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You're listening to Mornings with Pat Craiglow powered by Up North News.
Now, for my Lake Mesota studio, here is the founding editor of Up North News, Pat Craiglow.
Oh, that's me.
It's a time to say good morning.
It's 706.
It's a Friday morning, July 11th, 2025.
Nice to have you here up north.
Parker Olson standing by in Studio A2 meteorologist, Brittany Merleau.
And just a sec as well with the weekend forecast, our weekend review panel will be along shortly.
Former U.S.
Attorney Jim Santel and veteran journalists Mark Jacob and Jennifer Schulze.
A lot to cover throughout the course of the next hour.
But here's something else that we can cover during the course of this next hour and the one after that.
It's free ticket Friday.
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Use that keyword, send it to us through the Civic Media app.
Text us before the end of the show at 9 a.m.
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for four tickets to Sunday Afternoons game against the Washington Nationals.
So if you can go to a brewer game Sunday afternoon, this is the contest for you.
Our keyword for the show this morning for a four pack of brewer's tickets for Sunday's game is ball.
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So get that civic media app from your Apple store your Google store wherever Find one of the stations on the app and use the text button to send the keyword ball to be entered in and then listen later in the day to Jane and Greg Tom Hartman Todd Alba and Maggie Dawn for more chances to win on this free ticket Friday Let's see from we've got Brittany here.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yes.
We do.
This is from the text line from Jim Brookfield
Always nice to hear Brittany's radio voice providing an accurate statewide forecast.
I feel connected to my friends up north.
Southeast forecasters usually ignore most of the state and always overemphasize not to change your plans, even when it's pouring.
So thank you, Jim, for that.
Brittany's going to tell you, if it's going to pour, you should change your plans.
But that's only if we're going to get that pour.
I had the, you know,
I had the thing last night with Todd Alba where we, we did the fair and we're
going to do it
again today from two to four.
And
then the original plan was to take Todd out on the lake, get on the pontoon and go, but you know, there was the chance of scattered showers everywhere.
You know, there'd be a cloud over you five miles over this way.
You could see a cloud was raining on somebody five miles over there.
The sun is shining, you know, and
So we decided to go get some dinner instead.
We're sitting outside on a deck and the sun is out and it's gorgeous.
But, you know, you just know that if you try to get on the boat instead.
Your luck might change.
Yeah, you just, you don't know.
So it's not that you cancel your plans.
You just, you just need alternative plans, varying plans.
Back up.
contingencies.
Yes.
So what kind of plans are we making today and tonight?
All right.
So if you're down south, those plans are probably going to be to stay inside.
Unfortunately, we've got that front that is stalled over northern Illinois right now.
The low pressure, little disturbance is still moving in towards the Rockford area.
So as this happens, it's going to start to lift this front north into us.
So southern Wisconsin is going to see those showers and storms starting to increase.
especially by this afternoon, they kind of fire up around two to three o'clock or so.
And this is far, far southwest.
And this is going to ride the state line and in towards Janesville, Madison area, Milwaukee too.
Actually, Janesville and Milwaukee, you're in a slight risk for these storms to be severe.
And if they are severe, there are chances for a tornado.
There were some yesterday down in Illinois with this rotation and some strong winds are possible and also hail too.
So that's the risk from Janesville through Milwaukee this afternoon.
and also statewide still heavy, heavy rain.
There's a.
of moisture that these storms can tap into.
So even as far north as park falls or like Eau Claire, you could still get under a storm tonight and it could still dump a quick one to three inches of rainfall.
This is a heavy, heavy rain.
Um, getting it in an hour, an inch, an inch and a half in an hour.
That's what they saw down in Madison yesterday.
Streets were flooded, sewers overflowing, trees were knocked down.
There was also a tree I saw on top of a house.
and this is by Wanaki.
So a lot going on and even in towards Rockford, they had about three inches rapidly plus more on top of it.
There was waste deep water in Rockford.
The city bus was flooded.
There's pictures of two to three feet water down there.
So this can happen.
This is not far away from the state line.
This can happen this afternoon for us.
Hopefully it won't, but be prepared.
North.
Planned area.
Still, you can get a storm underneath you, but your chances are a little bit less.
Those will be much more wide scattered.
Now, as we go through tomorrow, we still got a cold front moving through.
It doesn't look to do too much now.
It just wants to spark a few scattered, widely scattered showers and storms.
Again, they still could pack a lot of heavy rainfall.
This will be tomorrow afternoon.
Then the front has cleared us for Sunday and Monday.
We'll stay dry.
We'll stay sunny.
It'll actually be comfortable on Sunday.
It starts to get more humid as we go into Monday.
My goodness, so much to track here.
People definitely appreciate it.
There's a lot in the mailbag here today for Rob from Tigerton.
Good morning from Tigerton at sunny and sixty-two half an inch or no five one hundredths of an inch of rain last night.
Yesterday I mowed four yards in the Tigerton area.
Today I need to get two more mowed.
Now we just got a hodgepodge in the mailbag here going back to last hour.
I use the CPAP machine I have since 2019.
I can tell a big difference when I use it compared to falling asleep on my recliner.
This is National French Fry Day.
So he makes note that he will have French fries with his fish fry tonight.
He
says the corn is really growing now.
So we're going to have some corn sweat with the humid weather.
It's been a mad dash for farmers to get the second crop of hay in.
I can testify.
They got that second crop.
in a hurry here earlier this week.
But I gotta tell
you this.
The folks all around Courier Newsroom, all around the country, we occasionally get on a video call, you know, a Zoom or whatever you use.
And there's people from all over the country.
And somebody from Iowa's starting line mentioned Corn Sweat.
And the folks from the east and the southwest
thought for sure they were being punked.
They're like, what is corn sweat?
And as the Midwesterners, you know, explained it, you could tell they were, they were not buying this at first.
They were like, this is not a real thing.
Yes, corn sweat is a real thing.
Absolutely.
It is.
It totally
is.
You know, that much that it gets real humid there.
Roger and Stevens Point says, have you rained soaked parts of Western Portage County in the Golden Sands area?
West of Plover and the town of Linwood.
West of Point last night.
Tony goes on to say, Brittany gets the Northwoods is the most important weather forecast to give rather than, you know, the southeastern part of the state.
No, I love all of you.
It's just important
in the world.
You've got a lot of
trees to knock down there.
Yeah, exactly.
And let's see one more from Rob.
Watch out for flooding.
And also I have scenic roads that were washed out from the culverts getting washed out.
Yes, that
is
also a thing that could happen.
And we mentioned that the sun is setting just a little bit earlier now.
It's
it's coming up just a little bit later now.
And, you know, it'll be fall before you know, Alicia's like, Oh, yeah, there's already some people declaring Halloween.
You know,
the Halloween
stores are going to go up.
Leave it to Tony to go.
Yeah, I miss the darkness.
Well, Tony lives up near the tundra.
So six months of, you know, night is more in his wheelhouse than it is to us.
So that's why you're saying that
I'm wearing Alaska shirt right now.
You know,
where they get the
darkness, you know, in winter, but
or, you know, you don't get to sleep because the sun is always gonna say you get that far north.
It's just always sunny.
Yes.
And as now is Parker, he his mallards game got rained out yesterday.
He's got a doubleheader today.
Are they gonna get the doubleheader in today?
Well, I don't think so.
Good
luck.
I hope so.
What time is it?
I think we start at four.
Yeah, I would say, I don't know.
Maybe you'll get one in.
You're so like, yeah, no shot, Parker, sorry.
Yeah, there may be more make-up games to come.
All right, Brittany, thank you so much.
We'll talk to you next hour.
Sounds good.
All right, as always, a reminder, sign up for our newsletter.
Head over to UpNorthNewsWI.com.
Sign up for our weekday newsletter.
We've got a Sunday morning newsletter as well.
Today's newsletter talks about the Northern Wisconsin State Fair where Todd Alba and I will be today from 2 until 4.
Come over and say hi if you're anywhere near Chippewa Falls.
and also some stories there about scenic destinations in Wisconsin and public factory tours that are available as well.
So, so much to check out in our newsletter.
Again, upnorthnewswi.com.
Our weekend review panel will be coming up next.
We've got some court cases to talk about, birthright citizenship, of course, but there's also a new challenge.
to the congressional maps in Wisconsin.
You'll recall it was not long ago at all.
Was it last week?
Week before?
That the state Supreme Court said it was not going to take up original jurisdiction over a challenge to the current congressional district boundaries.
But now another lawsuit has been filed and so we'll ask former US Attorney Jim Santel about the differences between them.
We'll have that coming up for you in just a short time.
One other story that caught my eye and not not in a great way, the headline from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Frank Vaze Velas, sorry Frank if I mispronounced that, Trump dumps a panel targeting offensive names so Wisconsin's half-breed rapids will likely stay.
That is because the Trump administration dismantled a committee
tasked with removing racist names from landmarks.
It was established by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in 2021.
Haaland was the nation's first Native American person to serve as Interior Secretary.
The Trump administration dismantled the committee in part saying that, you know, moves like this to remove racist names are racist themselves.
because that's the kind of down is up world that we live in nowadays.
So a lot of places have had their names changed.
There were 28 different place names that changed in 2022.
All had the derogatory name for women as part of their title.
A lot of them were, you know, rivers, lakes, creeks throughout the part of the state.
But the work hadn't been done yet.
And so other racist names like Half-breed Rapids would have been the next logical step, according to Chris Goodwill, who is monomony and former tribal liaison for the Wisconsin DNR, but the committee never got the chance before it was dismantled by the current Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, the former governor of North Dakota, who had been considered a friend by tribal leaders.
according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article.
Now Halfbreed Rapids is on the Tomahawk River about 20 miles west of Rhinelander near the Lactoflambo Reservation and within Ojibwa-seated territory which is land the U.S.
took from the Ojibwa where tribal members reserve the right to continue fishing and hunting.
Now the reason this really stuck with me is because of a hockey game.
you'll recall I was following the Western Michigan hockey team on their way to a national title because my son-in-law works for the team and that included a game against North Dakota.
Now the University of North Dakota has been the fighting hawks for quite a few years now.
Prior to that for several decades they were the North Dakota Sioux and there are folks who will tell you well that's part of our culture no
No, that's just your stubborn pride unwilling to let go of, you know, names that you've appropriated from elsewhere.
It's not like Sue was North Dakota's original team name.
They were the flicker tails originally named for the ground squirrels around North Dakota.
But then they changed to the Sue because, you know, racism was cool back then.
you know, like, like cigarette smoking or chasing your secretary around the desk or, you know, redlining the maps so that black families couldn't buy a house.
Good times, right?
So if you wanted to name your team, you know, for the red men or Indian head or Sue or whatever, you got to do that for the longest time.
Until finally enough, folks said, maybe not a great idea.
And the names are starting to get changed back.
or given something less racist.
And then Donald Trump happened.
Still a work in progress in this country.
Our Week in Review panel is coming up.
A local update next for some of you, and we'll continue on these mornings powered by Up North News on the Civic Media Radio Network.
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Once again, it is Free Ticket Friday here at Civic Media, so you just text in the keyword before the end of the show today, and we've got a pretty good response here.
Now, these are game-specific, so it's four tickets, great seats, but they're for Sunday Afternoons game against the Washington Nationals.
If you can go to Sunday Afternoons game and want to be in the running in this statewide contest, text the word ball, B-A-L-L, before nine o'clock in the end of the show, and you will be in the running for those tickets.
former U.S.
attorney Jim Santel is joining us now along with the journalist Mark Jacob and Jennifer Schulze joining us.
Whoops.
I gotta hit those buttons on the right order here and joining us from Mark and Jennifer from the Chicago area.
Hello panel.
Nice to see you all.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Hope everybody had a good fourth.
Let's jump right into things here.
Jim, we'll start with you because there are some legal cases.
We've already talked at length about birthright citizenship.
We
May get back to that but I want to get asked you first about another legal case and it is this new challenge to the congressional district maps and I don't know the difference the the original one said, you know This is a partisan gerrymander and the state supreme court didn't want to take it up originally this new one says the congressional maps are an anti-competitive gerrymander and they're willing to work their way through the court system But I just I don't know if there's anything in there that
Sounds like it's likely to gain any more traction than any other attempt, unfortunately.
And traction, Pat, I think is what we focus on.
The thing that I think many people find interesting about this is, thank goodness, finally, let's all take a breath and say that our judicial system works when we begin at the trial court level, right?
We've forgotten all that.
And so these recent cases recently in a year or so ago, when the Wisconsin Supreme Court said,
No, go away.
We're not deciding on the merits of your challenge to congressional line drawing.
Go back to the trial court and develop a record on this.
This is how our system works.
And so there should be some sense of embracing what the Supreme Court did last week, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and saying, go back.
to the court and come up as you normally did.
Maybe there's a lesson there for our federal Supreme Court also.
It's taking all these emergency applications, leapfrogging over same kinds of things at the federal level.
That's number one.
The second part of this is exactly what you noted, which is this is premised upon.
I set up a related theory.
It's not racial gerrymandering, which plainly is in violation of the Voting Rights Act.
And again, it may not be partisan gerrymandering, which the federal courts have said that they will not take attention to.
But it does talk about competitive gerrymandering.
And so it is a new, not new theory, but a new concept.
The notion is that in the candidates for the eight districts, the MAPS, since MAPS were acted, the
The median margin of victory is close to 30 percentage points.
So they're looking overall, Democrats, Republicans that like, that's a significant portion of this.
And beyond that, I find it interesting that this is being brought by a bipartisan group of who?
business leaders.
And that too is interesting because why do we have a court system?
And for many, many reasons to vindicate rights interests, but also to send to the world the notion you come to Wisconsin and you will get contracts enforced.
You can go into litigation and get arrangements for employment situations addressed.
It is good for business to have a court system that is rational and normal, including districts for the congressional seats.
Normal is the word that I would seize on, and getting back to norms.
And there's a related thing about getting back to norms that I want to bounce off mark here.
And he was the one that raised it from a New York Times headline.
And we've seen this all the time, but he specifically picked on this headline.
Social Security email says, policy bill eliminates tax on benefits.
Does it?
That was the headline.
Does it?
Mark says on a social media post, why are New York Times editors asking this question when they know the answer?
I don't know, Mark.
Do
Well, the story did.
That's the thing.
The stories are so often better than the headlines.
The headlines often say less than the.
than the story did.
And in this case, the Trump regime is sending out a misleading email that's saying that they eliminated taxes on social security, which they didn't.
They did some sort of relief for some people, but they definitely did not eliminate taxing of social security income.
And one thing, Pat, I went back and looked at it, and the New York Times changed that headline.
I think maybe it was people other than me
saying, what the heck are you doing?
We don't pay these subscription rates so that you can ask us questions.
We pay the subscription rates so that they're.
headline later said Social Security sends a misleading email claiming to eliminate taxes, which is where they should have been in the first place.
Exactly.
Jennifer, this is not an easy thing in newsrooms.
The discussion of the tease or the headline of how to make it compelling.
You want the people to click on it.
You want them to read it.
You want them to stick around past the commercial break.
But there's that line somewhere where it becomes clickbait.
And
I don't know that there's a right or wrong answer, but in this case, much like the old Supreme Court just said, you know it when you see it.
It's clickbait.
Well, I come from a good long history of local TV news where writing catchy little teases to get you to stick around through the two and a half minute commercial break were very important to us.
And it has been really disappointing to me to see grand.
news outlets like the New York Times follow that, a mistaken thing that we've been doing for years in TV news.
And they have a choice.
And they're making the choice to ask a question they already know the answer to in hopes that you will click on the story.
But as we have talked about 100 times, people typically only look at the headline.
Oh, maybe they did it, maybe they didn't.
Oh, well, hmm.
You know, and it's just, we don't have time for that in this environment we're living in right now.
No, I mean, look, there's a lot of people that will, we say don't just get your news from the headlines.
But by the same token, you know, the headline should at least contain a kernel
of
information in there.
And again, these are these are tight ropes.
We all walk in various professions in the profession of journalism.
It seems fine to to ask them stop asking questions in your headlines.
Will we talk about something more after the commercial break?
You'll have to tune in after the commercial break to find out live from Lake Wissota on the Civic Media Radio Network.
you
The Milwaukee Brewers were off yesterday.
They started three game series at home against the Washington Nationals this evening.
Coverage begins at 635 on several civic media stations today, tomorrow afternoon, Sunday afternoon, and then it's time for the All-Star break.
But before that time.
There is this series, and if you would like to win four great seats, four great tickets to the Sunday afternoon Brewer game against the Washington Nationals, well, then text the keyword ball BAL using the Civic Media app.
You will be in the running for those tickets.
There will be a rally at the state capitol today.
put on by Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed, Wisconsin Public Education Network, Main Street Alliance, and others, basically all about the state and federal budgets that were passed last week and how both of them.
continue harm to many Wisconsinites by benefiting the wealthy in the form of tax cuts and not doing nearly enough for things like the childcare crisis and K-12 education.
Now there will be a news conference there at 9.30 with several speakers including Kareen Hendrickson who's talked to the show plenty of times on childcare, Secretary of State Sarah Godluschi and many more.
So again that's at the state capitol over on the
state street steps and then there will be some letters delivered to elected leaders as well.
So we may talk more about the federal budget that was passed and the coverage of it with our panel Jennifer Scholesy, Mark Jacob, and Jim Santel.
But I do want to take a moment to talk about coverage of the Texas floods.
Jennifer, let's start with you.
It's the subject of your latest column in distinct chatter that you can get on Substack and what you had to say about the coverage of the tragedy in Texas so far.
I think that local Texas media in particular, TV and print digital have all done an excellent job not just telling the story about
the tragedy, and it is a tragedy.
I mean, it's just a nightmare.
I can't even imagine.
But they are also very aggressively holding officials to account.
There have been numerous news conferences that have been held on live TV where reporters have really pressed these officials to say, why didn't you do X, Y, and Z?
And that's really impressive stuff.
And I would like to hope that that
influences some of the coverage we see today in Texas when the pool travels with Trump from DC and then we'll have the opportunity to ask a lot of those questions because these local TV reporters have really been pushing for answers in a way that we do not see in our national media frequently the ones covering Trump.
Well that takes us to the national media mark.
And Chuck Todd, who is doing Chuck Todd things, who posted and was completely roasted.
I would dare say annihilated on social media for this post.
The tragedy in Texas could have been avoided if both sides stopped playing politics and better prepared our communities for extreme weather disasters.
I examine how the political discourse has become a virus.
If we sounded an alarm.
For both sidesism, we'd go deaf blaring this one, Mark.
Yeah, and when you actually look at the facts, you know, it's these extreme weather disasters, which we're seeing more and more of, you know, are happening because we're not taking climate change seriously.
Well, who's what side is taking climate change seriously?
And what side is not?
I mean, this is not like just partisan bickering.
This is one side deciding to
to eliminate all these programs for clean energy and double down on fossil fuels because those are the donors that make the money.
And the other side trying to actually deal with the climate crisis.
But no, no, it's both sides are doing this and that.
Plus also, I mean, it's clear now that local Republican officials...
It's not because they were Republicans, because they're local officials who decided not to spend money on an early warning system because it cost too much.
So, you know, that's what they decided.
They made a calculated decision.
This was not just a matter of, well, we didn't know better.
They discussed it.
They decided not to spend the money to protect people.
because it costs too much money.
And so, you know, zero in on that.
Don't like that.
Don't do this kind of vague kind of, whoa, partisan bickering, you know, that doesn't get us anywhere.
And then it's Chuck Todd acting as if he's above it all instead of actually zeroing in on whose fault it is.
It's marketing.
It's his marketing stick now is to try to, you know, rise above it all.
And but that means there's times when, again,
Both sides aren't 50-50, and if you're if you're afraid to call it so, I mean, what what good is your marketing position?
We have spoken already this morning about birthright citizenship, but Jim, as a former U.S.
attorney, I'd like to, your explanation will probably sound better than mine, as far as why, why the case is now a class action case, because I think to the layperson, they heard that the U.S.
Supreme Court made a ruling
And in their mind, especially the way some media, I think, portrayed it, was that President Trump can go ahead and try to ignore the Constitution in terms of birthright citizenship.
That's not actually what the Supreme Court said.
And a federal district judge this week took it to that next level, making it a class action suit.
I think it's fascinating, as a legal matter, fascinating simply as an American news item too.
We would call that when the Supreme Court decided not to decide.
on birthright citizenship.
It is still unresolved.
This very clear issue.
They said that national injunctions can no longer happen.
One judge cannot impose her or his will on the entire nation.
Okay, we can argue about that.
And there may be times when it's appropriate, maybe times when it's not appropriate.
What they did also say, in addition to staying this order until July 27, tick tock right now here in America, they also said, but you've got other remedies here.
You can do a class act.
which basically identifying large groups of people who have commonality in their facts, commonality in the law, and bring them together, and by certifying that class, you may be able to do the same thing.
Well, within moments of the Supreme Court's issuing that decision, sure enough, class actions get filed, the lawsuits anyway, and this particular judge in New Hampshire says, okay, that's fine, I can do that, and it's arguably brilliant.
What he says is,
I am now going to certify a class of virtually everybody who was affected by the president's executive order way back on January 20th and that includes in particular the babies of people of women and men obviously born since the time of the executive order.
He certifies the class and says all of you who otherwise would be citizens today I am certifying your class and as to that class
I am now imposing a national injunction.
And so it is fascinating.
The judge says, you told me I can do this.
I've done it.
I preserved.
America once again, it's going up to the first circuit court of appeals may end up before the Supreme Court again.
But it just underscores once again.
Why doesn't the Supreme Court simply say what we all know, which is the 14th Amendment grants you a right for citizenship.
If you're born here, that's been the law for 100 years.
Say that Chief Justice Roberts,
right?
How is this still a thing?
Exactly.
And Jennifer, you just heard the explanation of a former US attorney.
And as you know, in this era of sound bites, I mean,
This is a serious challenge to reporters, whatever the level of experience, to convey all of these nuances of the legal system.
And I'm not saying that you or I have the correct answer to it, but for the love of all things, holy, maybe run your copy by somebody with some legal experience before you pop off on this subject.
I think you might be asking too much there.
Um, I do think a lot of these stories are very complicated, but they also can be boiled down very simply.
And what, what somewhere in the press gets stuck somewhere in the middle, right?
They, they try to tell the story without going too far so they don't offend their corporate owners and get on the wrong side of Trump.
But then, you know, so they, they never land in a place where they just say what actually happened.
And I find that particularly frustrating.
Do you use the phrase, maybe you do it a different way, but I've often heard the phrase said to reporters, tell it to your mom.
In other words, instead of writing all the legalese and the jargon, you know, if you got on the phone with your mom, what would you say?
You wouldn't say, no offense, Jim, you wouldn't say everything that you said for 90 seconds there.
You'd say the Supreme Court did this.
And it just, I don't know if you have a similar way that you expressed that to beginning journalists.
I think that that is an excellent lesson and that is in fact how people are taught about journalism.
Tell me what you're trying to tell me.
Tell it to me in one sentence.
You know, what is the story here?
Get to the nut of the story.
Okay, that's where we're going with this story.
And in fact, I think we try too hard not to do that because of all these other sensitivities that are now in the atmosphere.
Yeah.
And Mark, you were your front page editor for the Chicago Tribune.
I mean, you know how you have to work so hard to make it concise, not just the headline, but the lead.
Yeah, well, I think I feel like a lot of journalists are writing for other journalists, or they're writing for their sources.
And that becomes a real problem, you know, that they're they're writing defensively.
And politicians want them to write defensively.
That's why you get so many
so much criticism of the news media by politicians who are being covered.
They'll have their press person call after every story and explain to them why it's wrong.
There's this pressure campaign, and not just by Republicans.
When I was a metro editor at the Tribune in Chicago, Rahm Emanuel was all over us all the time.
In effect, what he was doing was working the refs.
He was trying to get us to
to use and try to intimidate us so that we would say other things and say softer things next time.
And so, yes, I mean, exactly, talk to your mom.
You're not talking to Rahm Emanuel.
You're not talking to some other journalist who's a competitor.
You're not trying to impress anyone.
You're just trying to tell your mom what happened.
Now, we've mentioned that Jennifer's latest newsletter for indistinct chatter is on the Texas floods.
Your latest, stop the presses.
The headline is Jake Tapper Believes in Jake Tapperism, which is probably one of the most honest headlines I've seen in the longest time of trying to explain the way that he has covered certain things like a dog with a bone that they just will not let go of.
And that's certainly, that's as Jake Tapper as it gets.
It's not that he's a right-winger or a left-winger or anything like that.
I mean, he was actually quite hard on Trump in the early days.
But now that Trump is established, he's here for the second time as president.
you know, I think Tapper's decided to kind of play to that audience.
And, you know, he's decided idiotically to make a big deal about a former president who's no longer really a factor in American politics rather than looking at, you know, trying to report on the five alarm fire that's happening next door.
And it's, I think it's just, he's just a careerist.
He's just trying to position himself for maximum benefit to Jake Tapper.
Well, the fact that he's got a history that stretches back to, you know, the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
I mean, he's got a record.
He's got a style.
which, again, works in certain circles, but I also feel like somebody like you needs to, you know, point out the way that that operates.
So that's in Stop the Press.
Get it at stopthepresses.news or couriernewsroom.com.
And then last but not least, Jim's got this program on on the weekends, amicus, a law review Saturday mornings.
I'm sure you're going to get into a couple of the cases we've already talked about any that we missed that you want to promote quickly for tomorrow's show.
One of the
Yes, indeed, she's our attorney general, saying some very interesting things about how assistant United States attorneys and department lawyers should act, what the principles of standards are, changing America by virtue of what you're telling your lawyers staff to do.
We serve, the Department of Justice serves America, does not serve Pam Bondi, does not serve the president.
That has changed in the past five months.
More of that, again, coming up on
Saturday.
I can't believe we're not all taking loyalty oaths already.
I mean, God knows that's the expectation.
A local update is next for some of you.
Others will stick around here with the panel.
And then in our next hour, we'll talk to Dr. Kristen Lierley, who's out in Washington, D.C.
And we will get sports from Mike Clemens as well.
What have what has happened with the Brewers?
Where did this team come from?
We're loving this.
We'll ask Mike about that next after the eight o'clock news here on the Civic Media Radio Network.
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Former U.S.
Attorney Jim Santel is here along with journalist Mark Jacob and Jennifer Schulze and
Let's see, Jim, you will also be the guest co-host, at least in the four o'clock hour on the Maggie Dawn Show, coming up a little later.
We've noticed such changes already from the Biden administration.
I mean far too many to spend time with but one that the Biden administration really had was a focus on consumer rights and consumer protection and Obviously things are a little bit different now at least according to an appeals court judge in a case that you're tracking Making things just a little bit more complex once again for the consumer
right the Federal Trade Commission had passed a rule that basically said if you're going to subscribe
to subscriptions, memberships, those kinds of things.
You got to make it just as easy for people to get out from under those.
You can't go through five or six different hoops.
And they had proposed that as a consumer friendly.
It's a small thing, I suppose, given our other challenges in life these days.
But the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals just decided to block what's called the click to cancel rule.
Let's not make that more easier for consumers to do that.
The rule was set to take effect on July 14th.
No more.
We'll see what happens.
It's a small blip, if you will, in an otherwise interesting world.
But Peel's Court's saying, nope, we've got to keep those difficult mechanisms in place.
Such a different time that we live in now.
And Jennifer, I know that you've written about the coverage of Zoran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, and the New York Times, again.
you know, at a leader in journalism in so many ways, but in so many other ways, such frustration, and that includes their coverage of this mayor's race.
What's the latest controversy on that?
But the latest is that they rushed a story that seems to have violated even their own policies about sourcing.
They used an anonymous source and only shared his screen name, although he was well known and he's a far right wing race science supporter.
And they ran the story and the framing of it is just
that man Donnie did something wrong instead of saying he's got a very interesting racial background.
You know, he's multi-ethnic and he grew up in Uganda and there was no place to say all that in a college application.
You know, and how many people are like him and have these same challenges.
Instead, they did this story like, oh no, he did this terrible thing when he was 19.
applying to a school that he did not get into, I want to point out.
And then the follow-on explanation for it was, well, Christopher Rufo, the right-wing wing nut, was chasing the same story, so we had to get there first.
Just absolutely absurd.
Mark, that's a level of competitive pressure that, at a certain level,
you're above.
Obviously, you always want to be first, but not at the expense of your own standards.
You know, number two is to be first.
You know, I mean, it's and you don't want to be first and wrong, or violate your standards.
You know, so, Montani, you know, when he was, you know, applying to college when he was a young man,
He checked the boxes for African American and for Asian.
Well, you know, he's from his parents are from India and he was born in Uganda.
So it's not he wasn't lying.
He was he was just trying to deal as many people do deal with a system in which you know, just checking boxes doesn't tell the whole story.
But this is so this this information wouldn't be public except that a right-wing hacker went into the Columbia system and stole the information.
And then it gets to the New York Times through that person.
And the New York Times just, as Jennifer said, used his screen name, his internet name, rather than his real name, even though they knew it.
It was bizarre, Jennifer, I thought, that the New York Times said, well, in effect, they were asking the readers to check out the guy and figure out who he was, because for some reason, they wouldn't say who he was.
It was ridiculous.
We're not going to name you, so give us this info.
Everything about that story was wrong and their response to it since then is wrong.
There's a quote from someone at the New York Times in a leadership position saying, well, everyone's talking about it, so we must have been right.
I'm sorry, but
no, that's it's again, that's not how this works.
But again, we're getting away from norms.
For example, media companies that would back their newsrooms when they haven't done anything wrong.
But Mark CBS is that much closer or it's corporate owners to making a deal that's going to make Donald Trump look like he was right
when he was
complaining about CBS News when he was wrong, but he's still going to win.
And it's
because of the newsroom.
It's because of the corporation.
No, I mean, these are the cases in which the major media organizations have completely defensible court cases, but they're bending the Trump anyway because he has other things to hold over their head.
In the case of CBS, he can scotch the CBS parent companies deal to merge, and he's using his FCC to try to block that.
But so they're going to write a $16 million check to Trump's library, which I can't imagine will be like 10,000 copies of Art of the Deal, I guess.
I have no idea what his library would be like.
But this is the media bending to the knee, very dangerous.
And it just means that there are fewer and fewer credible outlets out there.
And Pat, if I can even add to that, and remember the underlying allegation made by our president was that CBS News had had plucked and clipped some of the interview sections with former vice president Kamala Harris.
And somehow that that is violative of I don't know what it is.
But you do that all the time
in journalism, right?
There's
something
And so
shocked.
Jim Santel, Mark Jacob, Jennifer Schulze, thank you as always.
Have a great weekend.
All right, take
care
up next after the news Kristen Lierly and Mike Clemens all next year on the civic media radio network
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