00:00
All right, let's go to the WRD talk line. We'll talk to John and Marietta. How you doing, John?
00:08
doing well, sir. I'm not a first time caller, but can I still get the bell? I'll give you the bell. You want the bell. You want the bell. You get the bell, John. Yes, absolutely. What's up? Hey, so have you ever been to Los Angeles? No, I've not. OK, well, there's a place called La Brea. Yeah, right. You heard the La Brea tar pit. Yeah. You know what that is? Is it oil? What is it? I have no idea. It's it's bubbling up.
00:38
in london
01:02
out of the ground and they won't do anything with it. is the dangest thing you will ever see in your life. Well that's because they found some dinosaur bones in it.
01:12
Well, I don't do okay, good. I know, right? I'm kind of the same way. Okay, big deal. But grind, grind, grind them up and make a gallon of gas out of it. You're exactly right. I agree. John, you deserve that bill today. I appreciate it, buddy. But I'm looking at all of these all of these refineries and good. I thought. We got the closest one to us. Is actually I had no idea.
01:41
It is down in, I know y'all don't know anything about Pula, Georgia, but it's kind of near Pula. um Kind of you go down past Hilton Head, past Defuski, kind of east of Tybee Island, there's actually a, it's called the Coastal Refining Corporation. um They've got one there. Where's another one? That is really, that's the closest one to us.
02:11
Actually, we've got what is this? Oh never mind. That's something else um Let's see Got one down in Clearwater, Florida Then you go over to Louisiana How is that? Yeah, Louisiana, then you get into to the Texas area. You got some over there looking out on the West Coast We've got what I got. I just got a couple It's got it. I mean you would think the West Coast. Well, of course the West Coast
02:42
they're not going to be doing refining, right? They got to have all their greenie weenie ideologies going on there. So anyway, there you go. All well, you just heard top of the hour uh with Stacey Bartrow about the medical fraud accusations that were levied on a business up here in the upstate. Anytime you have a federal program, this is the weirdest thing, but it's not. It's not weird, it's weird, but it's not.
03:12
Every federal program is rife with fraud. Every single one of them. I don't care what it is. Somebody is out there trying to game the system. We saw that in Minnesota. We saw that with the Somali community.
03:34
um with their autism fraud and their home health care fraud and their learning center fraud. We got fraud up in North Carolina. Now we got fraud here in South Carolina.
03:48
I was shocked when I found out, listen to this, this is gonna blow your mind. 30%, 30 % of all of the hospice and home healthcare companies in the United States, 30 % of them are in LA County.
04:10
30%. So they were like, hey, wait a minute, hold on. Let's kind of find out what's going on here. And a lot is going on.
04:21
18 % of the entire country's home health care billing is coming out of Los Angeles. One doctor billed the government $120 million in a single year claiming to oversee 1,900 patients.
04:38
Los Angeles County has over 2000 hospice agencies. That's more than 36 states combined. And now finally it is so big that the mainstream media they're having to pay attention to it. 69 year old Doctor Lynn Ioni was according to Medicare records dying in hospice care two years ago, something she discovered when she sought physical therapy for a pickleball injury. And I said what? What are you talking about?
05:08
Ioni's Medicare number had been stolen and used by a company to enroll her in hospice care, which she obviously didn't need. Just to think you're literally without coverage because of some ridiculous fraudulent thing. A CBS News investigation found an industry ripe for fraud, especially in California. Companies accused of over billing. Real patients denied care.
05:32
and it's costing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. When we called the hospice at fraudulently enrolled IONI, no one answered. uh CBS News analyzed every hospice licensed in LA County, more than 1,700, and checked for the same warning signs the state used in an audit of the industry, like multiple hospices packed into one building, or caregivers whose patients, supposedly at death's door, are discharged alive.
05:57
You can't throw a rock without hitting a hospice. brought our. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and she's absolutely right. One building. In Los Angeles, one building had 67 hospice agencies in it. 67.
06:15
But I'm gonna tell you the...
06:18
the bigger the organization.
06:22
the easier they are to defraud.
06:27
And that's just a fact. That's just a fact. In fact, wasn't it Lawrence County where they got defrauded here recently? I think it was.
06:43
um Yeah, Lawrence County is suing, they filed a lawsuit claiming that it was scammed out of more than a million dollars by cyber criminals who pretended to be their contractor, Mashburn Construction Company. The lawsuit claims that the county was tricked into sending money through a new bank account set up by the criminals. And they tell us not to give out any information, right? Don't give out any personal information online.
07:12
Hey, yeah, yeah, this is Mashburn. How you doing? Yeah, we got a new bank account. If you wouldn't mind, just kind of pay us with that bank account. Okey-dokey.
07:22
I'm pretty sure I was a little more involved than that, but...
07:27
fraud is everywhere.
07:30
The lawsuit states that the county was tricked into sending money through a new bank account set up by the criminals. The county is seeking to recover the lost funds and has requested that the court freeze the fraudulent bank account among other actions. I bet they did. I'll bet they did. When we get back, well, let's go to Justin in Silva and talk to him. Justin, welcome. And by the way, I got it right this time. Yes, you did. I got it right this time. Would I actually, all that fraud sounds pretty...
07:59
pretty awful, you know, to that extent that there's that much fraud going on. Yeah. What I actually wanted to talk about is ah I don't know why more people on the right aren't uh talking about electric cars nowadays uh because they've in the past 10, 15 years, electric cars have gotten, you know, so improved. And yet we're still, you know, we're still clean to oil and gas, even under
08:28
Donald Trump, very oil and gas friendly president, bombs drop on the other side of the world and prices jump 50 cents a gallon. We'd be way better off as far as energy security is concerned if we embraced more electricity because we uh can produce basically 100 % of our need domestically without needing to import so much from...
08:55
But here's the thing. Here's the thing about that. We don't have the electric grid to handle that.
09:04
We just don't have the electric end. mean, hell, we can hardly keep up with the amount of people that are moving here to Greenville to meet their electricity demands. And then we've got the data centers and all of that. I'm telling you what, that needs to be a big, big um thing that needs to be improved in this country is handling our electric grid, because it's in bad shape. Justin, I appreciate it. Got to hit a break here. It's the Charlie James Show.
09:33
Newstalk 989 W O R D. voice of the Carolinas.
10:03
Alright, let's hit the phone lines and talk to Jay, no we'll talk to Reid in Greenville. Reid, welcome. Hey, it's all good here. Alright. I just wanted to make a comment about electric cars. mean, yeah, it'd be great. I'd love to have an electric car, but you know, they cost a lot of money. Yeah. And you have to have enough stuff at your house to charge the dang things. And I looked at this years ago, so it's probably not correct today, but years ago I looked at just automobiles.
10:33
And I said, okay, here's how many cars they say we've got. Here's what an average mileage was at the time. And so here's how many, uh how much gasoline we're using. Here's how many, how much energy that is. And how much would it take in solar power, I think it was solar that I used, to come up with that much energy. And we would have had to cover up, I believe it was more,
11:02
than the area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park completely with solar panels in order to meet just the automobile's usage of fuel. Just automobiles. That's no transfer trucks, ships, no planes, no nothing. And so, yeah, I mean, it would be great if we could all drive around with electric cars, but the fact of the matter is, like you said, today, I know this for a fact.
11:31
because I have family that works in utilities. Today, we are seeing orange and red grid situations and companies are going, don't touch anything at the plant because we can't afford to lose any power. That was never the case, never the case when I worked for the power industry at a power plant.
11:52
25 years ago. happened. Yeah. Now it happens all the day in town. Yep. And with more and more of these data centers going up, it's going to be an even bigger problem. I appreciate it, Reed. Now we'll go to Jay and Lawrence. Jay, welcome.
12:07
Bye.
12:11
And I'm gonna put it out there as the United States Americans, all right? One, it's really, it's two comments about it. One is, who the hell can afford it? And they're expensive. mean, in South Carolina, what's all these-
12:33
Hmm, let's see, maybe your electric bill's be a thousand bucks a month, that's awesome. Yeah. I'm-
12:42
in the scope of 400 something horsepower down the road and carry it up and make noise. I'm American man. I'm not one of those foreigners. I'm American. I want to blow up the roads. You're one of those four barrel V8 guys. I appreciate it Jay. Thank you. Somebody sent a text in and that's when it hit me because we've been sitting here talking about the price of gas. How many times have you had to fill up? This war has been going on for 11 days.
13:13
How many times have you had to fill up in the past 11 days? Now, I'm not talking about you truck drivers out there. I know that's a different story. Not delivery drivers or anything like that. Just you and your commuter vehicle. You fill up once a week, Do you really? So you filled up one and a half times since the war started. Yeah. Somebody said, look, it's only cost me an extra 10 bucks. Let's go to Chris in Greenville. Chris, welcome. Hey, John. Good afternoon.
13:42
uh... charlie but that's okay go ahead outside that's uh... uh they've been on the tail end of the uh... the electric car thing i don't know you probably keep up everything that does not want you to own electric car anymore they want to read to you what about that like you all nothing and be happy and that's right and what that said because i mean that then they can just take it back and you know lease it again you're right
14:10
But that was, I don't even know anybody that leases a car anymore, do you? No, absolutely not. Why would you? I mean, when you can get a good used car for, you know, five to $10,000 easy and last for a long time. And now I'm really into right to repair. don't know how much you know about it. Yeah. It's huge. So all the car companies, they want to capture your data from you so they can sell it.
14:35
Yeah. market. if they get caught, what happens? They get a little slap on the wrist, point zero zero one percent of the amount that they've stolen. And they want to make sure that you bring it to the dealership. A Tesla, where do you got to go with it? If you want to get your tire changed. I was actually working at a tire company the other day, big national chain, and they brought in a Tesla and he was like, sorry, can't do that. You have to take it to the dealer. Wow. That's amazing. That is amazing. Hey, I appreciate it, Chris. Thank you. I got to blow through these real quick. Ray is in Clinton. Ray, welcome.
15:06
I do today, Doing good. I keep seeing these programs talking about the price of gasoline, but they're not really looking at the actual what has to go through a plant that makes gasoline to see where all the money's going. I worked in the petrochemical industry while I was going to college to pay for my tuition, and I learned that there's only
15:35
about 20 gallons of gasoline in a barrel. You can't get any more out of it. That I didn't know Ray, but I know this. A big chunk of that cost of gasoline right now is taxes and fees. Let's go to Gerald in Kalpins. Gerald, welcome. Hey Charlie, as the birds start building their nest, I put mothballs under them.
16:00
Yeah. Just heard the snakes and it worked well for me last year. Just food for thought, brother. I'm going to look into that. I appreciate it. I do know that the Bluebird Scouts are out right now. Kenneth in Woodruff wants to talk about electric cars. Kenneth, what's up? Well, they always talk about it's green energy and everything. Well, you also got to understand that cobalt, if you've ever seen one, they get
16:28
The mine. It is nasty, nasty. Oh yeah. And these people have so much cancer problems. Yeah. Their kids are born with deformities. Then the lithium. And they use child labor. this country, yes. And then lithium in this country, we can't even mine it because it's too nasty. Yeah. Because there's no way we can pass OSHA rules. That's right. That's right. And then to be able to...
16:57
support all of the energy, we're going to have to have more nuclear power plants. And that's something that they don't like. So actuality and when you take them and take them to the dump, you can't recycle it. So it just goes more and more into the dump. So in actuality, they're not very green. No, they are not at all. They're anything but. I appreciate it, Kenneth. When we get back, Abby Phillips
17:25
Told the biggest fattest lie on CNN. You're not going to believe it is the Charlie James show. News talk 989 WORD, the voice of the Carolinas.
18:01
All right, let's go to the WRD talk line. We'll talk to David in Greenville. David, welcome. Hi, good afternoon. How you doing today? I'm doing great, bud. What's up? So I heard you talk about fraud a while ago. And one thing I get at least every day, I get about 50 spam calls. Oh, me too. Yes. You're right. And I'm on the, I'm on the do not call registry. ignore that. Right.
18:30
I have contacted Ralph Norman, Lindsey Graham, the FCC. Nobody seems to do anything about it. Yeah. Yeah. I was even told to change my phone number. Yeah, it's up to you to change your phone number. That it is a matter. Who are the what? What is the organization? Who do they say they're from?
18:52
I would say 80 % say they're a Medicare or Medicaid. Okay. Probably 10 % are saying that they call it about a car accident that I had that I haven't received compensation from. Right. And the rest are just miscellaneous. Yeah, it's amazing. I get those too, David. I wish we could do something about it. I bet since I've been here on the show since three o'clock, let me just double check.
19:22
Let me just double check. Let me hit my old voicemail here. You're not going to be able to hear this, but here we go. I've got six. Now I emptied all of this out last night.
19:35
I have six and I'll guarantee you they're all the same thing. Hi, this is Julie Taylor from the tax sub blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they're trying to make me think that I am delinquent on my taxes and I'm not certain about a whole lot of things in life. But I know one thing for certain, I am not delinquent on my taxes. No, no, no, that is just outside the realm of possibility right now. So.
20:04
So yeah, it's a big problem. Well, we all know that CNN is just a bunch of liars, just a hideous, horrible bunch of liars. They even tried to paint the two people that were arrested in the terror attempt, and that's exactly what it was. It was a terror attempt in New York.
20:32
They were, they both of them have admitted that they were, oh no, they're completely unrelated. They don't even know each other. Yeah, why did both of them pledge their allegiance to ISIS? But CNN, they come along and they paint this flowery picture. It's really hideous what they've done. Let me see if I can find this real quick, because I want to read it to you again. um
21:03
Let's see here we go. Let's see if I can find it here. um Oh, here we go. This is from CNN. This is what they posted. Two Pennsylvania teenagers crossed into New York City Saturday morning for what could have been a normal day enjoying the city during abnormally warm weather. Well, that sounds, oh, that sounds awesome. That sounds flowery, but less.
21:31
In less than an hour, their lives would be drastically changed as the pair would be arrested for throwing homemade bombs during a...
21:41
So CNN had to come back and do an explanation of that post. Well, there was another explanation. And that's for what Abby Phillips claimed on her program last night. Let's take a listen. Republicans say Muslims don't belong here after an attempted terror attack against New York's mayor, Zoran Mnumdani, and the House Speaker Mike Johnson says nothing really to. Wait a minute.
22:11
Let's listen to that again. Republicans say Muslims don't belong here after an attempted terror attack against New York's mayor, Zoran Mondani. It was not a terror attack against Zoran Mondani.
22:27
The only thing that he had to do with it was the fact that it happened outside Gracie Mansion in New York City. The attack was against anti-Islam protesters, aka Christians, protesting things like happened right there.
22:49
So now all these people are just, oh, Abby Phillips, you gotta go. You gotta go. Pretty unbelievable. Two Republicans say Muslims don't belong here after an attempted terror attack against New York's mayor, Zoran Mamdani. So she issued a retraction. She said, I want to correct something I said last night. The bombs thrown in New York City over the weekend by ISIS-inspired attackers
23:15
was thrown into a crowd of anti-Muslim protesters and not specifically targeted at Mayor Mondani. It wasn't targeted a bit.
23:27
That wording was inaccurate and I didn't catch it ahead of time. I apologize for the error. No, you know what we want, Abby Phillips? We want an on-air apology. We don't want something that's hidden over on Twitter or X. We want an on-air apology. But if you think that's bad, well, this is pretty darn bad too. Why don't you listen to this? Here she is. She's talking with a New York Post.
23:56
Linda Moynihan, listen to what Abby Phillips said. Is there a line anywhere right now on Capitol Hill or elsewhere in the Republican movement when it comes to anti-Muslims? So I can't speak for Mike Johnson, but I would say we've had two terrorist attacks here in the last 10 days. can we condemn those? Of course. What does that have to do with Muslims? What does that have to do with Muslims?
24:26
They were done by Muslims.
24:31
One guy wearing a property of Islam hoodie with an Iranian flag t-shirt underneath and then you've got these two guys pledging their allegiance to ISIS. It's got everything to do with Muslims. Everything. What's that got to do with Muslims? But did you hear what she said? was like, and? And? Yeah, we've had two terror attacks in New York City. And? And then what? What's the bad part? Get to it. What's that got to do with Muslims?
25:00
Anytime, a white person does anything, what do they always go to? Oh, obviously a white supremacist, right? Always. We'll be right back. It's the Charlie James Show, News Talk 98.9, WORD, The Voice of the Carolinas.
25:53
i I let's go to Patrick and pickings and talk to him Patrick welcome. Yeah, there are you Charlie I'm great great what's going on with you. I just wanted to the. oh I call it a tail end of you guys talking about the electric car yeah I don't know something about the power companies or something in the user. I guess the computers or whatever that is all a has to do a.
26:19
It's got to do with the fact that we just don't have the power grid to power a whole lot of uh electric vehicles in this country right now. Right. So I don't know if you ever, uh anybody's ever called in or you talked about it, but for me living in Pickens, I've got Blue Ridge Cooperative, right? Yeah. It's kind of split. You got Duke Energy, got Blue Ridge, which you get it from Duke, Blue Ridge buys it from Duke. So they started the thing after Helene.
26:48
The peak time hours. I don't know if you're familiar with that. So in the springtime ah They they do It's three in the afternoon to six in the afternoon, right? Yeah, you can't use any You know like a walk if you use like a dryer or anything that pulls a lot of power I think it's like $13 a kilowatt is what you get charged It don't matter if it's on for a second or what Wow the same way in the fall or the the fall or summer
27:18
uh... are now the fall it goes from six in the morning time and well they've got figured out the calls most people in the morning six o'clock they're getting up get ready to go to work from people wash clothes same way in the are the other get the kids ready to have by way of coming in right now i'm in from work it three four o'clock so my thing is i mean how about even legal that's a good question
27:45
That peak hour pricing is ridiculous. Yeah. Well, I mean, my whole thought was, and I asked the lady, said, so are y'all doing this to recoup money from Helene? Because, know, they lost millions of dollars doing Helene. Oh, yeah. You know, and she said, no, we already had this. This is already in the works or whatever, which I don't know, but it just seems we've never had to do this before. But I know there's more demand for power. Yeah. With everybody moving here. Yeah.
28:17
Absolutely. You know, I don't know, man. So I know it's a man. It's hard. It's crazy because when you're doing things, just live in life. I appreciate it, Patrick. Just live in life. And then all of a sudden they're charging you more for living your life. This is what gets me. They're like, oh, well, we need to raise our rates. Here we are at the electric company. We need to raise our rates because we've got this we've got this solar farm project that we're working on. We'll take it out of your own profits.
28:45
How about quit passing all that crap along to us? How about you guys tell your
28:53
Shareholders? Yeah, your dividends might not be as good this quarter because we're trying to be responsible to the consumer. Boy, I don't care who you are. I don't care where you live.
29:11
In the grand scheme of things, you are last. You are last in Washington, you are last in Columbia, you're last in whatever your county council is, you are last. The only list you're on the top of with a lot of these people is the list of people to get money from. Let's go to Eric and Greer. Eric, welcome.
29:36
I just wanted to touch on that point because I worked for Blue Ridge Electric and they told me that they modeled this to see how the customers would react. And of course nobody likes it, but they are doing it because Blue Ridge Electric told me that to prevent rolling brownouts and blackouts. And in some ways it is good because we, you know, we live in the land of fat where we, you know, we use electricity without even thinking about it. So
30:03
what Blue Ridge Electric is trying to do is to get people to be conscious of how they use electricity, which I'm on Duke. I don't have that situation, but I do meet with a lot of people who are on Blue Ridge and nobody likes it. But I have to admit, you know, it's just like when gas prices go way up, you really start thinking about taking your trips when, you know, when it makes sense and doubling trips together. Here's what I don't like, Eric, because that makes this a social experiment to modify our behavior.
30:36
Yeah, but what they told me too is the fact that we're so far behind on the infrastructure that they can't keep up. even as the last gentleman stated that there's so many people moving here and they can't build the infrastructure fast enough or updated or upgraded. so even like what you're saying with the other gentleman about the electric cars, don't have, and Blue Ridge Electric, they'll charge you if you have solar.
31:04
They told me straight out that they don't make money on people with solar so they charge what they refer to as a connection fee. So any of the people who have Blue Ridge Electric and have solar panels, they're paying a $70 a month connection fee because they're not making the same amount of So let's talk about that connection fee, $70 a month. Isn't that your job to connect people to electricity?
31:31
Exactly. It's like all the other roomies that exist. Yeah, appreciate it, Eric. Thank you. My neighbors and I were talking about our water bill. I think it was about a month ago. And on the water bill, there was a thing called a distribution fee. And I'm wait a minute. They're charging me to distribute the water that I'm paying for when I use it? I thought that's what you did.
32:03
Oh my goodness. Nickel and dime us to death. Where are we going? The four? Let's go to Brad in Salem and talk about uh Blue Ridge. How you doing, Brad? That's easy for you. know, right? uh I'm going to have to be on the other side of this. I love it. What they've done. Okay. Makes you aware. It makes you conscious. uh My electric bill.
32:28
where it would have been say $200, it's typically about 150 now. So- Let me ask you something, Brad. I just, out of curiosity, how big of a house do you have? It's 2,000 square feet. Okay. And your average electric bill is 160? Now it is. Yeah. What was it? was 200. Well, when I had the house built, I had-
32:54
I two by six walls put in with extra insulation and the attic and everything. So the house, even one of the HVAC guys, when he came in to size the thing, he said, you could heat this place with a candle. Yeah. so, but what I've done is I don't have one of super smart thermostats. It's a real basic that you can set some time. Right. So for instance, in the summer,
33:23
when it's three to six is the peak period. And that's what they're doing. They're trying to get people to distribute and think about their usage because everybody comes home and he turns their air on and hits them at the same time. So about an hour before that, I've got it set to drive the temperature down as low as I can so that at the time of the peak, then I tell her, okay, now quit running it. That's interesting.
33:52
that is in his house three of those three hours the air doesn't okay at that right there they have also in conjunction with this week reduce the kilowatt our rate they charge you a kilowatt rate in the peak period which is why it's so expensive when you look at all of that you do put it i even have my own bills and everything and i look back and i said
34:21
Yeah, this has just been remarkable with me just thinking a little bit. Okay, Brad, I gotta leave it there. We got to hit a break here. I appreciate it. We'll be right back. It's the Charlie James show. News Talk 98.9, WORD, the voice of the Carolinas.
Mar 11, 2026
