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These are the times that try men's souls.
In the course of our nation's history, the people have rallied bravely whenever the rights of men have been threatened.
Today, a new crisis has arisen.
Citizens, hear me out.
This could happen to you.
People think I'm controversial, but the truth is, I'm a nice guy.
You know who I am?
In the field of live entertainment.
Oh my God!
I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.
All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.
Yeah.
Let me tell you something you lowlife lion, foreflushing sack of shit.
I will tell you this is going to be something special.
Just to show about nothing.
Hell, I like
you.
What is this fucking ponderous, man?
Ponderous fucking ponderous.
Sunshine today.
Looking beautiful this morning.
Temperatures in the mid 60s.
We'll get into the mid 80s this afternoon.
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Right now, let's
I mean, this kind of slipped under the radar, shouldn't have.
They actually agreed to something, finally, for once.
I think this is groundbreaking stuff.
Now, I believe that minority leader, Diane Heselberg, says that they have the votes in the Senate to help pass this budget.
Because there are Democrats out there that won't vote for this, even though I really think let's take what we can get from these guys.
I mean, when you look at what
They're finally going to spend some money on.
I think this is a really good thing.
And the fact that the tax cut that they were so demanding is smaller than I thought it would be.
And I'm really glad for that.
Now there's a surplus of about one billion dollars in the state.
state fund right now.
So after
they
it'll
I mean, you're gonna need that, especially after all the cuts on the federal level.
We're gonna have to backfill a lot of those cuts because they're making states pay more for the programs that the federal government used to.
But anyway, this is some of the details of this budget deal.
It includes a $1.3 billion tax cut, as I mentioned, increased Medicaid funding
which is going to help backfill what the federal government is taking away and unbelievably a boost for the UW system, which is crazy.
I mean, they were going to take all this money away.
Right.
And now all of a sudden they're going to put all of this money back in, which is fantastic.
Good.
The agreement still needs approval from the full legislature that's going on today, where some of the Republican senators have expressed reservations, but forget it.
Just vote for the damn thing.
Let's get this over with.
And as I mentioned, you know, Governor Evers is good at doing this stuff.
I mean, they're used to working against each other.
And now they're kind of working with each other, which is a strange thing.
So if they're starting to work together just a little bit, let's keep Governor Evers in there if we can.
If he decides,
to run for reelection and I hope he does.
I know Dan Schaefer, a specific media's Dan Schaefer
says,
so we'll see uh full vote today in the legislature and then uh and then of course governor evers will look it all over you know uses veto pen if he wants to use any of it in
in this bill, but we'll see what happens on this.
Of course, this marks a big shift in budget negotiations.
They finally agreed to something, my God.
Pinch me, I
must
Exactly.
It includes the tax fit, but also, let's see here, it would expand the state's second lowest tax bracket.
Now that's a big deal because the Republicans always wanted that tax cut to include up to four hundred thousand dollar incomes That is a little high and that's why Governor Evers never approved the tax cut now with the Lower bracket the second lowest bracket being expanded more people in the middle class are gonna get this tax cut right, but remember anything any tax cut at all affects
All people making money.
So even the wealthy get this tax cut as well So
now
Yeah, it's a $5 million per year tax credit for getting companies in here, TV, networks, movie studios to come in here and film, and now they're going to get the actual tax credit for doing so.
That's fantastic.
They repealed it.
We had it for a long time, and they repealed it, but they brought it back.
How about increased funds from Medicaid?
And that'll help people stay on Medicaid rolls here in Wisconsin.
Again, backfilling.
because the Fed is going to cut some of that, the Fed percentage of it.
The agreement increases the amount of hospitals get paid for the state to stay in business because of the Medicaid payments, spending on childcare.
That is gone up to $300 million, which is incredible.
Plus, by the way, $110 million directed toward payments to the childcare providers themselves, which was really important.
That's a big one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because they were just going to give it to the people to send their children with that tax rate.
But instead.
Those individuals might not send their children to whatever preschool or
not preschool daycare
A
cost of educating students with disabilities is also getting a shot in the arm, a good spending amount.
And the state's public universities will receive, get this, $256 million boost over the next two years.
And that also includes a tentative deal of more than $840 million for the UW campus building projects.
Wow.
I mean, that just, that's great stuff.
That is really terrific for the UW.
Yeah, that's excellent.
So the budget looks pretty good.
You know, they were.
Maybe they were just in contrast trying to make it seem like they were gonna do anything at all.
And then surprise everybody when they finally got together.
And well, it works on me.
I'm ready to go.
Big thumbs up, huh?
That's what I'm thinking.
Okay, well good.
He keeps coming out there and posting stuff on X. What's he up to now?
And this time he posted this, every Senate Democrat voted against requiring able-bodied working age adults to work pathetic.
What's he talking about?
They want Medicaid to include a work requirement.
That's not why Medicaid was created by the Congress.
Way back when it was a health care program for the needy for the poorest.
And that's why they created Medicaid.
It wasn't.
to force people, coerce people into working.
And there are very few people that are just, you know, sitting on their couch watching TV or playing video games.
That is such a stupid cliche that it makes me very angry when I think about it.
But anyway, you know, this whole thing, you know,
The courts have decided this too.
They have decided that it is just a healthcare program.
You can't put stipulations and strings in it to make people work.
Especially if they're, you know, I mean, they're very ill or they're elderly.
Elderly and disabled.
All of these people really need this.
And plus, by the way, most of the people who do collect Medicaid money, food stamps, they're already working.
They're
just not
a
my
you got time for
Well, you know, I've noticed that I don't think Congress has a work requirement at all.
Like, they don't have to work.
You had to bring Scott Walker up again, once again.
I'm sorry.
Wasn't he one of our younger governors?
Let's remember, Scott Walker ignored infrastructure in Milwaukee.
And so Donald's street garage collapsed and killed that kid.
Scotty, is that kid still dead?
is just...
Well, as you remember, Mark, you know, he bankrupted, nearly bankrupted Milwaukee County as county executive.
He was going to break parts of the county off and then give it to the state to manage.
Do you remember this?
And the worst part of it, the business community in Milwaukee knew this and they kept it a secret during the election so people wouldn't...
based their vote on the fact that he was nearly bankrupting the colony, which was just crazy.
They justified it that way, and people accepted that as a justification.
I talked to Tom Barrett himself and told him, you know, during that first campaign that he should use the, uh, Donald Street grudge collapse against Scotty Walker, not to mention this whole running his campaign from his, from his county office.
Yes.
All that were managed to escape that nooses and all his little staff that was doing the business for him in that office is just beyond me.
You were talking about Ronald Reagan before.
I mean that if.
If only we had Ronald Reagan's compassion for the immigrants under this
that we had under there, because he wanted to find a pathway to citizenship for those people.
I mean, for those people, I mean, these are human beings, and they're going to stick them down in a gulag down in Florida that's just as bad as some of the stuff that they had over in Nazi Germany when the people out in the cold.
Well, the cold is just the opposite of the heat, and the heat is just the opposite of the cold.
It's supposed to be just as miserable conditions there.
Those guys should be ashamed of themselves.
Anybody who was wearing those
Alcatraz alligator Alcatraz and stuff should be
don't know.
kick
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It's going to be beautiful.
Get out and enjoy it right now mid 60s.
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All right.
Senator Chris Murphy brought this up.
He said, here's the latest in a turn to believe, in order to secure the last GOP votes, Republicans exempted from the nutrition cuts, states with the highest level of errors,
in their food stamp program.
They exempted them, let it go.
So the states that waste the most money, get no cuts.
You know, there is a truly a double standard on the right.
It's mind boggling once again.
It's crazy stuff.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, you know, healthcare is one of the biggest issues, I think, that we have here on this program.
We bring it up all the time.
If we just had a universal healthcare system in this country, we'd have...
I think a lot happier people in this country.
A lot less problems and a lot less lawsuits and bankruptcies, healthcare bankruptcies.
But we have the right kind of people in charge now.
So let's, we're going back yesterday, I kind of goofed this thing up, but Dr. Oz, we're going to go back to Dr. Oz and what he has said.
And I just want to kind of present this only because, you know, what they think is
Misuse, fraud, and whatever else, corruption, is really not that at all.
It's just their opinion of programs they don't like.
And we're gonna get this from Dr. Oz about the reward of healthcare.
Again, working, and if you work, the reward is health.
See, if we had a universal plan, they couldn't coerce us.
Yeah, you know, yeah, you'll get health care only
if but
Surprise that the Senate has decided to completely depart from the House framework
when it comes to Medicaid and the provider taxes.
I was told we've got a fix on the provider tax issue.
We're going to help rural hospitals.
There's nothing in here for rural hospitals.
In fact, what they're doing is lowering the provider tax to make it even worse.
So it's like we're defunding rural hospitals.
So the Congressional Budget Office estimated that more than 10 million recipients would lose their Medicaid benefits from the House bill.
The Senate bill, at least the one that just came out of committee, would go farther than
that.
The plans that I've been asked to preside over Medicaid
and the Affordable Care Act exchanges in particular are not stable programs.
Medicaid spending has increased 50% in the last five years, and a major driver of that are the able-bodied individuals who join the program, and half of which these individuals don't work, and many of them could work.
I actually think work is a good thing in general, is if we allow able-bodied individuals on Medicaid to get a 90% match from the federal government, states gain the system.
We already know what happens when you take people off Medicaid.
We just did it for the last two years.
Under the Biden administration, if you give people a chance to work or volunteer, participate in your community, go get an education, or lose your insurance, they take the job.
20%, one in five of the people who are on an Affordable Care Act exchanges are inappropriately on that program.
One in five.
What do you
mean inappropriately?
Well, as I give you an example, there's no real adjudication of how much money you're making, so you can pick whatever supply you want to be in.
The amount of reimbursement you get from the program is based on your income
Yes, that's right.
We also have about 230,000 people, we believe, who are mistakenly on, for example, Medicaid multiple states, but there's a much bigger number of people who are on Medicaid and the exchanges in the same state.
Jake, we think there's $14 billion in those two categories alone.
So if we're buying insurance
for
people, and the American taxpayers, people watching this show are paying extra money to appropriately get Americans who are needing to get the right insurance, but they're not supposed to have insurance.
If they don't even know they have insurance because some broker made up a free healthcare here sign, which literally happens and then gets these folks.
They don't know
I tell you what, you're filling out the forms.
You know that you have health insurance.
The people you talk to, you know, you talk to those.
people, you know that you went online, you filled out the forms, you know, you have healthcare.
You're not sold by some salesman at the door.
Hey, I'm signing you up now.
Okay.
See you later.
How do you get a check from them if you don't have all the information?
You know, this, this is so, so ridiculous.
You know, this is Dr. Oz.
This is a healthcare system we have now and now they're going to pollute all of the online information that you get about healthcare with their
Theories and their conspiracies that's what we're gonna get they're gonna destroy what we know as healthcare in this country in the next three and a half years So there just stand by buckle down Buckle up.
I got a real strap in.
Yeah,
Right beautiful sunshine today, highs in the mid 80s, right now 65 degrees.
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All right.
Hey,
It is Mike McCabe.
You can read all about it at a substack.
It's a fantastic story.
Amazing stuff.
And I hope you encapsulate exactly what happened out there.
I mean, this is
This is almost like an expedition.
Right?
Would you describe it as an expedition in Tanzania?
Yeah.
It was that.
Yes.
How many
you?
Yeah.
There was a total of six.
Okay.
And
No,
lose anybody.
No, he didn't lose anybody.
Everybody made home safe.
And you know, I came home with a big smile on my face and just an absolutely buoyant mood.
And that's what that continent does for you.
You know, it's amazing.
Oh, man.
And you know, I had experienced that before.
I lived in West Africa
two years.
And people smile more there than they do here, and they laugh more, and they sing and dance more there than they do here.
But even compared to Mali, where I spent two years, he had Tanzanians are really, really upbeat about life.
And it's an extremely poor country.
Conditions are very, very harsh.
Roads are poor.
the economy, you know, the per capita income is something like $500 a year.
Wow.
They're
And that's the amazing thing.
They're living on, you know, more than a dollar a day, but not much more than a dollar a day.
Yeah, they've got smiles on their faces as wide as the Serengeti
you know compared to Mali it's actually it seemed like a pretty developed country it seemed more prosperous and more advanced and partly because it's got a more temperate climate so Agriculturally they're they're well out ahead.
They can just grow more stuff and they've got a
a very vibrant tourist economy, of course, because of all the wildlife in Tanzania and the national parks.
And those game reserves are a magnet for travelers all around the world.
So they've got more tourist income than a country like Mali.
But still, this is a very, very poor country and conditions are harsh.
And yet there's a lightness of mood, a lightheartedness.
A
mood.
And a tremendously welcoming mood.
One of the things I mentioned in the article I wrote for Substack is that they really do say Hakuna Matata a lot.
They really?
You hear it constantly because whatever is going sideways or whatever comes up that isn't quite right when things fall apart, yeah, Hakuna Matata.
Hakuna Matata, no worries.
And so they've got troubles.
They've got hardship, but they don't worry about it.
They don't obsess over it.
There's this lightheartedness that is really remarkable, and it's infectious.
You end up feeling like all these problems that I obsess over are just not that big a deal.
So their resilience, their unflappability in the face of...
hardship or turmoil is really a remarkable characteristic.
So people think about going to a place like Tanzania to visit the game reserves, the national parks and see all the wildlife.
And that is stunning.
The landscape is stunning.
The diversity of wildlife is jaw-dropping.
But to me, the thing that makes the most lasting imprint is the people.
And you know, the amazing thing.
is that we're talking about a region that spans only a few hundred miles and there are 120 different ethnic groups living there.
And they all have their own tribal languages, yet the genius of the society there is that they've all accepted a common language.
That has enabled all of these different ethnic groups, all these different tribes to live harmoniously.
And they're
fiercely proud.
They talk about it all the time, about how we've got 120 different ethnic groups, and yet we live peacefully.
We live with each other.
And so when they would always try to teach us words of their language, we traveled a fair amount with a guy from the Shaga tribe.
We ran into a lot.
We also interacted a lot with Masai people.
They didn't try to teach us Masai or they didn't try to teach us Shaga.
They didn't try to
us, you know, their own tribal language.
They were trying to teach us Swahili.
Wow.
And because that's their common language and it's what knits them together as a society.
So, yeah, it's a tremendously diverse.
society, but yet also a really cohesive and unified one
and I tell you for two weeks You know all the all that hubbub
social media was
abstraction and all of all of the heartaches and all the troubles that we have here
are just irrelevant there.
They're not thinking about America's troubles.
And we live in a really individualistic society, and it's so easy for us to become full of ourselves and think that the whole world revolves around us.
It was an incredible, both an incredible experience, but also a blessing to realize that there...
I'm not at the center of their universe.
Americans are not at the center of their universe.
They really couldn't care less about what's going on here.
They got their own problems, but then also, hey, Hakuna Matata.
That's
first of all?
Because
right?
Yeah, it is.
This is Southeast part
of the
continent.
It is.
And so we flew to Amsterdam first.
and actually spent a couple of days in Amsterdam, which was a nice way to get more in the same time zone.
It's only an hour different than Tanzania.
And it had a wonderful time.
Amsterdam's an incredible city, and we really enjoyed our stay.
But it was brief, and then we got on another flight.
So it was like eight hours or so to Amsterdam, and then it's another nine to Tanzania.
So it's a long journey, and then the rest of it was overland.
And the roads are not good.
No,
most of the roads other than in the we flew into Arusha, which is a fairly large city and there are paved
There are paved thoroughfares there, but once you get out, it's almost all gravel roads, and it's this incredible washboard.
It's just bone jarring as you go over these roads.
And then you turn off onto these dirt paths.
The gravel, it's all unmarked too.
I have no idea how these people find their way.
They must be using landmarks.
baoba tree over there
exactly because all these roads are unmarked and yet they seem to know exactly where they were going and and then you get off under these dirt paths which are just cratered you know they I can't describe them as potholes because they are craters and it's very deeply rutted and and super dusty but then it rained a time or two and then it would turn to mud
And it was slick and greasy mud.
We saw a crocodile or two.
Yeah.
Because in any river, there's hippos.
There's dozens and dozens and dozens of them.
So we saw a lot of hippos.
We saw a couple of crocs.
quicksand?
I fell into no quicksand.
Here's the amazing
out there on the Serengeti.
I kind of had this feeling like we would see the wildlife from a distance.
Because you're right there in the midst of wild animals.
We even stayed in a tented camp that was in the Serengeti, it was in the National Park, and there are no fences around the camp.
So animals just wander through.
There's a lion that came through the
camp.
Yes, there were baboons through the camp.
And you're just part of that nature.
But the first time we got really up close to a lion, that's really unnerving.
But the chaga man we were with, he said, you can open the windows, you're in no danger.
And he said, you know, if you've never been taught to cook, you don't know how to cook.
These animals have never been taught to hunt anything in a vehicle.
They've never been taught to hunt two-legged creatures.
They have no interest in you.
And indeed, we would be really close to this wildlife.
Cheetahs, leopards, lions.
care.
And we saw some of them with kills.
devouring animals that they had run down and killed.
And there they are feeding on a carcass.
And they had absolutely no interest.
One of the funniest moments is our truck pulls up and there's probably 20 some lions with mostly females with cubs.
And one of the lions decided that the shade of the truck was a really nice place to lay down and lay right down by the
And was within, and my son actually,
poked his head out the window and took a selfie
with this lion laying
by the truck tire.
And so after a few days, we kind of realized the animals have their own life.
The parks are for them.
They're not for people.
The people there don't have any desire to have dominion over those animals.
They live in harmony with them.
The Masai herders are out there, you know, driving their cattle and their goats and their sheep to pasture.
when there are elephants and zebra and, you know, lions and leopards out there among them.
So we have a really different relationship with wildlife here
there.
You know, it could definitely happen.
But we literally, we had a lion.
It
sitting up on a ledge when we came into this camp.
And during the night, apparently, the staff had seen it pass through the camp.
can report that I was within five feet of a lion.
on multiple occasions and did not get attacked.
Wow.
Really?
sure?
Proof
of God.
So
yeah, you know, I'm sure it happens.
It must happen occasionally.
But they were so, they were really assuring us.
You really don't.
And you know, we went on on a hike in the Serengeti amidst all these animals.
And we went with a local, he happened to be Masai, who had a gun.
And he says, I'm not going to shoot anything.
I don't want you to be concerned.
It's just for safety's sake.
Just
for show.
An
abundance of precaution.
I'm not going to shoot the animals, and I'm not going to shoot you.
We'll find out more what happened on that hike.
And I want to
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You have one of those
is.
These were big canvas tents, and they actually had beds in them.
Yeah.
And they were up on raised platforms.
it's a permanent, tented camp, and they
sprinkled throughout the national park there.
Crater.
Yeah, it's a region called Ngoro Ngoro, which is actually named for the sound of a cowbell.
what the Masai herders think of cowbell sounds like gora gora.
And they named this area, but there was this huge caldera, this huge area where a volcano blew the top off a mountain and left a huge bowl.
And what they described it as, they said, this is not rainforest, although it was very dense jungle at this spot.
They said, this is a cloud forest.
It doesn't really rain so much as all of the
just takes moisture from the clouds.
And I woke up in the morning and that whole bowl was full of clouds.
And it really gave you the sensation of this little patch of land that you're camping on was sort of suspended on the clouds.
It was like floating on the clouds.
darned a sight.
child, right?
When I was a fairly small child, I imagined out loud what heaven must
I kind of envisioned lodging or like a village up above the cloud in mid-air and was kind of...
ruthlessly mocked by the adults in the room.
But here I'm sitting at the age of 65.
I'm sitting in this camp looking out over the rim of this crater.
And I'm thinking, is this heaven?
Because
sure seems like we're floating on clouds
And of course, the sun gets high and the clouds eventually lift.
And then the floor of the caldera
opens up before your eyes, and it is just teeming with wildlife.
Thousands and thousands of animals grazing.
And then there will be these little Masai villages, these clusters of huts with thatch roofs.
And they're living amidst all that wildlife.
driving their cows and their sheep and their goats to good pasture
do a hike.
We did do a hike up the rim of a smaller crater.
And Gorongoro Crater is the huge one.
We did Almaty Crater.
And we went with a Maasai man.
And every once in a while, he would say, watch out their fire ants crossing
path.
Make sure to step over them.
Because if they get, if they get, they bite like crazy.
And it did remind me of that Indiana Jones scene.
And
so there were these ginormous ants and biting ants.
And my wife did get bit by one.
But not by a thousand, which was good.
Tanzania?
I
Burger King?
No McDonald's, not even in Arusha, which is where we flew into, but their staple food is called yugali, which is basically a really thick
paste or porridge made out of corn flour.
And you dip it into a sauce that made of tomatoes and onions and things like that.
So that's what they eat kind of on the day to day.
But they do raise a lot of cattle and sheep and goats.
And so they eat a lot of meat.
We rarely eat meat in Mali.
They eat meat a lot in Tanzania.
So we'd get various dishes stews and various dishes with...
meat in it.
And so
not all
that, you know, some of the dishes almost had kind of a Western feel to them.
Others were very typically African.
area?
Oh, gosh, I don't know.
Not terribly spicy food, I have
They do have this delicious bread.
If you are a fan of Indian food, their bread is very much like non-bread that is an Indian cuisine.
Just delicious.
Yeah, I got to try banana beer.
It's a local brew.
We were in a small village, well, actually kind of a large village.
But the chaga...
tribe is known for its banana beer.
They cut it with millet.
So millet is kind of the grain that they use.
And they
And they ferment the bananas.
They create sort of a banana paste and
Does it
tastes like beer, but with a bit of a banana flavor.
a little sweeter than a beer you'd have here.
And it was very, it had a lot of particulate matter
nice.
And so you had to kind of, you had the texture.
They should have banana beer at their ball game.
Yeah, absolutely.
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