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Good good morning and welcome, welcome to Matt Nair on air, Jane Matt Nair, Greg Buck.
And Calvin Budenoff coming to you live from our studio here at Radio Park in Racine.
You can always join us.
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Lots of stuff coming up on the show today.
Very excited to talk to Civic Media's new news director.
New news, new news, new news, not old news director.
No, she is our new news director.
Charlie Pittman is going to be joining us after 9 30.
We have a wonderful news department that is scattered all over Wisconsin, covering things that matter to all of us.
So Charlie is going to be joining us.
We will speak a little bit more in depth about the US striking Iran over the weekend, dropping that bomb.
We will
Again, talk about that a little bit more with Charlie and other things that our news department is working on.
And I mentioned this, I just appeared with Pat Crite Law on his show right before the top of the hour news.
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a great thing about Civic Media's news desk is that it's not just covering the statewide news.
It's not just covering the nation.
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It's all, it's got everything
you need.
Yep.
What's going on in Oshkosh?
What's going on in Park Falls?
What's going on in Hayward?
Again, we have a news department scattered all across the state.
So Charlie will be joining us after the 9 30 news hour.
Number two, we're going to lighten things up a little bit.
PJ leash.
is UW-Madison's and Wisconsin's essentially bug guy.
He isn't entomologist.
And I've seen a lot of reports that ticks are worse than ever this season.
So we're going to talk about that a little bit.
Also, the Trump administration looks like it's going to cancel another study on the importance of pollinators.
Because why bother?
We have no one depends on that for almonds or cherries.
You know, other things we
eat.
There is a farmer's market that Bridget and I go to every Saturday and there is a honey, local honey place and they have a t-shirt that's available that says no bees, no food.
It's true.
Very simple.
Yeah, pretty simple.
So PJ Lee's joining us in hour number two.
We will wrap up the show as we always do with this shouldn't be a thing.
Today it's the Lost and Found edition.
So stick around for that.
And as always, if you have a thing you think should not be,
Send it in to Greg and me at janesaysatcivicmedia.us, J-A-N-E-S-A-Y-S, janesaysatcivicmedia.us.
Wanted to start off with this again, we're going to be talking about the U.S.
bombing Iran over the weekend.
After the 9.30 news, we'll get into a little bit more with Charlie Pittman to find out the latest on that.
the latest where we're going from here.
But I wanted to start off, we wanted to start a little bit more locally with what's going on in Wisconsin and Wisconsin's Chris capping capping.
Thank you.
We're finally going to say
it correctly.
This is a, I will, I will say this again to his face when he's on the show on Friday, but this is an apology to Dan Schaefer, who on the air said he was pronouncing Chris capping his name incorrectly.
Cause we've been saying capenga,
which is not
it.
No one has corrected us.
That's not it.
It's a capping a capping a senator capping a was on WISN's upfront over the weekend Talking about the budget, but also talking about security of our lawmakers
This
is in the wake of the assassination essentially of the Minnesota lawmaker and her husband and the attempted murder of
of another Minnesota lawmaker and his wife.
And so Kaepenga was on WISN's upfront, talking about more security for Wisconsin's lawmakers.
Let's play that first clip, Calvin, please, from Sundays Up Front on WISN.
The security concern, I've been raising that for about the last four years.
And actually, when I was in the president's spot in the Senate, we researched security systems.
We had one picked out, but we just couldn't get enough support within the legislature to get that put in place.
And we've been, I've been to capitals all over the country.
There's not one capital I've been in that we haven't had to go through intense security screenings.
You mentioned your time as Senate president back in 2023.
You pushed for more security after a man was arrested trying to get a handgun into the Capitol, Governor Evers.
You say that didn't go anywhere because of support.
Where does that stand now?
Are you still having those conversations?
Yeah, I think this will obviously help.
I wish it wasn't something we had to have happen.
But I actually said that.
I'm like, what is it going to take for us to get serious about security?
It's probably going to take somebody getting hurt.
So let's just start off with the obvious.
We hear, Matt, near and air, civic media, we don't believe that violence is the answer.
We don't think it's right.
Politically driven violence is terrible.
We think that anyone in that building and anywhere period should be safe, secure, and feel unencumbered by an attacker.
That should go without saying, Jane, but I feel like we have to say that.
I agree with you.
But what he just said in that sentence,
is so I don't want to say angering, but just frustrating for me as an American.
What does it take?
Why we we we don't want to what what it's the reactive nature we want to be proactive instead of reactive.
Every time there is any sort of mass shooting in this country and that happens a lot.
There is outcry.
There's outcry for
red flag laws, there's outcry for increased background checks, there's outcry for get rid of certain guns, get rid of certain styles of guns, there's a conversation that happens every time and we are always told by the right and by gun enthusiasts, don't politicize this, you're making too big of a deal of it, it's the Second Amendment, it's our God-given right, it shall not be infringed, everything is there.
And we're simply saying, how many times does this have to happen for
us?
Before something gets done.
What, Mr. Cappenga?
Kappenga is saying is what the what the Gun What's the word?
I'm looking for you know, not gun gun lobby not the gun lobby the people who want to get some reform the gun reform individuals have been saying for years decades now is basically like what does it take to get some security?
What does it take to do something about this issue of weapons and let's just face it?
Let's say people aren't running in with axes.
They're running in with guns
So he's making the exact same argument that people on the gun reform side have been making for a long time.
So now all of a sudden it's something we need to look at.
Right, because it's
them.
Yes.
Because it's lawmakers.
It's about our lawmakers.
Not about our kids.
No.
Not about our kids going to school having to worry about being shot at school.
That's that's not that we're there.
He's not talking about any of that.
No.
And if you want proof that he's talking about specifically about lawmakers, he's not talking about the people.
And that's the other thing that's really infuriating.
He's not talking honestly about the people in the building.
He's not talking about the assistance, the interns, the aides, the.
There's all kinds of people
that work in the capital.
All sorts
of individuals who work in there.
He's talking about the lawmakers who need to be protected specifically.
And that's true.
They should be protected.
They need, like everyone should in that building should be protected.
And once again, I'm saying the obvious again, but he is speaking about lawmakers in specifically on this one.
And that also upsets me because it shouldn't matter what your job is in that building.
Everyone should feel safe.
I would say that
every even as individuals should feel safe.
I what amazing idea, right?
We have another clip from yesterday's appearance senator Chris capping on WISN upfront Calvin play clip number two, please
What what Indiana for instance?
It's a great example that I bring up a lot is that Indiana is extremely conservative and and pro Now protection they allow legislators to carry into the building for protection, which I always do
I always have been armed to protect myself, especially when I'm up in the front in the president's spot.
That was, I just felt it was very important.
But the general public, they don't need to have their weapons in the people's house.
In the people's house, it's their representatives who are elected.
That's the voice of the people.
I need to be protected as a public servant.
So does everybody else who's been elected into that spot.
We should not be worrying about our lives walking into that building.
We still want lawmakers to be able to carry inside
and on the
floor.
Absolutely.
Lot to unpack there.
Did you just hear what he said?
Everyone listening right now watching on the live stream.
Did you hear what he just said?
He said that his life.
is more important for protection than the lives of others.
Because he's the voice of the people.
No, he is not.
He is the guy who cast the vote.
And right now he's doing nothing.
We'll get to the budget later.
But the people are important.
And the people's voice needs to be protected.
I have so many problems with this
statement.
So many.
Well, and...
I don't disagree.
Yes, our lawmakers should be able to walk into the Capitol and not have to worry about getting shot.
I think our kids should be able to walk into school and not have to worry about being shot.
I think all of us as Americans should be able to go, I don't know, to church or the grocery store or the gas station or pretty much anywhere and not have to worry about being shot.
And the fact that he can stand up there and say that he is the voice of the people, when we know the joint finance committee that had four meetings around Wisconsin completely ignored the top three issue they heard from people, don't tell me that you're the voice of the people.
Well, and also he's designated as he is more important than.
His life has more value if life has more value there or he should be able to carry a gun into that building The fact that there's no metal detectors in there is surprising.
I'm I will say that
I don't have a problem with that
There should be there should be up to the state of the art security in that building and there should be
well-paid guards in that building to take care of it.
Who are trained.
I do not believe that lawmakers carrying guns in their pocket is somehow making it more safe to be in there.
I do not agree with that.
And I vehemently disagree with the notion that because he is a lawmaker, somehow he has more value.
That is ridiculous.
That is offensive and it's stupid.
It's a stupid argument to make.
just because you want to carry your personal defense mechanism.
It's a gun.
It's a gun, sir.
People are pro-personal defense.
It's a gun.
You want to carry a gun because you watched a Western and you want to feel like a man.
I'm sorry.
This is so telling to me what
he thinks of the people.
And I just found it immensely tone deaf.
Yes.
I did.
I found it really tone deaf.
Again,
Yes, I agree.
Our lawmakers should be able to do their jobs without the threat of being gunned down at work.
I think all of us are entitled to that as Americans.
And if you're going to be the voice of the people, Mr. Kappenga, then actually do what they're asking you to do.
Absolutely.
That's a thought.
Absolutely.
And this is splitting hairs here, but we're also ignoring the fact that this
This lawmaker these two lawmakers and their spouses were not gunned down in the building.
They were gunned down at home That's a whole other argument.
We are hold on the argument whole other discussion We need to have about this.
What kind of security do they need to have off the out of the off the clock if you will, right?
You know, we can talk about that but just because you want to carry a gun into a building Don't make the argument that you're more important than the other individuals in said building
when we return Elon
He's just going to rewrite history the way he wants it.
It's all good, nothing to see here.
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Good good morning.
Welcome.
Welcome to Matt and air on air Jane Matt and air Greg Bach sweet Calbee on the board Coming to you from our studio at radio park in Racine You can join us caller text at 8 5 5 7 5 2 4 8 4 2 Leave a comment if you're watching on the live stream on Facebook YouTube and what used to be Twitter later on today 235 during the Todd Alba show Todd welcomes back state senator Kelder Roy's
from the joint finance committee to talk about the state budget in hour number two on Todd's show, a weather edition of what's worse.
Is that the heat or humidity?
I'm just
guessing.
I'll bet you it's winter versus summer because I'm seeing a lot of the, especially in Wisconsin, the moon.
Do you say it's too hot now you said it was too cool like all that right we do it every year we do every year we forget that Wisconsin is insane
It's weather whiplash exactly just you never it wait two days and it's gonna change before we went to the break We were talking about state senator Chris capping appearing on WIS and up front over the weekend Talking about that tragic assassination of the Minnesota lawmaker and her husband
And he would like to see metal detectors at the Capitol, which I don't have a problem with.
But essentially he's talking about how important he is because he is the voice of the people.
Wow.
Yeah.
Just, I mean,
okay.
Cassandra from New London.
Wow.
I don't have a lot of words for this.
How you, how dare you say you are more valuable than my children.
Yeah.
And Sue from Franklin, I watched that yesterday and I was thinking the same thing.
They are so inward focused.
Yeah.
What does Jane say?
Good for me, but not for thee.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Security for me, but you, your kids five, they're gonna, they'll be fine.
And if you want to talk to Mr. Kappenga's office, you can go to myvote.wi.gov.
You don't even have to be represented by Mr. Kappenga because he's the voice of the people and you are the people.
You are a people.
So go to myvote.myvote.wi.gov and you're gonna put in your information and you can find not only all sorts of great stuff on voting.
which you should do now before this election, before you might forget, but also on your representatives.
You can find out from the president on down to your local school board and common council members.
So you can call his office up, be kind, be nice.
The person who's answering is either an aide or an intern.
So yeah, they're just there to talk to you, but tell them that your voice matters, that you will matter, and it's not, and he is not more important.
than you
are.
Well, and also if he's the voice of the people, maybe he should actually vote on behalf of what he hears from those people.
Absolutely.
It's just a thought.
Yeah, just a tiny idea.
I didn't, we're not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I think this is really important.
Yeah.
And I think if you, if you just spend a couple of minutes thinking about this, this is really disturbing.
Elon Musk has announced plans to completely rewrite human knowledge.
after his AI chatbot GROC, which I've never used, but I see it show up on Twitter all the time.
GROC is like community notes.
So if you post something and you go to GROC and say GROC is this accurate, well, unfortunately, GROC has been discounting a lot of what Elon has said as far as it's not factual.
So GROC is correcting Elon.
We can't have that.
Yeah, yeah, have Grock create a create a correcting the the most wonderful smartest man in the world Elon Musk So yesterday here's what he said on Twitter quote we will use Grock 3.5 Maybe we should call it four which has advanced reasoning to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge Adding missing information and deleting errors
So Elon wants to rewrite history.
I deleting errors.
Well, honestly, Jay, I mean, let's let's just be quite honest, really quick about it all.
He is doing what the Texas school board has done.
He's doing what other school boards have done.
He is he is making it.
But he's saying fancy space words like I'm rewriting now.
No, you're not.
You're just going to say that you're going to say that, oh, man, white Africans really had it harder than.
Then you think yeah, whoo.
Yeah.
Oh my gosh that a part that I really hurt them to yeah, so yeah This is I mean I should be shocked appalled I should be clutching my pearls, but he's really just digitalizing and advancing and making it look cooler what lawmakers historians school boards and other weirdo individuals who just want to
Want us to forget about slavery have been doing for decades and I'm sorry for over a century.
Well,
right and just trying to disappear troops Yeah, absolutely.
Let's let's disappear things that are uncomfortable that make us feel badly about our past We shouldn't ever have to admit that we did things wrong.
Mm-hmm.
That's what I see some Donald Trump all the time Well, I mean who never admits that he's done anything wrong, but
This should be very concerning especially with AI and if you've seen some of the AI fakes going around Yeah, it's pretty astonishing.
So in different chats, I've seen people tell other people hang on to your books Hang on to your history books
What I'm hoping is that while he does his
redefining human knowledge in a space age, blah, blah, blah.
All
my
rockets blow up.
Is that there?
I blew up another
one last
week.
I know.
I think that I believe that there will be people or groups of people who will, who are just way smarter than Elon.
What am I saying?
I'm as smart as Elon.
Who will build systems, AI systems, things that will counter this?
Yes, absolutely.
I think there are good people out there and I think they'll put their brains to good work.
And while
Grock is going to be funded by the biggest weirdo loser, richest man ever.
I think there are going to be people who I wouldn't be surprised if that's not already happening, who will produce things that will fly in the face of what he's trying to do, especially in the rewriting of human knowledge.
Something to counter
this.
At the very least, and I know it sounds very basic, but you go to Wikipedia and while people can say, well, it's Wikipedia, but there are dozens of,
citations on there saying where they got the information and you can go find out for yourself.
So while this is disappointing yet nothing new, I feel like good people will.
come to the rescue me like hey step up
yeah let's hope so we have news coming up next when we return civic media's new news director jolly fitman is going to be joining us stay close you are listening to matt and air on air this is the civic media radio network good morning welcome welcome to matt and air on air jane matt and air greg box sweet cal b on the board
Coming to you from our studio here at Radio Park in Racine, join us.
Call or text at 855-752-4842.
Leave a comment if you're watching on the live stream on Facebook, YouTube, and what used to be Twitter next hour after the 10 o'clock news.
He's the bug guy, entomologist PJ Leish from UW Madison is going to be joining us to talk all things creepy crawlies, including ticks.
It's supposed to be a bad tick season.
So we're going to talk to PJ Leish about that after 10 o'clock right now, though, delighted to be joined by Civic Media's new news director.
Charlie Pittman is here.
Good morning, Charlie.
Nice to meet you.
Thanks for joining us.
New news.
New news, director.
You've been with us just about a month here at Civic Media for folks you don't know, including us.
If you want to tell us a little bit about your background, Charlie.
Well, I've worked in broadcasting since I was an adult, since I was 18.
I come most recently from W-O-R-T, which is a community radio station in Madison, Wisconsin.
Interesting structure, mostly volunteer run and operated everyone on the air as a volunteer.
So very used to training and running a news department where we also had an hour-long news show.
Wow, that's great.
It's a big job.
Civic Media has news reporters all over the state.
We're going to talk about that a little bit more, a little bit later on.
But let's just talk with what happened over the weekend, Charlie, from the news department, at least as far as the U.S.
bombing Iran over the weekend.
Where do we stand right now?
Well, we're waiting.
We're watching and waiting, right?
Operation Midnight Hammer was the decision to strike Iran with these bunker buster bombs and these massive ordinance penetrators.
Obviously, our listeners heard that when we went live this weekend.
But right now, we don't know.
We are in the waiting period.
President Trump is slated to meet with the, I believe, the National Security Council later today.
The many nations around the world have condemned it or issued warnings, but we don't know.
Well, and I think the other thing that we don't know, the Trump administration has said, we completely obliterated Iran's nuclear capabilities.
From what I'm seeing this morning, that has not been confirmed.
We do not know that, correct?
There are kind of aerial maps that you can look at and kind of guess at.
These three sites, Fordo Natanz and Isfahan, are deep underground.
I'm waving with my hands, but listeners can't see that calling attention to the limitations of the medium.
But there are these big, they're reinforced with concrete and all sorts of things in deep underground.
So they're hard to reach.
It's also hard to tell.
So we don't know that either.
Yeah, it's not like you can confirm this by sight and just say, yes, everything's been destroyed.
Because again, the president had warned
Iraqis or Iranians to evacuate what that was last weekend so They did have the the Iranians did have the opportunity to move things if they if they took that threat that Donald Trump said you should evacuate immediately if they took that threat seriously Then they we gave they they had a little time to move things
And this is, I mean, it's quite shocking on Saturday night, just to get the news coming through all the notifications.
And this came on the heels of him essentially saying, I believe you the Thursday or Friday, I'm going to give it two weeks.
the king of the fortnight.
He loves two weeks two weeks to solve everything But he said two weeks and then this happened which obviously means that you know, I mean we have to assume They didn't just call on that Saturday said go this has been in the this has to be worked now I am speculating I do not work for DoD or state But for him to say two weeks and almost 48 hours later for this to happen
I don't want to say it's miscommunication, but it just doesn't seem like this was handled in the best way.
I was right here running the Racine Raiders game at WRJN and going, oh, no, touchdown.
All right, cool.
Yay.
You know, it's very much, there's.
There's no such thing as a quiet weekend or a slow Friday every day.
Every day now is it can happen anytime.
News is always
breaking.
If you're just joining us, Civic Media's news director, Charlie Pittman is our guest and we're talking a little bit about what we know as of today after the U.S.
bombed Iran over the weekend.
Where are Wisconsin's Republican lawmakers on this?
Where are Wisconsin's lawmakers in general on this, Charlie?
Glad you can glad you asked that you can find at civicmedia.us a roundup of reactions from Wisconsin's congressional delegation It's predictably divided Republicans mostly endorse it mostly and Democrats don't right and are calling on the passage of the an update to the war powers Sorry the
the War Powers Act, which would require congressional authorization to go to war or to conduct the military.
To take these kinds of books, yeah, right, because
this when he decided to do this over the weekend.
Well, so I watched the briefing yesterday at the Pentagon, and under the the War Powers Act of 1973, it says, you must inform Congress within 48 hours.
But what's new, there's a new resolution in Congress that was introduced by Representative Thomas Massey and also by a Republican from, I believe, Kentucky, and then Ro Khanna from California, who introduced a bill
into the house.
recently, but it hasn't been passed and it would require express authorization from Congress for any hostility, taking hostile action on Iran specifically.
For those who don't know, Thomas Massey is a Republican lawmaker who came out over the weekend pretty strongly against this move.
And now he is in the crosshairs of President Trump who said he's gonna make sure he's primaried and get him out of there because it does seem like
within the Republican Party or at least the magas, there is some division on whether or not this was the right thing to do.
And so I bring that up because Wisconsin's congressional delegation pointed back to that.
We have Representative Mark Pocan saying that this must be passed to block Trump from dragging the U.S.
into an unconstitutional war in the Middle East.
And we had others on the Democratic side echoing those statements.
Meanwhile,
Senator Ron Johnson, endorsing it, saying, we could not allow Iran to become a nuclear power.
They were getting too close.
They wouldn't listen.
They wouldn't give it up.
So I support President Trump's action.
We had our own expert on Saturday night, Stephen Zunez, a professor at the University of San Francisco.
He called this nonsense.
He said the idea that there was some kind of imminent threat that required military action immediately was nonsense.
He pointed to the fact that we could go back to the Iran nuclear deal, but we don't have that anymore.
Right.
And that was a deal brokered by the Obama administration, which was in place and seemed to be working.
There were agreements, as far as if I remember this correctly, that our inspectors were allowed into Iran to
check
on their nuclear capabilities.
And then when Donald Trump was elected the first time around, he blew that up.
He pulled us out and blew us out of that, took us out of that deal that had been brokered by the Obama administration.
It's interesting though, Tulsi Gabbard was the one who essentially said last week that there were no signs of an imminent threat.
She did not go along with Donald Trump's assertion that it had been verified that Iran was ready to take a move.
And now it looks like Tulsi Gabbard has been kind of exed out out of everything.
So
And back to Senator Ron Johnson.
He was on Fox News either it was yesterday or it might have been this morning because that is his favorite place to be.
And essentially said that this bombing now has done, he is even more resolved now to do more cutting in the budget bill.
Because what they want to cut from Medicaid and SNAP and all of that stuff, that's not enough.
Now that we've done this, he wants the cuts to go even deeper.
This is a very weird path to go from bombing Iran to Medicaid cuts.
One of the things I want to talk about really quick, and you both brought this up as far as the divide in the Republican Party, is that, you know, it's not just the lawmakers.
I remember listening to the Tom Hartman show here on civic media and a Republican called up and said, while he is a mega Republican, even this is giving him pause.
And when the world stage is saying, we don't like this, it is going to be interesting to see how, how President Trump will square this to the American public in the face of his own party isn't on board with this.
So.
But that nothing like that ever makes him change his mind.
No, I know he just doubles down on it
and says he's right I didn't say it will change his mind.
I said it's how he's going to sell it
on
Sunday and there was sort of an impromptu protest against this action she talked to people there and Some told her that this reminded her of when president
Bush said there were weapons of mass destruction, right?
And is the child of parents who heavily followed that.
You know, that has a deep and lasting impact on folks watching.
the United States potentially committed itself to yet another
war.
And you bring up a really good point, and George W. Bush and all of his advisors told the American people they had weapons of mass destruction.
That's why we needed to go to war.
And after how many years and how many lives and how many millions of dollars?
Trillions.
They did not have weapons of mass destruction.
Yes.
So Melissa found a little...
Maybe not necessarily swallowing the administration's claim that Iran was on the brink of attacking us.
Yeah, she talked to the organizer who said it was a spur of the moment called action and that they were just too furious about the bombing of Iran to
they wanted to do something.
So, you know, not that there haven't been protests before in Wisconsin Rapids, but another thing to add to the protest list.
And I think that's a, you know, when you were speaking anecdotally, that's something that was very much on social media this week and is, you know, pictures of George Bush saying there's WMDs and George and Donald Trump.
But also the other thing too, and I brought, I said this on Twitter was that during both his debate with now former president.
Biden and with Vice President Kamala Harris, he made it so clear that these two are going to be the ones that get us into war.
These two are going to put us in the crosshairs of World War Three.
And I just found it very interesting that Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022.
And while we did give them munitions, we gave them resources, we gave them money, support, we never got involved in that war in almost three years if Joe Biden's presidency.
It took us
three months, less than six months to get into now what seems like a war with Iran, which is something that has been on the, has been on the stage for a long time.
That's something that people have really feared.
They've been pushing the notion of war with Iran.
Well, and again, you, you've said it correctly, Greg, in that Donald Trump said that everyone else was going to get us into World War Three.
He's the peace president, maybe not so much.
We're going to continue our conversation with Charlie Pittman on the other side.
She is the news director here at Civic Media.
Stay with us.
You are listening to Matt Nair on air.
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Good, good morning.
Welcome.
Welcome to Matt and air on air Jane Matt and air Greg Bach doctor slide on the board Coming to you from her studio at radio park in Racine.
You can join us call or text at 855-752-4842 Leave a comment if you're watching on the live stream on Facebook YouTube and what used to be Twitter We do have baseball action coming up later on today our broadcast starts at 6 0 5
Crew hosting the Pirates, you can listen live on Terrestrial Radio to WRCE and Richland Center, WISSN Oshkosh, WRJN, here in Racine and Kenosha, WCQM in Park Falls and WBZH in Hayward.
They have lumberjacks next month.
Oh, we should.
We should talk more about
that.
We should maybe go there.
Our broadcast with baseball starts 6.05 today.
The crew hosting the Pirates.
Right now we are joined by Civic Media News Director Charlie Pittman is here.
And Charlie wanted to talk a little bit about the Wisconsin budget.
What's happening in Wisconsin?
I feel like I'm showing up and saying I don't know.
I can help to get you to where we are at this point.
So last week there were budget legislative committee, the budget writing committee, had a bunch of meetings and some planned meetings.
Not all of them.
materialized.
They'll
It
And this was after, because we talked to some childcare providers who either closed their daycare centers,
or worked out special arrangements so they could drive three hours to get to Madison to attend this meeting.
And then our lawmakers, being as gracious as they are, just canceled it at the last minute.
gonna
Yeah, so so that's where we were we saw a statement from Devon Lemay you that that the direction that were headed that the Republicans felt they were headed in a
in a direction taxpayers couldn't afford.
Now we hear from Tip McGuire, a Democrat who's also on that committee saying, look, you're giving into the desires of your most extreme legislative caucuses, and that's a quote.
And he's pointing to this internal disagreement in the Republican Party.
So first we had budget talks between Democrat Governor Tony Evers and the Republican leadership breakdown.
This last week, and coming into this week,
we have internal disagreement within the GOP.
There are two state senators, both Republicans, who say they're not, or have gestured that they're not going to vote for the budget, for a new budget.
And they are, let's see, Kappengut, Senator Chris Kappengut, and state Senator Steve Noss, Republican from Whitewater.
two slightly different reasons.
Kappenga had previously said that he wasn't going to vote for it because he believes the existing budget should carry over.
In a kind of thread following his reasoning, he says it would be the lowest spending increase in a decade and that there would be no risk of Governor Evers veto pen.
And so that's why he says he's not going to vote for it.
And then there's state Senator Steve Nuss, who has repeatedly come after
kind of the GOP leadership and everyone to say that this quote might be the worst process used in all of his time in the legislature, unquote.
So the worst budget process.
So we have two kind of disgruntled Republican senators who, you know, because there's a slim majority, Republicans need those two to get to a deal.
So again, we don't really know, but what
What comes after this right?
Well, we have Broomers swirling last week of an 87 million dollar cut to higher education funding UW Madison That is that's a cut when Governor Evers had proposed an 850 million increase for the universities of Wisconsin or UW system So we don't
That's a huge disparity and trying to square that, I think is a difficult, difficult thing.
And it sounds like, this sounds like the federal level too.
You have Ron Johnson saying, I don't like this budget.
And it's not because he wants to put more money into help.
He'll be like, we need to cut more.
We need to cut even more.
This program's gonna get gotten rid of.
And Chris Cappenga is really just the human version of this whole process going, yeah, let's just do the old one.
That's fine.
And I just find it interesting that
At least some of our lawmakers believe that they can take no action.
They can do nothing.
Again, after the joint finance committee traveled around the state, four different stops hearing from hundreds of Wisconsinites about the top issues that are important to them, but our Republicans apparently feel secure enough that them not doing anything is going to be just fine with everybody.
It's going to be just
fine.
Chris Kappenga, who said we should just wait and do nothing, is also the man who said in that same upfront interview that they are the voice of the people.
So apparently the people say, don't do anything, just it's fine, it's all good to go.
It's very disappointing to see this kind of gridlock and see the finger pointing that's happening.
If you would like our lawmakers to do something, you can always reach them in a real handy dandy way.
Go to myvote.wi.gov, myvote.wi.gov, just put in your address.
All the contact information for all of your lawmakers will appear.
You can always give them a friendly, polite phone call.
Check in on what they are or are not doing in Madison.
Charlie Pittman is the news director for Civic Media.
She's going to be joining us every Monday.
Thank you so very much, Charlie.
Really appreciate your time, and we will see you next week.
Thanks so much.
We have news coming up next, and then we'll return, talk all things creepy crawlies with PJ Leish, the bug guy.
You're listening to Matt and Air on Air on the Civic Media radio network.
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