Ep. 349 - When the Going Gets Trough

Happy Election Day, the one day a year we all pretend this system works. In Alaska, a Senate race features two candidates named Dan Sullivan, and one of them was allegedly (definitely) recruited by the other side to siphon votes from the other Dan.Meanwhile, you need an ID to buy cold medicine, board a plane, or rent a kayak, but asking for one before you choose a senator is apparently a hate crime. Do your research, vote your conscience, and if you’re in Alaska, pick a Dan. Any Dan.

With the midterms bearing down, Brad has finally found a candidate worth getting excited about. He lives in a tree outside Brad’s window, he doesn’t pretend to be a different species, and he has never married a cousin or a sibling. Also, he’s a squirrel. And look at the country he’d be inheriting: furries who expect to be taken seriously, rioters who call a Louis Vuitton heist a protest, a New York mayor rescuing carriage horses straight into the glue factory, and a Virginia man who would rather spend a night in jail than one more evening of Sunday Night Football with his wife. In a place like that, a candidate who spends all fall saving for winter looks like the only fiscal conservative in the race.

There are two kinds of hustle: the one they taught in a first-grade gym in the late seventies, and the one Kimberly Guilfoyle ran as Ambassador to Greece. The second featured private jets paid for by foreign nationals, six-figure Amex bills pitched to Trump donors, and a shipping tycoon in an ascot who turned up so often the State Department assumed he was her chief of staff. Trump’s official position is that he’s pretty sure she dated his son. David and Brad sympathize with a president who has to staff 180 embassies from a talent pool that includes the Homeland Security secretary’s husband in a huge set of fake boobs. But the real problem is upstream. Only people willing to feed their families to the media and pass a purity test ever run, which gives us AOC in 2028 and Bernie Sanders, the socialist with four houses. Unfortunately the system is rigged up to prevent any sane person from ever running for office.

Nebraska is gutting Memorial Stadium in a $600 million renovation, and somewhere in the room a genius realized the men’s urinal trough would sell. Three grand and a local pickup in Lincoln gets 300 pounds of Husker history under the Christmas tree, bow included. Then the guys mourn the trough, the filter cigarette, and the last era when a man could pee in peace. Tennessee botches a lethal injection twice on Christa Pike, which has Brad ranking firing squads above any needle. A Russian bioweapons lab springs a plague leak, which will likely affect local property values. Congress remains the one workplace where nothing has been accomplished since Obamacare, and Brad admits he’d watch wrestleball before the WNBA.

David returns from Europe with a formal grievance against a hoity-toity hotel whose house rules ban robes, glassware, and dogs, and instruct guests to "obey." They also require a shirt and shoes but never mention pants, a loophole the guys are quick to find. In Milan, David is the only man in the city who doesn't care for a Negroni, which everyone around him is drinking, including Jason Momoa. And just as the duo was set to tackle the news, David's Mercedes locks with the keys inside. Our dedicated listeners will have to wait another week to unlock the headlines.

It’s the second best-of in a row. David and Brad are either too busy saving the world to record a new episode or hoping you won't notice. Either way, enjoy the highlights. New York's tenant czar says the way to dismantle white supremacy is to dismantle home ownership, a bold position that gets awkward when someone asks about her mother's $1.4 million Craftsman in Nashville. Then it's off to Venezuela, where Russia's top-of-the-line air defense system became molten slag in about three minutes and Maduro flew to New York in a blindfold and earmuffs without the US losing a man or a plane. And Greenland has 56,000 people, or 56,002 if that's where David and Brad are in fact saving the world.

An idiot swallows a Big Mac whole, an app lets you talk to your dead grandmother for a monthly fee, and somewhere in the White House, Joe Biden’s portrait was updated to a signature-stamping machine. David and Brad revisit the segments that still hold up, prove the news never actually gets better, and confirm that history, much like the Auto Pen, is written by whoever's currently holding the pen.

A hung jury hands Lindsay Clancy eleven votes to acquit and one lone holdout, on a defense theory that boils down to women being too hormonal to be held responsible for premeditated murder. David and Brad walk through the Google searches, the CVS alibi, and the exercise bands, then turn to the crowd in pink shorts who raised over a million dollars to cheer on a woman who strangled her own children one at a time. If hormones are dangerous enough to excuse that, the guys want to know why the same crowd is so eager to hand them to kids. Also, Neil Diamond may now be a hologram.

Atlanta has fully bureaucratized the fart: second graders now get a permitted emissions zone, a taxpayer-funded air freshener budget, and a command economy that's guaranteed to produce shortages, black markets, and worse air quality than it started with. David and Brad give the policy a windfall of criticism and predict the whole plan gets gassed the second a bean burrito enters the supply chain. Also on deck: Trudeau, long since voted out of relevance, blows through his post-office career as a full-time TikTok plunger dancer for girlfriend Katy Perry, right as the White House renames Lake Ontario "Lake America" purely to watch Canada erupt. Bob Kraft closes out a championship with a five-star happy ending while the Niners' owner gets busted breaking wind, and money, at a $140 trailer park sting. Norway's dead king leaves behind a royal email chain where the future queen helped Jeffrey Epstein go "wife hunting" for Scandinavians, a scandal with way more staying power than anything in that Atlanta classroom. And AI agents on Hugging Face get caught passing notes on black market message boards to cheat their assignments, which David reads as the first toxic emission of Judgment Day.

Prince Harry blew through a hundred million Netflix dollars on shows nobody watches and now wants his old bedroom back at the palace, which David and Brad note is a rough way to test the theory that you can never go home again. Meanwhile in Belgium, a 26 year old car salesman named Clement Vandenkerckhove gets a DNA test and a royal title, becoming a literal prince the same week Harry becomes a metaphorical pauper. Up at Penn State, a Sigma Chi and Delta Upsilon joint venture turns out to have been running a multimillion dollar cocaine operation, which the guys generously concede is at least ambitious for a fraternity. And in Massachusetts, hundreds of women in pink gather outside a courthouse to defend a mother who strangled her three children, which David and Brad call it what it is: evil, and a society that's started cheering it on.