we need more. And

There is currently a combined tariff of around 250%.

importing truck chassis from China. Now, regardless of what we think about trade policy in general, there's one Chinese company that is the world's largest producer of truck chassis. They were in the process of moving their North American production process totally to the United States. So what they were doing was they were manufacturing the parts in China, then

then shipping them to the United States to be assembled and inspected at facilities in the United States that employ Americans. They were in the process of moving their manufacturing process also to the United States entirely for all of North America. And these tariffs got in the way, prevented them from doing that,

And now our domestic chassis producers have not been able to keep up. And there was just an article in the Journal of Commerce a couple days ago that said that most of the orders for truck chassis in this year will be delivered in the second half of 2022. So that doesn't do us much good. It would be great if we could get them from the company that already makes them, which, like I said, has two factories in the United States already.

But they're prevented because there's a 250% tax. If you're going to tax something that high, it might as well just be a ban. Yeah, I mean, there's no way you're going to try to do that if you're a business. I mean, that's just incredible. That's insane. Mm-hmm.

You know, Dominic, I want to thank you for being on the program today. We really, really appreciate it. Would love to have you back again in the future. Tell folks again where they can follow you, nationalreview.com. I believe Dominic J. Pino on Twitter. Is that it? Yes, that's correct. That's correct. No TikTok? You're not doing any TikTok dances or anything like that? No.

Absolutely not. Maybe you should go to Long Beach Port and do one. I mean, that may really bring focus to it. With a chassis in hand, with a broken chassis in hand. Someone has to teach us how to communicate to this current generation because I'm baffled. Exactly. Dominic, thanks a million. Appreciate you. Thank you so much. It was great being on with you. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Fantastic interview.

And only an economist would find out, an economist who's now a journalist, would find out about the chassis. Right. I mean, literally, think about that. But it's true. We have 700,000, and he said we need a lot more. I mean, I don't know what that means, but it's probably six digits, and we can't get them because we have an over 200% tariff on them. I guess the question at that point becomes what's more important to you? Is it having food on the shelves, or is it having the principal in place?

But this is the balance. And Abe, I mean, I don't think your office will deal with this if you're elected. But look, I'm all for American made. I'm all for our manufacturing sector getting better. But then...

I just don't, we can't do it all. So I don't know what the happy medium is on this. Right. You can't do it overnight. You know, I think Trump, I think the idea of buying American is obviously a good thing. Absolutely. But right now when you have a problem like this, tariffs and you have this, I mean, this is what's nuts. I mean, I came back from Saudi Arabia to a country I no longer recognize, right? And you were gone a year. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I was gone a year. No, I mean, that's sad, but that's reality. Folks, we're going to have Abraham on our podcast-only segment coming up, so if you're following us there, be sure to tune in, Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, available on all of those. But, Abe, tell us about your podcast.

Tell us where people can follow you for our radio listeners here. Definitely. It's really easy. Abe4AG.com. And there's my campaign announcement video, which is hard charging. I encourage everybody to go watch it. It's pretty fiery. Oh, yeah. It's good. But you know what? That's what we need right now. We need courageous leaders. And there's no substitute for courage at this moment. Are there any chassis in it? That's the real question. No, it's not going to be boring. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Folks, be sure to tune in again next week, 3 p.m. Saturday on 960 AM The Patriot. You can always follow us. The podcast goes up about Tuesday the following week. Burn the potholes. Back next week. The 2020 political field was intense, so don't get left behind in 2021. If you're running for political office, the first thing on your to-do list needs to be securing your name on the web with a yourname.vote domain from GoDaddy. Get yours now.

Welcome back to the podcast only segment of Broken Potholes. Thank you for tuning in. Please like, share, get this podcast to your friends. Our audience is growing every week and we appreciate all of you for tuning in.

Thank you again. Also, thank you, Abraham Hamadi. In studio today, abe4ag.com. Did I get that right? Yep, too easy. Okay, yeah, that is way too easy. Your opponents need that to be more difficult. Right. Well, I got a difficult last name, so we made it easy with the Abe4AG. Good old Irish boy's last name, right? Little boy from Dublin. Yeah.

Tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background. I think you have an interesting story to tell, and I think listeners would like to know more about it. Sure. I think in order to get to know me, you first have to know where my family came from. I was born in Chicago. My family, they're Syrian immigrants. They came here 30-some-odd years ago. My parents did. And just a typical American dream. They came here with nothing. No education, no money, and just nothing.

We moved around so much, but once my parents discovered, actually randomly, they got some reward to go stay at the Scottsdale Princess in 1996. And this was back when Scottsdale Road was barely, it was all desert. So they sat through two days of the timeshare thing? I mean, they landed in January, and they're coming from Chicago, right? So they're like, wow. Yeah.

We didn't realize there was like a Syria in America, a Middle East type weather place. So I think they fell in love with it, obviously. And I'm glad they did. So I've been here since I've been five and moved around all around the Valley. You know, I grew up in, I would say more Scottsdale. And I went to high school up in Cave Creek at Cactus Shadows. So definitely the old cowboy country up there. But Arizona is my home. I love it. And I've traveled the world. I've been to 20 some odd countries, um,

And every, you know, Arizona just,

And it's beautiful. You forget how great it is until you go to other states. You're paying for toll roads. I mean, it's just a miserable place. I don't know how people do it. I mean, I hope we haven't let it out of the bag that Arizona is such a beautiful state. But I know there's a lot of people moving into it right now. Even before COVID, and I said this all the time before COVID because my folks live in New York and I have a lot of friends in California. You go and visit them and it felt oppressive because the government is crawling around.

up here wazoo at every opportunity yeah i think we have the benefit of being the 48th state so we were the last state on the continental united states so we learned i mean their grid system is great i mean we've learned a lot from the mistakes of other states and this benefit of being last same with why i jumped in the race so last i got a benefit of learning from the mistakes of my candidates right there let me ask you this question because you heard this a lot in 2021 you grew up in arizona yes um

Did you ever face any bullying because you're Syrian? Did you experience that at all in Arizona? No, never. I mean, I remember 9-11 happened. Obviously, that was a tragic incident.

incident and terrorist attack, but never, you know, what's a beautiful, you know, beautiful thing about America. It's such an open and diverse country. Correct. You know, I've been around the world and I'll tell you other countries are racist. America is not racist. Exactly. When I heard an American tell me that's like, you've never been outside the country. No, I mean, you go to Japan. I mean, Japan's a great country. I mean, you go, it's like a very homogenous country. You go to Saudi Arabia, you go to anywhere else, Lebanon, wherever. I assure you like racism is,

exists. The beauty of America, it's the melting pot. It's the melting pot. And we're a nation of ideas, not a nation of skin color, a nation of, you know, ethnicity. And that's what I love about this country. That's what I'm going to fight for. And that's why, you know, being in the military is the best. It's the biggest melt. You know, in Arizona, we don't really deal with a lot of Southerners. I never did really. So, you know, I met with Mississippians, you meet West Virginians, you know, I think that's a whole different culture. And what's great is that you

put on that uniform you have that american flag on the on your shoulder sleeve and you're you know saluting to the one anthem right and now i come back to country what is it nfl plays a a black national anthem you know it's it's something that i've it's odd because in the army in the military what you know it's all about unity and fighting for the constitution and that's something that we need to uphold i've heard a lot of people who've served in the military talk about how it doesn't matter what skin color you come in with you're coming out green oh yeah

Oh, yeah, definitely. It doesn't matter what religion, what race, anything. But right now, unfortunately, what you're seeing is, I mean, the radical left has tried to dominate every aspect of our lives. And it's, I mean, with corporations, right? You can't even talk about NBA players can't even speak out against China. Now you're seeing the military, this critical race theory has been a joke, but it's

It's infesting our lives. And I'm glad right now what we saw in Virginia. I mean, you see moms pushing back, right? And that's great to see. So hopefully, you know, we're pushing back against the radical left's agenda. Because honestly, they think we're crazy. But no, there's the 0.01% on Twitter. I'm going to put you on the spot if it's OK, Abe. Because we actually had something pop up that, frankly, I think the AG right now needs to get involved with. I don't know if you've seen this at all with what's going on in the Scottsdale Unified School District. Yeah.

But you have the board president apparently conspiring with the superintendent. Who has no kids, by the way. Right. How is he even on a board for a school district when he has no kids? And to spy and dox, including potentially making public the Social Security numbers of parents who are objecting to their COVID policies. Right. He needs to be prosecuted. He needs to resign. What's going on is...

They're trying to silence us, you know, and they're doing it through bullying. This is a very communist tactic. It's a very authoritarian tactic. And he needs to resign. I mean, you just all this information, social security numbers, odd things to have. Right. To have a dossier on all these things. When you have your board president in a disguise.

On a motorcycle. Was he in a trench coat? Yeah. Taking photographs of license plates of parents? He needs to be gone or recalled. I mean, he's a disaster. Frankly, I hope they go for some sort of criminal prosecution. I agree. Right. I mean, it's...

It's really sad to see. All these parents are doing, they're worried about their children, right? And what the school boards, they've gotten a lot of power over the years. There was a good report, I think it was done by AEI, American Enterprise Institute, talking about the consolidation of school boards. It used to be 75,000 just about 40 years ago, 75,000 school boards. It's now consolidated across the country. Now it's consolidated down to 16,000. So you're seeing this mass concentration of school boards are becoming a

expensive races. And why did we do that? Was it based on expenses? Is that why? I think it was based on expenses and also just based on trying to consolidate these powers for the unions, right? I mean, they can have more power to influence these elections. Well, we talked about conservatives have really ignored public schools for a while. We've been very big on choice and we don't

need to get back involved in these school board races. But as Abe said, you talk about these races getting expensive. When someone goes out and has $100,000 from a union to spend on a school board race, they have a massive advantage over somebody's mom who has five grand that she's gotten from scraped up from her friends.

And we see that across the government over and over and over as the left is using government unions, government contracts, same thing we were just talking about with Build Back Better. They're funneling all these monies through government into their political activities.

And massively outspending their opposition. Yeah. And really in a very deceptive way. Oh, I mean, you're saying Mark Kelly, you know, raising, you know, 100 million dollars for U.S. Senate races. Right. The left is much better at this than the Republicans. Right.

And it's going to get expensive. And you're seeing George Soros is definitely going to get involved in my race, the attorney general's race. Absolutely. Just like how he was involved in, you know, what's, you know, district attorney races across the country. And you're seeing Chase, you know, the San Francisco D.A. Chase, the literal socialist who was raised by Bill Ayers. No, he's crazy. And you're seeing the he's become the criminal defense firm for criminals. I mean, it's insane. He's not a problem. You're seeing all these prosecutors resigning in mass.

I mean, it is... It ruined the city. Oh, yeah. But it's hopeful, for instance, that in New York they just elected Eric Adams, an ex-cop, to be mayor, but the guy who was elected as the city attorney...

is left of the previous city attorney. I mean, basically saying they'll refuse to prosecute anybody who doesn't have white skin. Right. It's very scary that they've really taken over the justice system as well. You know, they've even hijacked the term justice, racial justice, social justice. It's scary. And this is a part of the reason why I'm running. I'm not going to sit back and just let my country fall apart like this. This is why I jumped in, you know, at this stage of my life. I'm ready to fight.

Well, that is a good way to end this segment. Yeah, I was just about to say the same thing. I can't say anything better than that. Go fight win. Tell us again where we can find more information on you. It's at AbeForAG.com. AbeForAG.com. What about Twitter? Yeah, so it's my first and last name, Abraham Hamaday, so...

Okay, we're going to have to find Abe4AG on Twitter for you. We do already have. That's a campaign account. I have my personal account. I do my late night tweets like Donald Trump used to. So you'll see tweets at 2 in the morning probably. And I assure you, it's me tweeting it out. Folks, thank you for tuning in. Tune in again next week. We love you. We appreciate you. Like, share this with your friends. Get it out there because we're having a good time in here in the studio and we want to keep doing it. We want to keep entertaining you.

To do that, we need you to be tuning in and getting this program out there to more people. Broken Potholes will be back next week. The political field is all about reputation, so don't let someone squash yours online. Secure your name and political future with a yourname.vote web address from godaddy.com. Your political career depends on it.