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and a big thank you from Catherine who texted us and said hi John and Gordy wanted to thank you for the great meetup and tour at Downshawn Stillery, Downshawn Stillery
Mm-hmm.
Can't say it.
Downdran's Distillery.
There you go.
You've been saying it enough over there.
The other side of the table.
Yeah.
Downdran's Distillery last Saturday had a great time, and that is Catherine in Madison.
Well, let's talk about the jobs report here.
Oh, yeah.
Hard things going in the employment line.
Well, in the last year, it didn't work out real well.
Oh.
Firing at BLS Commissioner because you don't like the results of the job data.
Well, you know, that's one thing that you can do, I guess.
But, you know, it creates a lot of distrust in the data.
So anyway, you know, what...
They found out after the jobs report came out, you know, it's a year-long job report.
So they had to readjust it, and it went downward by 911,000 jobs.
And that's pretty big.
And that happened mostly on the Biden side of the presidency.
This is MSNBC's Katie Tour talking about that.
Let's listen to cut 47.
All right.
Sorry, give me a
Oh
Yeah.
She's talking it up, you know.
And I got to say this, I watched the interview with Brett Baer on Fox News.
Oh, really?
And he had some really, really good questions.
The only question he didn't ask and, you know, was just begging to ask the question is, how could you have given the president immunity?
Where in the Constitution did you pull that rabbit out of your hat?
Come on.
Oh, boy.
All right.
Well, anyway, let's get to a part of that.
And this is a bear bringing up the Dobbs abortion decision.
All right.
This is a Coney Barrett on her process.
Let's let's hear it.
That's right.
And that is a really good point Leaving it up to the political process has a very troubling implication You know because this affects everybody in the country and I think the Supreme Court justices forget that their decisions affects Everybody if it affects everybody in the country, they should have some kind of input on this.
Yeah
And you just don't leave it up to the democratic process, the political process, because then it'll be manipulated.
And
That's the bad part of it.
It's a privacy issue.
And that's why they passed it in the first place.
You know, Roe v. Wade, privacy.
I think it should have been passed on a religious basis.
If you don't like it and it's always based on religion, then okay, you don't have to have it.
But that's why it's a
freedom issue.
It's a First Amendment issue.
I personally just can't believe that she is okay with the turmoil that's going on in the country right now.
Women losing their lives because of this.
And well, you know, some people win, some people lose.
It's a political process.
See you later.
Isn't that
Apparently not.
That that is what it means.
Very strange.
This is how she's selling her book.
You know, Kamala's coming out with her book too.
to have to take a look at that.
I have another part of this that we don't have time for right now, but we'll get to it right after the break,
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Good morning.
I'm pretty good, even though it's a damp and dreary one to start.
How about you
what can we expect the
So right now you have a front parked right over you so those little sprinkles staying there for a few hours on and off
nothing
major though I think by like two three o'clock their chances for rain will kick on out of that area Maybe you'll start to see the clouds start to clear at that point But overall mostly cloudy kind of day today highs in those mid sixties But nothing major nothing severe no heavy downpours that all happened up north yesterday
It's kind of fizzling out as it sits over you.
And then by tomorrow, summer's here.
So
is.
I told y'all, I think a week or two ago to take PTO if you're a summer lover.
Now was the time to do it going into next week.
And it's really happening.
So tomorrow we're going to hit 80 degrees.
It's going to be sunny, calm, perfect day.
A little bit of that mugginess is going to start to seep in for Friday.
Highs in the mid 80s, still sunny out there.
Maybe a chance of rain overnight Friday into early Saturday morning.
That kicks out.
We get hot and humid near 90 degrees on Saturday.
That's what it's going to be feeling like.
Yeah.
conditioning
All right.
Yeah.
And that's going to stay there all weekend and it's next week too.
Right.
Bring the shorts back
it.
We're talking about Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Oh, yeah.
Her new book and she's out doing interviews.
She did an interview on Fox News with Brett Bear and said, you know,
Dobbs abortion.
Hey, that's a political process, which is turning out really well.
Barrett, thank you very much.
Um, but she also wants us to think nothing is wrong.
Don't worry about what we're doing here.
Don't worry about what you're seeing.
We're doing just, you know, think we've got control.
Really?
Okay.
It is 735, some clouds, a few scattered showers this morning and we'll see some of that off and on today in highs in the upper 60s or low 70s, still in the mid 50s this morning.
Mike McCabe joins us now and we'll get to Mike in just a moment.
Want to remind you you can
have a chance to win a $50 gift card from Sugar River Pizza, you could have dinner on Sugar River Pizza and WMDX.
It's all to help celebrate John and Gordy being nominated for Best of Madison along with Sugar River Pizza.
Yes, those nominations
Yes.
And he was very adamant about not gerrymandering.
All right, and I disagreed with him, but I was thinking about it later on just how stable that is, how you have a belief system and you stay with it.
You don't deviate because somebody else is doing something else, even though they may gain an advantage by gerrymandering their states and eliminating the possibility of even a good election for Democrats from taking control of Congress.
So what say you?
As Todd Alba
of
But I couldn't get Wisconsin Democrats to support a nonpartisan redistricting.
At the time.
Well, after the 2008 election, as the 2008 elections played out, the Democrats gained control in Wisconsin of both houses of our state legislature and the governor's office.
And I was working for nonpartisan redistricting reform then, as I had for more than a decade, and I couldn't get them to do it.
Because I think they felt like if they had control of the legislature in the governor's office in 2010, they could gerrymander the hell out of the state.
And of course, Scott Walker won the 2010 election, and Republicans flipped both houses of the legislature, gained total control, and they did.
do an extreme gerrymander of Wisconsin's legislative districts and cemented Republican control for well over a decade.
And they chose not to.
And I was told, you know, I was told by Democratic senators and representatives, this is a legislative prerogative.
This is our responsibility under the Constitution.
We're not going to hand it off to some commission or some other panel to do the redistricting.
But at bottom line is they had control of the legislature in the governor's office and thought that they could gain an ongoing advantage.
So this is something that's been practiced by both parties over the years.
There have been some Democrats in some states that have put in place independent commissions or other kinds of ways of doing nonpartisan redistricting.
And now what you see is a whole bunch of Republican, Republican states wanting to do this, you know, not once a decade, but even in between the, you know, the, the, the, the census that it's done every decade, they want to do it just for partisan advantage in the short term.
And I get where Matt's coming from because if you, if you decide, you know, if, if somebody commits an evil and then you decide to join that,
You're really, you're taking yourself, you're taking your own values and flushing them down the toilet.
I understand that.
But what Matt says and what I say doesn't amount to a hill of beans at this point because what you've got is this redistricting war going on across the country.
And I think there are gonna be democratic controlled states that will join in this as well.
I think in the end, voters lose.
because what you're gonna have is a whole bunch of states where voters won't have a legitimate choice
about
It's either gonna be a Republican state, and that's gonna be preordained, or it's gonna be a Democratic state, and that's gonna be every bit as much preordained, and voters are gonna lose power.
And I don't think it's a great thing when voters end up losing power, but I think that's what's gonna
Yeah, the politicians.
Politicians win.
The politicians are going to win and the voters are going to lose.
So that's where we're headed.
And I don't know if it matters what Matt and I say, but that's where we're headed.
And I think it's really unfortunate.
And I hope that once this current fight ends, that we get back to the point where we can put voters back in a more powerful position.
Yeah, at some point.
Well, okay, that's one element of what the Democrats could do to counter the Republicans at this point.
In just a moment, we're going to take a call first.
But in just a moment, I want to talk to you about shutting the government down.
It's another ploy that the Democrats are thinking about doing.
All right.
But first, let's go to the phones.
We have Catherine Lake, our program director.
Good morning, Catherine.
We
have to take the call.
he's uh... i think it's a jerrymandering for just one more second i'm begging you now uh... mike and john and gordy please give me at my daughter in the car here uh... a one-on-one on jerrymandering remind us because to my ear and memory jerrymandering is basically just legalized segregation it feels like but i know that's not quite right and i just wanted to have a a one-on-one reminder
on why this is not good, why it is the evil that we should not be joining the Republicans in doing.
Well, sometimes it does have, it can have a really vicious racial impact.
You can draw districts that dilute racial minority voting power to the point where they could never elect somebody of their own race to represent them.
You can draw districts like that.
But it has a broader impact.
It's not just a racial impact.
You can draw a district that either packs a whole bunch of the opposition parties voters into a single district so they get one district, but then you dilute their power to such a great extent that your party controls every other district and you maintain your majorities.
Or you can crack.
that minority voting power and disperse it throughout a whole bunch of districts so that they can never get to 50% in any district.
And that sometimes has a really vicious racial effect because you basically make sure that African Americans can never have African American representation or Latino voters can never have Latino representation.
But even more broadly, you can do it so that a Democratic voter never has an opportunity to have any hope of having a Democratic representative or somewhere else.
A Republican voter will never have a hope of having Republican representation.
You can just, you can design the districts so that you get the outcome you want.
And that's what politicians do.
They tailor make these districts to maintain their own control.
It leaves them without much hope of getting the kind of representation that they want.
It makes election results preordained.
That's what's wrong about it.
Now, when one side decides to do it nationally all across the country, you can expect the other party is going to fight back.
talking to a substack blogger, Mike McCabe.
And so, Mike, how does this play into the Electoral College?
I mean, the Electoral College seems to be in place and we can't do anything to change it without changing the Constitution.
You know, it seems like people in the smaller states are insignificant.
You know, it's all about the big states.
It's all about
So
another voter's
gets the
And when it just comes down to voter power,
There has been an awful lot of effort to weaken the power of the voter and that's because there are people who want power but don't
aren't confident that they can actually convince people that they should be in power, but they want it anyway.
So they go to great lengths to try to weaken the power of voters.
There's another option, of course, and that is shutting down the government, doing something.
A lot of people are making an argument that, you know, why should we fund this particular government?
And the arguments I've heard mostly are from the right, and that is that it didn't work out for the Republicans.
So, you know, if you're a Democrat, don't do what they did.
We have Ezra Klein here in his opinion on it, so a little less than two minutes.
Oh, we don't have to call.
We can play that when we come back, John.
Yes,
on WFDS right around the corner.
in Trump
All right, let's get to the other part.
The other way the Democrats can fight back is by shutting down the government and the reasons for that.
are articulated here by Ezra Klein, a great host.
He used to fill in on MSNBC all the time.
I really like him a lot.
My kids don't like him because he's a supporter of Israel.
But yeah, anyway, suffer through it, my guys.
Okay, here we go.
This is Ezra Klein and what we should do about the government shutdown.
There you go.
Okay,
And it sounded like Ezra is for a government shutdown.
I mean, we're at a point where there's just nothing left, right?
If we fund this government that Trump is putting in place, then we're complicit.
We're just supporters of it.
Inadvertently.
Unwilling participants.
But it seems like that would be the only way we can fight back.
What
Hey, I'm not gonna... I don't...
We're waiting for your decision.
I don't think I have.
I don't think I can make a better case to Democratic officials than Ezra Klein just did.
My focus has been more on talking to citizens rather than politicians and what can citizens do in such a moment.
And that's what I've been writing about.
He's right.
The Democrats have not had a plan.
They've just sort of stood idly by and watched and sort of helplessly as all this destruction goes on.
And yeah, they need to do something.
They need some new blood.
I think that's where the citizenry comes in is pushing this in the right
Damn.
Always good to see you.
See you next Wednesday.
Thanks, guys.
Coming up next, it's Stephanie Miller.
Tomorrow, Tim Slecker talking about education from busted pencils, also former U.S.
Attorney Jim Santel will join us.
Find out what his thoughts are on the Supreme Court.
And yeah, there it's new book.
That's it for us.
Have a great day.
Talk to you tomorrow.
So long.
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