When the chips are down and democracy's back is up against the wall, two radio veterans step up to the microphone to right the wrongs, standing for truth, justice and just because.
Hey, are they ready to go yet?
It's John and Gordy on 92.7 WMDX.
UMDX 92.7 On a overcast morning again, it's the John and Gordy show and we are Broadcasting live from State Street to block away from the capital the capital city Madison You know the Republicans are in session and they're writing up bills, you know, they're trying to come up with a budget and
And it's a disaster.
It's just like the disaster, the budget we're watching federally.
And I'm just amazed at how both of these processes will clash in whatever way they're going to clash.
So the federal government is shifting all the expenses now to the states.
And the states are planning on big tax cuts too, and they don't want to spend any money.
I wonder how this is all going to end.
Well, good morning to you, too.
Yeah,
I'm just, you know.
But the Wisconsin budget's a two-year budget, right?
Yeah, it's a biennium.
Every other year, they fight about the budget.
And
it's a perfect year.
Now, the first year of the Trump administration, let's see what happens.
They don't care.
They don't care at all.
Well, that big, beautiful bill passed the House,
now goes on to the Senate.
But they don't really have any deadline until...
June, July, kick it around for a couple of more months.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So
while, uh, while Trump goes after California for one student who's a, uh, transgender athlete, well, we can't have that.
So he's going to stop funding California.
Sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it?
But that's, that's what we're watching.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah,
and
on it goes.
Yeah, it's something else.
Hey, you know what?
What?
The sun rose at 523 this morning.
Yeah.
And it'll set tonight at 828.
Thank you for that information.
I'll write that down.
From the official Samsung watch of the show.
Yeah.
You know, I
sometimes
forget it, but I remembered it this morning.
Thank you.
It's working well.
It's looking pretty cloudy out our window overlooking State Street.
We had some
sprinkles.
Yeah,
yeah,
we're gonna have some showers off and on today.
Currently 54 degrees.
Is that what your watch is saying for this morning's temperature?
The
official weather watch
of the show?
WMDX
weather
watch?
Yeah, let's see, it's a 56 degrees currently on a high of 62 today.
Okay, that's what your watch
is saying.
Let's see what
the one-armed bandit, do we have the one-armed bandit all set
and ready to go ahead?
I think we got our candy.
All right, let's hold the lever.
First number zero, five.
Nine.
First number is always
zero.
Yeah, it's always zero.
I'm going to be really, really sad when it's a number.
Well, maybe it has a one.
I know.
It's got to have a one.
Yeah, we'll have a one this summer sometime.
OK.
As we crank more pollutants into the air, it's called freedom, folks.
Freedom.
OK, well.
A little bit later on, Mike McCabe will be joining us in our next hour, as he does every Wednesday.
And we've got some other guests that will join us in the seven o'clock hour, Jeff Wilde and Dan Elsis.
They're with the Guns and Gardens Safe Disposal event.
And this is something that's going on Saturday, June 7th.
Now this is similar to
another program that we...
had guests on, they melt down.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, but instead of just melting down iron stock to cast into various carvings and whatnot, these people are melting down old guns in order to turn into new things.
Yeah.
Like garden tools.
Yes,
garden tools.
Interesting.
So we'll find out about that in about
an hour.
Kind of interesting.
Just load up your garden tool with ammo.
You
can have a multi-use tool.
You can have a gun and like a garden hose.
So if you got like a like a bunny gopher.
A rabbit.
Yeah.
You can just take care of
both
problems.
I
want to get rid of the chipmunks.
I'm bad.
I hate those things.
Yeah.
Producer Sam, good morning to you.
Good morning.
Producer Henry, good morning to you.
Oh, it's
Henry.
He keeps changing his name.
He's doing a great job.
This is his first full week of handling the control.
I'm blushing.
Thank you, thank you.
So
far, so
good.
You deserve it.
It's early yet.
Let's see.
What should we do now?
Do you have any history items, Sam, that you'd like to share with us or Henry?
What
happened to the calendar?
You want the calendar?
No, well, we always talk about ignoring the calendar and changing the show.
So we
don't have to do the
calendar anymore.
If we were doing the National Day calendar, these would be the days.
It's National Beef Burger Day.
It's National Flip Flop Day.
Who doesn't like to wear their flip flops?
Oh,
yeah, flip flops.
Oh, yeah.
You know, I don't know how people wear those.
I hate flip flops.
I hate flip flops.
How do you keep them on your feet?
It's stupid.
It doesn't make any sense.
Like, I hate having things between my toes.
so it really gets in the back.
Yeah,
exactly.
Exactly, yeah.
Yeah.
So, yeah, it's national flip-flop day and national, as I mentioned, beef burger day, but it's also national hamburger day.
What would the chances be that those two would land on the same day?
It's amazing that that worked out so well.
It's also national brisket day.
Oh, brisket.
Yeah, brisket.
And national senior health and fitness day.
Yeah.
Well, I'm celebrating that each and every day of the year.
Okay.
All right now Do we have any history items?
Are you gonna tell your chili Willy story Sam like you keep yeah, what's this you
put it off a year and a half Dom Dom has sort of taken over the history.
So you need to decide between us for who gets to take them You want to hear about the chili Willy?
Well,
so right before the show we were watching this video on John's computer of the Irish
Cheese roll.
The cheese roll is people running down the hill.
600 year old tradition.
You roll a wheel of cheese down a hill and people run after it, chase it down this really steep hill.
A lot of people get injured trying to catch this cheese.
catches the cheese first, wins a big prize.
They're rolling at about 200 miles per hour down that
hill.
Yeah, they're going
to be injured.
Right.
Well, so I brought up this tradition we do at the summer camp I work at called the Chili Willy, which this tradition reminded me of.
The Chili Willy is basically you get two teams of people together.
You go out to the lake very early in the morning when the air temperature is still freezing.
Yeah.
And you get a big block of ice that you freeze in like a five gallon bucket.
Somebody throws it into the water and the teams run after it whichever team gets it first wins a point and you keep going until all of the ice has melted Okay, and it's just these it's an absolute brawl in the water.
What do
you get
over this when you go into the
water?
What are you chasing after
a big chunk of ice like a five gallon bucket size ice cube
so the first one to bring the
The ice back in wins, is
that it?
They win a point, and then you keep on going until the ice is melted.
Oh, okay.
You know, I had something completely different in mind.
Right, you wouldn't think that this is what a chili willie is.
We
know what a chili willie is if you get into cold water,
right?
There's shrinkage involved.
Yeah, a little bit.
So, you
know, we should all participate in one.
I think that would be a good time.
Yeah,
that would be fantastic.
Yes.
You know, the Johnny Gordy, Chilly, Willie competition.
Maybe that could go hand in hand with the Testicle Festival that we go to.
Add that as a side event.
We have to move to a lake for the
Testicle Festival.
Oh,
God.
OK.
Well, now let's get to the history items.
What do you say?
What happened on this day?
Back in time.
Let's do it.
Okay.
All right You go for it.
All right.
So in 1937 the Volkswagen the car found it
Wow!
1937.
1937, yeah.
And Sam's got his 1974 Volkswagen out there again today.
1973.
Are you done working on that?
I mean, basically, I
mean, is everything... Am I ever done working on it?
Well, that's what I'm wondering.
I'm
hoping that you would finish
working
on it.
Well, I mean, it runs and drives.
I drove it probably almost 500 miles over the long weekend.
Okay, you're going to be leaving real soon, so I just want to know.
In good condition, will you be stranded any place?
Will you need to get a call from you sometime and help you out?
I mean, what is it?
What?
It's only happened one time in all my years owning it that I actually had to call for help.
Really?
But now, is it in good working condition?
In other words, it's where you want it to be.
Why don't you drive it and then you can see for yourself?
Apparently not.
Wow.
Don't you want to relive your days of driving a Carmen Ghia around?
I would love to, yes.
Yes.
Oh, those were great
days.
They were
great.
Man.
Especially rolling them over.
Did
you
do it more than once?
No, just
once.
Oh.
Once is
enough.
Yeah, once is.
Especially when it's a convertible.
That's bad.
That's good for trouble.
It's just bad.
Anything else happened on this day in history there, Tom?
Yeah.
Yeah, it was kind of, I mean, honestly, it was a little boring today.
It wasn't, not a whole lot of stuff, but in 1998, so kind of recent, comic Phil Hartman was killed by his wife.
Yeah, that was tragic.
That was awful.
Yeah, he was notably for President Bill Clinton.
Yeah, he was so talented.
He had so many great bits.
And we used to, a long time ago when we first started on the show, remember we used to feature.
Watch.
Frozen caveman lawyer.
Oh, that's right.
Oh,
that was him lawyer.
Yeah, the unfrozen caveman lawyer.
Yeah,
that's him It's a long story down or Henry, excuse me.
I'll see if I can find a clip of the unfrozen Yes,
if
you
get the What else happened on this day?
So this was kind of a fun, it's not really a funny story.
But there was a murder suspect that was perched on a crane.
Let me pull it up real quick.
Yeah, his name was Carl Edward Rowland.
He was 41 years old.
And for three days straight, he was stuck on a crane.
No food, no water.
And they had to like position a bucket underneath them so he can go to the bathroom.
So it was.
Well, wow.
He just climbed up on the crane.
Finally.
Yeah.
Finally after.
I don't know how he actually got up there.
But after 56 hours, they finally persuaded him to come down after after some food.
But I just thought that was like, how do you even get up there?
Like, what is the.
thought process behind that.
Yeah, there are weird stories like that.
You know, I remember this one kid that, you know, was balancing an engine on two tables and he caught his finger in the engine block
and he couldn't pull it out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What the story behind that is.
What happened to that guy?
Crazy stuff, isn't it?
Did he survive?
Well, almost,
almost.
Rest in peace.
Except
for that tip of his
finger, yeah.
It's still inside that engine somewhere.
Any birthdays on the state, Tom?
Yeah,
also kind of stale, but I would say 1938.
Jerry West, LA Laker.
Yeah, great basketball player.
And then 1944, Gladdy's Night.
Gladdy's Night.
Gladdy's Night, sorry.
Gladdy's Night.
Yeah, I got tired of Gladdy's Night.
I
mean, just because you heard her song one song over and over and over.
Yeah.
Midnight train
to Georgia.
Yep.
Yep.
Yep.
Can't stand it.
I
think
we
should play it right now.
Do you have it handy?
We could do that.
Did you find a frozen caveman layer?
We're fighting over the same mouse and keyboard
here.
Well, that's your problem.
There's
Matt there.
You're a crazy modern world and AI and con man leader who painted their face orange scares and intimidates me.
I am just a caveman lawyer.
Matt from middle.
Yeah, that's great stuff.
Thank you for that.
Thank you.
You can call us.
You can text us on the civic media app.
Also call us at 608-879-8255 or send us a text again.
Okay.
Just getting started on a Wednesday morning.
Mike McCabe with us our next hour.
We'll
be back with more of John and Gordy in just a
moment.
You know, no one cares about Gladys and I
was saying.
You know,
I remember when I was, you know, just kind of introduced to the song, I do the background singing.
You
know, I didn't care about what she was thinking about at all.
You know, it's the pips that made that song.
The pips, you know, they're overlooked.
You know, they were really good.
Yes, they were.
They're over looked.
Yeah.
They were in the background there, just doing their dance moves and just.
Yeah, I'm chiming in every once in a while, but really great singers.
But that's
all he cared about.
That's what made the song.
Yeah.
Yeah.
She just, you know, kind of blurt in every once in a while, lyrics to the song.
Enough to make you kind of irritated.
Just
wait until Dom discovers your other your other musical.
Yeah, yeah, your hatred for other musicians.
It's got a lot of on that
list.
Yeah, I've added a few over time.
But you know, that's my that's my prerogative.
All the years top 40 radio does to a guy.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And all the little kids that call in with requests, same song over and over and over
again.
Oh, I don't remind
me.
It is 624.
It's cloudy.
But we
were nice to them.
We weren't
sure,
of
course.
Right?
Oh, always.
Got to be nice to listeners and
the callers.
You let the listeners pull your pin, Johnny Grenade.
That's right.
My alter ego.
That's where the days.
From El Segundo, California.
It's cloudy, we might get some sprinkles or showers, grab that umbrella, you know, check your wipers.
Oh, the wipers, definitely make sure that they're in good shape.
This portion of the show being brought to you by Madison Hearing Aid Center,
4706
Cottage Grove Road in Madison.
They have fast and flexible appointments.
They're family-owned and community-focused, and they help people by changing their lives.
Their number one goal isn't just selling hearing aids, it's improving the quality of life through better hearing.
We have those hearing aids.
Well, my life has completely changed.
Has it
really?
Yes.
You're hearing everything that your wife is telling you now?
How's that working out?
It's not good, I can tell you that.
Doing a lot more work around the house.
Madison Heriade Center, 4706 Cottage Grove Road in Madison.
Just go to their website.
They've got a hearing test right there to get you started.
Madisonheriadecenter.com.
Everything going okay at home?
I almost knocked down the book tower that I have the microphone perched
on.
Well,
it was
so good to have a new studio put in.
It's just, you know, if we had mic booms, it would really...
They're on order.
They're back order.
There's something about the shipping, I think.
Are we trying to give people the
impression that we
read books like these?
John, would you like me to dangle the string down from the ceiling to hold the microphone instead?
You know, that might
even be better than
the old days.
And the old days, they did that, and they sounded great, didn't they?
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You
know, I've
never been able to figure that out.
That's one of the great mysteries of life for me.
What?
In the old days, these people would go out and they performed live on stage on these variety shows,
and
they sound wonderful, great voices, incredibly full, right?
But they didn't have a mic on.
They didn't hold a microphone.
They didn't have a headset with a mic on it.
They had an overhead mic.
And they
sounded great.
Yes.
You're talking about television.
Yes, television.
Yes.
It's just
unbelievable.
There was a whole art to those
boom mics.
And I was like, how did they do that?
How do they sound so good with a microphone like five or six feet away from you?
Well, above you.
Yes.
And then you
see the performers holding
microphones.
Yeah.
Wait a minute.
You don't need a whole microphone anymore.
You got mics that hang overhead and and no one was listening.
Hollywood didn't care.
Right?
See, it's flyover country, they don't care
what we think out here.
Okay,
I don't know.
Are you done with that?
We could try to hang the mics.
Maybe we should get some fish line or something.
This is the tallest book pile
I've had so far.
Um, but it's working, right?
No, it almost, it almost tipped over.
I think we should add a book to it every day and see how long it takes for you to notice.
Well, then I
can do the, uh, the show standing up, which is what I used to do.
Yeah, that's true.
Well, that's true.
Yeah.
Once we get those, uh, stands
in, well, that would be really nice.
Just stop
buying stations and just, you know, finish this one.
Okay.
Um, all right.
What do you got, Gordy?
Yeah.
Hang on a second.
If you got the latest newsletter, John, and you've been checking the WMDX newsletter because it's really good.
It just keeps getting better and better.
It
really does.
It punches in the face when you're on our website.
What are you on this morning?
Get the latest inside information, what's happening behind the scenes here at WMDX and what's going on around the city.
It's really excellent.
It is.
WMDX
newsletter.
Just go to WMDXradio.com.
WMDXradio.com.
It's a remember.
I'm waiting
for a text
to them.
Yeah, I'm waiting for Catherine to call and haul you out of here.
What's the matter with you today?
I don't know.
I
don't know.
I really don't know.
It's 29 minutes past
an hour.
I feel almost
like giving up.
Don't give, what?
You
know,
as I watch,
you
know, as I am going through the news stories, you know, prepare for this show, there's, there's really not much hope.
It puts you in a frame of mind that's kind
of negative.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It kind of, you know, I, I, every once in a while, I come in and I think this is the end.
This is the last day.
And, uh, and, and that's never true.
No, you got to be
right.
You're Mr. Positive.
You bring me out of this.
I try to.
Yeah, some days it's harder than others.
29 past the hour.
We'll come back with idiocracy.
All the really weird good stories coming up next on John and Gordy in the morning.
As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point, a dumbing down, until humanity was incapable of solving even its most basic problems.
At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything.
That could be considered a rational thought.
Just when I think you couldn't possibly be any dumber, you go
and do something like this.
We can duck and cover.
There's a fallout shelter right there.
There's no way to survive this, you idiot!
Idiocracy.
For the smartest guy in the world, you're pretty dumb sometimes.
All the time.
All the time.
Alright.
92
ports,
7WFD.
WMDX.
Go ahead.
It's cloudy.
And maybe a couple of sprinkles along the way, a couple of showers here and there, 54 degrees currently, highs close to 60 later on today.
This portion of the show brought to you by Virlo mattress, where you can wake up and sleep better on a Virlo mattress.
A lot has changed since 1958.
You know
I was just
thinking about that the other day.
1958, what a year that was and so much has changed since then.
Yes, I've thought
about it too.
Things have changed.
But some things have not changed.
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Yes.
All right.
You can.
And you can rely on those wonderful.
What?
Bed frames.
The
adjustable bed
frame.
Not just any bed frames.
The adjustable
bed frame.
Well, yeah.
Thanks for.
You got
to go with that.
Yeah.
Alright now should we get by the
way don't got a bed.
Yeah, what got a bed finally?
He's not
sleeping on the floor really good news for some reason super tall too.
It's the size of me.
I'm a short guy It's freakishly I'll show you guys a picture.
I'll show it on the light as well.
Okay, really?
Yeah, it's it's it's nice and comfy.
Is that the only
furniture you have now
that and
Yeah, actually, that's actually it.
You don't have a chair?
No chairs?
A TV tray?
I don't have a dining room table yet.
Well, one thing at a time, you know, you don't want to push it.
You know, that's one of the things I noticed, you know, in adulthood, you get tall beds.
Tall beds.
I'm so used to a mattress on a floor.
If
only my dad had known about Verlo mattress when he was in college.
His bed frame was four melt crates that he stole from the local gas station and a sheet of plywood.
Oh my god.
That was his bed frame.
Whatever works.
Sounds like you've taken after him.
Maybe in one way or two,
yes.
Well, that's, uh, that's kind of interesting.
Okay.
Well, you know, tall beds.
Yeah.
It's kind of strange, you know, because you really don't have to get up from them.
You just kind of, you know, fall off a lot of bed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Let's get to, uh, idiocracy.
This is a story I started yesterday and I got off on this tangent on the ACA.
Okay.
Okay.
What?
I was
just thinking of something
else we
were going to do, but go
ahead.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Why don't we, uh, why don't we do that?
Can we do that?
So we were talking earlier about one of the great Phil Hartman bits on Saturday Night Live.
And at first you'd think, well, why would this be funny?
What is he going for here?
What's the humor?
And it just sank in when you watched this particular segment on Saturday Night Live, you just ended up loving it.
And it's a story about an unfrozen caveman who turns into a lawyer.
Here we go.
100,000 years ago, a caveman was out hunting on the frozen wastes when he slipped and fell into a crevasse.
In 1988, he was discovered by some scientists and thawed out.
He then went to law school and became unfrozen caveman lawyer.
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We'll play that for Jim Santel.
He'll be here.
Is he tomorrow?
Yes, he is.
All right, so anyway, we've got three ugly parts of the big bad bill.
I was gonna get to that yesterday.
We talked about the AC instead, but let's go over these things.
The big bad bill.
Yeah, a stunning provision that would allow Trump to defy court orders.
Yes, tucked into the bill is a paragraph limiting
a court's ability to make the government follow its rulings.
They snuck that through.
I watched a representative of a Democrat grilling the guy about, you do know you put this in there.
Oh no, no, no.
This is Comer.
I thought we played this maybe a while back, but he was grilled in the fact that they were giving all this power to Trump.
And it's true.
What
happens if part of this law is declared unconstitutional?
Can the government just say no?
Apparently.
Yeah, I wonder if the whole bill would have to be tossed up because it has unconstitutional elements to it, right?
Great big loophole.
How about this?
Significantly raising the debt would automatically trigger cuts to Medicare.
Who knew this one, right?
The Congressional Budget Office found that the bill would increase the national debt so much
that it could force nearly $500 billion in cuts to Medicare.
This is a little thing that none of us ever were aware of, but now we are.
The bill would force officials to mandate across the board spending cuts to Medicare.
All right, and that's just something to look forward to.
And another part of this, this is part three, bans federally funded healthcare for transgender people of all ages and
Bands coverage for those same services under the Affordable Care Act by excluding them from the definition of essential health benefits.
Yeah.
Well.
See now they're, you know, limiting the kind of benefits you get on the ACA.
And
the ACA is just a marketplace for insurance companies.
That's all it is.
You can shop there, you can buy whatever you want, you can choose from whatever insurance policy you want.
You're not forced into buying something that gives you transgender care.
Anyway.
So that's in the big bad
bill.
That's in the big bad bill.
Three elements.
The bill would reduce health insurance by 8.6 million.
Okay.
Yeah.
And mostly from Medicaid, the 13.7 million figure includes the expiration of premium subsidies for the ACA, and that's what I got on a rant about yesterday.
13.7 million people will lose their health insurance because of this big, bad bill.
Now, what are the chances this is going to go through the Senate as is?
I mean, they're not gonna, they're gonna mark this thing up.
Now you hear Ron Johnson talking about this all the time, but actually these guys will fold.
They'll, they'll win small victories and they'll use that as an excuse to say, well, we worked really hard.
We worked for you on this thing.
We fought for this and then they're going to pass it.
So we are definitely going to be getting this.
And they're going to pass it in some way, shape, or form.
We will lose a whole bunch of health care benefits.
All right, let's go to the phones right now.
We've got Mark on the line.
Mark, thanks for calling.
Good morning, Mark.
Yeah, for the whole transgender thing, do these people actually realize there are genetic conditions that the swirer syndrome where somebody is XY chromosome, but they actually have the external genitalia of a female?
Um, yeah, it was just beyond me.
And so that's not going to be treated because that's trend.
They'll consider that transgender.
Exactly.
Yes.
Yeah.
It is just beyond me that the ignorance of these people, it means that maybe Biden should have, maybe Biden should have invoked, you know, Trump's, you know, incredible cosmic power that he has now before he, before any of this ever happened.
It rested everybody under project 2025 and sent them off to some gulag someplace.
along with all their, you know, supporters.
I mean, it is just beyond me that we're finding any of this acceptable.
It is just...
Well, you know, you brought up a really good point, Mark, and this is something I thought about yesterday, was I was thinking about what they're doing in this big bad bill, and now in the Senate's hands.
But their whole agenda is based on punishment.
It's not to solve a problem.
It is to punish people for something they see as a waste or fraud or whatever it is, some imagined problem that they see in these issues, social issues, and they punish people.
Yeah, retribution.
There's a line in the Declaration of Independence.
I don't know if I've said it on this airwaves yet, but it's actually when the founders are, because right in the Declaration are actually kind of chiding their British... British...
Fellowes over in Great Britain, you know the fellow citizens and you know too long They're deaf of the deaf to the voice of justice and of their common concept we get to eat But that's a mix of common blood their common ancestry and these guys are deaf to justice into a common humanity Yeah, they're just that
yep.
Yeah.
All right,
Mark.
Thank you for that
call.
Thank you Appreciate it.
All right.
Here's
six eight eight seven nine eight two five five.
There's another one Q up
Cut 168.
Okay.
Louisians, they're losing their Medicaid and food stamp benefits because of supposed fraud down there.
Jake Tapper had a guest on and he was asking about this and his guest was Mike Johnson of all people who were really bad at explaining this stuff because he's, well, he thinks of himself as some kind of religious
Um, savior of some sort.
And, uh, just let's play this and listen to his reaction to the cuts to Medicaid.
So 1.4 million people in your home state of Louisiana are in Medicaid.
More than 800,000 receive, uh, SNAP benefits, also known as, uh, food stamps.
Is it your contention that if any of those Louisianans lose their benefits, it's because they shouldn't have been receiving them because they were committing waste, fraud, or abuse?
Yeah.
there
you go
that
was short and
sweet yeah yeah yeah that's that's what's gonna happen okay wow uh that's that simple short and sweet all right now let's get to something here this is uh i love scott percent you know uh
Treasury Secretary.
He is such a stiff piece of wood out there, man.
Wow.
No personality whatsoever.
Never invite that guy to a party.
Anyway, in a stunning moment, Democratic Congressman Richie Torres just perfectly explained how stupid Donald Trump's tariff plan is and a dissent appears clueless of all of the negative possibilities.
Let's listen to cut 82.
All right.
I'm afraid, John.
We
don't have time for that.
Yeah, but it's 40, what, yeah, it's a minute and a half, right?
Yeah, but we don't have a minute and a half left, John.
Time
is marching on.
Do you need to go back
to school and learn to tell time?
Well, we even have that coming up, though.
Oh, yeah, yeah, that's a little teaser.
That's what it was originally meant to be, a teaser.
Is that what it was?
Okay, I've got another thing, and this is not good news.
Wisconsin dropped a 44th in public funding for the UW system.
Is that so?
Yes.
And don't forget, they are going to punish the UW again, this buying in a budget.
And while Republicans bend over backwards for business interests, they apparently don't care, they nearly
800 business groups and individuals signed a letter of support for additional state investments in the UW.
This is the private sector talking.
Signers include the Green Bay Packers, Bucks, Epic Systems, Bartolotta's Restaurant Chain, Quad Snap-On, Exact Sciences, Uline, Uline, didn't believe that.
It goes
on and on.
Greater Milwaukee Committee.
We will be back with that comment from Scott Bassett, too.
Coming
up
next on John and Gordy.
you
Cloudy overcast morning.
It's Johnny courty in the morning.
WMDX 92.7 overlooking State Street.
Looks a little wet out there.
Had some sprinkles this morning.
Yeah, got a little bit of light rain moving through downtown.
And temperatures in the mid 50s will top out near 60 for today.
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dot com all right American author and journalist Molly young fast had a comment the other day this is cut 165 could we play that this is her comment on starving children Just to grow the deficit a little bit more right in the big bad bill It makes my argument that if you want to pay down the debt
You don't spend money on tax cuts.
Just restore the three trillion dollars of the expired tax cuts.
Okay.
You know, the thing is, and they never, no one has made this argument.
I'm the only person that I know of is making this argument.
So maybe.
Maybe I'm wrong.
You're the lone wolf on this thing.
People would say, don't listen to Peter.
He doesn't
know what he's talking about.
OK, I set that up wrong.
I gave you a big, a wide opening.
Sorry.
But anyway.
But any time you take money out of a budget, it's spending.
And if you spend that money and give it back to billionaires, millionaires, and corporations, that's spending money.
Now, the right will come back and say, well, it's their money.
And I say, no, it ain't.
It's money they paid in taxes to the US government.
Right.
And now it's the government's money.
And we don't.
give it back to them after they've just paid their taxes.
What kind of system is that?
So it's spending.
And if if Democrats would just get on that role, explain it that way, that this is spending money, but they're giving it to millionaire billionaires and corporations.
That's as simple as it gets.
Right.
So anyway, let's listen to Amaliyan fast here.
What what you're seeing now is these
it's just these Republicans are going after the people put them in office.
And a great example of this is the SNAP benefits.
And I mean, it'll be a seismic shift in the way we give money to children.
It will mean more and more hungry children.
Important to mention that this bill also grows the deficit.
So it both cuts services for poor children, more hungry children, and also more government debt.
Starved children.
and also grow the deficit, but it does.
It shows a certain lack of responsibility that the Republican Party doesn't, they are not worried about the deficit, and they're also not worried about serving children, which these are two things they should be worried about.
You'd think, right?
You would think that would be... Just a common sense would tell you that.
Yes.
What do we really have to be worried about, John?
Do we really have to concern ourselves with the budget deficit?
I know.
Or starving children?
I
know.
I know you're right.
Sam, you are right again.
Thank
you.
Thank you for
admitting it.
OK.
Well, you know, I was going to play a little cut here from Scott Bassett.
Do we have time?
Do we?
We get to it.
We
get to it right away.
Let's play it.
This is cut 82.
And this is Bassett not quite getting it.
These are other clueless.
Let's listen.
Do we have that?
I
have a simple yes or no question.
Do you think excessive taxation undermines the competitiveness of American manufacturing?
Yes, sir.
Now the Trump Tower regime is a breeding ground for the excessive taxation of American manufacturing.
Consider as an example, Intel's manufacturing of CPUs, Intel's sources, foreign components, which is subject to the first layer of taxation.
First layer.
It then manufactures the CPUs in the United States before exporting it to China, which will face a second layer of taxation.
And finally, China will export the CPU back to the United States, where it will face a third layer of taxation.
Taxation upon taxation upon taxation of American manufacturing goods.
Do you think that that kind of compounded taxation
Hinders or helps American manufacturer.
I think the strategic American manufacturer is very important like Intel and I think we have to bring that back to the US
Do you think taxing intermediate goods that go inside American manufacturer products helps or hinders manufacturer?
I believe that as the Intel example you give we have to bring these strategic industries back to the US
We're not gonna bring every component a Boeing aircraft 747
has six million components.
There is no universe in which we're going to manufacture all six million components in the United States.
And so if you impose a tax on those foreign components, you are hindering the manufacturing of Boeing 747 here in the United States.
Yeah,
it's
a big, big, big catch right there.
And I also found out that we're the nation charging.
the tariff uh-huh other nations aren't charging tariffs so they have kind of a lot of uh free will and they get a lot of product and we are the only nation doing that so we're actually hurting business in this country while other countries businesses are thriving
and on it goes it just boggles the mind well 659 after the news we'll uh welcome in jeff wilde and dan elsis
The Guns and Gardens Safe Disposal Program.
Gonna find out all about it on John and Gordy in the morning.
Next.
In the morning.
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It is 707.
It's cloudy.
We've got a few sprinkles, a couple of showers here and there.
Highs today, close to 60 degrees.
Right now we want to bring in Jeff Wilde and Dan Alsis.
They're with the Guns and Gardens Safe Disposal Project.
Good morning, gentlemen.
Good to have you here.
Good morning.
Hope to get a few guns off the off the streets, so to speak, or out of your homes.
Yes.
Tell us about your organization and what you got going on here on June 7th at the first United Methodist Church here in
Madison.
Just on the street from us here at the station.
Yes.
Well, Jeff, go ahead.
Yeah.
I am connected with a national organization called Raw Tools, as in war spelled backwards, and Raw Tools has been in existence for about 12 years, started by two co-authors of a book named Michael Martin, a Mennonite pastor, and Shane Claiborne, who's an activist and author.
I was so inspired by their book that I decided I could do this and began blacksmithing and took the training through an organization called the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship several years ago to help organize gun safe disposal events.
And so this is our third year, the second time that we've been at
First United Methodist Church in downtown Madison.
It's just like, you know, flapjacks in a Sunday morning.
I mean, you're out there, you know, grilling up the guns, melting them down, creating something else out of them.
It sounds laborious
and very hard
work,
right?
Do that on site?
Yeah.
I generally don't do it on site.
just because if our main focus is on safe disposal of firearms, it involves about 10 people, volunteers, and it also our focus is on destroying the firearms on site.
I take the barrels home and have work out of my garage, much to my wife's delight.
And it is laborious, but it's also
very meaningful to turn a firearm generally into a garden tool.
And that's the idea, right?
A garden
tool shoots bullets, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
So you're superheating these metal parts.
Right.
Down to iron or metal and then you do the sculpting?
I do the forging.
beat it out on my anvil.
What's one of your more popular gardening items?
Turn a gun to a gardening tool?
Well the first would be the hand spade.
The hand spades are very attractive.
I have a friend who turns wood, lives in Stoughton, and he makes the handles for me.
And yeah, I sell those.
The money is used to purchase gift cards for people who surrender their firearms.
So it's sort of self-supporting.
That's
great, yeah.
So Dan, let's bring you in on this.
You're with First United Methodist Church, correct?
Right.
Now, that's going on on June 7th, and it's a morning thing.
It's nine till noon, and that's where some of the forging will take place.
Are you going to melt some stuff down there
in the
parking lot or right in the lobby of
the
church?
Probably not.
It does not work
that way.
I'd just like to say, John, that
for people that are interested in, and this is totally voluntary.
We're trying to get people that have unwanted firearms.
Maybe they inherited those from a grandparent, you know, a long gun hunting rifles.
We get a lot of those.
And
those are particularly good, Jeff, for making, melding down and making into trowels or little pickaxes.
But, or maybe you had, unfortunately, an accident with a gun in the past.
We've had some people that actually have brought in AR-15s, which are military-style assault weapons, which were really eager to get off the streets.
They estimated in 2023 that there are 20 million
military style multi-round like 30 round guns are in this country they have no purpose practical purpose hunters would never want that much lead in their deer 20 million
Yeah, 20 million went up from in 1994.
When there was a assault weapon ban in this country for nine years, there were 400,000 nationwide.
So it went to 20 million.
But in any case, we encourage people if you just have an old handgun that you don't want your
Children or grandchildren playing with to bring those in voluntarily We give you a gift card up to $250 at pick-and-save Then we want those unloaded
and in the back of your vehicle, and you'll be coming in to the church parking lot off of Dayton at the corner of Dayton and Wisconsin Avenue, and we'll have volunteers directing you around, and then you can actually get out of your vehicle and watch Jeff and his crew chop saw these
items.
They don't wait.
They don't wait to take it out.
They just chop saw it right there in the vehicle, huh?
Yeah.
Um, wow.
They're all destroyed according to the, uh, the firearm tobacco and alcohol.
Yeah.
I was,
I was just thinking, I actually have a long gun, uh, 22.
And, uh, I accidentally, uh, lost the key to the gun lock that I have.
I've
never been able
to use it after that.
I don't know.
That's the way it is, you know?
So,
well, it's time to recycle.
If you'd like to dispose of it safely, so it won't fall into any other hands, I would make you, from a rifle barrel, a Maddox.
And a Maddox is another word for small pickaxe.
There you go.
You've been asking for one
of those for Christmas.
I need a small pickaxe.
So this is all a part of...
The National Gun Violence Awareness Week, right?
And is that the week of June 7th?
Or is that this
week?
Actually, all of June, Gordy, is National Gun Violence Awareness Month.
Oh,
OK.
But particularly June 6th through the 8th, we asked that people wear orange.
and also write their legislators at the state level.
We're looking for more stronger background checks at pop-up gun shows, taking guns out of the hands of
abusers, which the state has pretty lax rules on that, and also more red flag laws to identify mental illness,
many
mass shootings, they found people have mental illness, signs of mental illness, and we need to make people more family members more aware of that.
We had those in place at one time, right?
Didn't didn't they get rid of the red flag laws in the in the static?
No, I but we have really loosened up on Carey open carry.
Yeah With and in public buildings, which are Wisconsin Alliance Against violence wave is really pushing for tightening up on carry
laws as well
Now, Jeff, how many of these events do you help coordinate every year around here?
Several.
After this one, I have great hopes of working with some churches on the east side in the area of vicinity of Abundant Life Christian School and a joint effort.
to hold something around the anniversary of the shootings that took place there last early December.
Sure.
So the event is June 7th, Saturday, 9 to noon in the parking lot at First United Methodist Church.
And that'll be going on from again, 9 till noon that day.
And what else do people need to know about bringing their guns in?
Or you accept any kind of
firearm?
Yes.
Okay.
As Dan mentioned, we do not receive any ammunition.
The guns should be brought in and put in the trunk of a car or the backseat.
The driver doesn't leave the vehicle at all, but a person accompanies the driver through the event.
where the gun is removed from the car, ammunition check is done, given to the chop saw team where it is destroyed, they're offered a gift card and sent on their way.
It's kind of scary, you know, handling firearms in a parking lot.
safe rather
than sorry.
Yeah,
faith,
Jen.
And
it's interesting, like I've taken training with a group of other people doing this around the country, and we've been trained in pistol training.
And the teacher of that was an instructor from the National Rifle Association.
Wow, well,
that's great.
It's great to have that.
Well, we should mention the website to rawtools.org and get a lot of really good information there.
And again, that's rawtools.org.
And again, once again, June 7th, Saturday, market on your calendar, Saturday, June 7th, 9 to noon, parking lot at the first United Methodist Church.
And Jeff and Dan, we wish you all the best at that event.
Anything else you'd like to add before we wrap things
up?
I just want to express my appreciation for your willingness
to have us on this program.
Well, we're happy to have you.
Wish you well as well.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you so
much.
I will probably stop trying at this point to arm liberal citizens out there for the coming war.
Are you
gonna donate your... Well, yeah, I really have to get that .22 rifle out and just get rid of it finally.
Thank you, Jeff
and Dan.
We'll be back with more of John and Gordy in just a moment.
Stay with us.
Thank you.
All right.
Good job,
guys.
92.7,
John and Gordy.
It is 723 cloudy, little bit of rain here and there.
Highs today, right around 60.
Currently it's 55 degrees.
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All right, why don't
we
get
into the economy?
And it's a little chaotic when
you consider
all of the tariffs that are on and off, delays.
All that kind of stuff.
I don't exactly know what you're talking about in there.
What are you?
We're going to get to all of that in just a moment.
What?
But first,
we have
our chief
meteorologist, Brittany
Merlot.
Oh,
man, you know.
Good morning, Brittany.
Crazy day around here.
I'm a little
discombobulated.
We need Dan Schaefer in here.
Yes.
Recombobulate us all.
So we've got some clouds and rain this morning, a little bit of light rain around the Madison areas.
This is what we expect for today.
All day.
Pretty much until about three o'clock, I'd say it's going to stick around on and off light drizzle out there.
Yeah.
Probably a quarter of an inch of rain expected throughout the day.
Maybe some rumbles of thunder this afternoon, but I think a lot of those are going to stay north of you.
But like you said, high is it about 60?
It's the last cool, crisp day before that summer heat starts to move on in.
Tomorrow will hit 70.
It'll be partly sunny, but we do start to have those chances of pop-up showers and storms in the afternoon.
So that's going to be, again, chance tomorrow.
Then Storm Chances Friday
hit
80 degrees and some muggyness starts to seep
in too.
Oh, the dew points.
Oh, the dew points.
I was looking at the dew points next week and into next weekend for you, John.
Yes.
They're disgusting.
It's 70s.
That is like
dripping sweat.
Dew points headed our way.
That's bad.
All right.
Well, it's air conditioning time once again at the Peterson home.
All right.
So by next week, so enjoy the 60 degrees today, 70 tomorrow, 80 on Friday on a sunshine to end the week.
So
that's nice.
That's nice.
Yeah.
The weekend looks okay.
No rain.
No, actually, not at all.
Saturday, sunny and Sunday, sunny.
All right.
Excellent.
All right, Brittany, thank you so much.
You have a good day.
I'll talk to you again tomorrow.
That's our WMDX.
As we all wear black today.
Yeah.
Black clothing date today.
Thanks, Brittany.
Our
WMDX
meteorologist.
OK.
As we all watch, you know, our phones, the video on our phones as we drive into work.
That's
what you do, yes.
Our phone lines are open, 608-879-8255-608-879.
Talk, or you can of course always reach us the easy way on the Civic Media app, free to download and free to use.
One of the fun people we'll listen to normally on the economy now is, you know, with that.
British accent, right?
Justin Wolters, he
comes out
and he has a few things.
He was on Chris Hayes last night and I've got, I'm definitely gonna get a few comments that he made last night on the show, but I've got one here and he's talking about explaining what's really behind Trump's decisions on the tariffs and the economy.
Guess what?
It's stupidity and crony capitalism.
Surprise!
Yeah,
so
this is cut 190 and he's talking about crony capitalism and explaining it to everybody in the easiest way you can.
Here we go.
Essentially the president of the United States, not essentially literally, is calling the CEO of an individual private company and telling him where he should produce what.
Often when governments do this, they use a committee to do this planning called a central planning committee.
But it is very much of an ideology that I understood Americans had fought a cold water reject and that Republicans more than anyone else rejected.
This is the most interventionist White House of my life.
There is not a single institution that this guy doesn't want to call, whether it's Harvard, whether it's Apple.
To tell him how to do their jobs.
Yeah, and I'm just an economist But sometimes I think that if you leave people alone to do a pretty good job and fight stuff out in the market that really works The problem is the president also not only is not an expert on how to run a university or how to run a computer company or how to make iPhones He's also one who likes favors and so what that's actually leading to is a bunch of people competing Not in the market to produce the best good but competing to get closer to him at Mar-a-Lago
And so if we end up with the products being produced by the folks who are best at getting tomorrow lago rather than the best at making products We're gonna end up with a market economy full of crappy products at terrible prices And the losers are gonna be you and me and that's what we mean when we talk about crony capitalism
Why can't wait?
This is what we're going to expect right crony capitalism and this is really the definition of
crony capitalism.
Just an
amazing analysis.
And I think he's spot on.
What was that again?
That
is just Justin Wolffers.
Justin Wolters.
Okay.
Wolffers.
And he is he's he's really nailed it a whole bunch of times in the last night on crusades.
He really did it again.
And we'll try to get a few of those comments in here.
But he pointed out and I pointed out here on the show that he he he identified Trump as a as
as an interventionist.
He is out there micromanaging businesses in this country telling him how to invest, where to build their businesses, how to do all of this.
And it's insane.
He's
the expert.
He can't do that.
But that doesn't stop us.
But he's
trying to do it
anyway.
Yeah, the entire economy.
It is 7.29.
Coming up next, Mike McCabe will join us.
He's going to explain the proclamation from the governor of
the
30th anniversary.
Wow,
we'll get
to that.
Just a moment on John and Gordy in the
morning.
This portion of the show is being brought to you by Ed's Department Store, which this week only is featuring its annual Clarence sale.
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I'm a little confused.
I'm trying to work that out.
Quite understandable.
John Peterson, Gordy Young.
Johnny Gordy in the morning on WMDX 92.7.
It
is 735 cloudy, a little bit of rain along the way, highs near 60 for today.
And we'll get to Mike McCabe here in just a moment.
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Yes, it's able to tune out mega discussions at the dining room table.
It's amazing how the AI is able to single that.
I think you're making this up
now.
And
mute it.
A
man can dream.
Technology can take us there, I think.
All right, well, let's get to Mike McCame from Substack and also the author of Miracle of Long County Q. We have a county
you sign here that Sam brought in, Sam.
Well, yeah, this is my last time being in the studio for Mike McCabe's
weekly appearance,
and I wanted to finish his book before it, so I sat and I finished the book yesterday.
And
your review?
It's a good book.
I can definitely
tell that it was written by Mike.
There's a lot of wisdom packed into that book.
And
a few surprises, too.
A few surprises,
completely out of left field, yes.
But you mentioned the road sign.
I grew up probably two or three miles from Marathon County Q in Ringle, Wisconsin.
And when Marathon County redid their entire addressing system, I stole one of their old road signs for
County
Q.
And so I
thought it would be
funny to bring that in.
And for listeners who don't know where Marathon County is, it neighbors Clark County, which is where I grew up and where
Miracles Along County Q is set in
Clark County.
Yeah.
So next door neighbors.
And you also mentioned on Substack, your reviews, your star reviews.
And you have a four and a half out of five stars in your review column.
And that's really actually exceptional.
That's pretty good.
Yeah.
That's not bad for a rookie
for
the first time I've ever tried my hand at fiction.
And there was one one-star review.
Oh,
really?
And
somebody who hated it and gave it one star, which knocked the rating down.
So it was like a 4.8 or 4.9 out of five stars for a while, the average, but the one-star review knocked it down a bit.
But hey, that comes with the territory.
Yeah, you can't please everybody.
You can't please everybody.
Somebody was offended.
Well,
you know my wife also has those reviews and Yeah, you get knocked on every once in a while by
somebody
who says well you took too long to get the second book out Two or three stars and it's always unfair or I didn't get the book or I haven't read it yet, but you know
There's all these excuse for the low ratings that they give in some of these reviews.
It's crazy stuff.
Now we're talking about the highway sign here, and it's County Highway Q. And we were talking how in the old days, there weren't really references, addresses or road names, right?
In
Wisconsin.
We're saying off the air that when I was growing up in Clark County, we lived on a gravel road.
We had a dairy farm about a mile and a half down a gravel road.
And the road had no name.
And there was no fire number for the properties.
The postal service and the fire department for that matter just needed to know where people lived.
And they needed to come wherever they were told to go.
And so, yeah, when we gave people directions, we just had to say, go out County Highway E is where our farm was off of County E.
And you'll see a creamery on
the right and a tavern on the left.
And it's at that intersection where you turn left on this gravel road.
You go down there a little bit over a mile and you're going to find our farm there on the left.
And now I don't know when the law was changed so that you had to have fire numbers, but all you go out in the country and you'll see these numbers posted by every property.
That's actually a fire number so that fire departments know where to
go
if they're responding to a fire.
And I assume the Postal Service now has that road, never had a name, there was no road sign.
It's now called Hickory Road, the road where I...
where I grew up.
I don't know when that road was labeled, but it never was while I lived there.
Well, your farm's still there.
Yeah, oh yeah.
Yeah, and I'm still in touch with the people who bought the farm from us.
It's still in the same family.
The family that bought it from us still is on the land today.
And I still exchange notes from time to time with, he was knee high to a grasshopper at the time.
We sold the farm to them.
He was just a little kid, but Matthew Dorico now is fully grown and I'm still in touch with Matt.
It's a great story.
Working farm
still.
It's sort of a working farm, but they did get out of dairying.
They no longer milk, they grow crops, but you know, this was a family from the Chicago area that wanted to get out of the city and come to the country.
And they bought our
farm and they had never milked cows in their lives.
They weren't farmers, but they learned it and they became exceptional dairy farmers.
He was a trucker, Frank Dorico was a trucker.
They now run a trucking business.
off of the farm.
They have their, you know, they have their whole system of communicating with all their trucks is actually run out of an old shed on our
farm.
Well, you know, we had a late night movie show on Fox 47 many years ago, and it was brought to everybody by Rural Route 1 Popcorn.
That's right.
And that's how they identified properties back then as Rural Route 1 too.
I lived at
Rural Route 1 Curtis, Wisconsin.
There you go.
That was my, our family's address, and so there was no road number, nothing.
Rural Route 1
Curtis.
Talk with Mike McCabe, substack author and blogger.
What's your latest column about Mike?
Well, it's really about it's really about how We're living in at a time of great dishonesty and cruelty and there's an awful lot of people who who are being victimized Sometimes grabbed off the street and detained with without due process and and for no just reason and and
You know, an awful lot of people who are wearing crosses around their necks are looking the other way.
And so I, you know, I, you know, I just tell that old story that everybody knows.
And some people believe in this historical figure.
Some of them believe that this is actually a savior and attach religious meaning to this individual.
And, you know, and some people just don't buy the story at all.
But you know the story, the night that before Jesus was nailed to a cross, he met with his disciples and washed the feet of those closest to him, his closest confidants, knowing that he was about to be betrayed.
He was about to be abandoned and forsaken.
And the next day he would be nailed to a cross.
And the people who wear that cross around their neck,
are not washing feet.
They are washing their hands.
Of all of that is going on around us.
That's what the column is about.
Caroline Levitt.
It's literally, you know, the title of the article,
the
sub-stack, is feet or hands.
And we got that choice to make.
And yeah, you know, and all these people around this current regime, including the press secretary that you just named.
You look at them, they've always got a cross around
their
neck.
And yet the teaching of the individual for whom that symbol is worn has gone right out the window.
So I wrote about
that.
play a little cut here.
This is cut 183.
Can we just just a little bit of it?
OK, because you get the point, but this is James Tolerico.
He's a representative in Texas, and he's a pastor, also a representative.
So let's listen just a little part of what he's getting at here in this clip.
What is the fourth commitment?
The Sabbath part of keeping
the Sabbath holy is not working on the Sabbath.
That is, that is, yeah.
What day is the Jewish Sabbath?
It is on Saturday.
And what
day is it today?
It is Saturday.
Here we are.
The
Christian Sabbath is what day?
Sunday in honor of the day that Jesus rose from the dead.
And we're scheduled to give this bill a final vote on what day of the week?
It's ironic, isn't it?
Would you be willing to postpone your bill so that we're not breaking the 10 commandments by working on the Jewish or Christian Sabbath?
I love that you said that because you're
saying that you'd rather tell people to follow the 10 commandments than follow it yourself
I would have rather have had this bill passed the other day when it was time We as a
legislature are about to force every teacher in the state to post the 10 commandments in their classrooms
Do
members of
the Texas Legislature follow the Ten Commandments?
So again, this bill is about honoring our historical, educational, and judicial heritage with the display of the Ten Commandments.
The Ninth Commandment is, Thou shalt not bear false witness.
Are you aware of any legislators who have lied about anything?
All right, now we kind
of
get
the
idea.
But very good point, right?
They're really pushing the 10 commandments to get none of them are really following in the footsteps of Jesus and the tablets themselves.
And if she'd been honest, boy, that clip would have been really long if she'd listed
all
the lawmakers who had been dishonest.
Oh, that is so true.
My goodness.
Yeah.
But anyway, yeah, you were talking about that and this is what's happening kind of in this country here that they're they're they're doing things just the opposite of what You know what their religion is telling them.
Yeah, and you know, I partly wrote the article To call out that hypocrisy.
So that's part of the purpose.
But I also wrote the article for all of us whether we're lawmakers or not elected to any
any public station, regardless of our place in this society, we can choose, sort of metaphorically,
we
can choose to wash feet or wash our hands.
We
can turn away from the brutality and the barbarity that is around us, or we can choose to be kind when other people are being rude.
We can choose to...
to show common decency when other people are engaged in cruelty.
Well, we're seeing that not happen.
And that's part of why I wrote this is because I think a lot of times decent-minded people turn, they sort of take the cues of those who are...
at the top engaging in cruelty and barbarity.
And that's the way they start treating people.
And that's when we really are in trouble, when we start to mirror that behavior.
And that's something that we all can do in a moment like this, where it is a very dishonest age, it's a very troubling age in so many ways, and it's a very cruel age.
We can choose to go in the opposite direction.
We're here with Mike McCabe.
Mike, stay with us.
We'll be back after a brief time out here on John and Gordy in the morning.
WMDX.
You know there's a light that glows by the front door Don't forget the keys under the mat
When childhood stars shine, always stay humble and kind.
Go to church because your mom says to, there's a grandpa every chance that you can.
Won't be wasted time, always stay humble and kind.
And there you go.
It's Tim McGraw.
Great song.
The song Mike McCabe posted on Substack in this particular story that we're talking about today, and that is Feet or Hands.
And I never heard the song before, but the lyrics are actually really nice.
And they get more powerful as the song goes
on.
And
I posted the YouTube video, so there's a music
video
that goes with it.
And that's worth watching.
All right.
And you all posted a cartoon, which I thought was fantastic.
You showed a picture to guys on a very fancy yacht.
Yeah.
And the dialogue goes, and can you believe it?
It only cost 180 people their Medicaid benefits.
Maybe the way they describe it now.
And what would the jet airplane cost?
Oh, man.
And we were talking about, you know, addresses on the rural communities and Lynn from Golden Valley, Texas, saying, I grew up out.
outside of Eau Claire.
And in the 60s, we lived on rural route three box 94.
So the mail system had their own codes.
The road lacked the name until about the 1970s.
So and that must
have been a somewhat more populated area because they needed PO Box.
That's right.
And there was
a rural three.
Yeah.
Yes.
But you know, the whole thing here is I always thought it was a tradition here in Wisconsin where we described where we lived, where to go by landmarks, right?
I mean, that's always the way it was.
It's, you know, two blocks from the McDonald's.
You turn right at the mobile station and right across the street from the church.
That's where I live.
That's right.
That's right.
That's the way it is.
So, yeah, maybe that's how all of that became a tradition here in the state.
I don't
know.
Possibly so, yeah.
So, Mike, what do you got coming up in the next little while here?
You're kind of on a hiatus.
We were talking about you were making all these appearances.
For
book events, I think all the people who do book events must figure that they need to respect people's desire to be outdoors in the summer because there is a little bit of a hiatus.
I'm going to be up in...
Owen where I went to high school in July for an event.
But other than that, it's not going to get busy again until September or October.
And Miracles Along County Q is your book.
You've mentioned before, you don't think this might be the only novel that you write,
right?
Yeah, I don't have another story rattling around in my head, you know, ready to start writing down.
I would never rule it out because it was a wonderful undertaking.
I really enjoyed.
doing it, but it might be the only one I ever write.
I don't know whether another story is going to occur to me.
Yeah, I know.
You had a great idea for a book.
You know, one of the things I've noticed is a lot of authors, they'll write that first book and it comes from a place of great authenticity and
then they start and then they
start, yeah, they've got an inspiration and then they start writing formulaically and they kind of write for the market and they just start churning stuff out.
Yeah.
But
they're never as good as that one that came from that place of real inspiration.
And I don't really want to just churn books out for the sake of publishing books.
I would want it to be a story that inspires me.
Yeah.
Now, I want to hear... We were talking about...
wearing the cross and living the Bible, if that's truly what you think is important in your life.
But we're seeing a lot of people, at least Republicans and Magas at this point, kind of ignore our responsibilities to their fellow man by taking away all the healthcare.
And I've never seen anything quite like this.
I don't think anybody else has, and we keep saying that.
But just to...
Pass out tax cuts to spend money on the billionaires and millionaires and corporations to spend money on them and then taking away all of the health care that they will be taking away the safety nets food They're doing this at the expense of Every everybody in this country just to give tax cuts to people who already have the money and don't need it and should actually be paying forward at this point, right?
You know, and it's funny.
I wrote this article
you know, and it starts out with the story of Jesus.
I'm not a church-going man.
But to me, whether you see him as Jesus Christ or just Jesus of Nazareth, a historical figure, or even if you don't accept that such a man ever walked the face of the earth, the story is powerful.
And there's a tremendous amount of truth in the story.
And what it says to us all these years later, two millennia later, what it says to us is just...
is just be accepting and kind and decent toward people.
And don't look down at people and see them as beneath you.
Get down to their level and show them some human compassion and some decency.
And that is what is so missing in our...
in our society and in our politics today and our culture.
I want to get to, you were celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
Everybody, everybody, all the leaders of that group got together.
Yeah, that's the first and
only time that all four
people who have been
director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign were in the same
room
at the same time, which
was pretty cool.
I had about a 20-year association of that 30 years.
I was involved for about 20 and was director for 15.
and passed the baton to new leadership and keeps going strong.
And Governor Evers wrote a proclamation, which was wonderful that he did that for the people who are there now.
You
know, I'm in the past.
Mike McKay, we got to leave it there.
We'll see you next Wednesday.
This portion of John and Gordy in the morning brought to you by Virlo Mattress.
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On a overcast morning again, it's the John and Gordy show and we are Broadcasting live from State Street to block away from the Capitol the capital city Madison You know the Republicans are in session and they're Writing up bills, you know, they're trying to come up with a budget and and it's a disaster It's just like the disaster the budget.
We're watching federally.
Yeah, and
I'm just amazed at how both of these processes will clash in whatever way they're going to clash.
So, you know, the federal government is shifting all the expenses now to the states, and the states are, you know, planning on big tax cuts too, and they don't want to spend any money.
I wonder how this is all going to end.
So
one.
Well, yeah, but instead of just melting down iron stock to cast into various carvings and whatnot, these people are melting down old guns in order to turn into new things.
can have a, you can have a multi-use tool.
You can have a gun and like a garden hose.
So if you got like a, like a gopher.
A rabbit.
Yeah.
You can just take care of
Henry.
He
I hate flip flops.
I hate flip flops.
How do you keep them on your feet?
It's stupid.
It doesn't make any sense.
Like I hate having things between my toes.
so it really gets in the back.
Yeah,
Okay.
put it off a year and a half Dom Dom has sort of taken over the history.
So you need to decide between us for who gets to take
them
You want to hear about the chili Willy?
Well, so right before the show we were watching this video on John's computer of the Irish
catches the cheese first, wins a big prize.
hill.
Yeah, they're
Right.
Well, so I brought up this tradition we do at the summer camp I work at called the Chili Willy, which this tradition reminded me of.
The Chili Willy is basically you get two teams of people together.
You go out to the lake very early in the morning when the air temperature is still freezing.
Yeah.
And you get a big block of ice that you freeze in like a five gallon bucket.
Somebody throws it into the water and the teams run after it whichever team gets it first wins a point and you keep going until all of the ice has melted Okay, and it's just these it's an absolute brawl in the water.
What do
over this when you go into the
a big chunk of ice like a five gallon bucket size ice cube
that it?
They win a point, and then you keep on going until the ice is melted.
Right, you wouldn't think that this is what a chili willie is.
We
right?
There's shrinkage involved.
Yeah, a little bit.
know, we should all participate in one.
I think that would be a good
mean, is everything?
Am I ever done working on it?
Well, that's what I'm wondering.
Well,
on it.
Well, I mean, it runs and drives.
I drove it probably almost 500 miles over the long weekend.
It's only happened one time in all my years owning it that I actually had to call for help.
Why don't you drive it and then you can see for yourself?
Apparently not.
Wow.
Don't you want to relive your days of driving a Carmen Ghia around?
day.
Did you do it more than once?
once.
Oh.
Once is
that's
that was him lawyer.
Yeah, the unfrozen caveman lawyer.
Yeah, that's him It's a long story or Henry, excuse me, maybe we can find a clip of the unfrozen
you
So this was kind of a fun, it's not really a funny story.
But there was a murder suspect that was perched on a crane.
Let me pull it up real quick.
Yeah, his name was Carl Edward Rowland.
He was 41 years old.
And for three days straight, he was stuck on a crane.
No food, no water.
And they had to like position a bucket underneath them so he can go to the bathroom.
So it was.
in the engine block.
Yeah.
And he couldn't pull it out.
Yeah.
What the story behind that is.
What happened to that guy?
Crazy stuff, isn't it?
Did he survive?
Well, almost,
we
I'll have to get it real quick.
We're fighting over the same mouse and keyboard here.
Uh-oh.
OK.
Well, that's your problem.
There's
Yeah, that's great stuff.
Thank you for that.
Thank you.
You can call us.
You can text us on the Civic Media app.
Also call us at 608-879-8255 or send us a text.
Okay, just getting started on a Wednesday morning.
Mike McCabe with us our next hour.
We'll be back with more of John and Gordy in just a moment.
He gives
us very much pleasure.
Our little mokes fog and treasure.
You know,
they were.
They're over
Yeah.
just wait until you.
Dom discovers your other your other musical.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Your hatred for other musicians.
It's got a lot of on that
That's what all the years and top 40 radio does to a guy.
sure,
You
the colleagues.
You let the listeners pull your pin, Johnny Grenade.
That's right.
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John, would you like me to dangle the string down from the ceiling to hold the microphone?
You know, that might
the old days.
In the old days, they did that, and they sounded great, didn't they?
You know, I've
and
see the
holding
See,
I think we should add a book to it every day and see how long it takes for you to notice.
Well, then I
Yeah, that's true.
Well, that's true.
on around the city.
It is WMDX
morning.
As
the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point, a dumbing down.
until humanity was incapable of solving even its most basic problems.
At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought.
Just when I think you couldn't possibly be any dumber,
Idiocracy.
For the smartest guy in the world, you're pretty dumb sometimes.
you
know
Things have changed.
But some things have not changed.
Some things have remained constant throughout Virlo's history.
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Verlo mattress, that's Verlo mattress, two Madison locations, east side and west side.
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You can rely
Yeah.
If only my dad had known about Verla Mattress when he was in college.
His bed frame was four melt crates that he stole from the local gas station and a sheet of plywood.
That was his bed frame.
Whatever
Maybe in one way or two, yeah.
Yeah.
Why don't we, uh, why don't we do that?
Can we do that?
So we were talking earlier about one of the great Phil Hartman bits on Saturday Night Live.
And at first you'd think, well, why would this be funny?
What is he going for here?
Where's the humor?
And it just sank in when you watched this particular segment on Saturday Night Live, you just ended up loving it.
And it's a story about an unfrozen caveman who turns into a lawyer.
Here
go.
100,000 years ago, a caveman was out hunting on the frozen wastes when he slipped and fell into a crevasse.
In 1988, he was discovered by some scientists and thought out.
He then went to law school and became unfrozen caveman lawyer.
He used to be a caveman, but now he's
a
lawyer.
brought to you by gas plus actually gives you gas for those times when you feel like being the Joker and by happy fun ball still legal in 16 states it's happy it's fun it's happy fun ball
That was a runny fag that they had, yeah.
That was great.
Just, it was a dangerous ball.
Unfrozen caveman, boy.
We'll play that for Jim Santel.
He'll be here tomorrow.
Yes, he is.
Okay.
All right, so anyway, we've got three ugly parts of the.
Big bad bill.
I was gonna get to that yesterday.
We talked about the AC instead, but let's go over these things.
A big bad bill.
Yeah, a stunning provision that would allow Trump to defy court orders.
Yes, tucked into the bill is a paragraph limiting a court's ability to make the government follow its rulings.
Okay.
You know, I just watched that.
They snuck that
I watched a representative of a Democrat grilling a guy about, you do know you put this in there.
Oh no, no, no.
This is, this is Comer.
I thought we played this maybe a while back, but you know, he was, he was grilled in, in the fact that they were giving all this power to Trump.
And that's true.
What happens if part of this law is declared unconstitutional?
Can, can the government just say no?
Apparently.
Yeah, I wonder if the whole bill would have to be tossed up because it has unconstitutional elements to it, right?
Great big loophole.
How about this?
Significantly raising the debt would automatically trigger cuts to Medicare.
Who knew this one, right?
The Congressional Budget Office found that the bill would increase the national debt so much that it could force nearly $500 billion in cuts to Medicare.
This is a little thing that none of us ever
We're aware of, but now we are, the bill would force officials to mandate across the board spending cuts to Medicare.
All right, that's just something to look forward to.
And another part of this, this is part three, Bans federally funded healthcare for transgender people of all ages and Bans coverage for those same services under the Affordable Care Act by excluding them from the definition of essential health.
benefits.
The ACA is just a marketplace for insurance companies.
That's all it is.
You can shop there, you can buy whatever you want, you can choose from whatever insurance policy you want.
You're not forced into buying something that gives you transgender care.
Anyway,
They'll, they'll win small victories and they'll use that as an excuse to say, well, we worked really hard.
We worked for you on this thing.
We fought for this and then they're going to pass it.
So we are definitely going to be getting this.
And they're going to pass it in some way, shape, or form.
We will lose a whole bunch of health care benefits.
All right, let's go to the phones right now.
We've got Mark on the line.
Mark, thanks for calling.
Good morning, Mark.
Yeah, for the whole transgender thing, do these people actually realize they're actually our genetic conditions that the swirer syndrome where somebody is XY chromosome, but they actually have the external genitalia of a female?
Um, yeah, it was just beyond me.
And so that's not going to be treated because that's trend.
They'll consider that transgender.
Exactly.
Yes.
Yeah.
It is just beyond me that the ignorance of these people, it means that maybe Biden should have, maybe Biden should have invoked, you know, Trump's, you know, incredible cosmic power that he has now before he, before any of this ever happened.
It rested everybody under project 2025 and sent them off to some gulag someplace.
along with all their supporters.
I mean, it is just beyond me that we're finding any of this acceptable.
It is just...
Well, you know, you brought up a really good point, Mark, and this is something I thought about yesterday, was I was thinking about what they're doing in this big bad bill, and now in the Senate's hands.
But their whole agenda is based on punishment.
It's not to solve a problem.
It is to punish people for something they see as a waste or fraud or whatever it is, some imagined problem that they see in these issues, social issues, and they punish people.
There's a line in the Declaration of Independence.
I don't know if I've said it on this airwaves yet, but it's actually when the founders are, because right in the Declaration are actually kind of chiding their British
fellows over in Great Britain, you know, the fellow citizen saying, you know, too long, you know, they're deaf of the deaf to the voice of justice and of their common concept.
We get deep, but that's, uh, it's a common blood, the common ancestry.
And these guys are deaf to justice and or a common humanity.
Yeah.
And they're just that.
Q up cut 168 Okay, Louisiana's they're losing their Medicaid and food stamp benefits because of supposed fraud down there Jake Tapper had a guest on and he was asking about this and his guest was Mike Johnson of all people who really bad at explaining this stuff because he's
Well, he thinks of himself as some kind of religious savior of some sort.
And just let's play this and listen to his reaction to the cuts to Medicaid.
So 1.4 million people in your home state of Louisiana are in Medicaid.
More than 800,000 receive SNAP benefits, also known as food stamps.
Is it your contention that if any of those Louisiana's lose their benefits, it's because they shouldn't have been receiving them because they were committing waste fraud or abuse?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's that's what's going to happen.
Okay.
Wow.
That's that simple.
Short and sweet.
All right, now let's get to something here.
This is I love Scott Bassett, you know, Treasury Secretary.
He is such a stiff piece of wood out there, man.
Wow.
No personality whatsoever.
Never invite that guy to a party.
Anyway, in a stunning moment.
Democratic Congressman Richie Torres just perfectly explained how stupid Donald Trump's tariff plan is, and a dissent appears clueless, of all of the negative possibilities.
Let's listen to cut 82, all right?
I'm afraid, John, we don't have time for that.
yeah,
right?
Yeah, but we don't have a minute and a half left, John.
Time is marching on.
You need to go back to school and learn to tell time.
Oh, yeah.
That's what it was originally meant to be a teaser.
Is that what it was?
Okay, I've got another thing and this is not good news Wisconsin dropped a 44th in public funding for the UW system.
Is that so?
Yes, and don't forget They are gonna punish the UW again this buying a budget And while Republicans bend over backwards for business interests, they apparently don't care they nearly
800 business groups and individuals signed a letter of support for additional state investments in the UW.
This is the private sector talking.
Signers include the Green Bay Packers, Bucks, Epic Systems, Bartolotta's Restaurant Chain, QuadSnapOn, Exact Sciences, ULINE, ULINE.
Did you believe that?
You're listening to Civic Media.
Yeah, got a little bit of light rain moving through downtown and temperatures in the mid fifties will top out near 60 for today.
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This is cut 165, could we pull you that?
This is her comment on starving children.
Just to grow the deficit a little bit more, right?
And the big bad bill, it makes my argument that if you want to pay down the debt,
You don't spend money on tax cuts.
Just restore the three trillion dollars of the expired tax cuts.
Okay.
You know, the thing is, and they never, no one has made this argument.
I'm the only person that I know of is making this argument.
So maybe.
Maybe I'm wrong.
You're the lone wolf on this thing.
OK, I set that up wrong.
I gave you a big, a wide opening.
Sorry.
But anyway.
But any time you take money out of a budget, it's spending.
And if you spend that money and give it back to billionaires, millionaires, and corporations, that's spending money.
Now, the right will come back and say, well, it's their money.
And I say, no, it ain't.
It's money they paid in taxes to the US government.
Right.
And now it's the government's money.
And we don't.
give it back to them after they've just paid their taxes.
What kind of system is that?
So it's spending.
And if if Democrats would just get on that role, explain it that way, that this is spending money, but they're giving it to millionaire billionaires and corporations.
That's as simple as it gets.
All right.
So anyway, let's listen to Amaliyan fast here.
What what you're seeing now is these
It's just these Republicans are going after the people who put them in office.
And a great example of this is the SNAP benefits.
And I mean, it'll be a seismic shift in the way we give money to children.
It will mean more and more hungry children.
Important to mention that this bill also grows the deficit.
So it both cuts services for poor children, more hungry children, and also more government debt.
Starved children.
and also grow the deficit, but it does.
It shows a certain lack of responsibility that the Republican Party doesn't, they are not worried about the deficit and they're also not worried about serving children, which these are two things they should be worried about.
Yes.
What do we really have to be worried about, John?
Do we really have to concern ourselves with the budget deficit?
I know.
Or starving children?
I
you.
Thank you for admitting
Do
have a simple yes or no question.
Do you think excessive taxation undermines the competitiveness of American manufacturing?
Yes, sir.
Now the Trump Tower regime is a breeding ground for the excessive taxation of American manufacturing.
Consider as an example, Intel's manufacturing of CPUs, Intel's sources, foreign components,
which is subject to the first layer of taxation,
then manufactures the CPUs in the United States before exporting it to China, which will face a second layer of taxation, and finally China will export the CPU back to the United States, where it will face a third layer of taxation, taxation upon taxation upon taxation of American manufacturing goods.
Do you think that that kind of compounded taxation
Hinders or helps American manufacturer.
I think the strategic American manufacturer is very important like Intel and I think we have to bring that back to the US
Do you think taxing intermediate goods that go inside American manufacturer products helps or hinders manufacture?
I believe that as the Intel example you give we have to bring these strategic industries back to the US
We're not gonna bring every component a Boeing aircraft 747
has six million components.
There is no universe in which we're going to manufacture all six million components in the United States.
And so if you impose a tax on those foreign components, you are hindering the manufacturing of Boeing 747 here in the United States.
a big, big, big catch right there.
And I also found out that we're the nation charging
the tariff.
Other nations aren't charging tariffs.
So they have kind of a lot of free will and they get a lot of product and we are the only nation doing that.
So we're actually hurting business in this country while other countries, businesses are thriving.
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we're saying.
Oh, are our mics on?
No.
Yes.
Well, Jeff, go ahead.
Yep.
I am connected with a national organization called Raw Tools as in war spelled backwards.
and Raw Tools has been in existence for about 12 years, started by two co-authors of a book named Michael Martin, a Mennonite pastor, and Shane Claiborne, who's an activist and author.
I was so inspired by their book that I decided I could do this and began blacksmithing and took the training through an organization called the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship several years ago to help organize gun safe disposal events.
And so this is our third year, the second time that we've been at
First United Methodist Church in downtown Madison.
hard
Yeah.
I generally don't do it on site.
just because if our main focus is on safe disposal of firearms, it involves about 10 people, volunteers, and it also our focus is on destroying the firearms on site.
I take the barrels home and have work out of my garage, much to my wife's delight.
And
it is laborious, but it's also
very meaningful to turn a firearm generally into a garden tool.
forging.
beat it out on my Anvil.
Well, the first would be the hand spade.
The hand spades
very attractive.
I have a friend who turns wood, lives in Stoughton, and he makes the handles for me.
And yeah, I sell those.
The money is used to purchase gift cards for people who surrender their firearms, so it's sort of self-supporting.
Right.
Probably
not.
It does not work
that way.
I'd just like to say, John, that
for people that are interested in, and this is totally voluntary.
We're trying to get people that have unwanted firearms.
Maybe they inherited those from a grandparent, you know, a long gun hunting rifles.
We get a lot of those.
And
those are particularly good, Jeff, for making, melding down and making into trowels or little pickaxes.
But, or maybe you had, unfortunately, an accident with a gun in the past.
We've had some people that actually have brought in AR-15s, which are military-style assault weapons, which were really eager to get off the streets.
They estimated in 2023 that there are
20 million military-style multi-round, like 30-round guns in this country.
They have no purpose, practical purpose.
Hunters would never want that much lead in their deer.
20 million.
Yeah,
went up from in 1994.
When there was a assault weapon ban in this country for nine years, there were 400,000 nationwide.
So it went to 20 million.
But in any case, we encourage people if you just have an old handgun that you don't want your
Children or grandchildren playing with to bring those in voluntarily We give you a gift card up to $250 at pick and save Then we want those unloaded
and in the back of your vehicle, and you'll be coming in to the church parking lot off of Dayton at the corner of Dayton and Wisconsin Avenue, and we'll have volunteers directing you around, and then you can actually get out of your vehicle and watch Jeff and his crew chop saw these
Yeah.
Um, wow.
They're all destroyed according to the, uh, the firearm tobacco and alcohol.
I've never been
you'd like to dispose of it safely, so it won't fall into any other hands, I would make you, from a rifle barrel, a MADOC.
And MADOC is another word for small pickaxe.
week?
Actually, all of June, Gordy, is National Gun Violence Awareness Month.
But particularly June 6th through the 8th, we asked that people wear orange.
and also write their legislators at the state level.
We're looking for more stronger background checks at pop-up gun shows, taking guns out of the hands of
abusers, which the state has pretty lax rules on that, and also more red flag laws to identify mental illness,
many
mass shootings, they found people have mental illness, signs of mental illness, and we need to make people more family members more aware of that.
No, I but we have really loosened up on Carey open carry.
Yeah
With and in public buildings, which are Wisconsin Alliance Against violence wave is really pushing for tightening up on carry laws as well
Several.
After this one, I have great hopes of working with some churches on the east side in the area of the vicinity of Abundant Life Christian School and a joint effort.
to hold something around the anniversary of the shootings that took place there last early December.
Sure.
Yes.
Okay.
As Dan mentioned, we do not receive any ammunition.
The guns should be brought in and put in the trunk of a car or the backseat.
The driver doesn't leave the vehicle at all, but a person accompanies the driver through the event.
where the gun is removed from the car, ammunition check is done, given to the Chapsaw team where it is destroyed, they're offered a gift card and sent on their way.
faith,
Yeah.
And it's interesting, like I've taken training with a group of other people doing this around the country, and we've been trained in pistol training.
And the teacher of that was an instructor from the National Rifle Association.
Wow.
Well,
And again, that's rawtools.org.
And again, once again, June 7th, Saturday, market on your calendar, Saturday, June 7th, 9 to noon, parking lot at the first United Methodist Church.
And Jeff and Dan, we wish you all the best at that event.
Anything else you'd like to add before we wrap things up?
I just want to express my appreciation for your willingness
to have us on this
program.
Well, we're happy to have
you.
Yeah.
Wish you well as well.
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It is 723 cloudy, a little bit of rain here and there.
Highs today, right around 60.
Currently it's 55 degrees.
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All right, why don't we get into
you consider
our chief meteorologist, Brittany Merlot.
Good morning,
Madison
get back for
Pretty much till about three o'clock.
I'd say it's gonna stick around on and off light drizzle out there Yeah, probably a quarter of an inch of rain expected throughout the day Maybe some rumbles of thunder this afternoon, but I think a lot of those are gonna stay north of you.
But like you said
Highs at about 60.
It's the last cool, crisp day before that summer heat starts to move on in.
Tomorrow we'll hit 70.
It'll be partly sunny, but we do start to have those chances of pop-up showers and storms in the afternoon.
So that's going to be, again, chance tomorrow.
Then storm chances Friday as we hit 80 degrees and some muggyness starts to seep in too.
Oh, no.
Oh, the dew points.
I was looking at the dew points next week and into next weekend for you, John.
They're disgusting.
It's seventies.
That is like dripping sweat.
Dew points headed our
right.
So by next week, so enjoy the 60 degrees today, 70 tomorrow, 80 on Friday on a sunshine to end the week.
So that's nice.
The weekend
No, actually, not at all.
Saturday, sunny, and Sunday, sunny.
day.
We'll talk to
British accent, right?
Justin Wolters, he comes out and he has a few things.
He was on Chris Hayes last night and I've got, I'm definitely gonna get a few comments that he made last night on the show, but I've got one here and he's talking about explaining what's really behind Trump's decisions on the tariffs and the economy.
Guess what?
It's stupidity and crony capitalism.
Surprise.
Yeah.
Actually, the president of the United States, not essentially literally, is calling the CEO of an individual private company and telling him where he should produce what.
Often, when governments do this, they use a committee to do this planning called a central planning committee.
But it is very much of an ideology that I understood Americans had fought a cold war to reject and that Republicans more than anyone else rejected.
This is the most interventionist White House of my life.
There is not a single institution that this guy doesn't want to call, whether it's Harvard, whether it's Apple.
To tell him how to do their jobs.
Yeah, and I'm just an economist But sometimes I think that if you leave people alone to do a pretty good job and fight stuff out in the market that really works The problem is the president also not only is not an expert on how to run a university or how to run a computer company or how to make iPhones He's also one who likes favors and so what that's actually leading to is a bunch of people competing Not in the market to produce the best good but competing to get closer to him at Mar-a-Lago
And so if we end up with the products being produced by the folks who are best at getting tomorrow lago rather than the best at making products We're gonna end up with a market economy full of crappy products at terrible prices And the losers are gonna be you and me and that's what we mean when we talk about crony capitalism
Why can't wait?
This
Just an
And I think he's spot on.
What was that again?
That is Justin Wolffers.
Justin Wolters.
Okay.
Wolffers.
And he is he's he's really nailed it a whole bunch of times in the last night on Chris Hayes.
He really did it again.
And we'll try to get a few of those comments in here.
But he pointed out and I pointed out here on the show that he he he'd identified Trump as a as
as an interventionist.
He is out there micromanaging businesses in this country telling him how to invest, where to build their businesses, how to do all of this.
And it's insane.
He's the expert.
He can't do that.
the
Wow,
that.
morning.
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It is 735 cloudy, a little bit of rain along the way, highs near 60 for today.
And we'll get to Mike McCabe here in just a moment.
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It's amazing how the AI is able to single that.
I think you're making this up now.
Immute it.
A man can dream.
Technology can take us there, I think.
All right, let's get to Mike McCame from Substack and also the author of Miracle of Long County Q. We have a county
you sign here that Sam brought in, Sam.
Well, this is my last time being in the studio for Mike McCabe's
And I wanted to finish his book before it, so I sat and I finished the book yesterday.
And your review?
It's a good book.
definitely tell that it was written by Mike.
There's a lot of wisdom packed into that book.
And
completely out of left field, yes.
But you mentioned the road sign.
I grew up probably two or three miles from Marathon County Q in Ringle, Wisconsin.
And when Marathon County redid their entire addressing system, I stole one of their old road signs for County
Q.
And so I thought it'd be funny to bring that in.
And
for listeners who don't know where Marathon County is, it neighbors Clark County, which is where I grew up and where
Miracles Along County Q is set
Yeah.
next door neighbors.
That's pretty good.
Yeah.
That's not bad for a rookie
first time I've ever tried my hand at fiction.
And there was one one-star review.
Oh,
who hated it and gave it one star, which knocked the rating down.
So it was like a 4.8 or 4.9 out of five stars for a while, the average, but the one-star review knocked it down a bit.
But hey, that comes with the territory.
everybody.
Somebody was offended.
Well,
And yeah, you get knocked on every once in a while by somebody who says, well, you took too long to get the second book out.
So then I come down to like two or three stars.
And it's always unfair or I didn't get the book or I haven't read it yet.
But, you know,
There's all these excuse for the low ratings that they give in some of these reviews.
It's crazy stuff.
Now we're talking about the highway sign here and it's County Highway Q. And we're talking how in the old days there weren't really references addresses or road names in
Wisconsin.
We're saying off the air that when I was growing up in Clark County, we lived on a gravel road.
We had a dairy farm about a mile and a half down a gravel road and the road had no name and there was no fire number for the properties.
The postal service and the fire department for that matter just needed to know where people lived and they needed to come wherever they were told to go.
And so, yeah, when we gave people directions, we just had to say, you know, go out County Highway E is where our farm was off of County E.
And you'll see a creamery on
the right and a tavern on the left.
And it's at that intersection where you turn left on this gravel road.
You go down there a little bit over a mile and you're going to find our farm there on the left.
And now, I don't know when the law was changed so that you had to have fire numbers, but you go out in the country and you'll see these numbers posted by every property.
That's actually a fire number, so that fire departments know where to
go
if they're responding to a fire.
And I assume the Postal Service now has a, that road never had a name.
There was no road sign.
It's now called Hickory Road, the road where I grew up.
I don't know when that road was labeled, but it never was while I lived there.
Yeah, and I'm still in touch with the people who bought the farm from us.
It's still in the same family.
The family that bought it from us still is on the land today.
And I still exchange notes from time to time with, he was knee high to a grasshopper at the time we sold the farm to them.
He was just a little kid, but Matthew Dorico now is fully grown and I'm still in touch with Matt.
It's a great
story.
Working
still.
It's sort of a working farm, but they did get out of dairying.
They no longer milk, they grow crops, but you know, this was a family from the Chicago area that wanted to get out of the city and come to the country.
farm and they had never milked cows in their lives.
They weren't farmers, but they learned it and they became exceptional dairy farmers.
He was a trucker, Frank Dorico was a trucker.
They now run a trucking business.
off of the farm.
They have their, you know, they have their whole system of communicating with all their trucks is actually run out of an old shed on our
Rural Route 1 Curtis, Wisconsin.
was my, our family's address, and so there was no road number, nothing.
Curtis.
Well, it's really about it's really about how we're living in a at a time of great dishonesty and cruelty and there's an awful lot of people who who are being victimized sometimes grabbed off the street and detained with without due process and and for no just reason and and
And a lot of people who are wearing crosses around their necks are looking the other way.
And so I just tell that old story that everybody knows.
And some people believe in this historical figure.
Some of them believe that this is actually a savior and attach religious meaning to this individual.
And some people just don't buy the story at all.
But you know the story, the night that before Jesus was nailed to a cross, he met with his disciples and washed the feet of those closest to him, his closest confidants, knowing that he was about to be betrayed.
He was about to be abandoned and forsaken.
And the next day he would be nailed to a cross.
And the people who wear that cross around their neck,
are not washing feet.
They are washing their hands.
Of all of that is going on around us.
That's what the column is about.
Caroline Levitt.
It's literally, you know, the title of the article,
sub-stack, is feet or hands.
And we got that choice to make.
And yeah, you know, and all these people around this current regime, including the press secretary that you just named.
You look at them, they've always got a cross around
their
neck.
And yet the teaching of the individual for whom that symbol is worn has gone right out the window.
So I wrote about
What is the fourth commitment?
The Sabbath part of
keeping the Sabbath holy is not working on the Sabbath.
That is, that is, yeah.
What day is the Jewish Sabbath?
It is on Saturday.
And what
day is it today?
It is Saturday.
Here we are.
The
Christian Sabbath is what day?
Sunday in honor of the day that Jesus rose from the dead.
And we're scheduled to give this bill a final vote on what day of the week?
It's ironic, isn't it?
Would you be willing to postpone your bill so that we're not breaking the 10 commandments by working on the Jewish or Christian Sabbath?
I love that you said that because you're
saying that you'd rather tell people to follow the 10 commandments than follow it yourself.
I would have rather have had this bill passed the other day when it was time.
We as a
legislature are about to force every teacher in the state to post the 10 commandments in their classrooms.
Do
members of
the Texas legislature follow the Ten Commandments?
So again, this bill is about honoring our historical, educational, and judicial heritage with the, with the display of the Ten Commandments.
The Ninth Commandment is, Thou shall not bear false witness.
Are you aware of any legislators who have lied about anything?
kind of get the
And if she'd been honest, boy, that clip would have been really long if she'd listed all the lawmakers who'd been dishonest.
Yeah, and you know, I partly wrote the article to call out that hypocrisy.
So that's part of the purpose.
But I also wrote the article for all of us whether we're lawmakers or not elected to any
any public station, regardless of our place in this society, we can choose, sort of metaphorically, we can choose to wash feet or wash our hands.
We
can turn away from the brutality and the barbarity that is around us, or we can choose to be kind when other people are being rude.
We can choose to...
to show common decency when other people are engaged in cruelty.
And that's part of why I wrote this is because I think a lot of times decent-minded people turn, they sort of take the cues of those who are
at the top engaging in cruelty and barbarity.
And that's the way they start treating people.
And that's when we really are in trouble, when we start to mirror that behavior.
And that's something that we all can do in a moment like this, where it is a very dishonest age, it's a very troubling age in so many ways, and it's a very cruel age.
We can choose to go in the opposite direction.
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It glows by the front door.
Don't forget the keys under the mat.
When childhood stars shine, always stay humble and kind.
Go to church because your mom says to.
There's a grandpa every chance that you can.
There you go.
posted the YouTube video, so there's a music
goes with it.
And that's worth watching.
Oh, man.
And we were talking about, you know, addresses on the rural communities and Lynn from Golden Valley, Texas, saying, I grew up out.
outside of Eau Claire.
And in the 60s, we lived on rural route three box 94.
So the rail system had their own codes.
The road lacked the name until about the 1970s.
So and that must
have been a somewhat more populated area
they needed P. O. Box.
a rural three.
Yes.
But you know, the whole thing here is I always thought it was a tradition here in Wisconsin where we described where we lived, where to go by landmarks.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, that's always the way it was.
Yeah.
You know, two blocks from the McDonald's.
You turn right at the mobile station and right across the street from the church.
That's where I live.
That's right.
That's
right.
That's the way it
book events, I think all the people who do book events must figure that they need to respect people's desire to be outdoors in the summer because there is a little bit of a hiatus.
I'm going to be up in...
Owen where I went to high school in July for an event.
But other than that, it's not going to get busy again until September or October.
right?
Yeah, I don't have another story rattling around in my head, you know, ready to start writing down.
I would never rule it out because it was a wonderful undertaking.
I really enjoyed
doing it.
But it might be the only one I ever write.
I don't know whether another story is going to occur to me.
You know, one of the things I've noticed is a lot of authors, they'll write that first book and it comes from a place of great authenticity.
start, yeah, they've got an inspiration.
And then they start writing formulaically.
And they kind of write for the market and they just start churning stuff out.
Yeah.
But
they're never as good as that one that came from that place that were of real inspiration.
And I don't really want to just churn books out for the sake of publishing books.
I would want it to be a story that
That inspires me.
Now, yeah, I want to hear you know, we were talking about you know wearing the cross and living the Bible if that's truly what you You think is important in your life But we're seeing a lot of people at least Republicans and Magus at this point kind of ignore our responsibilities to their fellow man by taking away all the health care and I
I've never seen anything quite like this.
I don't think anybody else has and we keep saying that but just to pass out tax cuts to spend money on the billionaires and millionaires and corporations to spend money on them and then taking away all of the healthcare that they will be taking away the safety nets food they're doing this at the expense of
everybody in this country just to give tax cuts to people who already have the money and don't need it and should actually be paying forward at this point.
Right.
You know, and it's funny, I wrote this article, you know, and it starts out with the story of Jesus.
I'm not a church-going man.
And I, you know, but to me, whether you
whether you see Him as Jesus Christ or just Jesus of Nazareth, a historical figure, or even if you don't accept that such a man ever walked the face of the earth, the story is powerful.
And there's a tremendous amount of truth in the story.
And what it says to us all these years later, two millennia later, what it says to us is just be accepting and kind and decent toward people.
And don't look down at people and see them as beneath you.
get down to their level and show them some human compassion and some decency.
And that is what is so missing in our society and in our politics today.
that's the only time that all four
director of the Wisconsin democracy campaign were in the same
at the same time,
which
is pretty cool.
I had about a 20 year association of that 30 years.
I was involved for about 20 and was director for 15 and
and passed the baton to new leadership and keeps going strong.
And Governor Evers wrote a proclamation,
was wonderful that he did that for the people who are there now.
know, I'm in the past.
Mike McKay, we got to leave it there.
We'll see you next Wednesday.
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Tomorrow it's Tim Slecker, Jim Santel, attorney at law, and Stephanie Miller is coming up next.
We hope you have a great day.
Yes, gotta listen.
Sola.
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