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Jane NetNair, Greg Mock.
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We have a busy show today.
Very Wisconsin poet laureates.
We should.
probably
nicer.
Wisconsin's poet Lori at Brenda Cardenas.
He's going to be joining us after the 9 30 news to talk about what it is that the poet Lori to the state does.
I have many questions.
Many, many questions.
I
have two.
I want to know what she says to people who think they're too stupid to understand poetry.
Yeah.
I mean, that's, I think that's, I think that's a valid, that's a valid thought because
Poetry is one of those art forms I feel a lot of people can be like, I don't get it.
I don't get it.
I think poetry as well as like, you know, paintings, people will see paintings go, I don't understand why everyone sees what I don't see.
And yeah, and I think that part of that job I have to imagine is demystifying what poetry is and what poetry has to be to be considered such an art.
See, I can talk.
We're going to talk to Brenda after the 9.30 news.
In hour number two, very excited about this.
Shout out to Tucker Logersky, our senior producer for tracking down Zeke Fox, who's going to join us after the 10 o'clock news to talk about crypto.
Yes.
This is something we've been wanting to talk about for a long time.
It's kind of tough finding the right person to talk about this.
Zika's done a lot of reporting on this.
Yeah, because there's two major things for me personally on this is the fact that crypto isn't going away.
It's not something I'm interested in, but if you want to do it, good on you, live your life.
But I think it's important to not just be like, ah, but to understand it, even if I'm not going to use it, but also understand.
the growing implications and how it might be influencing our government.
Big time.
Absolutely.
So Zeke Fox joining us after the 10 o'clock news.
For the last half an hour of the show, we will lighten it up as we always do for Audio Sorbet today, where we take a breath and get away from the news.
Essentially, we clean your ears with fun.
Yes.
Jimmy Cliff has passed away at the age of 81.
We were talking about this before we came on the air and he was so
Hopeful yes, Jimmy Cliff songs were he came from really rough circumstances kind of really tough childhood and he still kept hope Yes, so we want to talk about so songs that give you hope.
Yes
songs that bring you up That's gonna be our audio sorbet conversation today after the 1030 news and then we'll wrap up the show today With this shouldn't be a thing today.
Mmm saved by the bell edition if you know what that means
Yes, that's essentially what it means.
And if you think you know what it means, no, it doesn't.
I can be vague too.
Stick around for this, shouldn't be a thing, the Saved by the Bell edition coming up at the very end of the show.
I did want to start off with this though, because this made national news.
Ann Kleber in the Milwaukee Journal sent in all slender man stabbing defendant found at Illinois after escaping a group home.
For those who remember, Morgan Geiser was charged with attempted murder when she was 12, after she and another friend stabbed a friend to appease this fictional online character Slenderman.
She went missing from her group home November 22nd, after she cut off her Department of Corrections monitoring bracelet.
She's now 23.
Was it that long ago?
It was a long time ago.
Oh my goodness.
She was in custody for a long, long time.
But yes, she went missing from her group home November 22nd after cutting off her bracelet.
She has since been taken into custody in Illinois on November 23rd the next day.
They also say that she was with the company of some other adult.
So again, Morgan Geyser back in custody.
All I could think of was the poor girl who was attacked.
Yeah.
And I know that like, I don't want to say poor Morgan Geyser at all, but
There is something to be said about these types of situations where it once again brings into account the discussions of mental health and what children see online and protections that are needed.
More protections than just a pressing a button saying parental controls that a kid can go in and say, nope, I don't have to do that.
I'm glad she's back in custody.
I'm glad for the, I mean, as you mentioned, the person who was the victim had to have not been sleeping well.
No doubt.
And also the fact that because of the, the, the theme of the case, it was also open for a lot of joking and a lot of ridicule and not satire, but in a situation like this, when you have so many problems,
There was nothing ever funny about it.
I don't feel like it and also and also being in Wisconsin.
It's just another thing It's like can we strip away all the jokes can get to the nitty gritty of it all and what the problem is in here?
So I'm glad she's back in custody.
I'm glad that that's taken care of and
Yeah, yeah, she is a Morgan geyser is back in custody
So
again, that's why I just wanted to share that because again, this has made that's a hit to national news
over the
weekend I wanted to start off also with this.
This is from Wisconsin Public Radio Evan Casey has the byline Republican lawmakers propose new fees for hiking biking and cross-country skiing on state-owned land Hikers would need a $20 permit now to hike on state land
This package of bills from State Representative Chance Green, Republican from Grandview, and State Senator Rob Staffscholt from New Richmond, also a Republican.
They want to help the DNR, which has a $16 million budget shortfall, by hiking fees.
They said hunters and anglers have shouldered the burden of rising fees whenever the DNR needs more money.
That is not fair.
expanding a new revenue stream, the most common sense way to help the DNR with its money problems.
So this package of bills called DNR Revenue Stream Refresh would require adults to pay for a $40 permit to cross country ski on state properties.
Also a $40 permit if you want to ride a bike on groomed mountain biking, hiking trails or other trails.
Adults who forage on state property would also have to pay $40 for a permit, and hikers would have to pay $20, although trail passes are already required at a lot of state parks for biking, cross-country skiing, and horseback riding.
The current fees, $25 for an annual pass and $5 for a day pass.
Again, according to this article on the Wisconsin Public Radio, the fees proposed are higher.
than many of the fees for hunting and fishing.
Ah, so, so, um, we're at a shoulder.
So it's the, you know, I'm not even going to, this is a clear cut case of the fact that Wisconsin legislators will not put the money into these projects.
We have a $4.5, $4.6 billion surplus in the state.
And instead of taking some of that money, and I'm going to say this word slowly investing.
in our natural lands in our natural landscapes in the thing in conservation which we have spoken about so many times in the past this is a topic which crosses all political lines people who hunt people who fish people who hike people who bike they all
have a vested interest in conservation.
And all of those individuals don't just vote for one party.
And the fact that one party refuses to infuse these departments with the money they need to do the jobs they have, they've been charged to do, instead saying, let's just put it on the backs of the voters.
Let's just put, you know, now you have to pay.
Well, it's a usage fee.
Yeah.
We have the money to do this.
Well, I just find it interesting because normally Republicans would be the ones bashing all over Democrats for raising fees for things well, right?
Yes, I mean that it would be it would be it's the wheel taxes Which communities are talking about because of the same problem going back to our state legislature refusing to invest any money into our current
systems and that's a
That's a conversation that you and Dan had on Friday about this topic is the fact that this all goes back to the 2010.
era of wisconsin when scott walker took over and the republicans took over and it became we are going to suffocate certain municipalities we are going to absolutely gut shared revenue we're not going to raise it you're going to have to do on your own and they had to by raising fees and they froze property taxes too so they had to raise fees for these municipalities to make money in order to do things this wasn't so that the cities could buy a 15th swimming pool it's so that
their services weren't going to get cut.
But guess what?
They got cut.
Yeah.
855-752-4842.
If you would like to join us, Ronnie from Horicon, texting in, listening on WAUK.
Hey, when you fish and when you hunt, you are extracting something from the environment.
What are you extracting when you use public lands to hike or bike on?
Well, there are fees certainly with maintaining these trails.
It costs
money to maintain the trails.
I just find it kind of ironic again that these are Republican proposals, hike fees.
We won't use the 4.5, 4.6 billion dollar surplus we're sitting on, because it is, again, Robin Voss's money.
And he doesn't want to use it.
And also it does come down to the, to the matter of when the, when the Democrats want to do it, it's the awful Democrats raising your
fees, raising your taxes, raising the moment they do it, it's in order to just pay for a shortfall.
This is fiscally responsible.
This is fiscally, not investing, not investing.
And granted, yeah, a $15 hike will definitely raise some more money, but that may keep people from not doing it because budgets are getting tight and people have to make decisions on what they can spend their money on.
Victoria Wilson, a Burlington resident is with a women's hiking group that goes on weekly hikes across the state.
She said there's already a vehicle admission fee in place to use state parks.
She says adding on just another fee really limits a lot of people, especially when the economy and times are tough.
She's particularly worried about the new hiking fee, 10 bucks for kids over the age of 12.
I mean,
I'm not saying get rid of the fees.
I'm not even saying don't raise the fees.
I'm saying invest some money and then maybe say instead of making a $40 fee, make it a $30 or 30, whatever or 25.
Yeah, you can do it incrementally over time, but you still have that pile of cash sitting there that could fund so many things in the state and conservation is one of the most important things in the state because it is also a heavy
tourist
attraction.
And this is something that most Wisconsinites agree upon.
Yep.
Our natural resources.
Yes.
Cindy from Appleton is joining us on the line.
Good morning, Cindy.
Thanks for joining us.
What do you want to say?
Well, are you on a specific topic or can I get off the subject a little?
Well, we're just about coming up to the break, Cindy.
Do you want to wait until we come back on the other side if we're going to change topics on this?
Yeah, I can do
that.
Okay.
We are talking right now.
about an article in the Wisconsin Public Radio.
Republican lawmakers want new fees now for hiking, biking, cross-country skiing on state-owned land because the DNR has money problems.
Yeah.
And
they've been talking about the money problems for a while.
We have.
And we've had that surplus for a while.
We have.
And we can invest this money and still raise some fees.
It's a natural thing.
It doesn't mean it, but this just feels like they're putting
the burden on anyone who walks to the door instead of actually doing some fiscally responsible long term planning.
Stay close.
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We're going to talk about the end of Doge.
Bye-bye.
Yeah.
First though, Cindy from Appleton is waiting patiently on the phone.
Good morning, Cindy.
What did you want to talk
about?
You know, everybody says that things are getting tight and the economy's starting to go off falter.
I don't see it.
I went out to the mall.
Unfortunately, I had to go out there Saturday afternoon for something that I could only get out there.
And the place was literally, this is Fox River Mall wall to wall people hardly move.
Wow.
And, you know, people were carrying bags.
They were eating in the food court.
So people are spending money.
And then yesterday I went to West Bend from Ableton.
I left at one.
It was bumper to bumper all the way down there.
I came back home around six.
It was bumper to bumper still coming back from south to north.
And the traffic was fairly heavy from south going north.
So I don't know where people are saying they don't, you know, things are getting tight and people don't have the money to spend because they're still moving around.
And then AAA said this is supposed to be one of the heaviest traveled Thanksgiving.
weekends and a long time.
So either people are maxing out their credit cards or really things aren't as bad as everybody's saying they are.
Well, I think what you said about credit cards is a big part of it, Cindy.
I really do.
Because if you look at some economic reports, people are putting everything on cards.
Lots of things on cards.
And just
delaying.
That I mean, I guess that's good.
I don't want to see the economy the economy fail I don't want things to be bad for people
But if people to be neck deep in credit card debt to do so that's also that's also a problem to them.
Well, it is
and I've seen reports that Mortgage defaults are up and car loan defaults are up That's not good.
No, that's not good.
This could be good from Reuters
Doge doesn't exist
yeah
with eight months left on its charter Doge is no more the Department of Government Efficiency has been disbanded with eight months left of its mandate The initiative launched with large fanfare as part of Trump's pledge to cut the size of the government Critics say it didn't deliver any measurable savings
Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Cooper told Reuters earlier this month the measurable savings don't exist.
No, no and and I I looked up an article on this and one of the and when I came to CNN article they did They basically also said we won't really be able to
quantify what Doge has accomplished.
It says, we probably can't, according to Nat Mulkas, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise in the suit, who tried to keep track of Doge's accounting for its cuts.
Because even though they said all this transparency, there was no transparency.
None greater than this.
They cannot track what Doge has done.
And depending on who you speak with, and I hate speaking in such broad terms, it's anywhere from a few billion to hundreds of billions of dollars that have been wasted in cutting, firing, rehiring, training, all of those things.
There is no, as it said, quantifiable savings.
This was Elon Musk.
being the shadow president for a few months before he tried to mess with Wisconsin's elections.
Well, and Elon was very efficient and Doge was very efficient in getting rid of regulations affecting crypto.
Yeah.
And things I had to do with his contracts and he made money
and his and Tesla's and safety reporting and all of those things.
Yeah.
Elon did a lot of good work for himself under Doge.
The rest of us.
Not so much.
As you said, they fired thousands of people.
And then oopsie doodles.
A week later discovered, oh, Frank has all the passwords.
We need him back.
And in June, we talked about this as well.
A former Doge employee came forward, Salih Lavigne.
He was a tech idealist who joined with the idea that
we're going to create change.
Like, it's sort of that thing of like, we're going to do great for the country.
And then he came to find out not only that was the work that Doge was doing, not great, but also, and I hate to tell folks this, well, I don't hate to because it's actually kind of true.
The government actually works more efficiently than we think we've been told for decades that it's terrible, it's slow, bureaucracy, red tape, blah, blah, blah.
But really, when it comes down to it, all of these
All of these safeguards are in place.
All this bureaucracy is in place.
So things move slower.
So things like happening now where executive orders and law, all these things that you ram through can't happen this quickly.
And that's why the government had so many safeguards in place.
What that employee found out is that government's actually pretty efficient.
And we have now wasted billions, if not tens, if not hundreds,
on this doge experiment, which I knew was going to go away when, when Wisconsin voted for Susan Crawford and they told Elon Musk, your money's no good here.
He disappeared into the ether and we've barely heard from him in the past what six months.
Oh, he's still
there.
You know, he's still, he's still, he's still around, but I don't think he's in the, he's not in the White House anymore.
He's not hanging out there.
You don't see pictures of him.
He is gone.
But luckily, he's still making all that money off of
our taxes.
We could increase Elon's taxes, I would think, by 30%.
And he'd still be really, really, really, really, really, really disgustingly rich.
Well,
Doge, we hardly knew you.
Yeah, don't worry, though.
A bunch of the Doge staffers.
have taken on other jobs in the administration because they were so efficient when they were with Doors.
Let's make them permanent parts.
Yeah, that's so good.
We have news coming up next.
And then when we return, we're going to talk to Wisconsin's poet laureate to learn all about what that means.
I'm very excited.
Stay close.
You are listening to Matt Nair on Air.
This is the Civic Media Radio Network.
We'll be right back.
welcome to Matt Nair on air.
Jane Matt Nair, Greg Box.
We'll be on the board coming to you from our studio at Radio Park in Racine.
You can always 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.
Our next guest is the current and 11th Wisconsin's poet Laureate, also an award-winning poet with numerous books with
We are delighted to be joined by Brenda Cardenas, Wisconsin's poet laureate.
Good morning, Brenda.
Did I say your
last
name correctly?
Was I close?
You said it.
You said it beautifully.
You were right on
the money.
She hit that accent today right there.
Now I'm leaving.
I'm
done for the
day.
Yeah, yeah.
I often get mail for gardenias, so it was very
nice to have to
be a flower today.
Thank you so much for joining us, Brenda, for people who don't know.
were named Wisconsin's poet laureate in January.
So what does that mean?
What what are your duties as Wisconsin's poet laureate?
Well, it's much more of an activist role than a passive role, right?
We are to be the ambassador for poetry in our state.
And that means traveling all around the state and doing various kinds of events, poetry readings, poetry workshops, talks, mixes of talks and readings, whatever it is that the institution asks.
for.
So I'm often presenting at libraries, community organizations, art centers and museums and galleries, many different, you know, you never know what it's going to be.
I guess I'll even be, I'm going to be writing a poem for the Martin Luther King Junior Day celebration at the Capitol.
the
capital
that I'll be delivered.
So it's all kinds of different activities.
Plus the poet laureate also, when you apply, you propose a project, a special project in addition to all those visits.
And then the you also work on the
project.
Well, tell us about that project.
I'd love to know because I honestly, I do not
I will be the first to admit, I do not know what goes into the process of picking a poet laureate.
I did not know there was an application process until we got our research.
But as part of that application, you said, what is this project about?
Well, the poet chooses whatever kind of project they want to pitch.
And I have long been a lover and admirer of the visual arts.
And so I write a lot of poems myself that are inspired by works of visual art.
And they call that ecfrastic poetry.
It's just a fancy Greek word for what it is, really, which is poetry inspired
by
art.
Yeah, inspired.
So I had a website built, divided the state into seven different regions, and it's going to work like a relay, or like the old game of telephone, if you remember that from childhood.
I
do.
So in each region, poets, you go onto the website, you sign up to be
you know, to be a participant and your register is a better word for it.
And then you can post, if you're one of the first 10 in your region, you can post a poem that you wrote that was inspired by any work of visual art in the world.
You post that poem, then 10 visual artists in the region will look through those poems, find one,
for that's inspiring to them.
They create a piece of visual art.
They photograph it and they put that up on the website.
Then more poets in that region who weren't the first 10 choose a piece of that visual art that was just posted.
They write a poem.
They post it.
More visual artists come,
right?
And
those.
Relays will go on for as long as there are participants in each region.
I imagine some of them in more populous regions will be longer,
of
course, right?
But my hope is just to see, you know, this go back and forth at least, you know, four or five times in some regions and longer in other regions.
That
is really
cool.
Thank you.
It'll all be archived on that site too.
So all the work will be archived there so people will be able to look at all of
it.
I am.
Wow, I didn't.
That's amazing.
That is absolutely amazing.
If you're just joining us on Matt and Aaron air where you're we are speaking to Wisconsin's 11th poet laureate Brenda Cardenas here and we are talking about
what it takes to be the poet laureate, what the job is, which is actually, I mean, I think if you would ask me a week ago, I would have said like, well, you probably sit in a room and write a lot of poetry and then they, but you actually go and you travel and you talk and you teach and you inspire and engage.
And that's also amazing.
And looking at an interview that you did with Notre Dame, I saw that, you know, you come from a family of artists.
This is not, you didn't just pick up a pen one day and say, I'm going to write poetry.
You were inspired by the art of your family.
Well, to a degree, I mean, they would have never called themselves artists, right?
I came from a very working class family.
They were truck drivers, they were factory workers, they were, you know, even tannery workers, right?
But one of my uncles, when he was serving in the Korean War, learned he had art talent.
So they put him in a position of creating commercial art.
And so he got trained in the army to become a commercial artist.
And
then he stayed that for the rest of his working life.
And he could also, on his own time, he would paint, but not commercially, right?
And my father could draw.
He never called himself an artist.
He never did anything with it.
But you would ask him to reproduce, like, you know, on a teenager, an album cover, right?
Oh, dad,
will you draw me a cat, Steve?
And he could do it, right?
And then I had, they were more like artisans.
So I had a cousin who wrote rodeo.
and broke every bone in his body riding rodeo.
But he also made all of the chaps in the saddles
and did all of that
fine leather tooling, that beautiful leather tooling.
Another cousin who's a fine furniture maker.
And my brother is also, what is still, he's still working a commercial artist.
So it ran in the family, although only my brother and my uncle would have said,
I'm an artist
that they were artists.
It's just
something
I do.
They probably just I just doodle.
That's that's my thing.
Yeah, right.
I do to my spare time.
Yeah, I completely get that.
And I think that's I think hearing that, though, it can be inspiring to some to say, you know.
you might have a full time job and that job may be one of the working class blue collar.
That's where my personal income, my dad was a truck driver.
But if you have those talents, you should still, especially I feel like today in today's day and age, we saw people in COVID exploring their talents and interests and art and really coming out of their shell and saying, I want to express myself.
And it doesn't mean you have to try to make money or become recognized.
It just means you are expressing yourself, which I think is important.
for what you are doing, Brenda, going across the state
inspiring people.
Exactly.
I would imagine that you talk to a lot of kids.
And I can remember Brenda being in fifth grade and writing these really tortured fifth grade girl poems.
And I wish I still had them.
Me too.
I would love to read
them back.
I do think that there is something that teens are able to express through poetry that they might not be able to do in other ways.
Yes, exactly.
And sometimes they're more talented than any you would ever imagine.
Because, well, I mean, teenagers are...
by the time they're teenagers, they start to edit themselves a little bit.
But when they're younger,
they
are not editing themselves and they speak lines of poetry all the time, right?
But teenagers also are going through so much, you know, they're going through whatever generation of teenagers has gone through that change, right?
And your physical body,
everything else.
Like you, oh yeah, falling in love and getting hurt and all of that, right?
And they need to express that.
Um, and then they're also living in a very trying time in world right now.
Um, if you think about things like just like, um, uh, you know, they went through COVID, right?
Um, and, and if you think about things like the state of the earth, right, they're living in the Anthropocene, right?
So it's, I think, um, maybe even more important than ever that they have some outlet.
of create for creative expression and you know when I was working I worked I was a teacher and professor my whole life and taught for 35 years and I taught everything from seventh grade to doctoral students yeah so I kind of like I know how to switch the gears just sort of bring this
message or bring like a little writing workshop to all different ages and all different skill levels and, you know, and that is really important.
I want to say that about the project too, is that everybody's invited.
You don't have to think of yourself as a professional poet or artist.
You don't have to have exhibited.
You don't have to have books, anything published.
You know, you can call yourself a beginner, right?
You can, you can be exploring this very, you know,
For the first time
sure
and you're still welcome everybody's welcome all ages.
That's fabulous It really is Brenda Cardenas is our guest.
She is Wisconsin's 11th poet laureate and we are talking about what that means and what the project that she has going which is a really cool kind of circular inspirational project where poets write about
visual works that inspired them, which will then inspire other visual works, which other poets will write about.
I just think the thing is so cool.
And I
will put that project onto our show notes so people can see that or take part, take part, read about it, tell friends.
But yeah, it'd be great to that will be in the show notes for today.
Brenda, what do you tell people who might say, I don't get it.
I'm not smart enough.
I read poems and I and I'm and I don't get it.
So poetry isn't for me.
Well, you know, I think what I would do with people like that is I would start with a poem that's accessible, right?
Because there's some poetry that's much more accessible than other poetry.
There are poems that tell stories.
We call them narrative poems.
And I would start with something accessible and maybe something narrative.
So they can see that a poem can tell a story too, just like a story.
It's like a short story or a novel can.
We're just using fewer words to do that.
So, you know, your mind has to fill in the gaps.
But the other thing I would tell them, and I always told my students, is that, you know, there's not one interpretation of a poem.
It's not that there's this one, you know.
This
is what it
means.
I mean, and I think sometimes we're miseducated to believe that and not at all that there are many different interpretations.
Sometimes I've written poems that other people have analyzed or interpreted and they've found things in the poem that I never even realized I was doing.
Right.
And that's thrilling for me.
It doesn't offend me.
It actually excites me.
Right.
So, um, so yeah, there, you know, you bring your, you bring your whole life, your whole existence, all your experiences to something when you read it.
And that becomes part of how you interpret it.
And that's okay.
Well, you, you, you equated it to art.
Yeah.
There are people out there who just feel, I'm not, I'm not equipped trained.
smart enough, which I don't, you know, I don't like saying that out loud, but like, it feels like you're not part of the club, but you have to expose yourself to something that's, I don't want to say simple, but something that is.
identifiable and work your way from there.
And that's just how you do it.
And there's no wrong.
There's no wrong.
Yeah, exactly.
There's no wrong.
Brenda Cardenas is Wisconsin's 11th poet laureate.
We will include links to her project where you can get involved.
Don't be don't be afraid of poetry.
Don't be afraid.
Brenda, thank you so very much for your time.
It's really been a pleasure.
Oh, thank you.
I really enjoyed being here.
It was great.
Thank you so much.
Stay with us.
Take care.
You as well.
When we return.
Bye-bye.
Yeah.
She's gone.
All the details coming up.
Stay close.
You're listening to Matt Nair on air on the Civic Media radio network.
You're listening to Civic Media.
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Good morning and welcome back to Matt and Air on Air.
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We're not going to spend a lot of time on this, but this broke on Friday.
A lot of things break on Friday after we're off the air.
Marjorie Taylor Green has announced she will retire from Congress in 42 days.
Someone on Twitter said, yeah, she's not retiring.
She's quitting.
Essentially, she is quitting.
Yep, she announced this in a manifesto on Friday night saying how essentially President Trump has turned on her.
He's called her now a traitor because she wants the Epstein files released.
Yeah, it is.
It was the Epstein files.
She was speaking out against Israel.
She was really.
Now, let's.
Before we give her too much credit, let's give her, she's not exactly like running over to the left, putting on a blue jacket and saying AOC for life.
She is still very much in the roots of her Republican.
And I think the, I guess early mega days, I don't know what that means, but the other thing too that someone pointed out, and I found this on the national taxpayer union foundation is that her leaving Congress, even though it's during the middle of her term, she's still going to get her pension.
Yes,
but it's
not as generous as people might think.
She's still getting a pension.
She is still getting a pension.
She's retiring.
I'm sorry, she's quitting on January 5th.
This is a couple of days after her five-year anniversary in Congress.
So in order for anyone, this is from Mo Davis on Twitter, US Air Force retired.
In order for anyone on the federal government payroll,
To qualify for a pension, you have to serve at least five years.
She was sworn in January 3rd, 2021.
On January 5th, 2026, she will pass that five-year threshold.
She will earn 1% of her salary for each year of service.
So 5% of 174,000 is $8,700 a year.
She's 51, she will have to wait 11 years until she turns 62 to start collecting her retired pay.
So again, it's still more than a lot of us will get but
it's
it's not like she's gonna be set up for life And she's gonna end up on the network where her boyfriend is is that news max?
I think so.
Yeah, she's gonna she'll be fine She'll be writing books.
She'll be doing she'll be on the the lecturing circuit lecturing about what I have no
idea what this might do though
From other articles I'm seeing in the last couple of days that other resignations from House members could be coming.
They are not happy with Mike Johnson.
No, but the problem I have is that these individuals who might be running in place might just be even more like...
It's even more mega like it's there is no that's true.
There is absolutely no no moderates anymore No, I mean we are living in a world where MTG can be considered a mild moderate What are we have what is happening in this world right now?
Seriously, but yeah, I mean it's I don't
per se, unless Georgia does a lot of work to in a special election to get someone in there for next year.
But I don't know if that's possible and I don't know who will replace them.
One senior House Republican reported in Ross story says the entire White House team is treated all members like garbage, all.
And Mike Johnson has let it happen because he wanted it to happen.
The arrogance of the White House team is off putting the members who are run rough shot and threatened.
They don't even allow House members little wins.
like announcing small grants, not even the high profile members, they say they're more upset than ever.
Members know they are going into the minority after the midterms.
Well, we'll see.
That's not a lot.
When it's a game for them to just lose, the Democrats can come in on wild style on that one.
But also, it's really what's happening is you're seeing that this movement is getting in the way of one of the biggest
One of the biggest things that draw people to these jobs is power and ego.
And when your power and ego are suffocated, they don't want to be
there.
Somebody even said, this is the worst job I've ever had.
I hate this job.
Time to leave.
We have news coming up next.
And then when we return, we are talking crypto.
So excited to talk to Zeke Fox.
That is all on the way.
Stay with us.
You're listening to Matt Nair on air on the Civic Media Radio Network.
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