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You're listening to Mornings with Pat Craiglow powered by Up North News.
Now, for my Lake Minnesota studio, here is the founding editor of Up North News, Pat Craiglow.
Hey, good morning.
It's 8.06 now.
Nice to have you here on this Tuesday morning, June 3rd.
Parker Olson is in Madison Studio A2 and Chad Holmes joins us now from 98.9 WXCO.
I only learned the other day what what A2 is and that the the studio and Racine, I don't even have it now.
This studio Racine is like C N2.
Yeah, is where there's one there.
What's your letter?
What's the Wausau letter for stations?
What studio are you
from?
That's a project I'll have to go on because I think we need more people here because since it's me and Ian across the way, we kind of know where we are.
So we don't have labels that we need to do anything that you guys have the bustling the studios.
I don't see now.
Again, he's got a one in Madison a to the one in Racina's n. And I said, Well, what's the Lake Wasota studio?
And they're like, you don't get one.
I don't get a I don't get a letter or a designation.
I
I'm an island out here on Lake Wissota.
I
tell you, it was funny, both on Saturday and then yesterday I had trips, on Saturday I took a little fun little trip to the Twin Cities area and then yesterday at a ball game and I had to go past, you know, the signs for Lake Wissoda and there was this one on one, I think it was on my way back both times, there must be some construction going on and one of the roads is says Lake Wissoda and then right under it says closed.
First thought is right low is making it a closed community.
It's
it's those Trump budget cuts.
We
have to
close the lake, you know We just we can't have we can't have nice things right now folks listening for the updated forecast meteorologist Brittany Merlot is out today Hopefully have her back tomorrow But it's not tough to see what we're gonna be facing throughout a big chunk of Wisconsin today as a cold front comes through with some showers thunderstorms They might be strong to severe later on and the other weird thing Chad is that you're thinking oh the rain's gonna come through and we won't have any of
that Canadian wildfire smoke.
No, that front is actually just ushering in more of it.
It's, it's helping it into the state.
And so I literally just saw a national weather service update that said today, smoky rain.
I don't, that's a first for me.
Well, apparently, at least there's one National Weather Service operator that has full-time meteorologists on and Eli.
I did just see a headline someplace that said that
they're hiring some new ones.
They're hiring some folks.
And I had the story earlier from the Journal Sentinel about how a popular librarian for the Bad River Public Tribal Library has been reinstated, again, through court order, of course.
And so it really does set up.
What I think a lot of us saw coming early on is that Trump was gonna try to make a bunch of these cuts Obviously, he can't legally so courts would say no that would be breaking the law You can't do that and so he can now go back to his mega constituency and say hey, you know I tried I tried but the the the deep state wouldn't let me know the law Wouldn't let you you can do you can do all kinds of things as a president
You just have to follow the law to do it.
I don't think that's asking too much.
Well, also, it helps if you have some competency around you.
Oh,
yeah.
I
mean, I think so much of it has to do with, hey, if you have a game plan to, again, the idea that you go around trying to look into areas that could perhaps be a little bit more tight.
I'm not saying that that's not possible, but you put a bunch of incompetence.
Into these positions.
This is what happens It's then and then all of a sudden you come out with this grandiose You know statements and about how much you're gonna be saving and then you don't find it then all of a sudden the lies start coming and it just It's a vicious circle and I think number one the the incompetence was was a major factor in all this and number two again Don't come out and make well.
We're gonna find this number Hey, you're gonna find it.
Whatever you find and I think sometimes you put yourself into a corner
and it just makes things worse than if you were to say, hey, I'm gonna go in there and see what's going on.
And hopefully we'll be able to find some significant savings and the like.
But when you come in and say, hey, there's all this waste, fraud, and abuse, and there's all this area that we're gonna find.
Well, number one, you're not gonna, when you don't find it, it makes you look bad.
And number two, where's all the prosecutions for this waste, fraud, and abuse?
Again, it's just- It's funny that
you say that.
That's exactly what I said yesterday.
And then we posted that, and I was calling out.
Congressman Derek Van Orden for saying there's waste fraud and abuse.
And yet like, okay, show us where it is.
And so he went into the civic media, you know, social media site, I don't remember if it was Facebook or something else.
And he has no time,
but nothing but time on his hands.
And he put something in there like kick rocks, you lying sack or something like that.
That's not a response.
The response is you're saying that there is fraud.
Okay, waste, fraud and abuse.
Set aside waste because it's in the eye of the beholder.
What somebody thinks is waste, somebody else doesn't.
But fraud is the big thing.
If somebody is actually defrauding us, the taxpayers, and we say prove it, the congressman's response shouldn't be kick rocks, you lying sack.
It should be, yep, here it is.
And the fact of the matter is, here it ain't.
And you can't point to say,
one or two relatively small things and say, you see where there's this?
There must be a hundred others.
Not necessarily.
Show us.
That's not too much to ask, Chad.
Don't go on it with Derek Van Orton.
Can we get a little bit of class once in a while?
Oh, no,
no, no.
I was looking at his post and language alert here, folks.
I'm not going to say bad words, but I'm a tiptoe up to the line.
To one particular post,
This is the post, the response from a member of Congress, from Derek Van Orden.
His response to a particular post, and this is it literally, is, F no, kick rocks, you worthless backstabbing jackass.
That is an actual post from a member of Congress from the great state of Wisconsin.
And that is not atypical of Derek Van Orden's social media presence.
Somebody needs to wrestle.
the password out of his hands?
Well, I mean, frankly, it comes down to again, at the top of their party, you have a man who does exactly the same thing.
I mean, it starts right there at the top with the president of the United States and you go to Derek Van Orden and others.
What happened to the old, I guess I'm old enough.
I'm sure you're old enough to remember when Republicans would talk about how they were the party of adults, that they were all these hippies over on the left.
And I mean, now they just act like spoiled children all the time.
And I talk about a lot about the power of the battle of ideas.
I have no issue if somebody has conservative points of view, whether it's on economics or even social issues.
We have the argument in a way where you have a battle of ideas.
Nowadays, it's just, you know, with Van Orden and Trump and others, it's about, like you said, it was a great example.
You pointed out a flaw in what they were saying and doing over the last four plus months.
And instead of responding and saying, hey, I have a response that would
maybe answer your questions, instead it's an insult.
It's insult and
I mean it drags us into the into the swamp of these kind of arguments because as much as we try sometimes you'll come back and and and I try not to do that myself but it's very difficult to have a conversation about important issues and that's an important issue when when that's how do you respond to that it's ridiculous
you can't really oh
and then it's like you're arguing against yourself because this
guy is just, you know, I could use a term like box or rocks, but that would be into his
again.
I just want to hear the ideas and I'm not all I all I see out of him are either insults or photo ops.
And he's really, he's really good at the photo ops because the I'm sorry, TV stations, newspaper station, or newspapers in the third congressional district.
Please hear me again.
He's a master of the photo op.
I saw last week again, you know, Congressman Van Orden tours this, Congressman Van Orden tours that.
And the few times that he's ever asked a tough question on these tours, he then belittles the reporter and does not answer the question to which I would say to the TV stations and others, don't put the story up then.
Don't just do the field trip.
Oh, the Congressman went on a field trip.
If there's no substance involved.
Then all you're doing, you're his press person at that point.
Don't be his publicist.
That's all I ask of the newspapers and the TV stations in and around the third district.
Unfortunately, again, it's real quickly, it's a trickle down from what we see nationally as well.
Yes, it is.
The guy says that's a nasty question.
I mean, come
on.
Just answer the question then.
You mentioned being on the road, you were in Menominee last night for a Wausau West playoff baseball.
How did that go?
How are things looking for
sports?
It was fun.
And I just, you know, and we talk about these things that get you all riled up and stuff.
And it was such a fun experience because it was like different because I'm in the booth.
I'm sitting right to the right of the PA announcer who happened to be a student at Menominee, who also happened to be along with her twin brother was hanging out there, siblings of the pitcher for Menominee.
And this picture for Menominee had a perfect game going through six innings and a no-hitter with one out to go in the seventh.
And of course, high school games are seven innings.
Oh, my.
And I'm throwing everything at the wall because there's the old adage where you're not supposed to be talking about the perfect games and the no-hitters.
And I'm talking about it all the time, and she's getting a little upset with me because she's saying, you're trying to jinx my brother.
I said, darn right, I've been trying to jinx your brother for five years.
It's not working.
And then with two outs in the seventh inning, it was two, nothing.
Menominee West got back to back hits and scored two runs in the inning ends.
And I turned around and I said, I said, I feel really bad now.
You should.
But it was such, but it was really cool to see a young person like that who was, I mean, she had, she was so, I mean, so often you get around these people that kind of bring you down.
This girl had so much energy and so much passion and.
positivity it just rubbed off I think on everybody around there and it's like sometimes you think about
And I was thinking about this on the drive home and we transferring it to somebody like Donald Trump and Derek Van Orden and Ron Johnson likes We could have leaders that bring the positive energy to our discussions We could and unfortunately now there's it's it's all based and again There's gonna be times when we have discussions that bring in negative aspects It's just the way it is.
So even if you're a positive person, but we start now with the negative we start there
with all these discussions and it just felt really good to be around this positivity in this environment and I'm trying to put together in some way to be able to to bring some of that to other aspects of life because
I don't know how guys like Van Orden and Johnson and the like can look at themselves in the mirror where Ron Johnson's, you know, big projects these days is to try to investigate a guy that may have terminal cancer.
I don't get that.
I don't understand how as a human being, that's your first thought.
I can make political points on a guy who's got terminal cancer.
I don't get that.
I don't understand that.
And I think we need to have a whole different perspective on how we have these battle of ideas where
Actually bring the ideas back instead of the political points.
Yeah, but you again you're dealing with somebody who said I I don't know of any poor person that created a job Said Ron Johnson last
week.
So all
right, let's end on
there goes my positivity.
Let's let's end on a positive note The Brewers winning streak is up to eight games after beating the Reds yesterday coming from behind Christian Yelich with another home run
Christian Yellich, he's back, no pun intended, or it's just a matter of time.
Come on, and I'm not, I'm not putting you on the spot, I'm just saying, these are the things that, you know, we worry about as fans, like, okay, we're doing great, no injuries, no injuries, because the pitching staff is finally, finally, but will it last?
Well, I mean, I think for whatever reason, they just have the secret recipe.
When it comes to maximizing everything they have, whether it's pitching, whether it is their everyday lineup, whether it's what Pat Murphy does with them, what Arnold does in the front office, it just feels like they're able to maximize.
They are.
Chad Holmes, thank you so much.
989 WXCO, we'll talk to you Thursday morning.
Sounds good.
Dan Schaefer still on the way.
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I wanted to share an article in this segment in The Bull Work, which is a conservative subscription news service that was started by, I guess, what are they called?
Never Trump Republicans, Charlie Sykes, and folks like that.
and a column from Jonathan Cohn.
The headline is, they are, in fact, coming after Obamacare again.
And it reads, eight years after trying and failing to repeal Obamacare, Donald Trump and Republicans are taking another shot this time.
Their plans are less ambitious and their work has garnered less attention, but if successful, the efforts could still have devastating effects.
that's buried in the quote unquote big beautiful bill that the House sent over to the Senate for consideration.
There's been a lot of focus, of course, on all the cuts to Medicaid and more, but the legislation would also take a few hundred billion dollars out of the Affordable Care Act and up to four million people could end up newly uninsured.
In much the same way that all of this talk about a changing climate and the Trump administration is rolling back all these environmental rules as if we have somehow forgotten smog and all of the other parts of pollution from 50 years ago.
Similarly, it seems like we have a national case of amnesia among many Americans as to the crisis that was facing health care before the Affordable Care Act when it was so easy for people to be denied health insurance coverage.
The ACA changed that.
It's not a perfect bill, but Republicans would never work with Democrats to try to make it better.
Instead, they've tried to scrap it entirely.
So returning to the column here from Jonathan Coney says the big beautiful bill does things like rewrite the rules for
passive enrollment and provisional eligibility and alter the allowable variation for calculating actuarial value That's just all kinds of jargon for death by a thousand paper cuts or death by a thousand literal cuts cutting people off from their health insurance because Well, here's one example right now
when you have a very big life event that happens, a divorce, the death of a spouse, other kinds of life-altering events.
It allows people who might be newly uninsured to get insurance, even if you're outside the normal open enrollment period.
When that happens, the marketplace will attempt to verify income, citizenship status, and other things, and if it all checks out, you can continue to get affordable insurance.
Essentially, there's a 90 day grace period during these times, but the Republican bill would effectively end the grace period.
So anybody whose data didn't match up immediately would have to pay the full premium until they work through all the discrepancies.
So imagine, I mean, that day, a spouse dies, or you get a spouse, you get married and you change your name, or you lose your job.
And somehow,
Republican politicians believe that day you need to notify all the right people and all the right government offices and it'll all be processed same day.
Otherwise, with no grace period, you become uninsured or you no longer have eligibility for premium credits that keep your health insurance affordable.
That's just one of the provisions.
There's also the shortening of the annual open enrollment period from two and a half months currently down to one and a half months.
and another provision that would end automatic re-enrollment at the end of the year and require people to re-establish their eligibility for coverage for financial assistance.
The column quotes Kristen Link Young, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution who says, this doesn't happen anywhere else in the healthcare system.
Everybody else has automatic re-enrollment for their insurance and yet here they're adding this mandatory annual process and a bunch of additional paperwork that's going to snare other people.
And of course they know what's going to happen.
What happens then is that people throw up their hands and they walk away and they no longer have affordable insurance coverage.
And what do the Tom Tiffany's and the Derrick Van Ordens, uh, another say about that?
Well, we didn't cut their coverage.
They chose not to reenroll.
They chose not to adhere to the requirements.
It's not our fault that we made the requirements nearly impossible to go along with.
It's the same stuff that we said last week about work requirements for Medicaid.
And that by, again, tightening those restrictions, making the barriers higher.
They're able to say well, we didn't cut the benefits These are folks that just couldn't prove that they deserve the benefits and that's some of the waste fraud and abuse that we're rooting out Like getting rid of the automatic re-enrollment Do you know how many things we have automatic re-enrollment for how many?
Newspaper subscriptions and credit card offers and and all kinds of things that we don't need anymore Maybe the Republicans could take a page from the Biden administration
and look out for consumers and try to cancel some of those automatic re-enrollments.
Before they go canceling automatic re-enrollment, that's going to kick millions of Americans off of their affordable health insurance coverage.
Dan Schaefer joins us right after this.
You're up North.
I'm Pat Critello and this is the Civic Media Radio Network.
Not that anybody's counting, but the recombobulation area is a now 19-time Milwaukee Press Club award-winning opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Schaefer, who is also the Civic Media Political Editor and who also now joins us, complete with Callahan Auto Parts' t-shirt from watching Tommy Boy.
There you go, representing well.
Mr. Schaefer, how are you?
I'm doing well, Mr. Krajlo.
Always wonderful to join you here on The Morning Show.
Oh, yes, joining here on the morning.
I thought you were talking about joining the club, the Derek Van Orden insult club.
I am
pleased to be a member now.
I did want you to welcome you to this exclusive club that we are both now members of.
of people who Derek van Orden has told to kick rocks on the
internet.
He loves that phrase, kick rocks.
That is a favorite of his, but when he told me to kick rocks last year when he was disagreeing with some of my columns about why we should stop having ridiculous constitutional amendments on the ballot every two seconds, he told me to kick rocks.
And you know what I did with that?
I had a special sale at the Reconpopulation Area.
You could go to the Reconpopulation Area.
com slash kick rocks and get 30% off a subscription and a few dozen people joined up.
So thank you Derek van Orden for for making me some money last year.
Let's see now
that's
that's the way that it's supposed to work.
And look from from a I don't even know that we can do this I was gonna say from a serious journalist standpoint from two political reporters talking about this.
Sure.
But it should still be a serious topic.
that a member of Congress who posts 45 social media posts within a 24-hour period riddled with insults and attempts to dox people like he tried to dox a UW-Stevens Point instructor yesterday, we still should not try to normalize this no matter who's in the White House.
It is a remarkably unhinged social media presence that Wisconsin's member of Congress from the Third District has.
You know, it's insults all the time.
It's conspiracy theories all the time.
And you know what?
He is not exactly an accomplished legislator.
No
end of the day either.
He is someone that has not really.
He was posting on Twitter the other day and I took note of this and he said, oh, we have work horses and we have show ponies.
There was an article in the Bull Work from a few weeks ago from Bill Leaders who wrote that talked about how unaccomplished Van Orden is as a legislator.
I'll quote here directly, of the 32 bills and resolutions Van Orden sponsored in the 118th Congress from 2023 to 24, exactly none became law.
and just three bills passed the GOP-controlled House before dying in the Senate, and a single Van Orden resolution received agreement in the House, it encourages all Americans to quote, engage with veterans.
That is the one thing that he is able to pass in Congress.
Maybe a little bit less time, a little bit less tweeting.
I guess I know I'm one to talk, but maybe a little bit less time tweeting and a little bit more time legislating.
You're not a member of Congress, although I would like to thank Alicia here, a Navy vet from telling us on YouTube, kick rocks is actually a common phrase used by Navy chiefs.
It actually goes kick rocks in flip flops cool breeze.
Now you know.
Now I know.
Now I know where he gets it from.
So as we talk about some of the stories that you're following, and we're going to start in your corner of the state.
Oh, wait a minute.
I have to bring up Tony's comment quick.
Wait, he hasn't finished the Farm Bill?
No.
No, Derek Van Norden has not finished the Farm Bill.
There's there's there is no Farm Bill at this point.
Too busy lying about Medicaid.
Yes.
So let's get to stories there.
And today is allegedly the deadline for a Milwaukee area mom.
and teacher's aide who has a law-abiding record to self-deport and I'm not quite sure how this woman came to the attention of immigration and customs enforcement.
but it sure does seem to be another case of, you know, we and the Trump administration are gonna send away anybody we like, even if they have twin nine-year-old daughters who are US citizens, even though we said we were just going after the criminals and terrorists, this case doesn't help their case at all.
Now, this is a frustrating story.
This has gotten a bit of attention here in the Milwaukee area where you have this teacher's aid, and apologies if I butcher the pronunciation.
Yesenia Ruano, Milwaukee's teacher's aide, her case has kind of become this public thing around here with a number of immigration rights advocates, you know, hoping and taking efforts and actions to try and get her to be able to stay in the country.
But it turns out such as not going to be the case and she is going to be have to be deported to her home country of El Salvador And you know, yeah, it's it's there there was I think a kind of some legal issues with that this this spring where For a minute there.
She had some legal representation It looked like it was gonna be able to bank her stay and then And now that is not the case and it is clear that you know, just this as so many other examples of what you know
Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and the rest of the Trump administration here, but their goals are, with this mass deportation effort, it's not a crime-fighting public safety type of initiative.
It's one that is, you know, go back to the refrain from Trump's first term.
The cruelty is the point.
And that's what we're seeing here with this case.
And I would put even stronger language on it that that it is race-based a race-based policy that they're engaged in by and large and that It's it doesn't matter that she has been a pillar of the community has lived here for 14 years has a family, you know daughters who are American citizens that she left El Salvador as a survivor of domestic abuse human trafficking Had a brother who was killed in gang violence and feared for her own safety
in coming to this country.
Now, in all of that, there are, there's nothing that indicates, well, she's a terrorist in waiting, you know, and yet to hear her plight, the comments on social media have been downright ghoulish.
People going, well, she's illegal, you know, what part of your legal don't you understand?
It's like, again, this was supposed to be about getting the undocumented immigrants who
are causing trouble, who may be gang members who have joined gangs here, things like that.
If you supported somebody like that, but now you're cheering when a mother is being deported at this point, somebody who would like to finish the process of becoming a citizen, it is a very sad commentary on where we are for the humanity of this country, my own personal opinion.
Yeah, and this is somebody who's had a work visa.
She works at a bilingual public elementary school in Milwaukee.
These are the type of people that we want to have a path to citizenship.
Right.
And, you know, I had a couple of immigration attorneys on a podcast at the Reconbibulation Area a couple months ago who were telling me just about how difficult it is to just do do things legally.
And that has forced so many people to into this bottleneck where they're applying for asylum, you know, if she's receiving death threats in her home country.
you know, a lot of these post-World War II, you know, never again type of measures that we've taken on the world stage to be welcoming to refugees and fleeing circumstances where they're fearing for their own, where people are fearing for their own lives, that's what that policy is there for.
And you think, you would think that, you know,
could expedite the process for these people.
But such is not the case.
And it is, it is again, yes, it's, it's like what you said, it is, this is not about public safety.
This is not about anything like that.
It is, there are racial tones to this, not undertones, overtones, overtones.
Yes.
Yeah.
And so it is a remarkably, it's
a sad story.
And again, to get to your point about fixing this immigration process, and
streamlining the process.
This country has perhaps, rarely in its history, needed legal immigration encouraged more than now.
With, you know, the baby boomers stepping off the stage, with a labor shortage that is already pronounced, this is a country that if we want our economy to thrive, had better be more welcoming than ever to immigrants.
Yet there was a deal on the table a bipartisan deal on the table and Donald Trump by himself said screw that Scuttle that we wanted to port whatever people that we want and that's how we end up with stories like this one out of Milwaukee, but we also end up with a story a very unusual one that deals with somebody who Apparently if I'm reading this correctly was the victim of a crime
And yet the person that was victimizing him set things up in such a way, allegedly, that it made it look like he was threatening President Trump's life.
And last I can see here, this gentleman, Ramon Morales-Rays, is still sitting in the Dodge County Jail.
This is insane.
It's a wild story.
And I think it is the fact that the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, put this out.
as a press release from the main Department of Homeland Security press room and all of that, saying that there is this suspect believed to be responsible for writing a letter threatening to shoot President Trump and it was all a hoax.
Well, you know what?
I can't help but think that paperwork errors like this are being used to deport people all over the country.
If the Department of Homeland Security is using paperwork errors and things like that to do that, and yet they are making very obvious ones, it seems, in this case by, you know, amplifying it to the national stage.
And less than a week later, finding out that this was entirely a hoax, that there was this other man in prison setting up this person.
It's seemingly a really obvious way that they couldn't pull coals in this.
And it's just, I think to me, the story here is that Department of Homeland Security are deporting people for the same types of problems that they themselves are committing.
Correct.
And doing so, again, despite paperwork errors, using masked secret police, using detention facilities that are off limits, even to members of Congress, Congressman Mark Pocan, Congressman Gwen Moore, tried to visit inmates.
at this Dodge County facility and were told that they could not.
And when they called a phone number that's associated with it for either ICE or another agency, that phone had been disconnected.
And so there was no way for anybody to have oversight and make sure essentially that innocent people aren't behind bars in this country.
And that's where we are at this point.
Again, it's got all of the elements of fascism with the secret police, wearing masks, people in detention that you can't reach, trumped up charges, deporting people out of the country.
I don't know what else people need to know to see where they what kind of country we've become.
Oh wait, I do have one more and it deals with trains of all things.
And the fact that there's a story out there that about how there are companies that would rather work with pretty much any other country other than ours when it comes to high speed rail, because we are so dysfunctional.
This was a story I saw on the Civic Media website.
Yeah, it is it really goes to show how broken our politics is when you when you see these international companies that would you know like to build something and make some money in in the United States and Build a rail service here and finding that not only was it so difficult to do it here was actually easier to build a rail service in northern Africa in Morocco I believe it was it was the rail service in Morocco said they found that northern Africa to be less politically dysfunctional
than the United States of America in the Trump term.
It's wild.
This was from SNCF, which is the French National Railroad, a bullet train operator.
And they pulled out of projects here in the States.
And again, the quote in the news story is, they told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional.
And that's, I mean,
We use the term third world a lot.
Perhaps sometimes not as politically correct as we should, but in terms of undeveloped and undemocratic with a small D nation, that is exactly the kind of thing that we're dealing with here, as Dan Shaffer tells us about from the recombobulation area.
I'm Pat Crightlow.
This is the Civic Media Radio Network.
You're listening to Civic Media.
Find the latest news, information, and archives of all your favorite shows on the Civic Media website, civicmedia.us.
What a great Wednesday lineup we have for you every Wednesday, including Earl Ingram tomorrow.
Melissa Baldoff will be here with our climate check.
Melissa Kay from WFHR in Wisconsin Rapids, Todd Alba stops by, James Kelly from the Civic Media Newsroom here in the Chippewa Valley, another Scotty summer text-to-win keyword, our homeroom segment on public education in Wisconsin, and that's all just for starters.
Tomorrow morning, here on Mornings with Pat Rightlow on the Civic Media Radio Network.
Dan Schaeffer from the Reconpopulation Area joins us again, and we talked earlier about Derek Van Orden being an internet troll.
Thank goodness you can remind us
about the more positive side of trolls in Wisconsin.
The the old school definition of trolls, if you will, there's a photo circulating a view with a rather large troll.
What is that?
That's right.
So not I went to visit a troll last night.
And that doesn't mean paying a visit to Derek Van Orden or paying a visit to anybody else in my Twitter mentions.
But it means that in Wauwatosa of all places, there is a large
Troll sculpture that was just unveiled about a week or two ago at Firefly Grove Park in kind of the west side of Wauwatosa.
And it is this, it is actually very, very cool to see in person.
So it's the, it's this troll made by a Danish artist by named Thomas Dambo who uses recycled materials to make these trolls.
And he has made
156 trolls all over the world, including 40 in the United States.
He's trying to do one in all 50 states, I believe.
And it just so happens that the one he built in the state of Wisconsin is right in my neck of the woods, right next door, one city over in Wauwatosa.
So I went to go check it out with the family last night, took a picture of a large troll and this.
sculpture from an artist.
This is what I did there.
How tall is this troll?
It looks massive.
It is huge.
It's like 40 feet tall.
It's pretty wild.
Seriously.
This is amazing.
And all with recycled material, you say.
All with recycled material.
And he's holding these lampposts.
Yeah.
Like they're a bouquet of flowers.
And then throughout the park, there are these kind of like, you know, it's almost like a Disney-fied type of thing, where it's just like it looks like the troll ripped the lampposts.
off of the edge of the sidewalk or whatever.
So there are these snarled bottom parts of lampposts that coincide with the ones that he's holding.
It's very creative, and it's very cool.
And I would encourage people to take some time to go see it in Mootosa this summer.
It's something else.
You're not going to see anything else like it.
I've seen the pictures and all that going around.
But going and seeing in person and just standing there, and I'm about up to this troll's knee or whatever, it's pretty
wild.
It is.
Wow, that is an impressive picture here.
Also on your social media feed, you point out that you sat down with the soon to be former chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, Ben Wickler, talking about Elon Musk, the spring election, being the chair, and a lot more.
What would folks get out of that?
Were they to click and watch you and Chairman Ben Wickler?
Yeah, that was that we had a great interview a couple weeks ago And you know, I interviewed him the day after he had made an endorsement in the wisdoms chair race like I know regular listeners of mornings with Pat Crite low have gotten here all of the here from all of those candidates running for
for Wisdom's chair and Ben Wickler endorsed Devin Remaker.
He initially said he was going to stay neutral in the race and he decided against it.
So we talked a little bit about that over the course of the conversation, talked a little bit about his run for DNC chair.
So it was a really good big picture.
conversation and so much that has happened and so much that he has been involved with over the past few months and a national scale and a local scale and all of that, everything in between.
And a lot of Elon talked to.
How would you evaluate his answer to the question about endorsing Devin Remaker?
Obviously, the William Garcia and Joseph Pecky were, I would say, caught off guard by that when Wickler said he was not going to endorse.
Now, Joseph Pecky has since said he sees that endorsement as a sign of his Joseph Pecky strength that Ben Wickler felt the need to get involved.
What was your own impression of how Ben Wickler addressed that issue?
Yeah, he's I mean he he really just said that he changed his mind and he kind of wanted to just be on the record And he's like it's an election.
We all have our say and this is what I wanted to say So he didn't want to let the moment pass without saying what what he really thought about you know the next steps For the party and but I think you're right.
I think there are it's it's not just mr. Zipaki and mr. Garcia who were a little bit irked by that surprise Endorsement from Ben Wickler.
I've heard from a number of folks that were you know, even people who were
very big fans of Ben Wickler, supporters of his, allies of his.
They weren't exactly thrilled by Wickler putting his thumb on the scale on this
one.
And again, I cast Noa's versions on any of these.
All three are great candidates, so I don't want anybody to take this the wrong way.
But I know from experience, perhaps the biggest cuss word in internal Democratic Party business is the A word, anointed.
And if anybody comes off as being the anointed one for any position because I was tagged with that for running, you know, after Dave Obi endorsed me and I've seen it in so many other races that, you know, it helps you in some ways.
It hurts you in some ways with some people as well.
So it's, it's far from a slam dunk.
Oh, you see what I did there?
Slam dunk.
We're going to move to basketball here.
I was talking to radio professional here.
No, he's old that way.
Uh, we were talking to Christina Laurie earlier about how, uh, some Wisconsin athletes play for some other teams, uh, not within our borders and we, we tried to follow them.
But for some folks, that's a little tougher with, uh, Tyrese Halliburton and the Indiana Pacers because here's this Oshkosh kid done good, but.
But he's also kind of made put on the black cowboy hat.
He's kind of being the bad boy this time around.
Yeah, he knocked the bucks out two years in a row.
So we don't love that.
And he's also just kind of a little he's been a little bit of an irritating personality at times in the NBA playoffs.
He's a big talker.
He has a lot to say.
But I, you know, it's pretty wild that a guy from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, home to my alma mater of UW Oshkosh is has led his team to the NBA finals.
Like we've had a lot of great players in the NBA come from Wisconsin, Nick Van Exel, Koran Butler.
you know, Latrol Sprewell go through the list, but I think Tyrese Halburton.
might end up on the top of that list and like the all time Wisconsin native NBA players, which is, uh, which is pretty wild.
And I think it's going to, it's going to take a bit for some folks to stomach.
I think,
uh, uh, yeah.
And Tony, a little irritating.
That's an understatement.
We will leave it at there.
And I won't ask you the brewer's magic number, but we're getting closer to when we have to ask about that.
Dan Schaefer from the recombobulation area.
Thank you so much.
Thanks to all of you for being with us as well.
I'm Pat Crite low from up North news every wonderful Tuesday.
We'll see you at six AM tomorrow.
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