Listen in as Florida stories entertain and baffle with a mix of bizarre and daring escapades. Craig Collins offers sharp commentary on political antics, bringing humor to the absurdity of it all. This episode also delves into serious topics like media settlements with Trump, showcasing the intricate web of news and politics.
Listen as students and young adults interview well-respected CEOs on our national radio show, realworldleaders.org, to learn secrets for success and how to use them to propel their careers.
SPEAKER 02 :
I think it was really inspiring how Mr. Levin just keeps on wanting to grow and learn more from the people around him, his peers and his advisor, his father even.
SPEAKER 12 :
Anya, how do you want to grow?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, I’m also trying to grow my communications. I just became the communications chair of my school’s TA, student government.
SPEAKER 12 :
Hey, Brett, this thing about communication, how important is that? And how important is for Anya to continue to develop these communication skills?
SPEAKER 03 :
It’s so important. And I think today, as kids, you have your cell phones in your hands all the time and learn how to look people in the eye, publicly speak and talk to people.
SPEAKER 01 :
To hear more and to help us introduce your high school, GED, work-ready and college students to our CEOs, visit our website at realworldleaders.org. That’s realworldleaders.org.
SPEAKER 04 :
Dana Lash’s Absurd Truth Podcast, sponsored by Kel-Tec.
SPEAKER 13 :
It’s his life mission to make bad decisions. It’s time for Florida Man.
SPEAKER 11 :
That’s right. It’s time for Florida Man. This is the Dana Show. D-Lash, Dana Lash Radio on X on Twitter. The best ways to stay connected to her and everything she’s doing. Producer Steven does a great job, as well does Dana herself, at keeping you up to date on all the information, all the things going on via their social media pages. We’ve got a few different Florida Man stories. A Florida man was arrested near the Mark Twain National Forest for drug trafficking. This feels like an odd place. to do this, although honestly, it’s Florida. They’re probably doing it everywhere. Well, that sounds like something I shouldn’t say out of context. They’re probably selling drugs a whole lot of places. But this individual, the United States Forest Service officer William Cox said, was observed in a Dodge van that crossed the center line of Highway 99 in a careless manner. According to the probable cause affidavit, Cox initiated the traffic stop and identified the driver by his Florida driver’s license as David Larkin. Cox asked Larkin if he had been drinking alcohol, and Larkin stated that the reason he crossed the center line was that he was attempting to retrieve a soda that had dropped in the back of his car. That’s not usually a good excuse. It’s better than, yeah, I got a bunch of drugs in here. Officer Cox eventually requested to have the Missouri State Highway Patrol on the search, and substance included methamphetamine, mushrooms, 57 grams of marijuana, drug paraphernalia, all kinds of different things. This is crazy, but this Florida man caught in Missouri for this problem seemed to be just absolutely very much impacted. by all the different drugs that he had taken. He also was in possession of different paraphernalia that luckily was not hidden anywhere in his body. We did a story yesterday about a guy out of Florida who not only had the drugs on him, but he hid it in a place you wouldn’t want to hide stuff. At least in this case, the dude just had everything on display out there in the open. But I love the fact that his excuse was, I’m just trying to grab a soda, man. And that turns into this whole thing. But that’s one Florida man out there living up to his Florida man reputation. Another Florida guy that’s in the news is, well, actually a Florida woman who had to tread water for 12 hours after falling out of a canoe. A Good Samaritan eventually rescued the woman. This was in Charlotte Harbor. She is lucky to be alive, of course. She’s kind of impressively alive because, again, she accidentally fell out of her canoe at around 9 p.m. in what is kind of hilariously called Peace River. That’s near Charlotte Harbor. She was found by Good Samaritan, as I said, almost 12 miles later, just a mile away from the shore. She might have been trying to get there. The guy who found her said, I heard someone yelling, help. And I looked over, and here’s a woman yelling help, and she could wave her hands. Amazing that she could do that with that much time spent in the water. But again, he was able to save her. Maybe she’s experienced in this. Maybe she’s aware of how to survive hours of being stuck in the ocean because she’s, in fact, from Florida. I’m not really exactly sure. But nonetheless, this is kind of the craziest thing. And honestly, I’m reacting to this a little bit oddly, and I’ll tell you why. The story about that guy who saved his kid, the guy who jumped in the water on a Disney cruise and saved his child and wound up treading water for like, I don’t know, 40 minutes or something like that before they saved him. A lot of people were saying that’s impressive. This Florida woman just crushed that. 12 hours went by between when she fell out of the canoe and when she was inevitably saved. And the fact that the individual in that amount of time was like, I’ll be fine. I can figure this out is part of the reason I think that so many Florida stories go viral because even in their successes, the people seem to pretend as though this is just normal happenstance, everyday life, a version of a thing. And she did something fairly incredible. All right. One last story. And to be honest, with these Florida stories, they usually shy away from anything all too violent, but this one, there’s something about it that’s kind of crazy. Well, there’s a lot of things about it that’s crazy and horrible. A Florida man who killed his family after his wife sought a divorce is finally set for execution. The Florida man, who I think on Tuesday had a death warrant signed by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, is a unique piece of crap. He pled guilty in 1996 to three counts of first-degree murder. This was killing his wife, Sylvia, and their two children, who were seven and five years old. Edward is seven. Ana is five. uh… the reason i bring up a story or talk about this at all and again it’s not as fun as a bunch of florida man stories are uh… and honestly it’s in reference to something i was talking about a second ago uh… to or a little bit ago earlier go uh… is harming children is the type of thing that even Jesus said in the Bible is uniquely horrible. The quote, I believe, from the Bible is that if an arm that you have, a hand that you have, would cause you to hurt an innocent child, it would be better for you to cut it off and throw it at the bottom of the ocean than to keep it and harm innocent kids. So it was the most aggressive thing that’s in the Bible where Jesus himself, where the Lord was saying something unique and something bad. So whenever people are up in arms and have discussions about the death penalty, and I am one who often sides with my faith on that, I do think that people who do horrible stuff like this are the exception to the rule. And I am not at all disappointed to see that this person will be facing justice in the way he will be facing it. It seems like the kind of thing that the family of anyone that was lost would absolutely be thrilled to finally see. All right, we’ll take a break. A lot coming up. Greg Collins filling in on The Dana Show.
SPEAKER 08 :
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SPEAKER 04 :
Why has the housing market absolutely tanked? The Watchdog on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day, Chris helps unpack the connection between politics and the economy and how it affects your wallet. When is the right time to buy a house? Market uncertainty is everywhere, including AI, tariffs. Is the Fed lowering interest rates? Don’t expect the housing market to recover anytime soon. Whether it’s happening in D.C. or down on Wall Street, it’s affecting you financially. Be informed. Check out the Watchdog on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER 11 :
For anyone that’s unaware, as the show is live, McKeem Jeffries is continuing to talk on the House floor in what is not a filibuster, but it’s definitely a filibuster. He was supposed to speak for one minute as the minority leader in the House before a vote. He’s supposed to get the, you know, simple magic minute treatment. And he stretched it out into a ridiculous thing. And I wanted to check on it. I believe we have some audio of it. That’s what it sounds like. That’s Hakeem Jeffries just doing his best Charlie Brown teacher up there doing whatever he wants to do. You know what? Actually, I do have actual audio. My favorite is that this one moment, this one statement he made has gone viral. And so when Jeffries finds out that a vast majority of the things he said, very few people cared about, which he doesn’t know. He’s probably not on Twitter as he’s speaking now. But when he gets on it later and sees, he’ll be fairly upset that this is the thing we all took away. But this is a brilliant, brilliant moment for us to focus on, and I’ll tell you why. Here it is.
SPEAKER 09 :
Manu wasn’t the only one. The only American citizen who’s been targeted by the deportation machine. A deportation machine… that will be unleashed on steroids by this one big ugly bill.
SPEAKER 11 :
Okay, that’s the moment where he’s talking about deportation and whatnot, and he says if this ugly, horrible bill passes, then it’s going to be a deportation on steroids. A whole lot of people on social media, on both sides of the political aisle, are yelling, don’t threaten me with a good time, because they’d absolutely like to see that happen. And I continue to point this out whenever I talk about this, uniquely on the left. During the Biden administration, excuse me, before Trump retook office, a whole lot of people were realizing how bad it is for a bunch of government money to be funneled to people who don’t have the right to be in this country. And all the different things they thought were no longer possible, not that maybe they were being funded to begin with, but no longer possible because the excuse of we have no money left was being used, like this outside of Chicago. where a whole lot of Democratic voters, a lot of black individuals, were saying their community has been unfairly treated for a very long time and they deserve additional government support, regardless of if you agree with them or disagree with them. And they were livid. that the newest excuse they were being told by a black mayor in Chicago was that he simply couldn’t afford it. He gave too much money to the people with no right to be here. And that part is true. The massive amount of spending that has existed in New York and Chicago all throughout the country to deal with this is surreal. It’s crazy. By the way, I believe Hakeem Jeffries finally finished his marathon speech on the House floor, and we are going to do something that’s going to be quite a bit of fun to go ahead and finish this off. So I have some audio of Jeffrey’s that I’ll play, and then we’ll go ahead and play this guy off. Here we go.
SPEAKER 09 :
We’re going to press on. We’re going to press on for our children.
SPEAKER 11 :
Uh-huh.
SPEAKER 09 :
Press on for our seniors. Press on for our veterans. Press on for our unions. Press on for our farmers. Press on for our dreamers. Press on for working class Americans. Press on for the middle class. Press on for all who aspire to be part of the middle class. Press on for the poor. Press on for the sick. Press on for the afflicted. Press on for the lease.
SPEAKER 11 :
It would be a little funny if he started saying, like, press on for me. Press on for my family. Press on for, you know, the guy who’s going to make me my sandwich later today.
SPEAKER 09 :
Press on for the lost. Press on for the left behind. Press on for the rule of law. Press on for the American way of life. Press on for democracy. We’re going to press on until victory is won. I yield back.
SPEAKER 11 :
And it’s over. It’s finally, finally over. Yay. Yay. That’s what he deserves for it to be. I love that the end message there is we’re going to press on, we’re going to press on, we’re going to press on, and now I’m done. It seems that he immediately decided to stop pressing on right after claiming that he was going to continue to press on, which is a weird thing to say or a weird thing to do. And I love also that Democrats seem so proud of themselves that they thought of saying the word press on as he’s speaking. I’m not sure if that was pre-coordinated. I’m going to assume it was. But even if it wasn’t, it wasn’t exactly a genius stroke move. And they’re all smiling as they’re throwing their hands in the air saying press on. Press on. And then immediately, again, the guy ends his speech. You’d feel like that should have probably been the start of the whole thing, where he then does the marathon speaking thing when he claims he will not yield, he will not sit down, he will not be stopped, because it’s uniquely hilarious. One last time. I feel like I’m belaboring the point, but I can’t help it for someone to say that and then be done something. It would be like me in the middle of some sort of argument, discussion or anything with the missus and be like, you know what? I’m not giving in on this, honey. On this one, I’m sticking to my guns. On this one, I refuse to be changed in my opinion. And then immediately I’m swayed and I’m like, you know what? Actually, I’m done. Actually, it’s fine. My wife might threaten to, you know, not do certain things. I don’t know how I could say that different. And then all of a sudden I’m like, you know what?
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SPEAKER 13 :
And now, all of the news you would probably miss. It’s time for Dana’s Quick Five.
SPEAKER 11 :
That’s right. It’s time for the Quick Five on the Dana Show. My name is Craig Collins filling in. Thrilled to be with you. D-Lash, Dana Lash, Radio and X on Twitter. Great ways to stay connected to her. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine did sign a two-year, $60 billion operating budget. It flattens the state’s income tax. It sets aside $600 million in unclaimed funds for a new Cleveland Brown Stadium. That was a big deal in the world of football news today. The Republican governor signed the budget late Monday night, about 45 minutes before the midnight deadline. And as you’re parsing through all of it, you see just how much money is being earmarked for a sweet, sweet new stadium for the Browns. Whether or not that makes the Browns actually capable of, say, winning a Super Bowl is something that’s yet to be determined. But we will see how that goes and what the inevitable result may be. But at least there’ll be somewhere swankier. They’ll be somewhere fancier as they’re losing in heartbreak fashion in the playoffs, which just sounds like a brutal thing for me to keep saying. And yet it’s true. And I’m not a Browns fan, as anyone can tell. Although I don’t really hate them. How can you hate people that don’t win? Anyway, moving on. Other stuff out there. That was probably epically mean. I apologize. Well, nobody. South Park season debut has been delayed by streaming rights that are in limbo. South Park is a uniquely interesting show to me. One, because even though they have a lot of left-leaning thoughts that pop up there, they have a lot of hilarious trolling of the left-leaning thoughts as well. I don’t know that I would really consider the people who run South Park to truly be a liberal, but they’re certainly no fan of President Trump. So they’re definitely people that are willing to go after anyone politically. But what’s unique and interesting about this story is that essentially the streaming rights have become more valuable than the television rights to the show. Something the founders and creators of South Park have long fought for and fought to, you know, retain. Because I think that more and more people just watch everything via streaming services. There’s almost nothing. that it feels like, especially Hakeem Jeffries being a moron and complaining for a while on the House floor and trying to filibuster and claim it’s not a filibuster. That’s the kind of stuff you don’t need live television for. You can get the highlights on an ex on Twitter and feel really good about yourself. That’s all you need. A beloved performer by the name of Red Panda fell off her unicycle and she was taken off the court in a wheelchair during the halftime of a WNBA game. This happened in Indianapolis. The woman is, you know, popular because she rides the unicycle, puts plates in her head, does that whole thing, and apparently quite good at it, been doing it quite a long time. An accident happened right at the beginning of her performance, and she did seem to be seriously injured. She did walk off the court with the help of others. I got to feel like that’s a weird moment. You’re at the game. I don’t think that many people bought their tickets, even to a WNBA game, to see the Red Panda. I think you might have gone to see Caitlin Clark, who was unfortunately injured and didn’t play in that game. But when you see that person get hurt during the halftime show or a timeout performance, I know you uniquely feel bad about them, but you also kind of wonder if maybe they shouldn’t have had that planned. You know, maybe they could have done something else during the halftime show. Although I’m sure as long as she’s successful at balancing the plates and staying on the unicycle, you’re cheering, you’re applauding, and then you’re waiting for the game to start again. But yes, sad story. Definitely something that a lot of people seem to care about because this lady has been performing a lot of places for a very long time. All right, other stories out there as far as Quick Five go. Amazon deploys its one millionth robot in a sign of more job automation occurring. I’ve said this a few times. Even though I believe in what are aspects of what I think the big, beautiful bill is going to try to achieve, the ramping up of manufacturing, creation of products right here at home in the United States for U.S. citizens, I think what is more likely to happen in the both short and long term is a whole lot of that will wind up being automated. and it can be automated abroad or it can be automated here we’d obviously rather have it automated here for a variety of reasons but i think that that is inevitably the future as does almost everybody else and this is another one of those signs of our times seeming to tell us that yeah this is what’s coming and this is how quickly it’s coming and you know we’ll do everything we can to avoid it but truthfully the creation of those jobs is probably a temporary not a long-term solution And then finally, one last one as far as quick five go. California just rolled back a landmark environmental policy. There’s quite a bit to deep dive into here. But the overarching thing, it’s a law that was signed in the 1970s. It was actually signed by Governor Ronald Reagan at the time. But it’s something that the Trump administration, a lot of these policies have been pushing back on for quite some time now. And many, many states, many cities all seem to be finally bending the knee. So rolling back some environmental policies and natural and protected land exclusions from certain exemptions does feel like you appreciate no matter what they say publicly, no matter how defiantly they speak. that the person in charge is definitively the guy in the White House. And so I like that. I’m a fan of that. It’s unique that actually the policy was originally signed by Ronald Reagan. All right, we’re going to take a break. A lot coming up. Craig Collins filling in on The Dana Show. This is lying for the sake of lying, so let’s do this first, and then I’ll get to CNN reacting to how good the economy is doing. which they seem very upset about. But this is Brian Stelter being rolled out, the idiot that he is, in front of cameras and microphones. I think this is PBS giving him an opportunity to talk and say how he thinks CBS did nothing wrong. that the way they added their kamala harris interview with standard tv news editing practices which is terrifying and i’ll be honest about that to brian stelter uh… fighting the uh… good fights at least in his mind the bad fight the rest of us i try to convince us that uh… a settlement from a news organization to President Trump in his library because they absolutely did something they shouldn’t have done and not getting the actual court case where we would have gotten even more awesome information about it is somehow a nothing-to-see-here moment. U.S. citizens should be paying attention to this. The everyday Americans should wonder why multiple news organizations are having to pay President Trump money. And it should be screaming from their minds and from our mouths that this means that media is as corrupt and lies as often as we think it does. And it’s unsurprising. And media is trying to do its best to pretend that that’s not true. Here we go.
SPEAKER 07 :
So, Brian, this is not the first major media company to settle with President Trump. You’ve been following this, though. Did anything in this settlement or its terms surprise you?
SPEAKER 10 :
Well, CBS did not actually do anything wrong here. CBS engaged in standard television news editing practices, but it’s…
SPEAKER 11 :
I love that. CBS definitively changed the answer to a question. An interview question was asked of Kamala Harris. The answer she gave was not actually to the question she was asked, and it was cleaned up profoundly to not sound as loopy and weird, which was a major criticism of the candidate running for the office of president, that she spoke in these giant circles that seemed to make no sense, which is what she did in response to a very important question, and they removed that. But I digress. Standard operating news editing practices.
SPEAKER 10 :
Their company paid the price anyway, with some people likening this to a ransom or even a bribe. The terms are not surprising because, as you said, Paramount’s not the first company to do this. Disney’s ABC in some ways wrote the playbook that Paramount is now relying on. Because last December, when Trump was still president-elect, ABC settled with Trump out of court to the tune of $16 million. So here we are again with $16 million heading toward Trump’s presidential library.
SPEAKER 11 :
I love how he makes that sound as though that’s somehow an indication that the money that’s being spent on these cases is, you know, not real. Essentially, what I mean by that is he thinks that because both organization spent the same amount that that means that they’re just giving in or paying a ransom or a bribe and they didn’t do anything wrong when the reality is that the second organization noticed what their mistake actually deserved to cost so the first organization sets the the standard Because we’ve never really seen this. We’ve never seen a sitting president use the legal system to go after the amount of news organizations he’s going after in courtrooms and winning by saying that they deceptively did certain things during a campaign. And so when ABC lost, which is what happens when you settle and give the money, CNN or excuse me, CBS decided, all right, that’s probably the amount of money we owe for our version of this crime. which we also committed. I love that a stelter, though, it’s just simple proof that, oh, that’s the number they’ll accept. So we’ll just do that and we’ll make the whole thing go away. I can’t understand how there are people in our society who don’t think this is an important story. actually believe the things that Stelter is saying on lying news media, that like, it’s not a bigger deal that organizations are paying the president and his library significant sums of money as a reaction to the way that they unfairly covered the 2024 presidential election. This should matter. And I know I’m repeating myself in saying it, but I don’t know how not to because it’s crazy that it doesn’t. All right, quick topic change here, and then we’ll take a break in a few minutes. CNN’s Berman was pained when he had to tell the audience that job losses didn’t materialize that inflation hasn’t gone the way that it was supposed to go that essentially all of the projections about what trumps tariff threats in an actual tariffs would do to our economy and society just haven’t occurred and so a ton of people uh… jim kramer certainly among them who said that by now everything would be a you know smoking crater of what it was supposed to be uh… is gotta look us in the face and say we were very wrong about this and pretend they don’t know the reason why other reason why of course being that all along they should have been aware that nothing would go as badly as they were projecting it to go and they actually were hoping for a worst case scenario to blame it on Trump, which is uniquely bad in our society to have people in media cheering on like an economic downturn that would be catastrophic because they want to be right more than they want their friends and families to keep their houses. That does seem to be a play. But here’s the back and forth where Berman is saying he seems to be upset that things just haven’t gone completely in the bleep, you know, the way that they’re supposed to.
SPEAKER 05 :
Again, since, you know, March and before, there were predictions that the tariffs, and granted, a lot of them had pulled back, most of them had pulled back, but all that tariff policy was going to lead perhaps to inflation, would lead to job losses, predictions of doom. That doom just hasn’t happened yet.
SPEAKER 11 :
What is going on? Why hasn’t it happened? He’s asking his guest. He’s going to weigh in with all kinds of stupid stuff.
SPEAKER 06 :
It hasn’t happened. And, you know, John, I’ve been doing a lot of reporting on this topic. What I’m hearing is that for the last few years, really since COVID, but even before, companies have realized that their supply chains can be interrupted for lots of reasons, for a virus, for a geopolitical event, for a war, for a climate event. And so they’ve been using technology to really streamline things. They’ve been getting their systems in place. And there’s just a lot more efficiency in the system now. They
SPEAKER 11 :
can survive it. These resilient, amazing companies can deal with the horribleness that is the president of the United States is basically what she’s trying to say or the position she’s trying to take on that so that they can be right, media, that things should be bad, but also the companies can somehow succeed because of how much forethought they put into this. There’s no chance that the other thing that’s true is that it’s just simply not having the negative impact that they thought it would have and things are going way better than you believe they go. That can’t be true. That can’t possibly be the reason for this. And even some of these policies are actually causing companies to hire even more people with the expectation that you might even create more product here in the United States, which is the entire design in the first place of this whole thing. I love that they wouldn’t even dare to dabble in that road.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thanks for tuning in to today’s edition of Dana Lash’s Absurd Truth Podcast. If you haven’t already, make sure to hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
