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Good morning, Jamie.
Good morning, everybody.
We're glad you're here, as Jamie said, if you want to get involved and speak with us this morning via phone or text 855-757-855-7575-24842.
Yeah, it's a lot.
Local, national, international, space news.
We don't have any space news today, but we do have health news.
that is our cross to bear to deal with the realities and one of those realities is still the ongoing war if again still the terminology not clear, but we'll call it a war because
sure looks and sounds like a war.
This is what's happening in Iran today.
The latest updates, U.S.
President, well, you know who that is, Donald Trump.
He has made contradictory statements on when the war will end.
Sure, why would they?
A top Iranian official, though, told CNN that Tehran is prepared for a long war and only economic pain will end it.
And we're going to actually get into a little bit longer discussion on the president's timeline in just a few moments here.
The war has caused the biggest oil disruption in history as well.
Threats of transit through the Strait of Hormuz persist while Iran and the US trade warning and the US trade warnings over its security.
Well, the old regime had to go, but it doesn't look like the new regime is going to be any better.
Five members of the Iranian women's soccer team have been granted humanitarian visas by Australia.
Supporters had been urging the Australian government to offer the players refuge over fears they'd be persecuted in Iran for failing to sing the national anthem.
We talked about it though, right?
We knew that under this new regime, things were maybe going to be a little bit stricter and go back and be a lot of the same, but maybe even with some more
more guardrails for the people of Iran.
So I think that's the first domino of that that we're gonna see.
Historic landmarks were reportedly damaged after an Israeli airstrike hit the nearby provincial governor's building on Monday.
That's at least according to Iranian media and eyewitness accounts in the area.
I was
The world's biggest economies are now considering emergency releases of millions of barrels of oil into the market.
That might sound like a lot, but experts say even tens of millions of barrels are more like a drop in the bucket when it comes to global oil needs.
So things are going to get, things are going to get rough.
We talked about not only gas, but diesel prices yesterday.
And it's don't expect any relief soon because even, even by a miracle, say this
war
go through
Right.
Well, and you look at what's happening and the destruction of the land and the property in the Middle East right now.
I mean, obviously there's also the loss of life.
There's been thousands of casualties of civilians.
You're right.
I mean, even if things ended...
Today at this very minute like the president keeps saying that they could maybe they will again, we'll get into that in a second with his timeline It turns out that when you basically destroy all of the infrastructure and let's be real in parts of the Middle East There's not a lot of infrastructure anyway, but there is for the oil there is for the important The oil can get out.
I don't want to be an American.
No.
So back to what you were saying about how long this could be.
The president has said the US war with Iran could be
quote, short term, describing the conflict as a brief military action that was necessary, that he told the people that when he did his little press conference yesterday and was speaking to Republican lawmakers and donors at a political gathering in Florida.
Because why would he be in Washington, D.C.
when we're at war when the golf course beckons?
Thank you, Mr. President.
On Iran, you called it an excursion.
You said it would be over soon.
Are you thinking this week it will be over?
No, but soon.
OK, and with respect to-
Look, everything they have is gone, including their leadership.
In fact, they have two levels of leadership, and even actually, as it turns out, more than that.
But two levels of leadership are gone.
Most people have never even heard about the leaders that they're talking about.
It's obviously been very powerful, very effective.
This conflict, we're what, 10 and a half, 11 days into this conflict now, the tensions continue to raise concerns about the global oil supplies, as we were just referring to.
The oil prices are now $100, above $100 per barrel, which is the highest level in nearly two years.
Gas prices all around the country, not just here
home, but everywhere have jumped to around $3.48 per gallon.
So if you're not paying that right now, consider yourself lucky.
That's up from about $2.90 a month ago.
Now, the president did warn that Iran attempts to block the ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which is that
critical oil route, and not only just oil, that's the other thing we all have to remember too.
It's
not just the
Well, we know that none of that has probably come into play at all as we go through this process of watching what's happened in the Middle East.
If somebody was using MC squared, I would actually feel a little bit better, I think, in this particular instance.
But the Strait of Hormuz is literally the most important transit route in the world.
And Trump has said that the US Navy has significant military presence in the region to keep the shipping lane open.
That's the question, right?
Because he was also asked yesterday about a reported U.S.
missile strike that hit that girl school in Iran, killing more than 170 people.
He said that he'd not seen the video.
And he suggested without any evidence that that missile might not have come from the United States, even though Tomahawk missiles are primarily used by the United States, as well as Allied forces.
The Department of Defense says the incident is still under investigation.
Of course it is.
War is messy, and that is the greatest understatement I've made in the 17 minutes we've been on the air.
But normally,
the U.S.
has been very forthcoming.
If we have made some sort of miscalculation, accidents seems to diminish what happened, but that's why it was not an intentional strike.
If that's the case, we come out and take responsibility.
He never takes responsibility for anything.
Of course, he's going to blame somebody else for blowing up this school.
And in the end, it's a tragedy no matter where the bomb came from.
But if it did come from us, the least we can do is take responsibility for it.
Right.
So many things about what's happening in the Middle East bother me, but wars aren't going to end just because you say they're going to, right?
That's not how this works.
That's not how diplomacy works.
And I think what is more frightening to me at this point is there's never been a clear plan.
There's not really a clear goal.
There's not a clear exit strategy.
We don't even know at this point as Americans and as a public why this even started.
Now, let me be clear.
I understand all of the background in the Middle East and with Iran.
I'm not saying that, but there was no imminent threat.
Intelligence over and over has proven that there was no intelligence threat, imminent threat to the United States.
And so without some sort of clear explanation,
what the objective was.
Anything around that just seems, none of this seems like it needed to happen.
There didn't need to be this many casualties.
There didn't need to be seven service members that have been killed in this conflict.
It just seems like it was unnecessary.
And this-
There's no doubt about it.
Yeah.
former Biden White House staffers are coming out and saying Netanyahu tried to do this after the October 6 attacks on Israel, which were horrible.
But he tried to draw the United States in and Biden said, no, we're not will will back you up if you're attacked, but we're not going to preemptively hit somebody.
Well, that's what Trump Trump doesn't have that kind of restraint.
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I'm Brian Noonan.
We're glad you're here.
Wisconsin lawmakers actually working together.
for once, not for once, but rarely do we see it.
We love it though.
Wisconsin has expanded its missing child alert system under a law connected to the Prince Act.
If you don't know about the Prince Act, it was named after Prince McCree.
He's a five year old Milwaukee boy who was killed in 2023.
The original law was passed to fill gaps in the alert system here in Wisconsin after officials weren't unable to issue an Amber Alert when Prince went missing because they lacked information about a subject.
So it's good to see this.
It's one, it's good to see Republicans and Democrats working together for something that actually has real world consequences and will help, you know.
children and families.
So this is good.
And they've done this before, Jamie.
similar issues have been addressed.
The law also addressed a case of 10-year-old Lily Peters of Chippewa Falls.
Her disappearance did not meet the Amber Alert criteria.
Now, the updated law now expands eligibility for missing child alerts to children up to age 12 instead of just limiting those alerts to children under the age of 10.
This expansion was possible after the state budget
added about $319,000 in funding, as well as two staff positions at the Wisconsin Department of Justice, so that somebody could manage this alert system.
And this is where the, yeah,
they're using the surplus, they're working on the budget, they're doing things together, because this legislation, as you mentioned, was authored by both a Democrat and a Republican, Democratic Senator Latanya Johnson and Republican Senator Jesse James, who they both also helped pass the
the original Prince Act.
Now, Jesse James is interesting because he is the only legislator in the state who is an active law enforcement officer.
So
Jesse
And I know that sometimes we don't want to admit this, right?
But Jesse James is a pretty great guy.
So he does a lot for his community, a lot for mental health as well.
And I love his name.
I know, right?
Governor Evers signed the expansion law.
expansion into law on March 6th, along with several other bipartisan bills.
Now, under these new rules, Brian, alerts can be issued for children ages 10 or 11 if there are several conditions met, including the child's location is unknown.
The alert is issued within 72 hours of a disappearance.
The case does not qualify for another alert like an Amber Alert.
The child is entered into the National Crime Information Center database and authorities have enough information to release.
to the public to help locate that child.
There's a few things that law enforcement are going to have to go through to make sure that they can get this out into the public.
But at the end of the day, if you're talking about a missing child and this helps and law enforcement has a few more eyes, I don't think that's ever a bad thing when you're talking about a missing individual.
And so during the first year after the Prince Act was passed, 17 missing child's alert alerts were issued for 14 children compared to about four amber alerts for five children during the same period.
I know you research endlessly and I did not see this.
And now, now I wish I had done a little more.
Do you know that the criteria between the differences between the criteria for a missing child alert and the amber alert?
What's why an amber alert only goes so far?
the
kind of some of
Well, are the police going to still want to do the investigative work?
What this bill does is essentially supports it and they give investigators more information, more awareness in the community and more chances to find a child quickly and for families.
That means not being told, hey, sorry, your kid doesn't qualify for this Amber Alert.
So, you know, there's not a lot we can do right now other than start the investigation process.
For law enforcement, this is just another tool to really help do their job faster and more effectively and get more eyes and more community involved.
a lot more regular citizens yeah exactly and I think that was just it I think for a lot of there were a few critics of this and I think for those people they just felt like maybe it took a little bit out of the police hands and put more in the community hands but honestly at this point I think.
You know, if you're talking about a community has
kiddo
Network.
Now back to more of Daybreak with Brian and Jamie.
Good morning.
Are you surprised that Doge didn't really work out?
I am, I am not.
But if, if you want to get involved with about this or any other thing, we're talking about eight, five, five, seven, five, civic eight, five, five, seven, five, two, four, eight, four, two.
So remember a year, about a year ago, when the Trump administration tied to Elon Musk's department of government efficiency, Doge, where we're, we're getting those money back, remember?
They
Right.
Well, now we're getting some hiring, Jamie.
This is exciting.
Officials say the hiring push reflects a recognition that some critical skills and positions were cut too deeply.
I think anybody, you don't have to be a civic planner.
You don't have to be a-
an efficiency expert to go, everybody, things aren't going to work anymore.
But they're just starting to figure that out.
So they're starting to hire some people back because it was more than 387,000 federal employees got fired during Elon's reign of terror.
It's about a year ago that they just laid off, they either fired, laid off, or accepted buyouts from these 387,000 federal employees.
And about a year later, they're like, huh.
we should probably have some of those people back.
It only took them that long to figure out that government wasn't actually running very efficiently without those 387,000 people, and now they're gonna hire about 123,000 new workers to replace, so less than half.
But you know, hey, government efficiency, and let me be clear.
I also think that there's a lot of places in the government where we do overspend, where we're not efficient.
We probably
It's like any other business in that respect.
But at the same time, I mean, usually you have a plan going into those processes and those conversations, and it's not just Elon Musk and his band of...
I'm not sure what they were.
Teenage hackers?
Yes, they were because they looked younger than my kids who were 22 and 19.
And it was mind-boggling what happened during the Doge period.
anyway,
When you are revamping not only a small company, but a giant bureaucracy like the federal government, you can't failure everybody in 30 days.
You need to audit each department.
There have to be productivity reports.
It takes a long time and you have to start like one bureau, one department at a time and say, okay, we've done this.
Here's, we've done our due diligence.
you need to reduce your workforce by 10%.
You don't just go in and start firing everybody to save money with the chainsaw.
lot of people... What are those?
because there's some new hiring rules that are designed to give the White House greater control over the federal workforce.
And those new rules include expanding the role of political appointees in hiring decisions, creating new job classifications that make it easier to hire people supportive of the administration's agenda, and to also make it easier to remove employees who oppose those policy goals.
So in other words, if you don't agree with the president, they don't want you working in the federal government.
That's not what civil workers do.
That's
not
They have served presidents of all different backgrounds.
They have served presidents of both political parties because they are civil service workers, and this is what they do.
I think this is actually...
Even if we're sitting here this morning and we're making light of some of the administrative's moves over the course of last year, especially with Doge, I think this is a time where you need to get a little concerned because they're literally putting lackeys in the US government.
And if you don't... I love
And if you don't support this administration...
We don't want you to work here.
You shouldn't be part of our government.
That's not what this is.
That's not how the federal government operates.
And I think that's the frightening part to me.
Now, officials say that they want to rebrand federal jobs as an opportunity for young professionals in college, graduates, and especially in the areas like technology, healthcare, program management, and cybersecurity.
And this is where this story gets fun, because you know this administration likes names.
everything.
So one initiative, Brian, is called Tech Force.
And this would recruit software engineers and data analysts and place them across federal agencies in two-year assignments before they move them to the private sector for jobs.
Why when the last jobs report came out and it was so dismal?
Why now are we going to hire 120,000 people just to bolster that?
And again, I love the term lackey.
that you use because who are we going to hire?
We're going to hire more yes men and women that will come in.
We're going to hire people who aren't qualified.
That just seems to be their MO.
I wish it was different, but who's going to be in charge of the hiring?
Is it just more people that want the same mindset in these new jobs?
1-855-752-4842.
1-855-75 Civic, if you want to join the conversation this morning.
I think something like TechForce, though, to me raises some real questions.
What exactly would those teams be working on?
And what data are they going to have access to?
And who's going to be overseeing these projects?
Because this administration has already asked for the 2020 election ballots from multiple states.
They've talked about nationalizing elections.
They've requested voter rolls and program data from multiple states.
it has also pushed for expanded AI and data capabilities inside the government.
So maybe there are legitimate reasons for those projects.
But when you combine all of that with their push to hire people based on political alignment, it makes me start really wondering what the goal for these employees is going to be on a daily basis.
election.
But
And honestly, if this government says that it's because people want to turn it into something, well, that's because you've done enough things at this point, why you've been in charge of the country.
that there's a lot of us that are doubting the things that you do or say because you haven't given us reason to actually trust the things you're doing or saying.
Now, despite this hiring push, the federal workforce is still significantly smaller than when Donald Trump first took office after major layoffs and agency cuts.
Some agencies have struggled to operate with fewer staff.
For example, Brian, the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency lost nearly 40% of its workforce by the way.
They'll be using tech force to basically put more people into the cybersecurity and infrastructure area of government,
just in case you're wondering.
Right?
The Department of Veterans Affairs has seen job applications drop by about 50% compared with the previous year, and the Social Security Administration has reassigned staff from policy and IT roles to answer phones due to the increased call volumes.
Honestly, here in Wisconsin, we're not faring much better because of Doge.
Roughly 2,400 federal workers in Wisconsin have left their jobs since late in 2024 during those workforce cuts.
Wisconsin has about 18,000 civilian federal employees, meaning the cuts affected around 13% of the state's federal workforce during that Doge operation in the federal government, which
I mean that's hard to come back for for a state economy and they're not going to hire all those people back and some of those people have gone on to find other jobs because they were forced to because of the the administration's actions.
And even if you're even if you're desperately looking for work and it's hard it's a very hard market to get hired are you going to go back to a place that you can't trust that you'll have your job in another six months because
things are so volatile it with this administration and if they don't get what they want like if they hire these the tech force and they're not getting the results they want or enough people push back once if there's any oversight to say hey, what what are these people accessing I Wouldn't trust going back and go.
Your job is to not capitulate to the administration.
Your job is not to necessarily agree with everything the administration does.
Your job is to be there on a daily basis to make sure that things are running smoothly and operations are not being affected, people are getting what they need, phones are getting answered, and your job is to not agree necessarily with the administration.
Now, I guess if you do, that's just a perk of going to work.
I
That's
These people were probably getting unemployment.
So now they don't have to get unemployment They can they can get this job or maybe they're not even hiring back former employees now.
Maybe they're just recruiting Who knows what these two-year contracts are you?
Who who's getting these jobs?
Who is going to be high doing the hiring?
There's a lot of there's a lot of different things So while you can say it's great that people have are getting jobs.
That's great
What is this going to mean to you and I down the road?
And what happens in two years when all those people who are hired for temporary jobs now don't have jobs again?
Always questions with this administration.
There's never straightforward good news.
have your health, right?
For now, it's the Civic Media Network.
All facts, no fiction.
It's Daybreak with Brian and Jamie.
I know.
You're saying Brian, Jamie.
All you guys do is talk about bad news.
But I'm feeling pretty good.
I've got my health.
Things are going good.
I whistle to work every day.
Everything's great.
Well, listen, far be it from me to let you have an enjoyable day.
I'm here to just point out the
absurdities.
We're going to squash it all.
I'm going to
but
So let's start with the Food and Drug Administration, which is under the auspices of our health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is a piece of work unto himself.
But the FDA's top drug regulator is Dr. Tracy Beth Hogue.
I don't know if you've heard of her, but she's in charge and she's trying to hire a researcher and friend who wants the agency to add new warnings to antidepressants about unproven pregnancy risks.
That's according to the Associated Press.
This doctor, Dr. Adam Urato, he's a maternal fetal medicine specialist and critic.
of anti-depressant safety.
He's pressing the FDA to add black box warnings to SSRIs.
Those are the drugs most commonly described for depression.
And Jamie, once again, we love when our government officials are pushing no science-backed science.
When did we hit this cliff?
This is a legitimate question for me.
When did we hit this cliff where we quit listening to science, we quit listening to actual data, we quit listening to the people who might, I don't know, have experience in these things?
When did that become the norm?
and that pediatric vaccines cause autism.
And I can only imagine if you are a parent and your child is diagnosed with autism, you want answers.
You want to figure out, well, how did this happen?
Was it something that I did?
Is it just genetic?
What could it be?
All of those, all of her claims were proven false over and over and over.
but there were still parents who in desperation to find answers, and I don't blame any parent who wants to find answers,
we also had a lot of time to sit at home and just search the internet for all of the things that ailed us and all the answers and then we also had a president at the time who also believed in all of the things that he saw online that might actually solve COVID and because of course he didn't want it to be his problem on his watch and so
It's mind-boggling, though, that we now have this person who is tied to the FDA, who's in a petition, says that these medications, meaning the antidepressants, can cause pregnancy complications, including miscarriages and fetal brain abnormalities that may lead to autism and other disorders in children, speaking of things that, you know, will drive parents off of a cliff trying
to find
These are
have
Uh, my 19 year old, it has to be on depressants because, anti-depressants because of, of how his brain works.
And that's okay.
He's had to figure out how to live with it and deal with it.
He's gone through the therapy routes.
He does it every single day.
I've seen the kid work harder than most people will in their entire lives to combat this because you know,
at one point in time my kid wanted nothing more in this world than to not be in this world.
So I've seen what these medications can do.
Another thing that we thought we so again this is there's people who are trying to
Stop this because if you don't a black box warning is huge
doctors, they won't prescribe if there's black box warnings, people won't take medication if there are black box warning on there.
And according to a doctor from the University of Virginia, she's a reproductive psychiatrist.
She said, quote, what's missing in this petition is an understanding of the risks of maternal mental illness during pregnancy, not just to women, but to the pregnancy and ultimately to the infant.
So, you know, they're getting away with a lot at the
FDA and the, but mumps is back.
That's good news.
I mean, I guess if you're a mump it's good news
Jamie, we, uh, health officials in Maryland have issued an alert confirming an uptick in mumps cases.
26 reported so far as of February 19th, including 19 confirmed and seven probable infections according to the Maryland Department of Health.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported as of late February 11 jurisdictions have documented 34 cases.
Uh, here, just a little something up until 67 mumps.
Everybody was getting mumps.
Oh, but then guess what came along?
of vaccine and it dramatically reduced this from just a number 152,000 cases in 1968.
to 231 cases in 2003.
Oh, why would we
And it might tell us
the
And we're sorely lacking it right now in this country.
And by the way, as we're talking
talking about this, the Wisconsin Department of Health just put out new statistics yesterday.
There were about 1200 fewer two year olds that were up to date on their vaccines in 2025 in this state than just a year ago.
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