The Debit Card Surcharge Bill, the Recall That Has No Case, and a Mom Who Took on TikTok

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 4, 2026.We open with a Louisiana bill sitting on Governor Landry's desk that sounds great on the surface and is actually terrible policy — Senator Beth Mizell's bill to ban retail surcharges on debit card transactions. We explain why this is not a conservative principle, why it will not save consumers a single dollar, and why all it will actually do is raise the price of everything for everyone, hurt the small businesses least able to absorb the cost, and prove once again that Milton Friedman was right — there is no free lunch, there is only a free lunch you can't see the bill for. In our Top 3, Louisiana AG Liz Murrell announced the arrest and indictment of two women — including a state Department of Health employee — for a $156,000 Medicaid and SNAP fraud scheme involving reinstating benefits for someone who had been kicked off the program for lying about her income and marital status. The DOH employee is now a fugitive. Then St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Randy Smith was arrested for second-degree battery and disturbing the peace after allegedly attacking a frequent critic at a steakhouse in Madisonville — and we say if the allegations are true, he should resign. And the deadline to register for Louisiana's upcoming Senate runoff elections is Saturday online only — so if you haven't registered, go to la.sos.gov or download the GoVote app right now.We also discuss another bill on the governor's desk — the Streets to Success Act — which criminalizes homelessness and allows someone sleeping on a park bench to be arrested and jailed for up to six months. We explain why we have serious problems with this bill, why designating public encampment zones is exactly the policy that turned Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco into disaster zones, why homelessness is fundamentally a mental illness and substance abuse crisis rather than a housing problem, and why a bill with no funding for the programs it creates is not a solution — it's a sentence.We dig into the Louisiana governor's recall petition — Louis was just interviewed about it by a local TV station — and we walk through each of the three stated grounds for the recall. Undermining fair representation? The governor was doing what the Supreme Court ordered him to do. Misaligned priorities? The legislature votes on the budget. Emphasis on punishment over root causes? Crime in Louisiana has gone down in every major city since Landry took office and focused on incarceration. We apply the principle that you don't recall a governor for doing what they were elected to do — you recall them for doing the opposite.We sit down with Sarah Standiford, author of Citizens Pray, whose son was killed when a semi truck driver watching TikTok live — going 68 miles per hour — slammed into the vehicle he was a passenger in. The truck burned for four hours. The driver was not convicted of distracted driving. Sarah took on the trucking company, the state of Arizona, and the legal system — and has written about all of it. We talk about why enforcement of distracted driving laws is nearly impossible, why she believes the accountability has to come from phone carriers and social media platforms themselves, and why a road in Arizona where 500 people died in six years still hasn't been fixed.That conversation leads us into a broader discussion about why no law can substitute for character — why the more people govern their own behavior, the less government they need, and why the inverse is also true. If you want government out of your life, you have to be the kind of person who can be trusted to run it.We also cover an illegal immigrant from Brazil who was driving the wrong way on a Massachusetts highway while allegedly intoxicated, crashed into a state trooper, and was back on the street in two days because of Massachusetts sanctuary state law. And a British Labour Party lawmaker is suing Elon Musk because someone used Grok to generate an AI image of her in a bikini — we discuss why the complaint, if legitimate, is against the person who created the image and not against the platform, and why Britain's hostility toward Musk has far more to do with his criticism of the British government's silence on a recent murder than it does with artificial intelligence.Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!