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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 is 706 on this Wednesday morning, August 27th.
Nice to have you back here up north.
Live from Lake Wissota on the Civic Media Radio Network, Parker Olson is producing things down in Madison Studio A2.
Coming up later this hour, we're going to be talking to the National President of the American Federation of Teachers, Randy Weingarten.
She is on her way to Wisconsin as we speak for an event later today, all about the big bloated boondoggle from Trump and congressional Republicans.
and the damage it's going to do to education, health care, and just life overall in the state of Wisconsin as well as around the country.
So we'll talk to Randy Weingarten about that.
Coming up in just a few minutes from now, about 7.35 we'll get that started.
And in our next hour, we'll talk to author Laura Bird about book banning.
They seem to spring up this time of year like weeds.
When the school year gets going, there are people who talk about banning books from certain school libraries.
We'll talk about what motivates that, some of the misinformation about it.
what you can do when these kinds of measures come up in your local school.
That's all along the way.
Temperatures right now include 53 here in the Chippewa Valley, 55 in La Crosse, it's 53 in Amory, 54 in Oshkosh.
And at the Fork and Knife restaurant in Manitowoc, it is 55 degrees right now.
So we've got a nice pleasant morning here that takes us to Brittany and a forecast for today, which seems almost as pretty and picture perfect as yesterday with maybe a change in the not too distant future.
Brittany, good morning.
How are you?
Good morning.
I am pretty pretty good.
You're still doing yes, which is why I see that we still got the hoodie going here is We were talking yesterday, you know Hans Brighton Moser at the lend is hoodie to his daughter.
I'd lend a hoodie to my grandson and It's like how many hoodies some people just collect all manner of things I've maybe got a half a dozen hoodies.
Well, how's your hoodie game over
there?
Oh
Oh, it's strong.
I have a ton of hoodies.
The one thing I get when I go visit and travel places or go see something cool, like I'm wearing pictured rocks hoodie right now.
So, you know, it's a destination kind of gathering like
I
like to do.
But
hey, it's perfect for camping.
It's perfect to lend.
It's perfect for mornings like this.
I was gonna say, it's perfect for about nine, 10 months out of the year or like right now in the middle of summer in August.
It's hoodie weather for today.
One more day.
Sure is.
It is 43 degrees in Antigo and Merrill.
That is the cold spot in the state.
Meanwhile, Ashland and Madeleine Island sitting pretty at 61 degrees right now.
but that's because it's cloudy.
And that's because you've got rain rolling through this morning.
This cold front is gonna be sagging south through the state tonight and overnight.
But throughout the day today, we're still gonna see a lot of sunshine, especially south and west in the state, but further north and east, those showers are already starting to move through, like I mentioned, mainly off Lake Superior this morning, kind of hugging that border between the UP and Wisconsin through this afternoon.
And then that front pushes everything through later tonight.
So some light showers, maybe some thunder out there.
These are not going to be strong or severe storms.
They're really only going to bring a trace of rain to a quarter of an inch at max highs today, still hitting the mid seventies all across the state.
So this is very comfortable conditions by tomorrow after the cold front passes.
We are looking at 60 to 65 degrees for a good eastern half of the state.
But out west, especially southwest, you could still hit some upper 70s tomorrow.
So this cold front isn't really reinforcing anything too wild.
But when we go Thursday night, I will say chances of frost far northeast do start to sink in just far.
Now as we go into the weekend, cooler 60s on Friday, mid 60s to mid 70s on Saturday and Sunday.
And then we're going to be in the upper 70s as we move into Monday for Memorial Day.
So it is warming up.
Summer weather is still coming back, but still cold blast today.
Labor Day.
Now, before anybody goes, oh, it's a rerun.
They're talking about Memorial Day.
No, Labor Day is what we're talking about.
Oh, I'm
sorry.
Did I say that?
It's all right.
You know, it's in the spirit of summer.
Exactly.
Well, and that's when you're more likely to get, you know, 60s would be Memorial Day.
Labor Day, you'd want to see your 80s.
Oh, look, oh, look, Pat's whining again.
Let's go to Robin Tigerton.
Good morning.
Partly cloudy and 50.
Yesterday I had mowing jobs in Wittenberg and highways 29 and 45.
We're busy with traffic before.
the Labor Day weekend.
Today I've got Lawnstomo and Tigerton.
The weather has been perfect.
I love the fall like weather, he writes.
It's another hoodie start.
I keep them in my truck.
That way you can wear them in the morning, then by noon, take the hoodie off as it gets warmer.
In other words, layers.
What do we tell everybody?
Yep, it's it's layer season already.
Have your layers nearby.
And it is that that is, you know, one of the the pleasant parts of living here is that if you've got a collection of hoodies.
Oh, the way Brittany does, you know, you're
not like,
yeah, you're not wearing the same thing over and over again.
So all right, Brittany, thank you so much.
We'll talk to you next hour.
Sounds good.
All right.
Hey, sign up for our daily newsletter up north news wi.com is the place to go.
Hit subscribe up in the top banner.
In today's edition, it includes a story about the old paps brewery in Milwaukee.
Which believe it or not I actually worked there for a week once I was doing a bunch of different office jobs and Worked in the office as a perhaps for a while, but anyway the old brewery still there being refurbished into all kinds of other uses and the I'm gonna tell you the place is called best place at the historic perhaps brewery and I know that
throw some people off until I remind them that Jacob Best was the name of the guy that started the brewery that eventually became Papst.
So Best Place is named for Jacob Best.
And Best Place just scored a $50,000 grant as part of the American Express National Trust for Historic Preservation, Backing Historic Small Businesses.
It will give Best Place and other restaurants around the US a chance to invest in potential renovations and expansion.
So if you're in the Milwaukee area and you have not been over in the old Papsbury area recently, you should go take a look at some of the buildings that are there and the ways that they have been redone.
Also in the newsletter is an article from Selena Heller talking about Wisconsin retirees who recognize that social security having just turned 90 years old needs to be strengthened, not threatened, the way it's being threatened right now by the current regime in Congress.
And there's also an article in there about a new climate lawsuit.
You see these in several states, Hawaii most notably, but it's been in Montana.
I want to say Florida and New York, but now here in Wisconsin as well, where young people helped by nonprofits are filing lawsuits to make sure that state laws are adhered to the state constitution.
when it comes to ensuring that young people have life, liberty, and safety, and that includes the environment they live in.
And we're going to be talking more about this with Melissa Baldoff in this week's climate check.
That'll be coming up at 8.20 here on these mornings powered by Up North News on the Civic Media Radio Network.
Tony, shouting layers on YouTube with what has to be seven or eight exclamation points on there.
Yes, we're very much in favor of layers here.
The Brewers were winners.
Once again, they had to come, not come back, but they had to protect what had been an easy lead, 6-0 on Monday, and again, 6-0 last night.
But in both cases, they turned into nail biters, Isaac Collins.
had a bases loaded sacrifice fly in the bottom of the ninth to bring home the winning run nine to eight.
The final William Contreras and Bryce Durang each hit two run homers for the Brewers.
Game three of that series takes place this evening.
Once again the pregame starts at six oh five on Civic Media Stations in Richland Center, Oshkosh Racine, Park Falls and Hayward.
I'm gonna read now from an article in the New York Times, Katie Rogers, White House reporter.
And usually I'll look at an article and then maybe interpret some of what I'm seeing here, but Katie Rogers' writing really gets to the heart of the essence of the nauseating spirit of whatever that thing was that happened in the White House yesterday.
Stensibly, it was known as a cabinet meeting.
But it lasted three hours and 15 minutes, and it was just three hours and 15 minutes of his cabinet members going around the table and offering him praise.
That's all it was.
It was a televised meeting that lasted almost half the work day.
Katie Rogers writes, in front of a wall of cameras, the old apprentice host offered a clear window into the way he was running his administration, starting with an ego.
that appeared to need frequent feeding and blustery stamina.
This has never been done before, the president said at one point in between calling on cabinet secretaries to speak and marveling over reporters' ability to hold microphones and cameras aloft for several hours.
Yeah, they were really looking forward to that part.
What was supposed to be a quick photo spray becomes three hours of cabinet officers taking their turns.
She writes, each working a little bit harder than the last to offer Mr. Trump praise and assure him that they were working to tackle his long list of grievances.
They talked about, you know, transgender
sports, violent crime crackdowns, the ongoing threat of windmills, the foul state of traffic medians, the speed with which water flows, and attempts at securing peace deals for as many as seven international wars, a number that seems to crow by the day, she writes.
Mr. Trump, a pop culture maven,
had relatively little to say about the biggest news of the day, that would be Taylor Swift's engagement to Travis Kelsey, other than saying, I wish them a lot of luck.
The Cabinet event was billed as a celebration of American workers ahead of Labor Day.
Yet with a running time of three hours and 15 minutes, it would be considered a wildly inefficient meeting at any other workplace.
The actual policy menu was just gristle in comparison to red meat politics.
But for an afternoon, the Trump White House really was as radically transparent as Trump likes to say it is.
There's something really nice about just, you know, the openness of what we're doing.
Mr. Trump mused as he closed out the gathering.
He also seemed interested in dangling the idea that at any moment, his cabinet members could be humiliated on national TV.
He said, each one of these people spoke apparently happy with their performances.
If I thought one of them did badly, I would call that person out.
As the hours ticked by, Trump's cabinet members highlighted the cost in hours, in money, perhaps in karma, of keeping a seat at his table.
And many did so.
while testing the apparently imaginary boundaries of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities on the job.
The updates ranged from the enthusiastic to the servile, and they went on for hours.
Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the Labor Secretary, implored the president to come to her agency and look at his big, beautiful face on a banner.
And if you've never seen that,
Go look at it.
Go look up the photo of how in front of the Labor Department and perhaps a couple of other Washington DC buildings, they have put up banners that are several stories tall with Trump's face on them.
And if you're looking for them on social media, no doubt you will see those banners compared side by side with similar banners on government buildings in Moscow and China.
There was Robert F. Kennedy talking about radioactive shrimp and saving the whales from wind power.
The same Robert Kennedy Jr.
who once sawed the head off a whale and then drove it home.
Trump and Kennedy engaged them back and forth about the rates of autism in young boys.
Science having nothing to do with anything in the conversation.
On and on it went with one of his cabinet members saying this is
The only thing I wish for, he says, is that the Nobel Committee finally gets its act together and realizes you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace Prize was created.
Thus ends the three-hour cabinet meeting that you all paid for at the White House today.
Randy Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, will be joining us in about 15 minutes.
I'm Pac Rightlow.
This is the Civic Media Radio Network.
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There's a chance that during the break you might have heard Dan Schaefer from the Reconbobulation area talking about some of the political news that he follows So I just wanted to remind you that one of his most recent articles that he talked about here yesterday
is called a too early breakdown of the 2026 race for governor in Wisconsin.
And of course, you'll find that over at the reconbobulationarea.news.
And as the political editor for civic media, you find a lot of what he's covering on civicmedia.us as well.
Also on one of the civic media newscasts here this morning, they're talking about the Knowles Nelson stewardship program, or just the stewardship program for short, a program that began back in 1989 and has been renewed throughout the years as a way to purchase land for conservation, provide easements to protect land from overdevelopment, and then do things to the land that make it more.
accessible to the public for recreation and relaxation rather than, you know, another strip mall and another golf course.
It has for years been a one of the shining stars of bipartisanship back when Republicans were more like, you know, Teddy Roosevelt Republicans and understood that this is a big country.
There's plenty of room for development.
There's plenty of room for people, but there's some places that if you don't protect them, if you don't conserve them, they're going to be lost forever.
It was Teddy Roosevelt Republicans that gave us the National Park System, the anniversary of which we celebrated, was it yesterday, but that's not how it's working anymore.
because as the Republican Party has been captured more by, you know, say the William McKinley Republicans who were in charge just before Teddy Roosevelt, the people who think you can run the economy based on tariffs, the people who feel like there's no piece of land that can't be bulldozed and made money off of it.
It's this group of Republicans that basically took it out of the budget.
Governor Tony Evers proposed a large reauthorization for the program, about a billion dollars over 10 years.
And instead, Republicans removed the program entirely.
And so the program is funded through 2026.
But after that, it would go away.
Well, now both Republicans trying to save face and Democrats are trying to save the Knowles Nelson stewardship program.
And it's that they disagree on the manner in which to do it that is noteworthy right now.
But I'm going to remain hopeful that the two sides can come together and find ways to renew the program, provide the oversight that Republicans are looking for while continuing its core mission of making sure that Wisconsin remains this beautiful place.
to live in, to work in, to study in, to do business in.
And we do, like I say, have room.
We have room for farming.
We have room for recreation.
We have room for development.
But to just allow it to happen completely without restraint, without any thought of conservation would just be an absolute tragedy.
So Democrats have put out their version of the legislation.
There would be an oversight board, 17 people on there, $72 million in spending each year, which is up from the current $33 million, but again, less than what Governor Evers was proposing, which would have been up to $100 million per year.
Of the $72 million in spending that would be authorized under the Democratic bill,
about 17 million would be for land acquisition, 45 million for upkeep and repair of current property so that we can enjoy these places because again it makes no sense to turn a place into a recreational area and then not do the maintenance to keep it a nice place to go.
Another 8 million would be for local boat facilities and 2 million more for motorized recreation programs.
Under the Democratic bill
Projects costing two and a half million dollars or more would require approval by this new board.
And if that board did not take up a project for review within 120 days or four months, it would be considered automatically approved.
That of course is in response to what Republicans had been doing with stewardship programs and that was bottling them up in committee without any timeline at all.
So they didn't have to go on record as saying they were against conservation programs.
They just simply had to keep them bottled up in committee and never have them come up for a vote.
Republicans that put forward their own version of the bill as well, that would bring back some kind of a stewardship program.
Again, it would be with some oversight.
I believe the Republican bill was about a million dollars that would require a board approval in order to move forward.
Authors of the Republican proposal are Tony Kurtz and Patrick Teston of Stevens Point, and they say they are looking forward to working with Democrats to reform and reauthorize the stewardship program, according to Teston.
He says he looks forward to reviewing the proposal brought forward by my Democrat colleagues to see where we can work together and find common good.
Well, if you're still
Unable to actually say the word democratic when talking about the democratic party I have reason to cast doubt on whether you're actually going to be negotiating in good faith But you know again, that's another one of those own the libs kinds of things is to mistake the name of the party It's really funny if you're a republican apparently so that's where we sit with the stewardship program currently set to expire at the end of 2026 and now with fairer maps it becomes
A little bit easier for voters to see if Republicans want to head into the 2026 cycle, saying that they are doing more than paying lip service to conserving land in Wisconsin for future use for our grandkids and for our current recreational and relaxation needs.
So more to come on that.
Coming up next, we're going to talk to the president, the national president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randy Weingarten.
I'm Pat Critello, this is the Civic Media Radio Network.
Welcome back.
It's time for our homeroom segment where we highlight public schools and the threats they face from politicians and grifters alike.
We have a special guest this morning, the national president of the American Federation of Teachers, AFT, Randy Weingarten.
She's en route right now to Eau Claire for an event later today called Fighting Back, a Western Wisconsin community forum.
She'll be joined by labor leaders, including AFT Wisconsin President John Shelton, who we heard from on Monday, Representative Christian Phelps, who visited with us last Wednesday, and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly.
So this is a panel that clearly knows what is currently spewing out of Washington, D.C.
I talked to Randy Weingarten just around five o'clock this morning, just before she got on the plane to head this way.
And I started by asking what motivated her to attend today's event right here in the Heartland.
So first, I never go where I'm not invited.
And I was asked to come by all by our Wisconsin leadership and membership to talk to them, you know, Claire, about what the impact
act of this, you know, of the federal policies are on Wisconsin.
And, you know, what has happened in terms of the third district, instead of the current occupant of the third congressional district of helping people in Wisconsin, it looks like he's more interested in freeing favor with Donald Trump.
And so we wanted to really talk to members and talk to community
uh activists about what the real deal is in terms of the impact of the bill that passed this summer and frankly um how there's a rollback instead of instead of actually helping people have a better act economic life it's really hurting people so whether it's getting rid of the clean energy jobs or whether it's the um what has happened in the rollbacks of nutritional services
what's happening in terms of the rollbacks of Medicaid, which is really going to hurt places like healthcare centers in Blacks River Falls and Sparta.
There's real impacts in this bill that basically gave a tax cut to the rich.
So we wanted to talk about this and talk about it.
in terms of what the real deal is.
And that's why I'm coming to Wisconsin today.
I've been in Wisconsin many, many, many, many times, but I'm really honored to be with the people who make a difference in the lives of others today.
Well, it's interesting that you mentioned all of those other areas.
It would be enough if just education leaders talked about the cuts separately or healthcare leaders, people about local services, but there appear to be no silos in this effort to convey all of the damage in this mega bill.
No, there's no silos and in fact, well, I actually there is one silo billionaires billionaires did very very very very well in this bill But what's happened is and you see it in mr. Trump's poll numbers you see it in terms of you know this the dystopian fear that people have in America right now the division the fear we're far from a golden age what we're seeing is that people
voted for him because they wanted a better life.
And as a labor movement, we know that.
We fight every day for a better life for working people.
So people have a good life.
They're entitled to a good life.
That's what workers deserve, the hard work they put in every day.
But what's happened is between the increases in prices, the decreases in affordability, and now all this federal policy
that seems to make it worse.
It's not a surprise to me that Donald Trump is now changing the agenda and trying to talk about crime because the economic working people are having a harder time right now.
And there's no silos, you're right.
So it's not just about the abandonment of public education and higher education that he's done, but it's all these kind of foundational supports
that that federal policy had done to help people have a better life.
talking to Randy Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers coming to Wisconsin for a special event today about the cuts in the Trump mega bill.
And I've heard you describe these cuts as children facing, which I take to mean you're not going to take care of these cuts by buying fewer staplers for the classrooms and some extra equipment in the cafeteria.
Just how how direct will
parents and children and educators feel from these cuts.
So there's several different ways they're going to feel it.
This is what people are going to feel immediately.
Snap or nutritional services.
We basically in America try to try to make sure we subsidize every child's lunch and breakfast.
That's going to change.
We're going to go back to lunch shaming.
which is one of the coolest things that we can do to kids, meaning that they have to pay for their lunch or show that they are poor in order to get their lunch for free.
That's really terrible to do in a school.
That's going to happen almost immediately because of all the red tape.
Then let's take special needs kids.
Under the federal law right now, and sorry, I am a social studies teacher, there are two ways that we help special needs kids.
One is through something called the IDEA, which is the Individuals with Disabilities and in Education Act.
That money should have been increased.
It has been increased every year.
It was flat.
It was not increased this year.
And so what's happening is districts have to find more and more money themselves.
And number two, right now, even worse, the grants that were the secondary grants that many districts got, those grants have been cut by Linda McMahon.
So that's making it harder.
Like after school and summer school, we got some of them replaced, but that's making it harder.
And number three, Medicaid.
It's called different things in different states.
but it's pays for things like wheelchairs and accessibility and OTs and PT's and every parent with a kid with a disability understands what I'm talking about.
All that stuff is being pulled back.
So districts, if you have a kid who has mobility issues, you need a PT.
If you don't have a physical therapist, then how is that kid going to go to school?
So what's happening is that districts all across
Wisconsin are scurrying.
And you know, in Wisconsin, what happened when Scott Walker cut all that funding statewide?
You saw what happened to schools.
You saw what happened to schools.
And so this is happening in lots of different places.
And districts are basically saying, what are we supposed to do?
Effectively, they have to go to the taxpayers next year to get a tax increase.
So what Donald Trump has done,
is he's forced, if school districts want to have these services, they're forcing people to pay more taxes locally so that Donald Trump could give a tax cut to billionaires.
And finally,
There continue to be large crowds that show up at events like this, at listing sessions, primarily if you're Democrats, but the occasional Republican pops up.
And again, a large crowd wants to show up.
Even though the bill has passed, the bill can't be stopped anymore.
Why do you think that is?
And then to wrap things up, moving forward, what is it that you would like people to do?
So it's really important.
And again, I'm putting my social studies head on right now.
We have never been in a moment like this in America.
And look, I actually left the DNC, the Democratic National Committee.
I said, no, I don't want to be part of it anymore.
I want to have a little bit more independence here.
I don't care if you're a Republican, an independent, a Democrat.
In America, our voice matters.
And people's voices matter.
And these politicians need to be accountable to the people on the ground, not so scared of Donald Trump.
that they don't listen to the people on the ground.
Now, I understand why they're scared of Donald Trump.
He bullies people.
You know, there's a lot of squeeds on Twitter.
I understand why people are afraid.
But if you're a politician elected to represent District 3, you've got to represent the people in District 3.
And then that's part of the reason why people have to show up.
People have to exercise their voice.
You can't just exercise your voice a minute before an election.
This has to be about what is good for Americans.
And for us, what is good for working people?
Working people made America.
Working people deserve to have policy in America that helps them, not hurts them.
And that's what we're trying to do here.
Randy Weingarten is national president of the American Federation of Teachers.
Randy, thank you very much.
Thank you.
Your time safe travels.
Thank you so much.
And there's Randy Weingarten talked to her about five o'clock this morning before she hopped on the plane to head out for the event in Eau Claire later today.
So there was only so much ground that we could cover.
For example, one of the areas we didn't get into was the way that this regime is trying to all but abolish the US Department of Education.
And by the way, for folks going, why do you say regime?
Why don't you just say Trump administration?
There's actually a reason for that.
It would be called the Trump administration.
if it were just as an executive branch facing some guardrails from either Congress or the United States Supreme Court.
But the fact that Congress and the Supreme Court have become wholly owned subsidiaries of Trump Incorporated means you basically have a regime right now.
The minority party, in this case the Democratic Party, you know, can't do much whether Republicans or Democrats are in the minority.
There's only so much they can do.
Our system works with its checks and balances.
If there are people within your own parties who say, sir or ma'am, I agree with you much of the time, but not on this one.
And there have been more times than any of us can count the number of instances where
Again, if we still had say a John McCain or if Mitt Romney had a spine would be able to stand up and say Sorry, sir.
You can't impose tariffs unilaterally.
That's something only Congress can do.
You can't abolish a cabinet agency That's only something Congress can do but Congress and the Supreme Court's they're just letting this all go I mean we're actually to the point now where Trump mused yesterday about changing the name of the Department of Defense back to the War Department
because he says it sounds nicer.
I mean, this is the kind of thing we're dealing with these days.
So that's why I say regime.
So they're going after the US Department of Education and talking about giving education back to the states quote unquote, we're giving education back to the states.
But state education leaders are going to tell you whether it's at this event today in Eau Claire or any other time that they're getting the buck pass to them, but not the box.
They're not getting any of the support that they would otherwise be getting from a federal government that wanted to operate in partnership to educate our children.
No different than this current legislature in Madison.
Again, does not want to be a partner in the education of our children.
They want the dismantling and the privatization of our public schools and they do it slowly year after year with funding that does not keep up with inflation and instead
pours more resources into a voucher program for schools that perform no better.
There's zero empirical evidence that on the whole they perform better.
But they can bend certain rules, they can discriminate in certain ways, and they help, again, move us toward an era where people can actually make corporate profits and shareholder dividends off the education of our children.
Those are the folks that are in charge right now and so for somebody like Randy Weingarten to come to Wisconsin and all these other leaders to gather together To call public attention to it is a necessary thing in this day and age Because again the bill may have passed a lot of these cuts are going to happen and It's going to take a very long time to recover from them if at all But one of the first things you do is try to stop the bleeding Stop letting things get worse
And that won't happen now until, you know, the next midterm elections, provided those midterm elections actually go on without being rigged or otherwise obstructed.
I'm Pat Crightlow.
This is the Civic Media Radio Network, Earl Ingram, Sean O'Malley, Joseph Peckie, all coming up in our eight o'clock hour.
We'll be back.
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.
Right now it's 53 degrees here in the Chippewa Valley.
It is 56 in La Crosse.
Oshkosh, you're at 56.
Amory, 55.
And in front of Rooster's Restaurant in Racine, it is 54 degrees right now.
Coming up later across the Civic Media Radio Network, the Maggie Dawn Show is on from 4 until 6.
And let's see.
Today on the program, she's got State Representative Jody Emerson from the Chippewa Valley showing up at about 4.30 this afternoon.
And then after 5 o'clock,
An interesting bipartisan slate here.
You've got former Republican Attorney General JB Van Hollen and Mike Tate, the former chair of the State Democratic Party.
They are two members of the Democracy Defense Project and they will be talking about the attacks on mail-in voting by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
I'm not aware of anybody else, honestly, who's going after mail-in voting.
with as much prominence as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
And why we're letting that happen is beyond me, but, but to, to credit Republicans.
And again, I've talked about that spinal fortitude that more Republicans need.
I'd like to see it out of current elected officials, but I'll take it from former elected officials like JB Van Hollen and others who are standing up as part of the democracy defense project and saying, no, no, no.
No, mail-in voting is working just fine.
It works fine in Wisconsin for Republican voters, for Democratic voters, for independent voters.
And so J.B.
Van Hollen and Mike Tate will be talking to Maggie Dawn about that coming up at five o'clock this afternoon on the Maggie Dawn Show.
In our Up North News newsletter that you can sign up for at UpNorthNewsWI.com, we've got a story there about Social Security and
You know, we just talked about the push for privatization of our public schools.
Well, social security is no less threatened, especially when you have a Trump cabinet secretary talking about how these Trump baby bonds might be kind of a backdoor way to privatize social security.
Yeah, I actually said that out loud.
The last time a Republican president started to make moves toward privatizing social security.
That would be George W. Bush.
It cost him dearly in his own midterm elections and harmed his second term because people know what they like.
They know that they like to work and when they're done working, they like to retire and they have paid into Social Security and the Medicare all their working lives and
what good does it do to work all your life, get to your old age and not be able to access the benefits that you've been paying for because you've got a group that A wants to just take care of billionaires and so they're going to take some of that money to pay for tax cuts and B wants to privatize it so that, you know, basically you're left to the whims of the casino we know is Wall Street.
And so in our newsletter today as an article from, you know, one, one Wisconsin
Social Security recipient talking about the importance of protecting Social Security in this day and age and not not monkeying with it So look for that article in our newsletter today and also we're going to talk to Melissa Baldoff in about a half hour here in our climate check about the lawsuit recently filed by several young people in Wisconsin filed by two nonprofit groups on their behalf
all about the climate and that if you have a state constitution like Wisconsin does in other states with language that is indicative of protecting the resources of the state for future generations, then maybe you should not have state laws that are specifically written to favor the fossil fuel industry.
as Republicans have wanted to do in Madison and in Washington DC as well.
So you can read more about that in our newsletter.
Head over to UpNorthNewsWI.com and click subscribe in the top banner there.
On the text line from Jim and Brookfield, thank you Pat for getting up early to record the interview with Randy Wyngarten of AFT.
A key measure of a society is the quality of the public school system.
She was able to clearly explain the ongoing assault on public schools by the Trump regime and the Scott Walker supported private school group.
Thank you, Jim and Brookfield, for that text.
I appreciate that very much.
There's a countdown app on my phone now, counting down to my next birthday next year.
So where we had 311 days, something like that.
turning 62.
I bring that up because of talking about privatizing Social Security and the whole change in thinking about retirement, that we used to have pensions, we used to have companies that wanted to take care of their workers, you work for us, we take care of you when it's time for you to retire, and we had many more pensions in this country.
But somewhere along the line, in this era of Reaganism, came the thought, well, you know what, you take care of yourself.
We'll give you these things called 401ks, and you can put money in their pre-tax, and then you pick the stocks you pick.
Do you want to be aggressive?
Do you want to be passive?
Do you want stocks?
Do you want bonds?
Domestic stocks, international stocks, you make all those decisions.
And if you choose right, you're going to make even more money.
But if you choose wrong, well, you know, tough hop.
A lot of folks preferred the security of a pension that was professionally managed.
So imagine my surprise when doing some retirement planning a week before last, and seeing that of all the different jobs I've worked at, I've got a couple of different 401ks here, a 401k there, a rollover, IRA over here, and seeing that one of the places where I worked many moons ago,
It was actually a pension plan, and it was a very small amount.
When I left that particular place of employment, I did not think anything of it.
What a lesson in compound interest and time.
You just leave that alone in that pension.
It grows to the point where, I know in 311 days or whatever, it starts to pay that pension at 62, not 65.
Now, it's not going to be that much.
It's you know, it's egg money.
It's it's maybe to put some some gas in the car, but it's something it's something reliable and it's a reminder of what we had and what we can get back to in this country instead of privatizing everything is actually taking taking care of the public of our workers instead.
Earl Ingram coming up after the news.
I'm Pat Critlow.
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