It's a wake-up call in more ways than one.
Time for some sh** you need to know.
The president was talking again.
He said he's holding off on a military strike on Iran planned for today because quote-unquote serious negotiations are underway to end the war.
Stop.
Trump made the announcement in a social media post on Monday.
Of course he did.
After threatening over the weekend, the time was running out for Iran to strike a deal or fighting would renew.
Last week, he said a fragile ceasefire was on life support and US forces exchanged fire with Iranian forces.
He is the ultimate boy who cried wolf.
Yeah, I'm going to lay down all these.
all these deadlines and then I'll back off them right away the president who had not previously disclosed that he was planning for a strike on Tuesday which means it came as a surprise to everybody did not offer details about the planned attack in his Monday post of course not but said he instructed the U.S.
military quote to be prepared to go forward with a full large-scale assault on Iran on a moment's notice yeah doofus they're deployed they're always right since you sent them there
They have been prepared for an assault non-stop.
That's what they do.
That's their job.
They're really, really good at it.
Trump's been threatening for weeks that the ceasefire struck in mid-April could end if Iran did not strike a deal with shifting parameters for striking such an agreement.
Over the weekend, he warned, quote, for Iran, the clock is ticking.
They better get moving fast or there won't be anything left of them.
How dignified and presidential, sir,
to go on social
media and try to be a diplomat that way.
He said he was calling off the planned strike at the request of allies in the Middle East, including the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
He has repeatedly set deadlines for Iran and then backed off.
But he's also in the past indicated he would hold off on military action to allow the talks to continue, only then to turn around and launch strikes.
So once again.
Do they all think we're stupid and don't remember?
Yes, they do.
They think we don't care.
So in recent days, Trump's spoken with Benjamin Netanyahu and Chinese President Xi Jinping about the Iran War.
And of course, his post caused oil to fall, the price of oil to fall, which had been rising with the prospect of a prolonged standoff.
Stop oil markets.
Why are you why are you doing this?
Why do you jump at every little thing he says?
He's he he woke up yesterday when I should probably
I feel that in my gut, I need to send a threatening text.
Well, new polls came out that showed people were even uneasier than a month ago about gas prices in the economy.
And so he had to do something to combat that.
So with diplomacy by a tweet, he was able to lower the oil prices once again.
Is he
that dumb?
It's not changing.
The gas is still going to be the same price.
It's still, we're not-
It's like short term gratification, right?
Because
it's all the stock market for his billionaires,
and he's
probably telling people, and I'm sure this is gonna come out.
I'm assuming this, this is not fact, this is my opinion.
But every time he does that, somebody's making money in the stock
market.
Mm-hmm,
of course.
I'll just leave it there.
Somebody's making money on these haphazard tweets that he puts out that everybody seems to be surprised about.
Oh, we were doing an attack on Tuesday?
It's a benefit to the inner circle, right?
I mean, it's what this administration has done.
Everything is to benefit the inner circle and the people who donate to this particular
President and the Republican Party.
That's what this is about.
It doesn't matter about the kitchen table economics for you and me.
That's not what this is about.
They don't care that we can't afford gas or groceries or electricity bills or health care, home prices, whatever.
The list goes on and on.
They don't care about that.
They only care about their own stock portfolios and getting richer.
Why the rest of us try to figure out how we're going to make ends meet on a daily basis.
Well, he said it last
week.
He doesn't think about anybody else.
So if they tell you what they are, believe them.
What else do we need to know this morning, Jamie?
Well, we're going to bring it closer to home because the Wisconsin Elections Commission turns out they were wrong to order Madison to remove 23 late arriving absentee ballots from its count.
That's according to a Dane County judge and a ruling that was made last Thursday.
ordering the city to count these 23 ballots in the soon-to-be-certified Wisconsin Supreme Court race.
The ruling comes in response to a lawsuit that was brought by two of those 23 voters who alleged that the Wisconsin Elections Commission unconstitutionally ordered Madison not to count the ballots.
We talked about that, right?
When this happened and this case came to light, we were like, hey, what about the voters?
Well, it turns out that the absentee ballots at issue arrived at the polls after 8 p.m.
if you remember the backstory.
Yeah, just a couple of minutes after 8 p.m.
Literally.
And it was a delay that city officials say was caused by election administrator air.
State law requires that absentee ballots, quote, be delivered to the polling place no later than 8 p.m.
on election day.
Now, this lawsuit alleged that it would be illegal to disenfranchise, properly cast votes over election officials' heirs.
I kind of agree with that, right?
Voters who comply with every element
that is required for them to vote a special absentee vote and then not be not being allowed to have the votes count is contrary to what good law in Wisconsin has been.
That is a statement by Dane County Judge Everett Mitchell and that was the statement from the bench.
The ruling came after an hour long back and forth between attorneys for the Wisconsin elections commission and the plaintiffs over the rights of voters when election officials commit errors.
Now in briefs and in court lawyers for
law forward, who represented the plaintiffs, referenced several past rulings in the state that they say established a long-running precedent that voters can't be deprived of their constitutional voting rights due to election officials' heirs.
Now, in ordering Wisconsin or Madison, I should say, in Dane County not to count the ballots weeks after the election, the Wisconsin Elections Commission argued that state law simply doesn't permit late-arriving ballots
to count, even as some commissioners expressed ambivalence about that rule and reluctance about disenfranchising voters in the process.
Now, it does remain at this point unclear why there was a delay between the ballots arrival at the election office and their delivery to the precincts for counting.
I mean, this
little line at Culver's drive-thru.
I thought he had some more time when he was driving over
it.
Right.
Got to
get a Butterburger.
I had no idea that that custard was going to take so long.
You should have just ordered the vanilla, not the flavor of the day.
But I mean, I think this is gonna be an interesting conversation in Wisconsin because yesterday, if you listen to the show, and again, civicmedia.us are Spotify to hear back past episodes, we talked about the new lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters because in...
this state, even though there is a statute, I think it's ridiculous that election commissioners can basically choose to treat these absentee ballots however they want, right?
Like if they want to notify someone that there isn't something right, they can, if they don't want to, they can call them, they can email them.
I mean, it's really about consistency for the voting process at this point.
And I know this suit was brought by law forward, which champions a lot of very conservative causes.
And it was also said that none of these, none of these
votes would change any other results, but this will go for everybody.
So
I applaud this, and it is the right decision.
It wasn't those voters' faults.
And if you're a Democrat and you're like, no, they shouldn't count those, well, think about it if it was on the other foot.
You know, if a Democratic law firm had brought this case, it doesn't matter who brought the case.
The case is valid, and it makes sense.
If the election officials screw up for whatever reason,
UK.
That's not my fault.
I did what you told me to do.
My vote should count.
And I think no matter how you vote, whether you're a Republican Democrat or an independent, I mean, if two voters make the exact same mistake, right, but only one gets notified and it gets allowed to be fixed or one vote gets counted in one county, but not in another, that's not a level playing field for elections.
It's just not.
And so when people start to feel like the rules aren't the same for everyone, that's when the confidence in the election process starts to erode.
And we don't need any more help in that process.
This administration has done plenty since 2020 to make sure that we feel disenfranchised as voters.
So whatever we can do to make it better, especially in a swing state like Wisconsin.
Very good.
All right.
One more thing we need to know.
A Minnesota County prosecutor yesterday announced charges against an immigration and customs enforcement officer in the non-fatal shooting of a Venezuelan man during the Trump administration's crackdown in the state.
The officer, Christian Castro, is charged with four counts of second degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime in the January 14th shooting of Julio Cesar's Sosa Celis, Hennepin County Attorney Mary
Moriarty said at a news conference a warrant has been issued for his arrest.
She said Mr. Castro is an ICE agent, but his federal badge does not make him immune from state charges for his criminal conduct in Minnesota.
There is no such thing as absolute immunity for federal officers who commit crimes in this state or any other.
Yay.
Castro, he's 52.
He fired through a home's front door.
and shot Sosa Celis in the thigh after Castro and another officer chased a different man, Alfredo Alejandro Alliorna, to a Minneapolis apartment duplex where he said Sosa Celis lived.
That according to Moriarty, she noted that both Sosa Celis and Alliorna were legally in the U.S.
Oh, then what had they done wrong?
Oh, I know they went outside as brown people.
Federal authorities initially accused Sosa Sellas and Ayurna of beating an officer with a broom handle in a snow shovel during the confrontation.
A federal judge dismissed those charges and ICE and the Justice Department opened a joint investigation into whether two immigration officers lied about what had happened.
Oh my goodness.
Minnesota leaders in the Trump administration have clashed over.
Who has the authority to investigate and prosecute federal officers for on-duty conduct with the administration suggesting that state officials
don't have jurisdiction to which Minnesota said, oh, really?
Let's see about that.
So good for Minnesota.
Right?
Federal badges doesn't mean you just are immune from everything.
No, the only
one with blanket immunity from everything is the president.
We know that because the Supreme Court let him have it.
Yeah.
But ICE officers don't, but presidents have it.
unlimited immunity from everything.
I hope that the people who championed that realize that that now stands for every president, right?
Like, I mean, I know this is besides the point.
Not if there is no other president, Jamie.
But good for, good for Minnesota.
I'm just getting nor that comment, because I don't even want to pretend that that's a conversation today.
Well,
that's...
But I mean, good for Minnesota.
Sometimes what's
said in jest...
has a deep seat of reality.
Yes, it does.
No, I agree.
But I mean, I love that Minnesota is actually doing this, right?
They're actually doing the prosecuting, and that's the good news for all of us.
It's a wake-up call in more ways than one.
Time for some shit you need to know.
This is how fast the news cycle goes.
I forgot all about Luigi Mangione.
I forgot all about what a dreamboat he was.
I forgot about how he suddenly made murder okay to some people.
No matter what the cause was, murder not okay.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here, Jamie.
That's a hot take.
Kids are gonna at me.
How dare you say murder is not okay, but I'm gonna stand by it.
I'll fight for it.
Well, you remember Luigi Mangione, he killed United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson.
Some evidence found in Luigi Mangione's backpack at the time of his arrest will be excluded from his upcoming trial, according to a New York judge ruling yesterday, though many other key items, including a 3D printed gun and writings expressing frustrations with the health care industry, will be allowed.
Although some of Manjoni's belongings were tossed from the case, the mixed ruling is largely a victory for prosecutors who will be able to show jurors the so-called manifesto and the firearm they say was used to kill UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Manjoni's attorneys argued that local police illegally searched his backpack when he was arrested at a Pennsylvania McDonald's in early December of 2024, days after he Thompson was fatally shot on a Manhattan sidewalk.
Judge Gregory Carl ruled that prosecutors can use the gun and a red notebook with handwritten entries at trial.
Those items, among others, were retrieved as part of a valid search, according to the Altoona Police Department's protocol.
But items found during the initial search at the McDonald's, including a loaded magazine, passport, wallet, cell phone, computer chip, those are going to be excluded.
So although police officers said they searched the bag at the time in part because they feared it may contain a weapon, Carol found the justification did not hold up to scrutiny.
All right.
Manjoni's defense attorneys had pushed for the backpack's contents to be barred from the state's case because they alleged it was searched illegally without a warrant.
Prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office denied the defense's claim and insisted the searches were legal and proper.
All right.
Remember how crazy?
Not the case.
I mean, the case seems pretty cut and dried to me.
Sure.
But the reaction, now, I think we all have a shared
Distain for insurance companies.
Mm-hmm because they love taking our money They'd always always like to pay out even if you have even if you have quote-unquote good insurance, which I am very fortunate We do have quote-unquote good insurance.
There's still stuff where you go seriously you're going to like The last insurance company we had my wife is diabetic She had to argue with them because they said they would cover the insulin, but they would not cover the needles
And the argument was, well, how do you get the insulin into your body?
Well, those aren't necessary.
Have you ever taken insulin?
It's pretty necessary.
Yeah, it's not a suppository.
You have to you have to inject it.
So we all have that disdain for insurance companies.
But this was this was a premeditated cold blooded murder.
This was not the way we deal with problems or the way we.
not the way we should deal with problems.
But all these people who idolized him, that was what was, again, crazy to
me.
Why do we do this in this country?
I mean...
Because he was cute.
Well, okay, so great, fine, sure.
Well,
that was the justification.
But do you remember...
a few years ago when there was that quote-unquote hot felon that Jeremy Meeks who eventually became
a fashion
model.
Why do we do this in this country?
Like they're
felons.
We're superficial.
We lack critical thinking.
I don't understand it.
I don't understand why we do this.
I
think it's weird.
Well, you're right.
It is weird.
It's very weird.
There's no reason that we should say, oh, just because that guy is objectively pretty,
he must be elevated above the rest.
Now, if, you know, if Manjoni had like a giant lump on his forehead and his teeth were missing and he was unkempt, people would have been, lock him
up,
put him away so we don't have to cast our eyes on him.
I think it's very strange in this country how we basically idolize these types of people and how we give them a pass because they look like
They look like they couldn't do these things, or they're handsome, or they're beautiful, or whatever it is.
I think that that's an interesting hot take that we have here in the United States.
Well, Frank said there's a whole website, a whole account called Mugshotty's, that posts pictures of mugshots of attractive people.
And I've seen that, I've seen the guy mugshot, I've seen female mugshots, and they're like, okay, and is it, let's be honest.
Is anybody really that attractive in their mugshot?
No Parker wait a minute Parker.
You're familiar with mugshot.
Yeah, I've seen am I saying that correctly mug shouties make shawty's.
Yeah, good job, Brian.
I mean, this
isn't
This isn't glamour shots, right?
This is your mug shot.
Not everybody could be as ugly as Nick Nolte was in his
mug shot.
Nick Nolte, that's a classic.
Well, it's like when people go to get their driver's license, they think it's glamour shots.
So could you take it again?
No.
You're hideous.
It's your ID.
You get
one shot at it, and that's all you get.
I mean, nobody's going to give you a bunch of attempts to take your mug shot
in your driver's license.
No, and also when you're showing your ID, you're standing right there.
This is what you
look like.
Right.
Yeah,
I don't know.
And if you don't believe that's what you look like, oh
well.
I'm just glad that the court system is, even with this much publicity, is doing what a good court system does.
It's called due process, people.
And whether you agree with it or not, judges in their very right mind to, you know, continue to follow the Constitution, no matter how you feel about Mangione.
And the case, just saying.
All right, next up.
We do have some other headlines of stuff you need to know.
We're going to go to a whole different continent.
We're going to the Congo and to Africa, because Congo will open three Ebola treatment centers in in Eastern Itturi province, and the World Health Organization is now sending a team of experts to the country following an outbreak of a rare type of the virus that has killed more than 110 people.
An American doctor in Congo is among those newly
confirmed cases of the virus with no approved vaccines or medicines according to officials in Congo.
Over the weekend, the WHO declared the Ebola outbreak a public health emergency of international concern.
As of Monday, there were over 118 deaths and 300 suspected cases in Ituri and North Kivu provinces, and one death and one suspected case in neighboring Uganda.
Now, experts say the number of cases is likely to rise as health officials conduct more surveillance.
The Bundy Buja virus spread undetected for at least a few weeks.
Because early tests looked for the wrong strain of Ebola, health officials got false negatives and then lost weeks of response time, at least according to the director of the Georgetown University Center for Global Health Policy and Politics, who also said that health experts are now playing catch-up against a very dangerous pathogen.
He also went on to criticize the Trump administration's earlier decision to withdraw from
from the who and make deep cuts in foreign aid.
The severity of the symptoms and the rising caseload are fueling a growing sense of panic in the neighborhoods of Bunia.
Now, Congo has said that the
first
person died from the virus on April 24th in Bunia, and the body was then returned to a different area with a much larger population, which caused this outbreak to escalate.
An American doctor is among the cases in Bunia.
Dr. Peter Stafford is his name, and he'd been treating
at a hospital there where he developed symptoms, at least according to Surge, which is the organization that he currently works for.
There are three other employees of Surge who are working at the same hospital, including Stafford's wife, but none of them, as of right now, are showing any symptoms.
This is starting to spread a lot.
Remember we had an Ebola scare?
I don't know, at some point in my lifetime, it wasn't that long ago.
Yeah.
I mean, anytime you start seeing, and I think, don't you think now, since COVID-19, whenever you see some weird or some weird medical issue start to spread or you see some sort of virus start to spread, people get really nervous.
And for good reason, right?
I get it.
I get it.
It's one of two things.
Yes, they could get really nervous or two, they're like,
Forget it.
This is yeah, you know the denier people who still deny COVID don't care about winter virus or Ebola or Bonnie wanted a panel on a cracker virus or whatever that was So people will you know and you saying there's no
You're saying that there's no vaccines?
Right.
People are going, well, vaccines kill you anyway, so why bother?
What I
think worries me most when I hear stories like this is just what this expert from Georgetown University said.
we have done away with so much research in this country in just the last year and a half, basically, that it really does scare me because I don't know if anything were to be more serious down the road and I'm not underplaying how serious this is in Africa right now.
But at the same time, it worries me, where would we be?
Right?
Because we don't
have the
research.
We don't have the information that we once did.
We don't have the researchers.
We've cut off funding.
We've done all of that.
We've pulled out of the WHO.
We're just, yeah, because it's a dumbing down of this country.
Yeah.
We, from the top down, we don't, we distrust science.
We distrust medicine.
We distrust anybody who they think they're smarter than us.
Guess what?
They are.
It's okay to not be the smartest.
Try not to be the dumbest, but it's okay not to be the smartest.
Sometimes you need smarter people around
you.
You always need smarter people around.
Look at everything we use and think to yourself, honestly, are you smart enough to have come up with a computer?
No.
Are you smart enough to have figured out how to pasteurize your milk?
No.
I know everybody wants to drink raw milk till you get sick, but...
So, think about all that.
And those were all done by smart people.
Yeah.
I mean,
we watched Artemis, we watched it fly around the moon.
I
say no
for myself.
And I know several people who would also answer no, because we know we're not smart enough to do those things, right?
No, I'm not.
And there's no shame in admitting it.
No.
All right, real quick.
We only have a minute or so.
The Supreme Court acted on the Voting Rights Act brought by Native American tribes on yet Monday, saying a closely watched ruling needs to be reconsidered after the High Court weakened the civil rights era law.
The justices ordered lower courts to take another look at the decision that went against tribes and undercut a key enforcement mechanism, namely lawsuits from voters and advocacy groups.
They've been key to enforcement, bringing most of the lawsuits filed under a provision of the Voting Rights Act, known as Section 2, but in a North Dakota case brought by two Native American tribes.
The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that only the federal government can sue to enforce the law.
The decision conflicted with decades of case law.
The Supreme Court blocked it in July, allowing the tribe's preferred maps to temporarily stay in place.
An attorney for Native American Rights Fund, Lenny Powell, said sending the case back was the right call and vowed to keep fighting to ensure that native voters have the ability to vote and effect change in their community.
As should be the right of everybody in this country, whether your land was stolen from you or not, we should all be allowed to vote.
Just making it harder and harder for every section of the country to actually cast a vote, because if people show up and vote, well, it's harder to win.
