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You're listening to Mornings with Pat Cricklow powered by Up North News.
Now, for my Lake Minnesota studio, here is the founding editor of Up North News, Pat Cricklow.
Thank you Don, it's Thursday, September 18th, 806.
Nice to have you back here up north across the Civic Media Radio Network.
Parker Olson is our producer down in Madison Studio A2.
We're here with meteorologist Brittany Merleau and of course Chad Holmes from 98.9, WXCO and Wausau.
And guys, I just while getting some creamer for my coffee, took a look and was reminded of what I have for lunch today.
And so we're going to play the game.
My lunch is better than your lunch.
Because yesterday last night, folks, get yourself a spouse who will make pizza crusts from scratch.
And so we every so often will have homemade pizza because she'll she'll get out the Mixmaster and she'll make up a big old ball of dough and turn that into two different pizza crusts so that we can so we can decorate our pizzas however we like.
And can we talk about homemade pizza when you get control over all the things, you know, right?
The whole ratio of cheese and garlic and, you know, all the
What did you go heavy on pat?
What
did I go
garlic?
And yet she's still married to me.
Pepperoni and mushroom and sun dried tomatoes.
I don't know what Brittany, if you were building your own pizza, what would what would you go heavy on?
I would do gosh, I do pepperoni, green peppers, mushrooms, black olives, I would throw everything.
I don't know.
Okay, Chad, a messy pizza, but that's all right.
Chad, making your own pizza.
Sausage onions and green peppers.
Sausage onions and green peppers.
No, that's all right.
I learned because the other kind of pizza we make is we'll make a deep dish one.
I'll make that in a cast iron skillet.
She'll make the dough and the recipe that I have for that includes once you've put the other stuff in after the mozzarella is just a little bit of parmesan and just a little bit of olive oil.
and just a teeny, tiny bit more of garlic.
So it's right there on the top.
Do you realize people are still trying to eat breakfast right now?
And I'm over here getting them all set for lunch already.
So
I've got
some homemade pizza standing by that I just had to brag about.
You can't stop thinking about it.
And I mean, for us morning folk, we eat lunch early in the morning.
I was gonna
say, my lunch is 52 minutes away.
So, you know, this works out just fine for me.
Brittany's folks are having their breakfast right now.
Some of them getting a little wet in the process here.
Yeah, they are.
We've got some scattered showers, light sprinkles moving in, especially up in the north woods, far northeast.
We're seeing that towards the Rhinelander and Managua area, then also south and west by La Crosse, the Mississippi River Valley and south.
You're seeing a few of those sprinkles moving in too.
And we're statewide seeing more clouds out there.
So a darker day, but we will see spots of sunshine.
A lot of sunshine is holding on near Milwaukee right now.
But what we've got happening is a
front that is slowly dropping through the state today.
It's unstable, so it's sparking some of these showers and they will spark again later on this evening, probably after five o'clock or so.
could be anywhere but I'm thinking further north is where those are going to target.
Highs today will be a little bit cooler up north only reaching 70 degrees and then down south you're still hanging on to that heat hitting the mid 80s still.
So that's our day today and then tomorrow it is going to stay mostly cloudy it is going to get breezy or that system itself the low pressure is going to get closer and closer and it does move in Friday night Saturday and Sunday so that's going to bring some widespread rain.
heavy totals are possib up to two inches in plac if you keep getting onr and I'd say at least a half spread rain by the time the this all ramps up fri and sunday and it drags
Okay, well, I mean sometimes you get the perfect September weekends and sometimes you got to keep the gear handy Parker my apologies and come to you next pizza toppings I Mean any meats really
any
sausage?
Let's let's
throw a grenade in the middle of this.
All right, everybody Tony in capital letters.
Whoops Tony in capital letters
Pineapple.
I'm fine.
Followed by three or four exclamation points.
We'd like to thank Tony for his service.
He will no longer be part of Mornings with Pat Cratlow.
I mean, come on.
Pineapple.
You know what?
I just tried.
I went up north to Cable and there was this pizza place and they had mangoes on their pizza.
And it was so different.
It's so interesting.
I decided to try it.
And I'm a talent here, right?
I like the classic pizza.
It was actually good.
Working a life.
Okay.
Tony also says it's cloudy and rainy up in Ashland, so much better than the 80s.
Robin Tigerton says I love a homemade pizza, onions, cucumbers, ham and hamburger.
Cucumbers.
Yeah, that's a new one on me.
Fall
colors
along 29 west of Shawnaw are looking beautiful.
He took some pictures.
Let's see.
I also missed some of what he had earlier.
He said he had the air conditioning going in Shawnaw.
back when the temperature hit 89 and felt like July at times.
He had a mowing job in a doctor's appointment in Chano yesterday and then had spaghetti and meatballs at the Chano cafe, which is also not a not a bad way to go.
So, you know, all kinds of good meals.
Brittany, thank you so much for playing stack that pizza with us.
And you got my tummy grumbling.
Thank you.
I know.
All right.
Talk to you a little bit later.
Yeah.
Now we've got Chad who's working all kinds of high school football games and not getting anything like a delicious homemade pizza by and large.
You're getting just, what'd you say last week?
You just bring like your own fruit snacks or something?
Or is that just Parker who eats
those?
That's not me.
Okay, concession stand hot dogs and things like that.
So anyway, you're looking forward to your games this week.
Yeah, I got one tonight and tomorrow.
So anything to
avoid thinking about
the state of the world,
how this country is falling down a rabbit hole here.
So I, I'm doing my best here, Pat, but I am livid this morning.
And I guess when, I mean, I was doing the big high school sports show last night, I get home and I see what ABC did.
And it's, it's, it's ridiculous.
And I don't know how to go about this right now.
I don't, maybe you can help me out here because I am just, I am just
Beyond Because we're seeing here in wasa too.
I mean there's a controversy this week because a alder person Made a comment concerning Charlie Kirk and be all we gotta fire him I mean what is going on here?
And now we have the government trying to pick winners and losers and if it's one thing we have a responsibility when we have a microphone
And it's freedom of speech, but there is responsibility.
You don't have the right to be here.
If I say something really, really stupid, then obviously our bosses would have the complete right to say,
exactly,
we
don't
want to hear anymore.
But it's so one way.
I went through this morning, the last hour, I spent some time talking about the fact that we have Jimmy Kimmel and others who make
I think comments that are not nearly as bad as what Brian Killme did last week, what...
Talking about euthanizing the homeless,
right?
what Jesse Waters did in the last week, talking about civil war and vengeance and all of that, not what Greg Gutfeld did when he said that conservatives should embrace the term Nazi, not there's crickets.
Yeah, yeah, not to mention the horrible things they said after Melissa Hortman was assassinated in Minnesota over the summer.
So I mean, none of them
have clean hands on this they are simply using this as an excuse for a power play and going after media that they think will submit and so far national media has been extremely submissive and this one from ABC is especially frustrating because they saw the Stephen Colbert thing they know
It had nothing to do with money.
It had nothing to do with speech.
It was complete politics on the behalf of Trump and the owners of Paramount and trying to get a deal done.
ABC knows all this.
And yet they caved to pressure anyway.
And I mean, you can see why corporate media, this isn't exactly their golden era right now, shall we
say.
And also, again, it's a combination, yes.
We need some courage being shown in that realm, but also it is so and I would say use of the term un-American to see what Brendan Carr, the FCC commissioner did.
This all started yesterday.
He went on Benny Johnson's podcast, who was a far right provocateur and he basically said he's going after ABC and Disney and Jimmy Kimmel and
We are seeing things that have not been done before by government entities.
We saw on, did you see on the Rose Garden lawn?
Well, there's no law anymore, but
uh, this lab the concrete stand
when Trump was getting ready to fly off to Great Britain this week He got a couple of questions.
He didn't like because basically he was asked, you know, how much money have you made since you became president again?
Because his family is just raking it in right now.
Oh, yeah in his position and then he got on Jonathan Carl and said, you know ABC paid me 16 million dollars.
We're gonna go after you next Yeah,
I'm exactly
president of the United States saying that you know in at the White House
Again, we've
drawn the parallels to what happened in Hungary with Viktor Orban becoming an autocratic, well, basically a dictator in everything but name, I guess, and it started in large part with this war on all the media there and on all of the universities there and got enough of them to either, you know, kowtow or to be taken over
by billionaires who were friendly with the ruling party.
And that is exactly what Trump is trying to do here.
And so when ABC thought, well, or CBS, well, we'll placate him and we'll settle this out of court for $15, $16 million.
Did you really think that was going to make things easier on you?
Now you've basically admitted guilt without admitting guilt, but you're guilty in their eyes.
And you are just fair game now.
And again, until some of these entities
Really start to push back and and by the way that goes for colleges and universities too There's been a couple that have but too many others have been too quick to settle and you know sell out themselves and sell out their first amendment and It's going to take a lot more courage from a lot more people now.
I get that it's easier said than done I'm not sitting in their offices, but I'm looking at their offices anyway and going You got to try harder to stand up for actual American values
and also everybody needs to say
This is not acceptable.
It is not acceptable for the president of the United States and members of its administration to use their powers to basically say, we're going to stop a merger because we don't like your political speech, or we're going to remove somebody, or if you don't remove somebody, we're going to make trouble for you.
That is just completely against what this country has been about, whether it's been a conservative or a liberal in office.
idea that there has to be a litmus test on whether or not you're saying nice things about Donald Trump in order to have a merger put through I don't I mean this is just this is unprecedented.
Oh, yeah
So much of what it is.
Now, PJ gets on YouTube and says cancel your Hulu and Disney subscriptions.
And there are people doing that to make a statement to ABC.
I mean, I canceled my Washington Post subscription when it was clear that Jeff Bezos was going to turn the Washington Post into something that would not hold Donald Trump accountable.
It won't make all the difference in the world.
But each one of those is a sign that
members of the American public understand the stakes and they're not willing to just go, eh, you know, what are you going to do?
I guess I'll keep doing what I'm doing.
These little acts, they do add up and they are a way of getting your voice out there.
Your voice isn't as powerful as the powerful, but with enough people, it can make a statement.
So I just, I hope people hear your words and don't just get complacent about it.
No, and it's just...
When you hear it, you can't just say, well, that's the way it is.
And that's, you know, when I heard that last night, it was just, it was another shot.
And I just, and I understand the battle of ideas, but using the power of the way that this administration is using it is wrong.
People call it out and say, this is wrong, but it's wrong on every level.
you go ahead and call it wrong.
I'm going to call it an American, because that's that's exactly what I think it is.
Chad, Chad Holmes, you can catch him on 989 WXC on Warsaw.
As long as the powers that be, let us hang on.
I will send you the check for this, this session with my my psychiatrist
anytime.
anytime.
I'm happy to do
that.
When we come back, we're going to talk about the opening bell with Sean O'Malley about your money and the markets, including did the Federal Reserve today cave to pressure from the President?
Or were they doing what was necessary as somebody drags the economy to the verge of stagflation?
That's coming up.
I'm Pat Krightlow.
This is the Civic Media Radio Network.
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Welcome back.
we've got Milwaukee Brewers baseball tonight.
Game three of their series against the Los Angeles Angels.
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Let's talk about your money in the markets with Sean O'Malley eventually.
I mean, we're going to get into the Federal Reserve and interest rates and jobless claims because things are still soft and the index of leading economic indicators, which isn't great.
There's mortgage rates.
There's stagflation.
There's tariffs.
Sean, let's begin with pizza.
Why don't you build your perfect pizza for us?
What are we putting on that, baby?
Well, I have a great recommendation and I loved Mr. Merlot's description of the pizza place and cable.
And considering how many times I have driven through and will continue to drive through cable because it's right between my two houses, I got to stop in to try that one.
But it reminded me of one that I had up here in Bayfield not long ago, in fact, at a local place, St.
James Social.
And the topping was, believe it or not, peaches
Barata, crumbled bacon and just a sprinkling of thyme.
And it was really lovely.
What's Barata?
And where was
in
Okay.
And if I ever get an invitation to get on that boat up in Bayfield, like now I got a place to stop as well along the way for some for some vitals.
So this would be good.
All right.
How late do you typically sail up there before you have to put things away, put your toys away for the winter?
No,
I got to fill out all the forms and they'll be taking that out Yeah, there's a new rule that went into into effect up here on shawamakin points all the marinas You cannot have your boat in past the end of October now the reason that this rule exists is due to my father.
Oh, no True he
absolutely true story.
He loved to do something you call the sale November Club.
And so
he would keep his
halloween blizzard
Yes.
Oh my goodness.
of that.
That makes perfect sense now because I was in the Twin Cities for the Halloween Blizzard and the threads stretched all the way up into, you know, Duluth, Ashland, Bayfield.
And oh my gosh, I never even thought about that angle of it.
Yep.
totally see it now.
the lake.
Oh, yes, we did.
Yeah, with 30 inches of snow to boot.
Yay.
All right.
Well, now that we've got that image in us to say, you know, life gets rough at all kinds of times, it got rough for a time in 1991.
It's a little rough right now, given the geopolitics and everything that's out there.
So you had the Federal Reserve through the Federal Open Market Committee, announcing a cut in short term interest rates.
We've talked a bit about why you would do that.
What's your own overview?
of, you know, what it is they discussed or what they ultimately ended up doing?
Because we know everybody, I mean, the administration has been talking loud and long about, you know, Trump has been saying, I want rate cuts, I want rate cuts.
Well, congratulations, sir.
You got your rate cut yesterday from the fed open market committee.
However, it was only a 25 basis point cut only one quarter of 1%.
So it was not, you know, it wasn't Christmas.
The markets were, you know, a little mixed.
Not all the indices were up on the stock market.
So I think it was.
Arguably prudent due to the soft jobs number.
It definitely would be enough to.
You know, go back to the White House and say, hey, we did what you wanted.
But they went even further when they indicated that there are two more cuts that they're considering later this year.
So that sort of sets the stage for, you know, possible future cuts.
But that also means that what they're seeing in the data that not all of us may see or not all of us may get is that the economy is continuing to soften.
Yeah, I mean, we're seeing that in a lot of
Right, right.
We had a big surprise last week with 263,000 initial jobless claims That was the biggest since I forget which month back in 2021.
I think it was April or August or something like that So a long long time We had another announcement this morning fortunately a little tamer 231,000 initial jobless claims, but as we mentioned I think in one of the earlier shows
there are now more job seekers than there are open jobs.
And that hasn't happened a long time.
So just not a real bright employment picture out there.
The closest thing to bright would be mortgage rates that had been falling ahead of the announcement on interest rates.
And what has that done for refinancing?
And what's your overview of that?
Yeah, so it was interesting that the mortgage rates went down before the announcement and it drove up demand by almost 60% from the prior week.
So a lot of people looking to capture those lower mortgage rates.
And I think a lot of that's driven by, you know, trying to consumers try to lower their costs.
They're dealing with, you know, increased prices pretty much across the board.
There is one one other bright spot though.
There's gonna be your fuel costs will probably be going down OPEC has recently agreed to increase production significantly That's gonna mean that US producers are gonna have less incentive to produce because the price won't be worth it But you as a consumer will probably be paying less of pump very shortly probably estimates are as much as like 25 30 cents down per gallon versus what you're seeing now so
Good news on the cost cutting side, yeah, with the mortgage rates and the fuel costs coming down, but everything else is not going the same direction.
We're talking to Sean O'Malley about your money in the markets.
We'll continue after the break, followed by Joe's Becky on this Thursday morning, September 18th.
I'm Pat Critello from Up North News, live from Lake Wissota on the Civic Media Radio Network.
This is normally the time you hear me say you should sign up for our newsletter at Up North News by going to UpNorthNewsWI.com and clicking subscribe in the banner at the top of the homepage.
But I'm not going to say that.
Kind of did.
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dot substack dot com and be part of civic media's new daily newsletter.
Let's talk about your money and the markets after the opening bell here with Sean O'Malley and the that that ever 11 stagflation that appears to be hanging on.
I mean, you've got the Fed cutting interest rates a quarter point.
But I mean, nothing in there.
says to me, well, that should take care of inflation, you know, and you've got a sluggish job market.
I sense a lot of treading water still.
They're trying to not make any sudden moves.
I mean, I think part of it is they're probably a little bit afraid of doing what they did back in 2022, where they kept raising rates far further than anyone expected them to, and far more aggressively, and they really overshot the mark.
then.
So they're trying to take a more measured response at this time.
Certainly, you know, they're making the administration, the current administration happy with that move.
But yeah, it's, it's sort of a placate to the soft employment market without too much of a raise in rates so that you're going to make inflation even worse than it already is.
So there are a lot of factors in play.
But we know that we're, everyone is looking and expecting an overall softer economy going forward.
Well especially when you've got the like we like to say the on the one hand inflation on the other hand you know employment and now you've got this while you've got things in both hands you've got the third thing is political pressure you know punching you in the gut while you're looking at the things in your two hands here so I mean it's not an easy time to try to actually manage the economy.
Yes, yes, I try to make these things radio friendly where I can and fine Let's let's conclude with the tariff watch the tax tally on the American consumer and what's the tote board looking like?
How much we as consumers have had to pay in additional taxes through the tariffs.
So this is going to be the tariff watch tax tally.
Lots of alliteration there to make it easy to remember.
So the tariff watch tax tally as of the end of August is $183.6 billion.
So that's without a farm
So
We're
since moved on, moved on.
And even if they come back, they'll be the mistrust.
And I know we talked about it last week in conclusion, but it really sticks with me as you drive around here, you drive around and you see cornfields, but you see a lot of soybean fields and those those soybeans.
I mean, it's looking good.
It's looking good until they're either left rotting in the field or piling up and rotting because I believe the tote board for China ordering soybeans is does that tote board still read zero as far as we know?
and
biggest buyer of soybeans.
But they have decided, and I'm sure this is supported by, you know, President Xi Jinping of China, that they're not going to order a single soybean from the US, which seems to be what's happening.
And they ordered everything from Brazil instead.
And I know exactly what you're talking about with respect to those fields.
I drive, you know, past them between the two houses, I see tons of corn out there.
I see tons of soybeans.
And nothing has been harvested yet, and I'm wondering, will it?
I'm wondering, speaking of Brazil, maybe we could,
could we import their Supreme Court?
a
willing to
could be
Yeah, against the former president trying to stage a coup.
Boy, a Supreme Court exchange would be grand.
Sean O'Malley, finance and economics expert joining us on Thursday morning.
Thank you, Sean.
Appreciate it.
Have a great day.
All right.
Yep.
Good to see you.
It is 840 right now, and we'll talk more about the state of, well, geopolitics, media politics, whatever you want to call it with.
Joe's Pecky.
Joe, I think I finally learned my lesson.
I'm no longer gonna ask how are you?
I keep looking for the perfect answer to how are you?
I think the right thing is to just stop asking and to find a new a new opening question.
Yeah, because there's no great answer to that one, especially after recent events involving, you know, a president pushing another talk show host off the air and a congressman continuing to use the First Amendment like toilet paper.
Yeah, you know a week ago We had a pretty hard conversation in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination and My take on it was that we just need to declare and decide these are politically violent times and that that acceptance of that reality is the first step in Finding our way out of a politically violent period of time
And so if you ask one week later, have things gotten better or worse in the wake of Kirk's murder, the answer is unequivocally that things have gotten worse, that what has happened in the last week is not concerning.
It is deeply alarming.
This is happening.
And what I'm talking about specifically in the last 24 hours,
is the government, the federal government threatening broadcasters, corporations in this country who air things like comedy and saying, you are, you haven't taken part in speech we disagree with.
And so we can do this the hard way or the easy way.
And the capitulation by ABC and Disney
to pull Jimmy Kimmel off the air for a joke about Donald Trump that was, if we're being honest, like, pretty benign.
Yeah.
It wasn't a great joke, right?
It
wasn't helpful.
It wasn't a reason.
It was an excuse.
And for Brendan Carr, the head of the FCC, who in the past has said things which demonstrate he understands
We are in a very bad place if the government is trying to engage in censorship.
And now as the head of the FCC is engaging in that censorship himself, we have crossed another red line.
And we just need to be as clear-eyed about that and about the current threat to the First Amendment this week as we were about the fact that we live in politically violent times last week.
Yeah, and and it's not, it's not going to get better anytime soon.
And here's here's one way it's not going to get better.
And I wish I had better news for folks.
But I have to say, here's how it's not going to get better.
In the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder, there was a lot of talk about Charlie Kirk's record, his legacy, his quotes.
And in normal times, that would have eventually faded
and people would have focused more on we can't have this kind of political violence in the country and we would all unite around that.
But instead, what is happening right now is that as you're seeing this, you know, vengeance campaign that puts the First Amendment in a woodchipper and starts getting people fired and shows canceled and organizations threatened with defunding, the response to that is going to be
You know what?
Let's remind ourselves what these people were saying.
And Charlie Kirk's words are going to come back.
I've already seen this online.
People going, hey, by the way, before we turn this guy into a martyr, before we turn him into a saint, here's a reminder of what he had to say.
And that's simply going to incense the people on the right even more.
But I think that's the next step is to remind people we are not.
I'm sorry, we are not doing the deification of Charlie Kirk.
We're not doing it today and we're not doing it tomorrow.
Think about the extraordinary privilege one has to have people in the wake of their passing, whether untimely in the in the case of Charlie Kirk, or at the end of a very long life, like Robert Redford, who we lost this week, and to have people
be trying to figure out what your legacy is and what your time here meant while you were here.
That is fine to do.
And the notion that people who are just saying this is what Charlie Kirk had to say about this issue, whether that's gun control versus the Second Amendment, whether that is his constitutionally protected, even if
By my count pretty gross take on members of the trans community or the intelligence of black women to have people engage in a dialogue and share the things that that person said when they were with us Be grounds for you're going to lose your opportunity to make a livelihood The government is going to censor your speech as a comedian like
Holy cow have we lost the plot folks.
I don't know a ton about Charlie Kirk other than some of the most heinous things he said But I believe and I've been told by my conservative friends that he is someone who cherished the First Amendment and understood that its most important purpose was to protect unpopular speech right and use somebody who
was engaging in in some quarters things that people wanted to hear and other quarters people did want to hear.
If the First Amendment doesn't apply to speech you disagree with, then we are truly lost.
Well, I want to agree with you.
But I just have to ask myself, if this had happened instead to Sean Hannity or Nick Fuentes or any of those other folks, would Charlie Kirk
be doing just that.
Would he be saying, hey, hey, wait a minute, we got to stand up for the First Amendment instead.
Right now, one of the few people I've seen doing that is Tucker Carlson of all people.
Once again, like Liz Cheney and another thing, when I realize that I'm on the same side of an issue as Tucker Carlson, we are living in the crazy times.
Crazy is certainly one way to put it.
I'm trying to see if I have it here.
I do not have Mr. Carlson's quote.
But yeah, I agree with him, too.
What he is saying is when the government controls what you think and what you can say, then we are truly lost.
And so that's where we find ourselves today.
And that's the long answer to, how
you doing,
I think that Tony's got a new one.
He puts up on YouTube.
What's the state of the dumpster fire today?
That's my new, how you doing?
That's a good candidate for it, perhaps.
He also says, my wife asked last night, so when do we go?
You look back in history and wonder why people didn't get out.
Are we there now?
I honestly didn't know the answer.
And I mean, again, I'm not trying to be flippant about it.
I love my country.
It's worth fighting for.
But yeah, my passport's up to date.
We
back with more with Joseph Pecky and a few final notes and news from Lake Wissoda right after this on the Civic Media Radio
Network.
Find the latest news, information, and archives of all your favorite shows on the Civic Media website,
civicmedia.us.
radio stations.
Up North News is part of Courier Newsroom, a national pro-democracy news network filled with podcasts and newsletters.
Like the one from Mark Chick, we'll talk to him tomorrow about his latest newsletter, media timidity from some cowardly journalists
after the Charlie Kirk murder.
You can read more at stopthepresses.news or couriernewsroom.com.
Joseph Peck, he continues with us now.
And if you missed it earlier, we're going to play back just a snippet of audio as WEAU13 news in Eau Claire actually reached out to Derek Van Orden about his threats to defund the city of Eau Claire, one of the largest cities in his district.
And Derek Van Orden was his usual jerk self and hiding behind
the federal code that defines domestic terrorism.
But without actually saying how, here's him being asked about all the tweets and he's been threatening to get all these people fired for their reactions to the Charlie Kirk murder.
And he equates their reactions to domestic terrorism in a very cavalier and condescending way.
Give a listen.
We asked the congressman about these posts saying they don't seem to be calling for violence.
Here's what he said.
I'm going to say this one more time.
If you look up the US code and read it, it is crystal clear that what they are saying falls under this US statute.
So it's a little frustrating when I have clearly intelligent people like yourself who can read that you don't do your homework before you conduct this interview.
So again, the word you're looking for is jerk.
And he said oh, it's crystal clear if you read the statute you look at the statute it's it's about domestic terrorism and inciting violence and Criticizing Charlie Kirk or even just putting up his own words doesn't come anywhere near that but it's nice of him to say that you know Clearly intelligent people who can read don't do their homework Joe
No in full.
No, I would bet not because
Hate speech is not treated differently than free speech or popular speech.
And the Supreme Court has routinely upheld that.
You cannot incite people to violence.
You cannot call for people to be harmed.
And saying, I disagree with this thing that Charlie Kirk said, and then putting it out there.
It's not hate speech.
It is protected free speech in this country.
And the fact that Derek Van Orden does not like it or does not agree with that sentiment does not make it unlawful.
And thank goodness he is but a mere member of Congress and not at the head of the executive branch like Donald Trump is.
But what we are seeing is it kind of doesn't matter.
It's a distinction without a difference.
because this executive branch has overstepped and is now trying to police speech in this country.
And that is deeply problem problematic.
Oh, yeah, that's policing speech.
It's the thought police, however you want to frame it.
I would recommend to folks to go over to the weau.com website.
The headline is Congressman Derek Van Orden discusses bill surrounding political violence.
You can hear the full report.
But to their great credit at the bottom of the story, they also put the entire 18 minute raw interview.
and I've seen excerpts of that raw interview where Derek Van Orden just talks over the reporters there are two reporters talking to him and he just talks over them rather than waiting to hear the question and answering the question because he's so much smarter than the reporters and just feels the need to talk over them and I give Channel 13 a lot of credit because after a lot of you know a lot of local media in the third district have not really given him critical coverage but proposing this bill that essentially you know
Counts all anti Charlie Kirk speeches domestic terrorism.
I'm glad they jumped right on this and tried to actually show who Derek van Orden really is We are finally getting more of that view out to his constituents than previously.
Yeah, I Am gonna botch who made this joke, but I do think it's important to remember that it's okay to joke and Someone on one of the social media platforms yesterday said thank God Rodney Dangerfield
and Don Rickles aren't around anymore because we would all be really, really sad to see them locked up and imprisoned.
Yeah.
I mean, again, heaven forbid.
And it's going to be an expensive lesson for Van Orden and others as anything like this is challenged.
Right now, we're only hearing about the firings, the threats, the cancellations.
They will eventually be followed by the lawsuits.
And it's going to be long and drawn out and very expensive to taxpayers.
And I do still feel like it's going to cost them a lot.
next year in the midterms as otherwise moderate or even lean right voters go, this is not really a group of people I want to keep in power.
They were concerned about high prices.
They were concerned about an economy that isn't working for folks.
And rather than focus on
making people's lives better and addressing that.
You instead have a mega majority Congress that has abdicated its constitutional responsibilities to be a check and balance.
You have an executive branch that is overreached into nonsense like attacks on the First Amendment.
And voters are seeing that.
And it is not to the political benefit of Republicans.
They can still get smart.
They can figure this out.
But I'm not holding my breath.
No.
So we'll, of course, be following this on all of the civic media shows until or unless, you know, the FCC wants to come down in some other way, shape, or form.
But in the meantime, we'll keep doing our talk shows.
We'll keep doing our sports.
We've got the Brewers who are playing again tonight.
And Joe, we're now in the season of trepidation for me, because we already know things are going well.
So now, as you're waiting for that injury, like the Angel's Pitchery yesterday, who got drilled on his pitching arm by a 107 mile an hour hit, I'm living in fear now for the final two weeks of the season.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I so needed to hear that.
You know what?
That applies to a lot of things.
Don't pre-greave.
I like it.
Joseph Pecky, thank you as always.
I appreciate it so much.
Talk to you next week.
All right.
Again, tomorrow we'll have our usual Week in Review panel.
We'll have former U.S.
Attorney Jim Santel and journalist Mark Jacob and Jennifer Schulze.
We'll have a key of the keel from Courier Newsroom, Dr. Kristen Lierly, and Mike Clemens giving us sports.
I'm Pat Crightlow, founding editor of Up North News.
Enjoy your Thursday.
See you bright and early tomorrow morning, 6 a.m.
here up north.
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