It's a wake-up call in more ways than one.
Time for some shit you need to know.
Well if you remember yesterday we talked about the president floating the idea of getting rid of the federal gas tax for a little while and we talked about how it was about 18 and a half cents and was that ever gonna really make a difference to anybody and the president said well you know money is money which is true and we figured it would just skate through well that's not
really the case congressional leaders are pumping the brakes on the president's plan to suspend the federal gasoline tax they're wary of taking a political gamble with relatively little payoff for americans at the pump so where does the gamble come from and why are we not going to really be affected well i told you 18 cents a gallon is not going to make that big a deal when gas is at five bucks republicans and democrats alike though are agreeing on this they said yesterday that they're open to the idea of temporarily
the 18 cent per gallon tax and that they'll discuss the possibility over coming days but at the same time one day after Trump's call to action more than two months into the Middle East war that's caused these prices for fuel both gasoline diesel everything to shoot way up congressional leaders were not throwing any weight behind legislative proposals they're preferring instead to wait and see whether Trump will make a more direct appeal to Congress which as far as
It goes, he needs to.
He can't unilaterally decide, not that that has stopped him before, but he cannot unilaterally decide.
I'm sorry.
My tongue is not cooperating with me this morning.
And that's a sentence you probably don't usually hear from people, but it's true.
So anyway, they're gonna wait and see.
Because, like I said, he can't just decide to drop the tax.
He needs congressional approval for that.
So Mike Johnson, the man who usually bends over backwards to do exactly what Donald Trump said, came out yesterday and said that it is certainly an intriguing idea, which is corporate speak for, yeah, we'll not be doing that.
But hey, interesting idea, no stupid questions.
Yes.
So Mike Johnson said, like I said, it's an intriguing idea, but that Republicans have to wait to assess and consider potential unintended consequences before they move forward with the bill.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise from Louisiana, he helped set the chamber's calendar, did not promise a vote on the issue.
So on Monday, leaders said,
Leaders were said to be discussing how to proceed according to people familiar with the discussions who were granted anonymity to speak candidly.
Now the trepidation for now to lift the federal gasoline tax underscores what Republican leaders are worried about and directly confronting.
the Iran Wars impacts, and marks the latest flashpoint in Congress' broader efforts to address energy affordability, that's one of the biggest issues that is framing the midterms.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers have pitched bills to temporarily suspend the gasoline tax.
Many of their colleagues have questioned whether it would make much of a difference.
I don't believe so.
I'm wondering how you would feel about that.
It is not.
Further complicating the gas tax holidays path forward are concerns about the beleaguered highway trust fund.
That is what is paid for mostly by the gasoline tax.
Now, pending a gasoline tax holiday legislation, pending gasoline tax holiday legislation would make up the difference with general fund dollars for the highway.
fund, but it would likely encounter resistance from fiscal Republicans who are worried about the deficit.
Yes.
So it sounded really good in the short term and any, anytime we hear, oh, we're going to cut a tax, we get all excited.
Don't we?
Yeah.
Oh, that'll be great.
I don't have to pay a tax.
So gasoline is going to be what, 295 again.
No, it's still gonna be way over four dollars.
It still may actually be over five dollars in some places, but it'll be 18 cents cheaper 18 cents now Parker I'm old enough to remember when it if I had 18 cents when I was a kid I could walk up to Ben Franklin and get 18 pieces of penny candy You know what I can get with 18 cents now bubkus nada zero nothing nothing nothing
I can't even pay a toll with 18 cents.
I can't go to a lemonade stand on the corner with some young child.
Uh, not that I would take a young child to a lemonade stand, but you know, uh, lemonade stand being run by a young child and by a cooling beverage for 18 cents.
Can't do it.
18 cents means nothing.
And again,
short.
Yeah.
I don't even know what a kid at a lemonade stand charges anymore.
I know we used to charge five cents.
And then we upped it as I got a little older.
It was only a
nickel.
It was only a nickel.
And two kids would man the stand and another would ride around the neighborhood just screaming from his bike.
Lemonade five cents.
Lemonade five cents.
It was an idyllic time, Parker.
That's good advertising.
It is.
Listen, none of us had degrees.
We didn't know target marketing.
We didn't know our demo.
We didn't care.
We didn't have social media.
That was social media.
riding around the neighborhood screaming was our version of social media.
All right, what else do we need to know?
Well, here's more good news, friends.
For the first time in three years, American wages are no longer outpacing inflation.
Oh, I mistook that as good news.
It's not.
Prices rose 0.6% on a monthly basis, driving the annual rate to 3.8%.
That's the highest inflation rate since May of 2023, according to the latest Consumer Price Index data that was released yesterday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Economists had expected prices to rise.
0.6% from March for the annual rate to climb to 3.7, but we went a little higher.
So prior to the late February, US-Israeli strikes on Iran.
Inflation had increased 2.4%.
It leaped higher in March, and now the energy price shock from the Iran War is further compounding long-standing affordability concerns for Americans weighed down by years of fast-rising prices.
According to an economics professor at Loyola Marama University, for consumers that means the cost of living remains uncomfortable.
For the Federal Reserve, it means rate cuts are likely to be pushed in the future.
So the post pandemic inflationary burst was the annual pace of price hikes.
That's when we hit a four decade high of 9.1 in the summer of 2022.
It drastically lifted all prices.
Now, in recent years, as inflation slowed, some Americans were able to get a leg up as their pay was rising faster than inflation.
Well, that changed last month.
As I mentioned, annual inflation adjusted average hourly wage growth went negative.
For the first time since April 2023, paychecks grew 3.6% from April of last year on average.
Prices rose 3.8%.
So you're working hard, but you cannot keep up.
You cannot do it.
Lynn, uh, we were talking about the gas prices.
Lynn remembers paying 45 cents a gallon back in her day.
And she, she had still laughing emoji.
I, it as early as, or as late as 1999 Parker, it was under a dollar.
Gas was under a dollar when we moved to California where gas is notoriously high.
I was getting gas at the gas king for 99 cents a gallon.
I don't know wasn't that long
ago.
I don't know what the lowest gas price I've ever seen is probably not below $2 Yeah,
and I don't remember like when I was a kid I didn't worry about gas prices because I wasn't driving but when I started driving it was still way under a buck You know you could fill you could fill the car for under $10 Wow,
that's
not what I did cruising around with your lady or your man or yourself if you had no friends
What else do we need to know?
There is stuff you need to know.
This is closer to home again.
Two-thirds of election clerks said they experienced problems getting mailed absentee ballots back for last month's election.
That's according to a survey of more than 900 clerks by the Wisconsin Election Commission.
Most clerk surveys said they believed ballots were received within three to five days, the standard timeframe for first-class mail.
but a substantial number of others said it took ballots seven days or more to reach the clerk's office after the voter mailed them.
A clerk in Fond du Lac County said some ballots postmarked on March 23rd or 24th didn't arrive until after Election Day on April 7th and could not be counted.
So when a local post office was questioned why, staff there said it was because of a blizzard.
Okay, well we'll see.
According to the clerk from Fond du Lac County, she said we had voters that paid additional postage to get their ballots to the municipal clerks and sadly they arrived after April 7th.
I do not want to see extended deadlines meaning mailed ballots can arrive after the election and be counted because I truly feel we will see the same issues and voters that will procrastinate.
We work so hard at the front end to get the ballots to the voter and then have them come back after election day is very frustrating.
Yes.
Now, for major elections, Postal Service Authorizes extraordinary measures such as overtime for postal workers in the November 2020 election, for example, nearly all of the ballots were set and were sent.
They were delivered to clerks within a week of voters putting them in the mail.
97.9% of them arrived within three days.
Now, the other delays
are caused in part by how the Postal Service sorts and processes mail.
Wisconsin is served by three regional processing centers.
One is in Oak Creek, which is south of Milwaukee, Green Bay, and St.
Paul, Minnesota.
So that means if you, Parker, are here in Madison, and you take your absentee ballot to the Post Office and drop it off, well, that Madison ballot goes from Madison to Milwaukee.
then comes back to Madison's clerk office.
And a ballot from a voter in La Crosse, Eau Claire and Superior, leaves the state before it returns.
That makes a zero sense.
That's what I would call silly.
That is very silly.
It's almost like Jamie's flight this week.
I'm going to have to go to Rochester to fly to Minnesota to fly back to Rochester to drive to Minnesota to then fly to Boston.
Makes no sense.
So our mail shouldn't shouldn't be the same the handling of absentee ballots has been contentious.
We talked about this the other day where Some of the 23 ballots here in Madison got to the clerk's office minutes after the eight o'clock deadline minutes That's ridiculous It is it is just it's crazy, but it's it's the way things are
I don't know.
We'll have to see what happens.
But it doesn't... If mail is going from Madison to Madison, it should just stay in Madison.
Mail doesn't want to go see Milwaukee.
Mail doesn't care.
And if you're sorting it, I would think, and again, I'm not a postal worker, I would welcome feedback from postal workers to set me straight if I'm way off the beam.
But I would think...
that if you're sorting it anyway, if you're in a city that the mail is going to, can it just pull that mail out by itself?
Why does it have to go somewhere else?
Do we have to always, because I'm guessing before the changes, if you mailed something in Madison, it didn't have to go somewhere else to get sorted.
They would just sort it right here.
But probably cutbacks and automation and trying to streamline the process made it so that we now have to do things a much more
difficult way.
So we'll keep arguing about this every election, there'll be a problem.
It's a wake-up call in more ways than one.
Time for some shit you need to know.
Yeah, man, there is stuff we need to know.
The first thing is that Pete Hegseth was on...
Capitol Hill yesterday, and he faced tough questions from Republicans and Democratic lawmakers about the administration's endgame for the war, the conflict's rising $29 billion cost, and its impact on diminishing U.S.
weapons stockpiles.
Well, while the Pentagon chief softened his tone from his hearings before Congress about two weeks ago, you remember where he was just yelling, he was out of his mind, that old pistol-peat.
Notably,
He was avoided the same pointed criticism of lawmakers.
He got far more pushback from members of his own party about the levels of US munitions used in the Iran war and President Trump's intense criticism of traditional allies for not taking part in the conflict.
He said, I take issue with the characterization that munitions are depleted in a public forum.
That's not true.
But even as Hegseth insisted that the military has plenty of missile defense systems and other munitions for the war or future conflicts, he did tell House and Senate lawmakers overseeing defense spending that the Trump administration is working to ramp up production of more weapons, because some is good, more is better.
Pentagon officials also told lawmakers that the cost of the Iran war has risen to about 29
billion dollars most of which about 24 billion of that is related to replacing munitions and repairing equipment but also includes operational costs just to keep forces deployed.
Now that's up from the overall total of 25 billion that the Pentagon Comptroller Jay Hurst revealed nearly two weeks ago.
Four billion dollars in two weeks.
That's
Wow, when I say that's a lot of money, I will grant you.
That could be the most obvious understatement in the history of dialogue.
But it still makes you shake your head to go, how are we spending $5 billion more in two weeks?
Two weeks.
Well, the Republicans really came out of the woodwork on this one.
He faced notable pushback from
about the straining of relations with longtime allies, Mitch McConnell, remember him, the Crip Keeper?
Mitch McConnell told Hegseth that NATO is the most important military alliance in world history.
That may be true, and I would believe it is true.
However, the president doesn't believe so, and so that is why we are threatening to pull troops out of many of our allied countries, troops that are there for specific
national security reasons.
He loves to talk about national security when it comes to trying to weaponize the DOJ against leakers or perceived leakers.
But when it comes to pulling troops out of foreign countries, he will threaten to do that just because they hurt his little feelings.
Okay.
Hey.
This is good news from Wisconsin.
Some good as you need to know here this morning.
Children's Wisconsin is expanding its Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, the NICU, in the Fox Valley Hospital to meet higher demand for care that was announced Monday by the health system.
Now, not good news that more
Babies are needing this service, but good news that the hospital is creating this new wing.
The NICU will add a six-bed pod in the Nina Hospital at 132nd Street to expand care up to 28 babies at a time.
The upgraded space will have more bedside space for family members, a larger private lactation room, and a private room for families to practice caring for their babies before they go home.
This is, if you've had to ever spend time in a NICU,
it is it is really cramped and it is now i'm i'm sure they have changed in the almost 30 years since molly was in the nick you but there was no room you would you would go in and of course it's very secure because there are babies in there nobody wants their baby snatched but i could
and Parker someday maybe if you have kids you will learn this it is an odd thing that you can identify your baby's cry from a long way away even amongst other babies crying you can figure yours out because I'd be walking down the hall to the nickroom and I would hear a couple babies crying and I was like oh that one's Molly and it turned out it was but the point of this is
There was very cramped quarters for families.
There were very cramped quarters for moms who were trying to feed their babies.
They would have to do it like almost right next to the bed where the baby was being held.
So this is good if you have to use this.
Now the health system said there is higher demand for newborn care in the region.
and the NICU in Nina regularly treats patients from other medical centers in the area.
Two pediatric rooms in the hospital have also been remodeled under the renovation.
In a news release, the executive director of the Northeastern region at Children's Wisconsin said, this expansion strengthens our ability to care for newborns in the Fox Valley and beyond, especially those who need critical care.
So congratulations to Children's Wisconsin and good news for...
parents if you are in need of those services in that area because it is It is really terrifying because you don't know what's going on and the doctors and the nurses of course are caring and they tell you what's going on But it is a very stressful situation So if you can have a little more room and be a little more comfortable and you know that your your baby is getting the top of the line care it eases your mind a little not you know
It doesn't wipe away all worries, but it makes things a little more comfortable.
It makes things a little more, you know, just adaptable where you can ease into this hard situation.
Well, somebody is being eased out of their hard situation.
The FDA chief is leaving after he angered big pharma and vaping lobbyists and anti-abortion groups.
So the head of the Food and Drug Administration, who is Dr. Marty McCary, is resigning.
after a rocky tenure that drew months of complaints from health industry executives, anti-abortion activists, vaping lobbyists, and other allies of the president.
News of the departure yesterday came just 13 months after he was confirmed to lead the powerful regulatory agency.
We should start a tally board of all both both
Terms of Trump's administrations and see how many people are in and how many are out and how long they lasted Because remember in the first one there is who is it?
Was it scaramucci who lasted like a week as the press secretary there?
I forgot about him.
Yeah, you can't forget scaramucci Wow, you can't and then you can't forget that You know Sean Spicer was there and then Sarah Huckabee Sanders
Who could have been she?
Sarah Huckabee Sanders makes Caroline Levitt look like a softball pitcher when it comes dealing with press Sarah Huckabee Sanders had Zero cares to give to anybody.
She was vicious But anyway, that's beside the point.
We need to start a flow chart
But a surgeon and health researcher, McCree, came to prominence among Republicans as an outspoken critic of COVID-19 health measures during the pandemic.
Sure, that'll endear you to MAGA.
He frequently appeared on Fox News channel, another prerequisite for getting into the cabinet.
You have to have made a lot of appearances on the one channel that the president watched when he wasn't throwing ketchup bottles.
He struggled to manage the FDA's bureaucracy and failed to win the confidence of its staff after mass layoffs, leadership upheavals, and a series of controversies in which the agency's scientific principles appeared to be overridden by political interests, including those of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yeah, I would imagine now I don't have a lot of management
experience, but if I went in and I fired half the people and I discounted all the work they were doing scientifically, it would be hard to win the confidence of my staff.
I would think.
Trump later confirmed in a social media post that Kyle Diamantes, the agency's chief for foods, is expected to take over as acting commissioner.
Diamantes is an attorney with personal ties to Donald Trump Jr.
Raise your hand if you're surprised.
Thank you, no hands were raised.
All right, in a post, in the social media post, the president included what appeared to be a text message from Macquarie submitting his resignation.
In it, he noted that, quote, I announced 50 major FDA reforms.
Joe Biden's FDA had none.
He thanked Trump for the chance to serve.
The FDA commissioner as leader of an agency that regulates billions of dollars in consumer goods and medicines is often required to juggle competing priorities that straddle science and politics.
It seems as if, and again, my opinion, and you are more than welcome to draw your own and share them if you want at 855-75 Civic, 855-7524-842, that this administration's department heads tend to veer more toward
juggling the politics rather than the science.
There seems to be a complete disregard for science, for scientists, for anybody who's smart, for people who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of making our lives better through science.
Again, my opinion.
McRae faced a unique challenge in balancing calls by Trump and other Republicans to cut red tape at the FDA.
Yes, fewer regulations often lead to good medicine.
Also, attending to Kennedy's interest in scrutinizing the safety of vaccines, drugs, and food activities, the decision to get rid of him was made by Kennedy and then the White House signed off on it.
So there you go.
And real quick, before as we start to wrap things up on as you need to know, if you are going outside, my friends, be careful because wood ticks have been unusually active in southern Wisconsin this spring.
Emergency room visits for tick bites hit their highest known level in southern Wisconsin.
have been up across the state in recent weeks.
That's according to data from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, which began tracking tick related ER visits in 2022.
Most of the country has seen a similar trend, but.
It has been especially pronounced in the Midwest, that according to the U.S.
Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Experts say the evidence in Wisconsin suggests people are having more encounters than usual with the American dog tick, also known as the wood tick.
Really common human biter, said a professor in the UW Madison Department of Entomology and director of the Midwest Center of Excellence for Vector Bone Disease.
It's also a very common on animals, including pets.
Every day when I let my dogs out and we're going for a walk and they want to go into the weeds in the underbrush, I'm like, oh, I tell them be careful for ticks.
Do you think they listen to me?
No.
Nope.
They don't care one way or another because you know who's going to deal with the ticks if they get them.
you daddy-o over here me i gotta pick the ticks uh no good so of wisconsin's wisconsin has two main tick species did you know that parker i did not please tell me well now you do because i'm nothing if not educational wood ticks are the less less or evil wood ticks are well relatively large and can be alarming to spot on your skin but deer ticks those are the ones you got to be really careful about
Dear tick populations appear to be about average for this time of year based on preliminary findings.
But ticks are present year round in Wisconsin.
They're the most active during warmer months between April and September.
We're in, we're in May.
That's right between April and September.
So be careful.
Human encounters with wood ticks normally peak in the spring and early summer, then they drop off quickly while deer tick activities stay high over a longer period.
So I guess what's the lesson here, friends?
You gotta wear long pants and good shoes when you're out hiking in the woods, perhaps some long sleeves, dressed like you're in a beekeeper suit, and then wander around the underbrush.
Or just stay off it, but ticks can be on the paved path too, so just...
Watch yourself and know knowledge is power, so if you know the ticks are out there, you can protect yourself.
