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Across Wisconsin on Civic Media, you're listening to Mornings with Pat Crichtlow powered by Up North News.
And now, live from Dallas, a city with so much traffic you're always an hour away from Dallas, even when you're in Dallas.
Here's the founding editor of Up North News, Pat Crichtlow.
Thank you, Parker Olsen.
It is 7.06.
Nice to have you back here.
Live from Dallas on this Thursday morning, October 9th, a getaway day, I hope.
that the
Oh,
boy.
Well, we've talked about switching up here.
We have, you know, buddy, Don Rue does it for a time and Parker does it on these trips.
And I tried to get some celebrity guest introduction people as well.
So yeah, we'll work on that.
You know what, we could actually invite the listeners to do that as well, because we have that voice note feature.
Yes, media app.
So here's the thing.
You write it down.
You use the voice note feature.
If you don't like it, you start over.
Start a new one.
Maybe throw a little punch line in there as well.
You know, keep it clean, of course, because it's got to go on radio.
But we are very much open to that.
We are very open to crowd sourcing the show intros.
Yes, I would love to hear from
Tony every day in the morning.
Yep.
Yep.
And he says, he only says two birds with one stone just made Parker a celebrity.
Oh, he was a celebrity long before this.
I mean, around whitewater, he never has to buy himself a drink.
That was whitewater woj.
Come on.
I
forgot about that.
So you can join us using the Civic Media app.
You can use that voice note feature.
You can send us a text message as well.
Now that we're done with the text to win contest for a little while, that's coming back though.
I mean, these these text to win contests, they're just getting increasingly popular.
And we wanted to thank I know this week yet, I have not officially thanked everybody who sent in texts during our show as part of the contest.
I mean,
I mean, look, I'm, I'm no Todd Alba.
No,
I'm no Jane Madden there.
But y'all did pretty respect CC.
I'm falling into the Texas stuff already.
Y'all did pretty respectable for being willing to text a radio show at six, seven o'clock in the morning and enter a contest.
So thanks to all of you for doing that.
I appreciate it very much.
So
You can now text in any old thing that you want.
You can use the voice note feature.
You can get in the comment sections on YouTube and Facebook.
If you're only hearing us on the radio and you're ever wanting, what do these goofballs look like?
You just head over either on Facebook or YouTube, either for the Up North News pages or the civic media pages.
And you can see what we do there and you can put things in the comment sections.
And you can see what other people put in the comment sections and say to them,
you should get a life.
You should not be writing such mean stuff this early in the morning.
If you don't like the show, turn the dial.
But we've got people that live to put little little comments like that in there.
So yeah, I think I think they'll be back a little later on this hour, because we will have Congressman Mark Pokan joining us to talk about the government shutdown, and also talk about the town hall meetings that he's been holding all across Western Wisconsin.
And you're saying
Wait a minute, Mark Polkhan is not the Congressman for Western Wisconsin.
No, he's not.
He's the Congressman for Southwestern and parts of South Central Wisconsin.
But Derek Van Orden's not doing any, so somebody's got to come meet the people and take their questions about all the looming cuts to healthcare programs and things like that.
And so Mark Polkhan's been doing that, so we'll talk to him about the shutdown.
And about the ongoing effort by Republicans to feel like, well, if they just say enough times that it's a Democrat shutdown, you know, that people will believe that.
But people understand math.
And the math says that Republicans have the White House, they have the House, they have the Senate, it should be their job to, you know, govern and pass a budget.
And they can't, they can't agree amongst themselves.
And so they need democratic votes.
And Democrats say, fine, we'll give you some votes.
How about you put back some of those health care cuts that you put in earlier this year?
And Republicans say, no, we don't want to talk with you.
Fine, then pass your own damn budget.
Go on, do it.
You have the majority.
You have the votes to do this if you could just agree among yourselves.
But it's always easier to blame other people when you can't do your own work.
I'm listening to Ron Johnson do it again this week and the stuff that he's saying, just the absolute garbage about how, you know, Democrats hate America, and that's why they don't want there to be a but how about you just work within your own party to get something done?
That's all you can do is just lash out at other people.
And it's not just Ron Johnson.
And it's not just Derek Van Orden doing that.
It's Wisconsin's own Sean Duffy, former Congressman from up north, who's now the US Transportation Secretary.
And on social media yesterday, he put up the little applause emoji, as he was applauding Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for video from South Beach in Miami, that showed some construction equipment being used
to dig up some pavement on a city street.
Not just any pavement on a city street, it was a crosswalk on a city street.
And not just any crosswalk, it was a crosswalk that was painted in rainbow colors.
And that really hurt Sean Duffy's Fifis.
He just could not
bear the thought of it.
Remember, he's the one who said after becoming transportation secretary that these rainbow crosswalks that let the LGBTQ community know that they do not deserve to be marginalized.
They do not deserve to be threatened.
This is as much their community as anybody else's.
But that hurts people like Ron DeSantis and Sean Duffy.
It hurts their manliness.
And apparently the way to
beef up that manliness is to, you know, show construction equipment, literally digging up, not painting over the crosswalk, not, you know, doing anything else to get rid of the paint job.
But to literally dig it up is how they got their jollies.
And a lot of right wing politicians, you know, move, you know, sharing that video.
And Sean Duffy doing the same thing when
he added the applause emojis.
And, you know, the responses, obviously, there have been some predictable responses from the right.
But I do like the way that some other folks responded to this video.
For example, one post says, the next time you think art doesn't matter, just think about how scared in 2025 fascists are about sidewalk chalk.
Another says,
I'm a straight man who walked across a rainbow crosswalk.
And somehow I survived without bursting into flames or crying about my masculinity.
Weird, right?
Yeah, I know.
And, you know, on it goes about, again, the people who love to invent the word snowflake are themselves the ones who are acting the most snowflake like
and one other post I'm seeing here kind of has the album cover from now that's what I call music and it says instead now that's what I call a distraction from the Epstein files which again I don't know how you can deny that that just seems to be where we are now that we're looking for anything right now of course with the health care part of the government shutdown debate what do we keep hearing
from Republicans, from President Trump and others, that it's all about, you know, illegals, you know, getting health care, which is so off the mark.
And again, I think most people already understand that undocumented immigrants aren't signing up for Medicaid benefits and other things.
They can't.
They're not documented.
They would risk being deported.
the things that are being cut are not cutting healthcare for undocumented immigrants.
It's cutting the healthcare of hardworking American families under the guise of hurting those undocumented immigrants, those illegals.
So you got to go after the LGBTQ, you got to go after the illegals, you got to go after DEI.
But in going after diversity, equity and inclusion, you end up going after a whole bunch of other folks who get
caught up in your, you know, race based politics, like deaf blind children in Wisconsin.
Remember, we talked the other day about how a program for deaf blind children is having its federal funding cut, again, in the name of wokeness that anything that singles out groups for what they consider special treatment is getting cut.
Well, the update on that story now is that that particular program, the Wisconsin Deafblind Technical Assistance Program, has had one year of its funding restored.
At the heart of it is that the grant money that would help these deafblind children in Wisconsin being routed through the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Well, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction does have language in its grant applications that says that where
where it can, it does try to give a percentage of its grant funds to either women owned businesses, minority owned businesses, businesses owned by veterans, or by the disabled.
And apparently all of these groups do not deserve special treatment.
Well, really veterans to and the disabled to that's what happens when you go after you know, the gaze or you go after, you know,
other racial groups that you feel like are getting special treatment is you end up lumping in all kinds of other folks who in your mind probably do deserve some special treatment, but you've managed to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
And all of this is to say
Why are we getting so caught up in destroying rainbow crosswalks?
Why are we getting so caught up in cutting funding for groups that you have some kind of a petty grudge with?
When we could instead all be governing together, instead of cutting the enhanced tax credits for the Affordable Care Act, which is at the heart of this government shutdown.
We could be saying, how do we improve the healthcare situation for Americans?
We hear all the time from the Ron Johnson's of the world about how bad the Affordable Care Act is, but here's the thing.
They've had 15 years.
Ron Johnson's been around now for 15 years.
He got elected the same time as the blowback from the Affordable Care Act when it first passed.
He and others have had every opportunity to do more to improve health care.
And yet all we've heard year after year after year after year is how they can cut health care to regular Americans.
And it's not working.
And so now they look for the other ways to call the, you know,
to create distractions from it.
So they're still working to cut your healthcare.
They're keeping the government shut down to cut your healthcare.
But they're trying so hard to pin it on undocumented immigrants or DEI or, you know, open borders or whatever other kind of stuff that they want to make up.
And poll after poll has shown that Americans are not buying this.
And now we're facing, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, the prospect of things like air travel being delayed and other things not happening as more federal employees are furloughed and threatened with not getting back pay.
Every government shutdown, every government shutdown that has been caused by Republicans has blown up in their faces because they keep forgetting that American taxpayers, while they're divided on many things,
While they're divided on many issues, do agree that because they pay taxes, government should work efficiently and effectively.
And if you're just there to shut it all down, you're wasting their money.
Most Americans don't like that.
We'll talk to Congressman Mark Bocan about this in about 15 minutes.
I'm Pat Crightlow.
This is the Civic Media Radio Network.
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Temperatures by and large around Wisconsin are in the 30s right now.
There are a few 40s scattered about the warm spot being 46 degrees down in Milwaukee.
It's also 46 degrees in Appleton.
But like I said, by and large the 30s, there are some 20s out there this morning in Manitou or I'm sorry in in Hayward rather and in Merrill Merrill Tomahawk and Hayward.
all coming in at 27 degrees right now, 28 degrees in Ashland right now, 27 degrees in superior.
So fall is here, like it or not.
And that's what that's where with the exception of Parker, of course, a warm cup of coffee really comes into play, which I finally have here.
It tells me that took you five days.
my daughter might be thinking it's time for me to go home.
Because the first three mornings here, she'd set the coffee maker the night before and so 430 in the morning, there's a hot pot of coffee ready to go.
And that was that was not the case this morning.
So I just got off from here.
I was like, Oh, that's somebody's saying, what time are you heading for the airport?
So the coffee's finally been made.
But looking looking forward to doing some traveling and getting back to beautiful Lake Wissota here later in the day.
Wisconsin's excited to have you back Pat.
I don't think so.
No, I think they're they're they're they're much more caring about the fact that temperatures are now in the 30s.
Although again, for people who have like their Packer hoodie and are ready to put that on, that's okay.
Packers will be playing on Sunday against the Cincinnati Bengals at Lambeau Field.
It's a later start at 325 kickoff.
And so pregame will begin at one o'clock Sunday on several civic media stations.
And if you hadn't heard earlier, we'll be facing the Cincinnati Bengals and quarterback Joe Flacco, who we just faced two games ago as the quarterback for the Cleveland Browns.
But he's been traded.
You know, it's really weird to me that Jake Browning was as terrible as he was for the Bengals.
Yeah, what three starts and now he's been benched and they trade for a 40 year old quarterback.
Yeah, I mean, that's that's got a sting if you're that if you're that guy.
If you go three games and they're done with you already.
But it it is the way of the NFL.
You have to I mean, Joe Flacco
I don't know that he's going to the Hall of Fame, but he's he's definitely proved to have some staying power.
He could.
He's tried and true.
He could.
Yeah.
So and thank you, by the way, in the comments section here, Alicia St.
Wisconsin loves Pat.
You know, I need just enough listeners to love Pat.
And then I'm good.
It doesn't have to be all five million of you.
I'm fine that way.
The Badger football team plays on Saturday at Iowa.
The pregame begins at four o'clock Saturday afternoon on some of the stations of the Civic Media Radio Network.
And then there's the burrs.
We haven't talked yet about them this hour, losing to the Cubs yesterday.
So they will try again today tonight to clinch that National League Division series with Chicago.
That'll be at Wrigley Field.
It's a late start pregame begins at 7 30 on several civic media radio stations first pitch a little after 8 o'clock tonight.
So again Apologies in advance for how tired Parker and I might sound tomorrow morning as we kick off a Friday.
However Friday, we've got the most of our usual crew
And so they will kind of lift us up and put us on their shoulders and curious across the Friday finish line.
We will have Mike Clemens here talking about the game.
He stays up all night every night anyway.
That's fine.
I mean, he is like the ultimate night owl for sports.
It makes him so
good.
I don't know when he sleeps.
I genuinely have no idea when he sleeps.
It's like between something like four and seven a.m.
seriously is like, and he probably catches a little catnap somewhere in there.
But we'll have him tomorrow.
Dr. Kristen Lierly, Mark Jacob, Jennifer Scholes, the former US Attorney Jim Santel, and, and hopefully me, depending on how the airlines work things out today,
live from the airport.
Yeah, that could be, you know, again, in this day and age, all I need is a laptop and a phone for a hotspot and a microphone and I can I can do the show from anywhere.
So might it be from the tarmac?
Yeah, yeah, it might be or or TSA jail.
I was gonna say for broadcasting from an airplane sitting on the tarmac all all things are possible.
We've got Mark Bocan coming up in just a few minutes here.
We will be talking about the government shutdown.
And then an hour later, we'll be talking to Joseph Hecke about state politics, especially the decision this week by Attorney General Josh Call not to run for governor, but instead to run for a third term as Wisconsin's Attorney General.
As you heard Earl Ingraham say on this show yesterday, he reached out to former Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes and Mandela Barnes confirmed that he is seriously considering getting into the race for governor.
And so we'll ask Joseph Peckie, what is the significance of all of that of Josh Colnack?
getting in of mandela barns potentially getting in and i'll ask him his thoughts on what's happening at the state capitol as well when it comes to pifas industrial chemicals and cleaning them up you might recall that not in this current state budget but more than two years ago in the last state budget republicans voted for 125 million dollars
to deal with identifying and cleaning up sites contaminated with PFAS industrial chemicals.
That stuff that's getting in our drinking water and causing health hazards.
And it wasn't spent because Republicans kept blocking the rules that would enable it to happen because heaven forbid some of the industrial polluters actually be pursued to help pay a fair share of the cost of the cleanup.
that some point the GOP has to stop carrying water pun intended for WMC Wisconsin manufacturers and commerce and actually look out for, you know, the rest of us who want clean drinking water.
And they'll tell you, well, we're just looking for exemptions for like, farmers who spread some of this industrial sludge who didn't know that there was PFAS in there.
Yeah, we agree.
So how about we write that exemption in a way where an industrial
company that was making all these things and dumping them can't put on a farmer's cap and go, Oh, yeah, me too, exempt me, make the taxpayers pay for it.
So last Joseph Becky, if there's a chance at reaching a compromise on that coming up in just over an hour.
But again, coming up next, Congressman Mark Pokan, I'm Pat quite low.
This is the Civic Media Radio Network.
You know, you can stay up to date on things.
We're covering it up with news by subscribing to our newsletters six days a week.
They come out now Monday through Friday.
Ellie Bordeaux puts those together and then I've got a politically themed one kind of a weekend review on Sunday mornings.
The newsletter today from Ellie certainly leads with the note of the Brewers losing to the Cubs yesterday but have a chance to win tonight.
She also has a story in there about how Eau Claire County is starting a new program to help coach people on recycling and knowing what goes where so that all that recycling actually can get recycled.
and use properly and so again to learn more sign up for a newsletter up north news wi.com uh on a news matter where people saying well wait how come you haven't said anything about the the uh you know ceasefire deal between israel and hamas and the prisoner swap and everything else
Only because again at the I will plead guilty to being old and curmudgeonly.
I hope it all works I want there to be peace I want them to you know figure it all out not have the terrorist attacks not have any more bombings and death as just up you know
I'll believe it as it comes together.
So it's not that I'm not happy.
It's not that it's not a discussion topic worth having.
I wish them well.
I just again, the proof is always in the pudding and let's see how things go from the steel that they've allegedly worked out.
I'm putting more of my effort into domestic politics and especially this shutdown that
Again, Republicans have the majorities, they could pass a budget, they choose not to in order to protect those health care cuts, and they're not inviting Democrats to negotiate.
Democrats like Congressman Mark Polkhan, who joins us now from Wisconsin, where he's been touring around the state, you know, and touring by and large the second congressional district, because the guy in the third congressional district seems to have had a problem
getting around the district.
Congressman Mark Polkan had joined us.
I've seen, I don't know if you froze up or not.
Congressman, are you hearing me?
I think we might have lost our connection with him.
So I'm going to just make this little adjustment here.
There he goes.
And we should see him click back in in just a moment.
Like I said, we had him on there and then it looked like the camera shot froze.
So hopefully we'll see the Congressman again.
and get into what he's been doing this week.
Again, as he noted, it's his third week back in Wisconsin, three weeks where they're not doing any of the public business that they could be doing.
They're also not swearing in, for example, new members.
We mentioned that there's a new member of Congress elected from Arizona, Speaker Mike Johnson, not even holding what's called a pro forma session or a very brief session to swear in this new member of Congress.
Well, Johnson says it's Democrats fault as soon as Democrats, you know, reopen the government.
Again, they don't have the majority.
But once Democrats reopen the government, they'll swear in this newly elected Democratic member of Congress.
A reporter pointed out to Speaker Mike Johnson that, you know, in the last government shutdown, you held pro forma sessions to swear in newly elected Republican members.
Well, well, that's just a distraction said speaker Johnson and moved on to the next thing every everything is a distraction with them.
No, this is the distraction is from doing things like, you know, putting the Epstein files out there finally, so that we can figure out why was the president of the United States mentioned in there.
So we'll
We'll see if Congress can maybe get its act together and if Speaker Mike Johnson can finally bring them back into session.
Congressman Polkhan, we've reestablished a connection with him and he joins us now.
Congressman, how are you?
Good, you know, living in rural America, as many of your listeners know.
I'm now working off of my phone, which has got a couple of bars, but you know, it sure would be nice if
we had something like a real broadband everywhere in Wisconsin.
Wouldn't it though?
Wouldn't it?
I mean, and to do that, of course, you'd need a working federal budget, which is where we are at all this.
So I mean, we, we've gone through this ad nauseam, we've established that Republicans have the majority and they could be doing something about this.
And yet, Congressman from Speaker Johnson's Senator Ron Johnson and others, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy again yesterday, working
so hard to label this as some kind of a democratic shutdown.
And they can read polling.
They know Americans understand who's at fault on this and that they don't believe them.
How much longer do they think they can keep up this facade?
You know, I don't know, I don't quite get their game plan because it changes almost daily a little bit on their messaging, especially at the White House level.
But
Last week, I got 85 calls all week about the shutdown.
We were getting up to 500 calls a day when President Trump was stealing funds from nonprofits earlier this year through Recisions.
And this year, I have gotten 14,435 calls so far on healthcare.
So I think I know what people are really watching, not the shenanigans of the Republicans trying to make some political point in Washington, but they understand that
In the next couple of weeks, we're going to get our new rate increases because of the big ugly law for the Affordable Care Act.
We're also getting group plan rate increases that they had to factor in that law.
And just to give you one example, I talked to an employer Friday night who said they got their new rate increases for next year, 41% increase.
And we got people on the Affordable Care Act.
that we've been told statewide, the average for this demographic, but a couple in the early 60s making 85,000 statewide, we'll see about a $17,000 increase next year in health insurance premiums through the Affordable Care Act because of the Republican action through the big ugly law.
So whether it be the half a trillion dollar cut to Medicare, whether it be everyone's rates going up, whether it be people going to be kicked off of Medicaid after the election in November next year,
or the very real effects of the next couple of weeks with people on the Affordable Care Act, people get what's a priority.
It's their health care and it's not, you know, whatever game it is that, you know, Mike Johnson and Donald Trump are trying to play.
And if I can just for a moment linger on that one group that you mentioned, maybe because I belong to it.
But look, we can say a lot about retirees and we can say a lot about young adults, young families, college students, farmers, there's no shortage of constituencies.
But
We did have a story from Up North News reporter Selena Heller earlier this week, a woman in La Crosse who was getting rather emotional talking about these looming health insurance premium increases because they're in the demographic of people in their late 50s, early 60s.
They are too young for Medicare.
And they've just been waiting and waiting to get on Medicare because they work for a place that doesn't offer health insurance or, you know, the health insurance is completely unaffordable or they are self employed and they are just waiting.
But in the meantime, at least we have the Affordable Care Act marketplace to get them there.
But that group in particular, some are realizing how tough it's going to be.
Others, like you said, they're they're a week or two or three away from getting a notice and getting the sticker shock of their lives.
Yeah, the 58 to 64 demographic is in the worst place.
If you're on the Public Health Act, those are going to be some of the biggest rate increases.
We've been told up to $24,000 you could see in Wisconsin.
The average will be more about $17,000 for people in that demographic.
But everyone is going to get that.
And the other thing that I should mention, because you know, obviously the Eau Claire area well,
I was just up there and, you know, they lost their two hospitals, 73,000 people, no hospitals.
You can't even call that a rural hospital when you have 73,000 people, but it still is by definition.
You know, they, in the big ugly law, because there's so many who are going to lose health insurance, that's uncompensated care.
You don't knock it sick.
You still go to the hospital.
That's going to cost about $434 billion, billion dollars across the country.
put a little band-aid on this gaping wound of $50 billion.
They're going to cover $1 out of $9, but when you don't cover $1 out of $9, you're going to have hospitals and nursing homes closing down across the country.
In Wisconsin, one of the three that's targeted is up in Osceo.
It's the Mayo Clinic Oak Ridge facility up there.
And you've got
people like Derek Van Orden in Congress who recently wants to pull away all the federal funding away from the Mayo Clinic as well as the city of Eau Claire and the village of Ellsworth and other people because they've somehow said something he doesn't like on the internet and
you know
it's a pretty scary time given you know people you know the most people think about can they afford their mortgage around do they have health care for their family can they maybe take a family vacation and if we're pulling away a real economic
you know, necessity for people.
It's a scary time for people.
What does it say then that somebody like a Congressman Derek Van Orden, or even the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, you know, saying, don't hold these town halls, you know, they love to tar the people their own constituents who are going to show up as somehow being like paid agitators or something.
And so that you've gone through the third congressional district, Derek Van Orden's district to do these town halls instead.
Is there any way that this works positively for people like Congressman Van Orden?
Not if they don't listen to their constituents.
And if you don't have town halls, you're not really listening to your constituents.
Because we had time when they canceled votes this week, my whole calendar was in Washington.
So we, with about 48 hours roughly notice, scheduled four town halls in Derrick's district in Richland Center in Verroqua, La Crosse, and Eau Claire.
People showed up.
in all of them, as well as the media, because they don't see their member of Congress talking about this stuff.
And, you know, I always used the Wisconsin smell test, you know, if he really did such a good thing with the big ugly law, and this is such a good fight over the shutdown, you'd want to go to every county in your district and brag about what you did and what you're doing.
And instead of doing that, you're hiding in your basement.
I mean, people get
that you don't have a message when that's the case so you know the rumors now they may pull next week we're already trying to assess do I go into another district or should I find three more communities in the western wisconsin district because Derek is obviously one of the the I guess biggest chickens in our delegation because he's never done an open public town hall in the three years he's been in office but you know people are it's a higher hurt in the third district than in my district
on what's going to happen on the Affordable Care Act when you look at the actual numbers people are going to have.
And I think, you know, people just have to understand that their member of Congress is actually giving them lies about what this is about.
And I'm going around doing truth telling on it.
Congressman Mark book hand is our guest talking about the government shutdown and again, the
their their hook, if you will, is that all of these cuts that they've made are all about making sure that that health care benefits can't go to undocumented immigrants.
And they use, I mean, just blatantly, you know, racist lines about, you know, if you're if you're an American citizen waiting for, you know, the ER, and there's some immigrant there who's going to get their health care first, blah, blah, blah.
Well, first off, you don't know that that's an immigrant.
They may be a citizen, just the same as you just not
the same skin color.
But again, can you talk about just how much of federal health care actually does go to undocumented immigrants?
Yeah, well, first of all, let me say the cuts to health care in general, they did the big ugly law, we're done to provide a tax cut for Elon Musk and Donald Trump and people who can afford to belong to Mar-a-Lago.
So first of all, they stole our health care to give rich people a tax break.
That's first and foremost in all of this.
But their argument that this is, I think, as JD Vance said, hundreds of billions of dollars, we're doing this because we want hundreds of billions of dollars of health care to go to their words, illegal aliens.
Well, here's the reality.
You know, I serve on appropriations.
I know a thing or two about numbers.
By federal law, not a dime can go to an undocumented person.
I'm going to use the proper terminology through Medicaid, Medicare.
or the Affordable Care Act.
Nothing can go directly to someone in that area.
The only little bit is in a program that was created under what was his name, President, Ronald Reagan, which is about 1% of the Medicaid budget.
So 1% of one of those bigger programs budgets is money that goes to hospitals for if you go there and you don't have health insurance, they don't check your papers or anything else.
you get coverage.
It can work for you or I if we didn't have health insurance or someone who may be undocumented, but that's a maybe possibly kind of could happen, not reality.
And that's 1%.
And if you don't have the money going to hospitals, Pat, here's the important part.
What happens is we all pay more for insurance to make up for it.
Exactly.
Congressman Mark Polkhan, great to catch up with you.
Thank you, sir, very much.
Yeah, thank you.
Appreciate it.
All
right.
Good to check in with you.
Safe travels around both congressional districts.
We'll be back with more.
I'm Pat Kretlow.
This is the Civic Media Radio Network.
You're listening to Civic Media.
Find the latest news, information and archives of all your favorite shows on the Civic Media website, civicmedia.us.
So there you go with Congressman Mark Polkan in our last segment.
We'll talk to Joseph Pecky in our next hour.
There's a lot of ground we cover every day from six to nine a.m.
And you can't necessarily catch it all.
I mean, I can I have to they pay me I sit here for three hours.
You may not necessarily so you should pot this program.
You can listen to us anytime by subscribing to our show as a podcast.
Look for mornings with Pat quite low on Spotify and Apple as well as civic media dot us and stay up to date on everything that we're
following, including what the civic media news team is following from places like our Chippewa Falls Newsroom, where we've got James Kelly standing by right now at 7.53 on this Thursday morning.
James, how are you?
Well, I've been better.
Yankees eliminated from the playoffs, but we still got
the blues.
Oh, yes.
My goodness.
You and you between you and the Yankees and Tony with the Guardians.
This is just getting to be the casualties are piling up.
Kind of killing our mojo here, guys.
No, we welcome more people onto the bandwagon.
We've always got room.
So you come join us anytime on there.
And, you know, there's always next year for your Yankees.
That's true.
But hopefully not.
Hopefully maybe the year after or sometime after that.
Let's see what James is following for stories in northern and western Wisconsin.
And you're going to start with an interchange project up there in the Twin Ports of Duluth and Superior.
What's going on there?
Yeah, so the Twin Ports Interchange project, aptly named, is going to be wrapping up this month for the most part.
There's still going to be some cleanup and landscaping work done next year, but this is perfect timing for this project to wrap up because this area is going to see a big traffic increase when the Blatnik bridge closes down for the reconstruction project.
So getting this done here is huge.
There's safer intersections.
They moved all the entrance ramps and exit ramps to the right side to just make it a little easier for people to get on and off.
The goal is to keep
those big freight trucks on the highway instead of driving through the city of Duluth, causing more traffic for everyone and just overall a little safer.
And that is very definitely needed.
We're talking about where you've got I-35 coming up from the Twin Cities and then you've got Highway 53 coming up through Superior, Wisconsin.
You've got I-535 in there, kind of a bypass and
I really like the part you said about keeping the trucks there because there's enough that have to go through the twin ports anyway on the city streets of Superior and Duluth, but to the extent that you can keep them on the freeways instead, all the better.
And yes, the timing really couldn't be better with the Blatnik bridge replacement coming in the not too distant future.
And we were talking about that, Parker, just the other day, the Blatnik bridge being one of those bridges that just
freaks some people out.
It is it is so high.
And
You know, there's there's always that concern of like, are the car rails really high enough?
Well, you know, can they ever be if you're going to Duke's to hazard your car off a bridge?
I mean, just try to avoid doing that.
Was it Jane Mattener that was saying that she's like terrified of bridges?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, and I've seen my fair share down here in Dallas, where like I said, every, every freeway here is a double freeway because they have lots of express lanes, which are good, but it makes everything
twice as wide and like every interchange is a double interchange.
So that the express lanes, you know, have their own interchanges.
It's just a beast.
And honestly, the closest I've seen to it has been up there at the twin ports, the way that they've got to, you know, tie everything together up there.
So again, good timing on getting the interchange project there wrapped up.
What's happening down at UW Stout?
I mean,
Look, as an old Claire grad, I can teased out about their football team and all the other sports stuff.
But they're going for e-sports now.
Yeah, well, Pat, I assume I'm correct in assuming that you're a big video game guy, huge.
You can assume that all you want is because I told you about being at that arcade the other day down here in Dallas, and I loved playing all these games from 40 years ago.
So yeah, if we're talking pole position or centipede or Galaga, I'm your guy.
But the games those kids are playing today, not so much.
They're pretty sophisticated.
Yeah, listen, I get it.
I used to like video games, but nowadays I just I can't keep up with these kids.
They're just way too good for me.
They have too much time on their hands.
But
the UW Stout officially unveiled this one million dollar arena.
It's got a lot of high end gaming computers, and it also has areas for like stream streaming on Twitch and spectators.
Spectators I never really understood for video games because you just watch on your phone or computer or television.
You can watch anywhere, but it sounds like a really big project.
Stout was the first
public university in Wisconsin to kind of establish this varsity eSports program.
So apparently it's going very well for them.
Well, Tony, Tony on YouTube, uh, kids these days.
Kind of where we are.
No, but I remember the first time that I saw a new story about eSports and they call it eSports because yeah, there are all these people who will be spectators for that.
And again,
There was nobody standing around watching me play Donkey Kong.
Okay, not unless you were setting a high score.
Yeah, maybe just weren't good enough
that
even that might not not have been good enough.
Maybe that was it.
But people love to watch again, it's much more sophisticated, you know, the graphics, some of them actually even have a plot, you know, to them as well.
And
So again, look, if this is where the attention is, if it's where the money is, and if there's any kind of an educational tie in, and I really hope there is, then go for it.
So that's fine.
All right, let's conclude on something that is as far away from video games as it is, and that is getting back to nature, getting back into the woods and forests of Wisconsin.
What's the DNR up to?
Yeah, the great outdoors.
They're seeking public comments for the North Central Forest Draft Regional Master Plan.
That's, you know, covering...
All the way up to Ashland, Douglas County, Barron, Chippewa County.
They're just kind of looking for ways that they can maybe expand state and national trails, better ways to protect the wetlands and streams and rivers.
They're going to be holding a couple of public meetings in early November, and they'll be accepting comments on the plan until December 7th.
I know Wisconsinites love their outdoors, so I'm sure they'll be more than happy to provide some of those public input.
Well, absolutely, because again, what most Wisconsinites understand is also finding balance in our for...
that you, you know, people go, Oh, you don't want anything to happen in there.
No, no, no, you can have recreation.
You can have, you know, develop some development on the fringes.
You can use it responsibly with the right balance.
But that only happens with some good public input.
So I'm glad you're telling folks about it.
James Kelly, follow everything that he's doing for us.
You can also catch his updates on 93 five tap that's WCFW HD two, or head over to the tap dot FM for more.
Thanks, James.
Appreciate
did it.
Have a good one guys.
All right, you as well.
Joseph Peckie coming up in our eight o'clock hour of our mornings powered by up front news here on the Civic Media Radio Network.
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