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Take it away, boys.
Is that
That is.
Gordy, what are you gonna wear?
This is kind of late breaking news.
I haven't really edited this.
this thing up, but I just thought he passed it along.
This is the Chicago Sun Times.
They're reporting on this at the request.
Okay.
Let's just go back a little bit here.
Remembering COVID and, uh, and all the rumors about taking this drug and that drug and trying this and that and, uh, remember, do you remember?
Yes.
Uh, going back in time.
And the administration at the time, Biden said, you know, we really have to stop all of this.
Could you please, he talked to social media, could you just please, you know, tamp down all of this because we don't need this misinformation going out there.
These are lies, misinformation.
Please tamp this down.
And then he did.
They took a lot of it off.
Then when Trump came into office, everything just opened up.
The billionaires fell in line with Trump, and they said, we're getting rid of this censorship.
No more of this censorship.
We're going to go full bore.
Sure.
You can post whatever the hell you want.
Right.
You
bet.
You guys
All right.
So here we go.
At the request of the Department of Justice.
A Facebook group used by nearly 80,000 people in Chicago to report sightings of federal immigration agents in the area has been taken down by Metta Zuckerberg Facebook parent company.
Yeah, the group called Ice Sighting in Chicago Land has been increasingly used over the last few weeks of Operation Midway Blitz.
But the Trump administration has claimed that its agents, nearly all of them who wear face coverings, don't wear badges, and at times vehicles without license plates are under attack somehow.
They're being doxxed.
This is according to...
Pam Bondi,
who believes her?
Today, following outreach from the Department of Justice, Facebook removed a large group page that was being used to docks and target ICE agents in Chicago.
Don't think so.
We don't know who they are.
They don't have identification.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, so so they took that Facebook so they took it down by the request of the administration Which by the way during the Biden administration was a huge issue.
They were censoring the right wing.
They were censoring people They couldn't do it anymore and Zuckerberg said yeah, let's go full bore put out whatever you want out there and now they're censoring Facebook site that is just I guess Reporting where the agents are that's all they're not doxing anybody
Okay, yeah, so So interesting isn't it?
Mm-hmm.
It's a different start You know they do live under a different set of rules than everybody else this administration and especially when you're a dictatorship and a fascist Government
He says imagine the mixed feelings of these ice thugs parents
Talking about ice agents and parents, the shame of raising a hateful man baby with nothing of value to offer this world and the relief of having them have a job that gets them out of the basement.
So mixed feelings.
Now about
CJ,
I mean, obviously, we're looking at this administration censoring a group.
Another group, just doing something legal.
They can do this.
They're making observations.
They're just giving people a heads up.
People can go to the site.
They don't have to go to the site.
It's just out there.
They're not lying.
They're not telling lies.
They're not doxying anybody.
They're not doing anything because how do you know who these people are?
So when no one believes this administration anymore at all, and our judges are making decisions based on the fact that they can't believe what they're being told in court.
Good morning, Charles.
I am sitting here crying.
I am so upset that our conservative caller from Stone didn't mention that our president is giving Argentina $20 billion.
I am so sad that our Stone friend who's always talking about the
the budget and the money that we're going to, our kids are going to have to pay back.
Didn't seem to have a problem with our country given Argentina $20 billion.
Oh, yeah.
Where is it?
I'll read yet.
Yeah.
And it
really, it really reaches into, uh, you know, uh, rural country that, you know, they, they voted for Trump and now Trump is completely betrayed them.
Uh, you know, Argentina, of course, you know, supplying soybeans now, uh, to China, uh, completely wiping out any sales of soybeans to China from our
country yeah soybean farmers are suffering here right and then now because of the trade wars we're gonna use tariff money to pay the farmers again and by the way that's my money too yeah and I support the farmers but I don't want to see this happen they don't want to see it happen they've just lost a market partner right I mean they've been you know these are relationships built up over years decades and they just lost it to another country that we're giving
billions of dollars to and we're keeping people from getting health care in this country because the budget is so tight.
I don't think it is.
Crazy.
Yeah, and 45 billion for ice.
I mean, yeah, yeah.
Another wonderful thing, don't you think, guys, is now we're not going to get any news from Pentagon.
The networks are all being set off.
I mean, there's nothing going on there anyway, right?
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
But yeah, that's a wonderful thing to hear, isn't it?
It's just unbelievable that they could actually go around.
I mean, after all the complaining and did about being censored, they go out and they censor people on Facebook.
Beside myself, okay, you know, I'm kind of burying the big story that I had this afternoon or this morning rather Here this is about Obamacare now a lot of stuff is going on behind the scenes, you know and Speaker Mike Johnson refuses to negotiate any of the
Any of the items that the Democrats are demanding, especially approving the tax credits for the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare.
All right.
But there is actually something going on behind the scenes.
And there's a menu of options.
They're starting to come up with a compromise that it might actually take place.
Yes.
On the Affordable Care Act tax credits, believe this or not.
No.
Now.
This is the bad news.
There are people on the right that don't get it yet.
They don't actually understand Obamacare.
They really never paid for it.
They never investigated.
They never signed up for it, so they don't know what's involved.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who's never quite gotten ACA, said, about 90% of members of our conference, they feel strongly that Obamacare itself and the subsidies have failed.
Well, as a person who has been on Obamacare and whose family is still on Obamacare, you're wrong.
Completely wrong.
It makes it affordable with the tax credits.
And we do have healthcare now.
And it covers pre-existing conditions.
So you're absolutely wrong.
It hasn't failed at all.
All right, now here are some of the MAGA solutions Except for one.
Okay.
This is this is Marjorie Taylor Greene.
This is cut 131 We're not going to consider this one.
Okay.
This is this is her point of view on the tax credits
Okay, let's take health insurance for for example, I I'm a conservative and I can say we're 37 trillion dollars in debt.
We cannot afford
a socialized health care plan in America.
We literally cannot.
But at the same time, I can say we sent almost $300 billion to Ukraine.
We spent, sent $30 billion to Israel in 2024 alone.
I can say we definitely should extend these, these ACA tax credits and we need to build an off ramp because it'll cost $30 billion a year to do it.
We can build an off ramp and open up a new system that will serve every
No, it's not going to be an off ramp.
You guys don't, you don't have another plan.
No.
Yeah, what's the plan?
There is no plan.
There is no plan.
And when you think about it, because of these tax credits and the added tax credits because of the COVID problem we had, all of that is a tremendous amount of money.
And that money increases as the premiums increase on the Affordable Care Act.
And we're paying a lot of taxpayer money into this system.
Why not just go with universal health care and stop dinking around with this thing?
All right.
Well, anyway, here are some of the other options and parts of the solutions to this a one-year extension Okay, put it off for another year.
That's
one of the
open to imposing new income caps, similar to the current credit caps, which is about $200,000, cutting off enhanced tax credits for new enrollees.
So your grandfather didn't, that's not fair.
That's not good.
And how about this mandate a minimum out of pocket payment to unlock eligibility?
All right.
But that doesn't make any sense either.
Why would you do that?
And just a moment, I'm going to tell you why there's a crazy group out there called Paragon Health Institute.
You know, they've got their little institute guys running around and it's a small group, but they're influencing the entire Congress when it comes to these tax credits.
The Paragon Health Institute.
I know, stupid name.
All right, we'll be getting to their point of view and what they're doing to our healthcare system in
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We've got a story here that will actually point a finger right at how stupid some of these right wing groups are.
I mean, this is just really unbelievable.
WMDX, 92.7, John and Gordon in the morning, Dom had the controls and feel free to text us, voice notice, and also give us a jingle on the phone.
608-879-8255.
All
of the small conservative think tank called Paragon Health Institute, which has a lot of influence in the Congress at this point, is outraged over millions of phantom enrollees.
I am not kidding you, they are warning Congress that there are phantom enrollees in the ACA, individuals who don't know
They've enrolled in a health plan on the Affordable Care Act in the marketplace.
These are enrollees who've been tricked.
They are enrolled and they don't know it.
These are called phantom enrollees by this Paragon Health Institute, okay?
You gotta say, well, what do they mean by phantom enrollees?
Well, this is how they think of it.
It's where people are on health plans
but don't file any medical claims.
Okay.
Um,
it truly
don't
like
Take advantage of it.
And this is the same argument I had with Medicaid, you know putting people on Medicaid Unless they're worried they got to work or else, you know, they're gonna take advantage of Medicaid But they're not gonna take advantage of Medicaid if they don't need it It's not like a paycheck.
They don't get a paycheck every month.
It's not taxpayer money going to them
Right?
I mean, this is just absolutely mind numbingly stupid.
And get this, on top of that paragon commission to poll, showing a majority of voters want the subsidies to expire?
Wow.
Well, that's in conflict with the September 2025 poll by the nonpartisan Kaiser Health Foundation that came up with 78 percent.
of the public wants to extend the enhanced tax credits.
So according to the Paragon Institute, no one wants it extended.
According to the Kaiser Health Foundation, which I think I would believe first, 78% of the public.
And you know what, I mean, there is no percentage below 50%.
conservatives, middle-of-the-road people and decided they all want to extend the tax credits.
And finally, a House Republican aide described the Paragon Health Institute as a conservative brainiac guys in this conservative health institute.
Conservative brainiac guys.
So let me remind you, if you're unfamiliar with brainiac, he is a supervillain in the DC Comics.
So, okay, maybe I'll go along with that comparison.
Let's go to Joe.
Joe's on the line right now.
Wow, gee, this is another escapade and stupid.
It's kind of amazing.
I think you put Paragon and then you put Institute.
And I think you guys should go for an Institute.
I think you should have the John and Gordy Institute.
think you need a little cut line, maybe like here for you while others are sleeping.
But when you talked about Brainiac, maybe you could be kind of like Brainiac, but not evil.
You could just work it.
And I just you know the reason I'm calling I Boy, I don't know if you can top that story that you just had but I am so The line is so intense the line is so it's like a fire hose of lies.
I had a friend who just said you know that that
Two questions to ask are, what's your evidence and have you looked at a timeline?
And I mean,
what's your
evidence could take care of like 99% maybe that's a lie of Trump's claims, like your child will go into the school and come out transgender in one day.
Okay, right.
Or no,
Sure.
And I never got a check.
I never did either.
I never got a check.
Nope.
And I guess the other question, so what's your evidence?
And the other one was, look at a timeline.
And there was a wonderful one this week from the failed son, Eric Trump, who's written a book, and apparently it's a book that never went through an editor or a fact checker, because he claims that Jack Smith planted classified documents prior to the raid, FBI raid that took place on August 8th at Mar-a-Lago.
This, in order for this to have happened, Jack Smith would have had to warp the time-space continuum because he was not assigned to that case at that point.
It wasn't until three months later, and in fact, Jack Smith was in Europe working another job, and so this notion that he would be there plant, and he said, well, he's planting the manila folders.
You could see Jack Smith.
What's that?
So, I guess, you know, I really hope that you're the John and Gordy Institute, you know, here for you while others are sleeping.
Maybe there's something you guys can do to keep pushing on this fire hose of lies that we have.
WMDX.
It's
I hope we survived this.
We got three and a half more years.
This is Johnny Gordy in the morning as I contemplate this.
We've got our special guest each and every Wednesday morning.
It is Mike McCabe, our sub-stack author and commentator and the guy who looks at things in a very positive way, who's going to lift us all up this morning.
It's all on you, Mike.
Well, good morning.
a
Rain's already letting up, I can tell you that, having just walked over here.
Walked in,
So anyway, yes, you've got an interesting substack.
This is kind of a busted pencil version of your visit today, and you're talking about education and...
How things quickly change in the environment that we have right now with AI and everything else that's taking place, and how high schools are trying to adjust to that, but maybe not in the right way.
What's your thoughts on that?
Well, you know, our school system has gone from one fad to another, to another, to another over the last...
you know, generation or so and probably goes back longer than that.
You mentioned busted pencils, Tim Slacker.
You can, he can give you a history better than I can, but, you know, I used to work in public education for a period of time and I saw fads come and go then, but then the big one, of course, was the school to work
push where,
you know, let's not just.
you know, you do a standard education, but let's actually use the school system kind of as vocational training, just preparing people for the workplace.
And that failed pretty miserably.
The fad didn't last long.
wasn't particularly effective.
know,
college education anymore.
Right, and we don't need colleges.
But then, of course, the next revolution was STEM.
which stands for an emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and math.
So we don't need social studies.
We don't need civics.
We don't need a broad liberal arts education.
We just need to focus on those areas that will prepare people for their profession, for their work life.
Problem is, our economy is changing so rapidly that if you
focus on training for something today, that work will be obsolete tomorrow.
And then you're gonna have to retrain.
And then when you retrain for that, that will then be obsolete in short order.
And now as we enter the age of the dawning of artificial intelligence, and companies are using AI tools,
to even do away with the computer scientists.
I said in the column, there is nothing more STEM than computer science.
That was at the very heart of the STEM revolution.
And so all of these young people were sort of funneled into computer science.
because there needed to be the software developers and the hardware engineers and the coders.
The animators.
We needed all these people in computer science.
But now AI tools are replacing all of that.
And you've seen all of the high tech jobs that market has cratered.
Silicon Valley, that market has cratered.
And you've seen tens of thousands of layoffs year after year after year.
And those people who trained for that need that big tech had and no longer has because they're using AI instead to replace all that human labor, those people have been left high and dry.
They're just out of luck.
And so what all of this screams is for the need for genuine liberal arts education, where you teach people not
a particular skill that companies need today, but you teach them to think.
You teach them how the world works, how people tick.
You teach them to think analytically and strategically and creatively.
Those are the abilities that will allow people to adapt to an ever-changing
world and an
ever-changing economy.
That's what you really need education to do, is prepare us to be adaptive, to be able to adjust to changing times.
And that's what the classic liberal arts education does do for you.
And we've moved so far away from what we used to have in our education system, and it's not preparing people for the future.
It's preparing people for today's economic needs, but it's not preparing people to be...
citizens in a democracy it's not preparing people to more fully participate in society and it's not even preparing people for the jobs of tomorrow in our economy because those haven't been invented yet.
kind of occupation they may want to get into or maybe more creative in getting into something they find more interesting and creating a certain avenue on their own, of their own, is that because not everybody has this creative ability to be a critical thinker, not everybody has a creative ability to imagine something completely different and go in that direction.
What
happens?
We don't even know really how much capacity young people have for creativity and
for
adaptability because we don't teach for that anymore.
Here's the professional need that businesses have today.
This is what we're going to train you up for.
This is what we're going to focus on and then you're going to be funneled into these jobs.
but then those jobs disappear in short order.
And the companies, then they accuse the schools of not being able to adjust enough to changing times.
And they accuse the educators, but they don't take any responsibility for the fact that they've chosen to technologize those jobs out of existence.
And they don't care about what happens to the worker that is displaced, that is put out of work.
And you know, when you think about it, when you think about,
all the CEOs, all the people who are leading companies, all the people who are entrepreneurs and who are creating new businesses.
A lot of them are history majors or philosophy majors or political science majors.
They have classic liberal arts educations themselves, which have permitted them to think analytically and strategically and creatively.
And that's made them successful.
But it's interesting, they don't want that for
for their kids and grandkids.
Or somebody else's kids and grandkids.
They don't want that.
They want worker bees who they can plug into the jobs that they have available today.
And those jobs are vanishing tomorrow.
That's the economy we live in.
I mean, is
Well, what's interesting is that the American public is deeply wary of AI.
The citizenry doesn't want it.
The average person is afraid of it.
Now, I'm not gonna go so far as to say that AI should be shut down.
AI has some applications that it can do amazing things.
I'll grant you that.
But to me...
We should be using AI to perform tasks that human beings don't want to perform.
I want AI to do the dishes for me or do the laundry.
I don't want it to write books.
I don't want it to take over the space that should be reserved for human creativity.
I don't want it to produce music.
I don't want it to
So we
Yeah, and I don't even feel the need to go back to cursive.
Because I was never any damn good at it anyway.
I could never write cursive to save my life.
My printing, by the way, is
But what I do want is for human creativity not to be snuffed out.
Yes, you can have AI write a novel for you.
You can actually ask AI to write a novel from a famous author's voice, and it will do that.
But that is what human beings need to reserve for themselves.
They can't farm that out to machines, not unless we are willing to pay an immense price in terms of the loss.
of humanity that will occur in our society if we
other examples.
That's all that AI can do is borrow from things that it grabs off the internet.
So that's why it can write a book like Stephen King novel because it simply goes out and
everything Stephen King wrote.
Exactly, borrows a bunch of Stephen King writing and mimics it.
That's all AI can do.
loses is the magic of the human imagination.
If we're willing to surrender that to machines, we're cooked.
We're in deep trouble then.
And to me, all of this screams for that return to the classic liberal arts education that prepares people to both understand the world we live in.
and understand how people tick by studying history, by studying language, by studying human behavior, by learning the scientific method.
All of that prepares us to operate in society, but it also nurtures and cultivates the human imagination.
And that's what we need now more than ever.
is imagination.
We have to imagine our way out of this mess that we've gotten ourselves into as a society.
just got an idea.
Oh,
a
lot of
You're listening to Civic Media.
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Yeah.
A high today about 57.
And right now 49 degrees.
Tomorrow on the show we'll have Tim Slecker from Busted Pencils, also Jim Santel, former U.S.
Attorney at law.
Right now we're wrapping up here with Mike McCabe.
And we're talking about AI taking over and, you know,
It occurs to me that AI, who controls AI?
I mean, is it the Mark Zuckerbergs, the Jeff Bezos, the Elon Musk's, all these powerful, very rich, super rich people seem to have the president's ear and this administration's ear and they're just letting AI run rampant.
Run with it.
Yeah, you know, and that's the thing.
They didn't invent it, but they claimed ownership of it.
And now they're...
profiting from it, and it's turning billionaires soon into trillionaires.
But it's something that they don't want any restrictions placed on it.
They don't want it used in the public interest in any way.
And we've talked about this before.
Every time we had major innovations in the area of human communication or human knowledge acquisition,
We've treated it as a public commodity.
And we required it to be used in the public interest.
That's not being done with AI at all because billionaires want to become trillionaires.
But it leaves a whole lot of people vulnerable to being rendered irrelevant.
So people train for the hot job.
They go into the hot profession today.
But then business and industry is rapidly figuring out how to replace that human labor with technology tomorrow.
And that makes them even more profitable because they don't have any cost of labor.
more science, technology, engineering,
he had a passion for it, but he
passion for it.
And I just told.
You gotta tune these people out, because they're telling you to go into what's considered the hot profession today, but I'll tell you, even if the news business doesn't end up being your cup of tea, you're gonna have skills, you're gonna be able to think, you're gonna be able to research, you're gonna be able to communicate, you're gonna be able to write, and when you can do those things, you've got skills that'll make you employable.
and you'll be able to adapt you'll be able to adjust and so yeah he went into the humanities he went into that area that has been kind of ruled irrelevant in our society but the odd thing is is that
What he found once he got out of college is that there's an acute shortage of TV news producers.
So he got immediately right out of college.
He got a job in Portland, Oregon in a big TV market.
Then he decided he wanted to move to Twin Cities and had two job offers in the Twin Cities to do TV news producing.
And so he's gainfully employed.
He's doing fine.
And he's doing something that he's passionate about.
And man, I want to see that kind of story made possible for more kids.
And here you are, all these years later, gainfully employed.
Sort of.
Well, that's sort of key word there.
We may have to send some resumes out, so maybe put in a good word for it.
We were talking about your sub-stack.
I don't know about getting trained and retrained.
that kind of stuff.
Your response was from Ralph Knudsen and he said, a population without understanding is and feels vulnerable and easily frightened by change and has few skills to adapt.
And I think that puts everybody on edge.
And
everybody is on edge right
What we're talking about right now may cause people to be on edge.
Oh my gosh, what what occupations do we get into?
Because we're not giving people tips right now, but this is
you should go, but you're saying that if you're not in college, if you can't get into something that can train you currently, it puts a lot of people on that bubble where they're worried about their future.
They're worried about life, where it's going.
That's, I think, the tension that
the public feels right now.
That classic liberal arts education, which can start even before high school.
That focuses on helping us understand the world we live in and understand what makes humans tick and understanding human behavior all of that and That stokes imagination and creativity That will take that that anxiety away that helps take the edge off because you you you have an idea of where the world is headed and when you have an idea of where the world is headed you have a you can develop a strategy for how to
how to carve out a meaningful role for yourself.
But man, if you just train for the job, business, and industry you want to train for today, and then they say, OK, we don't need you anymore because we've got technology that can do it for you, for us, then those people are on edge and rightfully so because they're
down
at this time?
I don't at the very at this very moment.
Okay.
I had a bunch of flurry of them.
You did.
Yeah.
Yeah, Mike McCabe.substack.com.
If anybody's curious.
everybody.
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