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The Mark Belling podcast is presented by Uline. For quality shipping and industrial supplies, ULINE has everything in stock. Visit ULIN. com . The Mark Belling podcast is a production of iHart radio podcasts. I've got two separate examples today of how compassion, legitimate compassion and big government just fail to mesh . They don't go together when government and when the left say that they want to show compassion , their idea is to throw a lot of money at something . Now , normally throwing a lot of money at something works . If you don't have much money and suddenly you have a lot of money, chances are you're going to be able to have a lot of better things than you did before and solve a lot of your problems. Let's use, however, the example of baseball. Baseball's perfect for this. Football's usually a really good example because of their financial structure, it doesn't work baseball There is certainly an advantage to having a ton of money to spend on players . And one of the great franchises over the last ten years , the Dodgers throw a lot of money at players . But right in their same market you have the angels who also have had a huge payroll for years and they're always terrible . Then you have a team like the Browers or Tamp a , both of whom generally have very layrolls and generally are very, very successful franchises . So throwing money at something helps, but when does it not help ? When you throw the money in ways that it doesn't make anything better . We've got a very good example that I'm going to share with you to open up the podcast. First, I want to tell you about ULIN because ULIN moves fast so your business doesn't miss a beat. From shipping and industrial supplies to off ice furniture, ULINE offers a wide range of products that are in stock and ready to ship the same day if you order by six PM, even the big stuff. Uline's expert customer service team is available twenty four seven to answer your questions, help you quickly and easily place an order or assist with any other business needs. There was an interesting hearing last week on Capitol Hill There's a battle going on over whether or not SNAP benefits should be increased . Snap is the name that we now use for food stamps . I think we don't call them food stamps anymore because they're all electronic, but we used to call them food stamps now it's snap . And it's an interesting back and forth that you're going to hear here from one of the brighter Republicans on the scene. He's a freshman congressman. He just doesn't seem like a freshman. He's too knowing. His name is Brendan Gilly, congressman from Texas. Remember the house ? And one of the lefty witnesses in to testify asking for an increase in SNAP benefits is a woman from the Food Research and Action Center . We're going to be playing here a five and a half minute back and forth between G and her . It's very revealing and it explains almost everything. Now I'm going to bite it a couple of times to offer some perspective on this . But I think this is a real teaching moment . You know, for all of these young lefties that are falling for Marxism right now And they hear old farts like me say about it doesn't work, it doesn't work. You're going to hear here why it doesn't work . So here's the exchange between Brendan Gill and Gino Platonino . Thank you, Mr. Chair , for holding this hearing and for your intense and steadfast work on combating waste fraud and abuse. We certainly appreci ate it. I know taxpayers appreciate it. And thank you to the witnesses for taking the time to be here . Miss Plata Nino, did I pronounce that correctly? Plot platin o. Okay, plotin o . Got a couple questions for you . Should SNAP dollars be spent on sodas ? The purpose of the SNAPs program is to provide families to have food and beverages Should it be on spent on sugary sodas? I am happy to talk about hunger and nutrition but not dictate what Americans should or should not eat or may have access . I'm asking if tax dollars should be used to pay for sodas . Taxpayers' money should be utilized to ensure that individuals have access to the food that they need to serve Clearly, she doesn't want to answer this question . Now, it'll become apparent. And if it isn't, don't worry, I'll explain it why she doesn't want to answer this question . Gill is coming at this from the perspective of if the SNAP program is aimed at improving nutrition and dealing with the legitimate hunger problem in the United States . Why are we having people spend a good chunk of this on crap that isn't nutritious? And in the case of sugary sodas , something that is bad for you, how bad people can debate . But it's certainly not anything that adds to nutrition. Now that's what he's driving at . And you'll notice that he's not arguing with her, which is what a lot of members of Congress do that these things aren't actually asking questions. He just keeps asking this question and he's asking this question to demonstrate that she doesn't want to answer it. Now think about this for a moment. This woman is from the name of the organization is the Food Research and Action Center. They're an advocate for dealing with the hunger problem in the United States . You would think that this would be a question she has an opinion on, but she wants nothing to do with this question back to the hearing. O two. Do they need sugary sodas to survive? Some of them do who do have low blood issues who maybe is that right? Do you think they need Coca Cola to survive? Do you think that's the most appropri ate use of our tax dollars? I am not a physician but medical records and experts you were just citing the health needs apparently of the American people . So do the American people need Coca Cola to survive I did not say that. I said then I'm asking you. I'm giving you the opportunity to say yes or no . I will not answer for individuals and their choices. All right, let's stop the Now he's asked this same question about seven times and she does not want to answer this . And one of the things that first of all Gil is a lawyer by trade. He's yelling , but he's a lawyer. And you can tell because really good lawyers, especially , especially those who do trial work , they know how to ask questions . And in this instance , you know, if he's in court that probably say asked and answered, even though she's clearly not answering it . So he's simply going to persist in asking the same question rather than arguing his asking the question over and over again demonstrates the point that he's trying to make about this . Many people on the right I think would support an increase in programs like this if they thought that the money was actually being spent to deal with hunger . But Gill's drawing attention to the fact that these Snap benefits can be used for all sorts of stuff that don't address hunger and certainly don't address nutrition . But why are the people who say that they care about the nutrition needs and want to deal with the hunger problem . Why do they want to divert so much of this money into stuff that doesn't deal with nutrition and aren't good for you? Again, the answer is going to become apparent, but you could see this woman' ssitting there. She just does not want to answer the question. She's not gonna answer the question and she keeps recycling. I'm here to talk about, I'm here to talk about I don't know, like you don't know. What do you mean? You don't know? You don't know if Coca Cola is good for your health or not ? Back to the table. That there are some Americans who need Coca Cola to survive, is that your testimony? I'm happy to talk about the food industry. You just don't know. Individuals . I just don't know . I think most people can r ationally say that you don't need Coca Cola to survive . Wouldn't you agree? I agree that we have a hunger crisis and that we need to address it by ensuring that individuals have the food resource that they need. Got it. And one of those is sugary Coca Cola. What does SNAP stand for? As a supplemental nutrition assistance program. What's nutritional about Coca Cola I am not a nutritionist. I am a food security expert in ensuring that individuals have the food . First of all, it's just hilarious how these people define their position so narrowly when it serves their purpose often. They'll use whatever little credential they have to talk about any damn thing in the world, but in this instance, well, I'm not a nutrition expert. I'd say I'm dealing with the hunger problem and access the food yeah Anyone that has a brain can answer that question , but she again doesn't want to answer it . She's doing everything in her power not to answer a question that is easy to answer , which is precisely why Gill keeps asking it , because this refusal to answer when it's coming from somebody who's lobbying on behalf of the hungry , I think explains the entire problem . And again, I said I was going to come up with two examples of how compassion and big government just don't mesh together . More on this. This is a common sense question. All of these have been common sense questions. I'm just asking you, is there a nutritional value to sugary sodas That's a yes or no question . I am not an expert. I would have to look at the dietary guidance. I'm not an expert . I don't think that there's nutritional value to sugary sodas. I think most people in this room would agree with that assessment . But you have no opinion . I'm here to talk about the food needs and the hunger crisis that individuals here in America are you that ideologically dug in that you want our tax dollars paying for sugary sodas that you will not in a straightforward way admit that sugary sodas are not helpful for the American people? I think that focusing on soda when people are going hungry. We spent a lot of our a lot of our tax dollars are spent on soda. That's why I'm asking about it. You appear to be so ideologically dug in , that you won't answer a simple question that that's not an appropriate use of our tax dollars and that that does not in fact make the American people more healthy. All right, stop the tape. Now, I like people to think through Some of you already know the answer. You're smart, you're well informed. You understand what goes on here, but some of you don't . And I believe that when you figure something out yourself, you're likelier to retain it than when I tell you, I wish you did retain everything that I told you because I'm right about just about everything , but I want you to work through this. Again, the group she's with is something called the Food Research and Action Center and she's there testifying without hearing is the SNAP program, how much money we're spending on it. The Trump administration has backed off on some funding for SNAP. The lefties want to throw fortunes into this program . That's the back and forth . I want you to think about why somebody who is an advocate for hunger and nutrition disease. That's what her group is does not want to take Gill's bait and say anything negative about using these benefits to buy junk crap. Now he's sticking to the sug ary sodas. There's any number of things that are covered by the stat benefits that he could go after, but he's sticking to this. And I want you to again think about for a moment why she can simply say, No, there isn't any nutrition al value on it. And then secondly, jump to the next point . If we limited snap purchases to food that has nutritional value, we'd be getting more bang for the buck for the program and we'd be helping these people more than encouraging them . Now, I'm going to come up with a far example because it's the ultimate bogyman, but it'll make the point . We don't allow the use of snap benefits for cigaret tes. Why? Well, they're bad for you. Well , consuming six cans of sugar filled coal is probably bad for you too. They're maybe degrees But obviously, we don't allow snap benefits for everything . But in terms of something that you can put in your mouth and eat, it's pretty close. Let's go back to Brendan Gill and the lobbyists for the Food Research and Action Center . I won't answer because there's no data sort of put proving that. Do you need data to determine whether drinking soda is healthy? I think I'm sorry. It's a serious question . Is there some do you believe that perhaps drinking sodas every day is healthy? The worst health outcome is hunger. When the individuals don't have the resources you satiate hunger with Coca Cola? I did not say that . But you said that the worst health outcome is hunger and I'm asking you about sugary sodas. And I'm focusing on the nutrition needs and making sure that children have the resources . Is your organization funded by soft drink makers ? I am not in charge of development, but no. It's not, okay Is your organization funded by organizations that make money from food stamps? Do organizations who profit off of food stamps fund your organization or businesses ? I mean , I can't comment to that. Happy to talk about the resources that need us. Does General Mills fund your organization? I don't have access to that information. I do. It's right here. They do fund your organization . Do they profit off a food st amps? Retailers are the major beneficiaries. Do you think that that's a conflict of interest? That's where EBT dollars are utilized . Yes, and they're profiting off of your advocacy. Do you think that that's a conflict of interest? I think most people think that's a conflict of interest. I know you don't want to answer. My time is up. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Congressman Brendan Gill of Texas questioning Geno Platonino of the Food Research and Action Center . This is very revealing I know that it's a cliche to say follow the money . But hardly anybody in thinking about things follows the money . For all of you people that are falling from Mamdani and D SA and all of this, we're going to give you this. We're going to give you that. We're going to give you the other thing . Who really is pushing for that ? It's the people who sell that stuff we g'ivreing it away giving away for free because we're giving it away for free because the government is buying it, the government's providing it . So her organization , who provides the funding to come in and demand that we spend more money on the SNAP program . And it turns out that it's the big food lobby . He mentioned only one by name, General Mills. I don't have the entire list, but you get the drill . This organization is bankrolled by the giant industry that by and large sells Americans non nutritional crap . Now, I'm not out here to tell everybody that they have to live the healthiest life in the world . But if everybody's spending their snap benefits on, I'll give you a best case scenario, macaroni and cheese head . Other highly processed food . And then they wash it down with Coca Cola and dye and Dr. Pepper and Mountain Dew and all of that junk . What benefit are we providing ? There's a joke that people always tell, and the joke is actually wrong. They'll draw attention to somebody who's really fat . Who says they don't have enough money for food ? There's a hunger crisis here. How can there be a hunger crisis? How fat the person is ? Well, there's a reality there, hunger isn't the right word , but they are certainly lacking nutrition . The point that Gil was making is , if people want to nd some of their disposable income on Coca Cola , we believe in freedom, they should have a right to do it . But they shouldn't do it with the government handout that we give them. The handout should be for stuff that actually benefits them . And the stuff that may not benefit them, but they just want to do that should be on their own nickel The reason it isn't is this whole problem that I mentioned about compassion and government . Let's use this is not the second example that I'm giving you, but it's a good way of discussing the point. When left say they want to address anything , they end up spending a fortune , but how much of it actually addresses the problem, but it sure results in a lot of people being employed and a lot of companies selling things often at inflated prices . Let me give you an example . The stupid trolley that we have in Milwaukee . It's clearly benefiting almost no one except during the summerfest period we're in now because hardly anybody rides it . But when we spent this, lots of construction workers dug up all the streets and laid down the stupid tracks . There's a company, it was it Siemens I don't remember who made the trolleys ? They got big contracts off of those . Then there's all the part, the thing is always breaking down. Somebody sell it all those parts . It's like the school referendums. Do you know who comes up with the big money to get these school referendums passed? The architectural firms, the design firms, the construction companies . They're lobbying to spend tens of millions of dollars that they will be the recipients of . Why wouldn't you want some body to build a really expensive school if you're the company that builds the school ? There was a time that the live health y life, people, that this was an entirely liberal movement . I used to joke about the outposts, which might still be around. It's one of those food co op things. And you know, I laugh about the beans sprout eating crowd and so on . That was once the left . It isn't anymore The left is so tied to leaching off of to be parasites off of all of these programs that they're loyal to not the principal , but to who's bankrolling them . This woman's organization is b ankrolled by the big food lobby. We've seen the same thing happen with regard to how the left has hoarded itself out and some on the right, to the pharmaceutical industry . I'm not a critic, per se of the pharmaceutical industry. They do lots of wonderful things. But they make way more money on brand new drugs under patent than on generic medication. All of us who have prescriptions and I got a lot of them . You go to the store before you meet the deductible. Some of the prescriptions they're close to free because they're generic and anybody could sell them. And others hundreds. Some of the GLP ones were in the thousands initially . Well, the drug companies are pushed, that's where they make the money . Why are the lefties showing a vested interest in them making money. During COVID, we had all sorts of really inexpensive ways to combat COVID to help you, perhaps not if you got it, not suffer as badly, build up your immune system, take Vitamin C, Vitamin D iceifency was a huge cofactor in whether or not you get COVID . Anybody who dared bring that up was called a quack, even though obviously it was true and they were being called quacks by people that were pushing really expensive medication solutions and the biggest one was these vaccines that three companies, two in particular , made absolute fortunes because the government bought up all the dos es . This maha movement that I don't think Trump's fully comfortable with, which is a shame . And I'll grant you it is inflationary . Unless you're gonna simply make all your stuff at home and do all the cooking from scratch, eating healthier can be more expensive than eating crap, not always . But the Maha movement has moved from the left to the right because the left abandoned the notion of healthy anything because they've hoard themselves out to everybody that bankrolls their groups . The next story nothing to do here with how we spend money or so on, but it does deal with that principle that I was stating earlier about how compassion and big government don't mesh . There's this big argument going on right now over the fact that the United States Supreme Court, which Trump's fattening about six thousand forty, and there were two bad Supreme Court rulings today, but this was a good one last week . They ruled that Trump has the right to end the program called TPS , Temporary Protected Status . Temporary protected status was a way of giving essentially automatic asylum to people from certain nations . They didn't have to go through the normal long asylum process and prove anything . The program is called temporary because it's meant to deal with a crisis . The program in and of itself, I don't think is bad It's the whole issue that we have about whether or not we should have to have a declared war before we can begin hostilities. It's not World War two anymore , where it takes weeks to gin up a military . In some instances you've got to move within five seconds . Weaponry and warfare has changed . Likewise if you have a certain brand new suddenly breaking imminent refugee crisis . A compassionate nation may say, hey, temporarily cut the red tape and allow people to come here temporarily to escape , death , whatever they're escaping . The word is temporary . Trump is ending it for certain nations, including Haiti . And the left and the media is going craz y . The program is temporary . The program isn't called PPS permanent protected status, it's temporary . We see this forever . There was a big debate in Wisconsin childcare funding. During COVID, we passed a temporary program to provide extreme increases in funding funding essentially for daycare and daycare for older kids . Because you had the incredible pressures going on of the kids weren't in school because they were closed, but many parents still had to work . So we created this temporary program . It expired. The Republicans of the legislature didn't want to extend it . And the left is screaming, but you have to, this will cre ate a hardship . But here's the thing when we the lefties are very, very shrewd about this stuff with regard to spending money . They know that all you have to do is turn the faucet on. It's impossible to turn that damn faucet off . Even if you claim it's just get the foot of the door, get the money started . We'll raise holy hell if they try to stop spending the money, even if we say it's temporary . I am, as many of you know , not an opponent of aggressive legal immigration . It's been the basis of our country . I have been an extreme critic of abandoning all of the protections and principles that we have had in place for as long as we've been a country to have orderly immigration We support open legal immigration because it can be a benefit to the United States, particularly if you have people who want to come here, who then can help make us better. I mean, you got to here's a good example. I'm going to use when Paul was my producer, he'd have a Seinfeld example for everything and I'd always have a sopran os example for everything. This is a Madman example. That's another one of those shows that just got way bigger in the era of streaming than when it was on I was going to say the era, on cable initially. When it was on cable , I think was it six, seven, eight, it went it took place to the nineteen sixties. So the series started in nineteen sixty and ended in nineteen sixty nine. But like a lot of these shows that are on cable, there was a long time between seasons . And the seasons were short, thirteen, fourteen episodes . So when it came around the first time , you'd watch it for thirteen weeks. A year would go by, then you'd watch another thirteen and so on was many, many years . And once streaming came in and all of these programs ended up on one streaming service or another , people were able to watch really in three weeks by binging a show that when on it was the origin ally, I think it took up seven years of my life because at the times it would be off there. Anyway, Madman. If you haven't, it's considered one of the greatest TV shows of all time. By the way, it's the rare case of a program that I think I binge after I watched it, I watched it every week when I was on. And then several years later , it must have been with some screaming. I binged it again again . I almost never have this happened My opinion of the program was higher after I watched it the second time . And I know what the answer is I didn't pick up on some things the first time and that show was just filled with nuance , kind of like the Sopranos . It's a great show. So here's my example of this. There was a storyline that they had, and this isn't really a spoiler alert in the same way that when you talk people talk about the ending of the Sopranos, it's not a spoiler alert because the show isn't like how is all of this going to happen? The show isn't dealing with all of the things that are happening in the middle. They had this character who was from Britain Lane Price . He was kind of an officious guy in the advertising business. He wasn't like a creative guy or a sales guy. He was like an administrator. And he worked for the agency that was the centerpiece of the show . And they caught him in bezeling . So they fired him. And he's freaking out because he said, I'm going to lose my visa . A visa we still have visas . A visa is something that allows you to stay in the United States if you have work . In other words, you don't have to go through the process of immigration and get a green card many people do during this process, but they have the visa in here which simply allows them to stay and the visa is granted, okay, you're contributing the American economy. This is again, the show was set in the nineteen sixties . The notion that he would be able to overstay or anything once he lost his job , he ended up killing himself in the show, obviously , the storyline . But that's how we had an immigration policy in the United States. It was orderly . There were exceptions if you were able to obtain a visa . Many of the baseball players, for example, operate off of visas and sometimes you'll see that somebody is late getting to spring training because they didn't get to keep their visa paperwork up and so on . My point is I'm a fan of legal immigration in an orderly way . What we have now , let everybody come into the country and don't enforce one damn rule . Trump's enforcing the rule with Haiti . And the Supreme Court ruled and again of all the cases in front of the Supreme Court, this was one of those in which you knew that Trump would get the six conservatives. Two of those conservatives often flop to the other side because this is clear. The program's a temporary protection program . So Trump has the right to say that the temporary he's the government . He says, Okay, this is the time period. This is how long you get to say. The program, by the way, is set up for eighteen months, but some of these people have been here for years and years and years and years . When these things are created though. The leftis sell them to the rest of us by saying, This is a temporary fix . We have a crisis. This is temporary. Don't worry . These people won't be here permanently . But then they are . And they don't want anybody to end the temporary status of a program that has temporary in its name . The word temporary is the that's the T in the name And then they say, well, would you want to send somebody back to Haiti? Of course I don't want to live in Haiti . I'm not nuts . I wouldn't want to be sent anywhere else . Unlike the left is who America, I realize we got it awfully good here . And I do believe there should be an aggressive legal refugee program from Haiti with proper vetting of people . One of the problems here is that a lot of people came from Haiti on TPS have been criminals . Most so aren't . Haitian refugees are the same as talk show hosts, plumbers , lawyers , actors . Most are good people, some are creeps and a few are in between . But when we didn't do any vetting of them, when they all come in, you get a lot of people in who cause trouble in addition to those who are wonderful people. The wonderful people are the people who should be able to reapply to come to the United States and we should err on the side of letting them come legally proper processing and if they do anything they shouldn't do, immediately deport their damn as There's a big story in Fox News today . It's on their website about how the DSA Democratic Socialists of America, the Marxists . Fresh from their big victories in New York, knocking out several Democrat incumbent congressmen in primaries and defeating them with Marxist . They're now going to turn their attention to three other states that all have primaries coming up this summer . One of them is Wisconsin . The headline in the story, Mum Danny back socialists look to take New York playbook nationwide after primary victories . And they then draw attention to several states that have primaries coming up this summer , and Wisconsin is one of them . The people who have the most to lose in this obviously are patriotic Americans if the Democratic Party just gets turned over to Marxists and instead of being stupid ass progressives, they become something far worse. Open communist Marxist . But the second group that has a lot to lose are regular Democrats who've been lefties forever and bet in that party who are now seeing their careers threatened by less qualified candidates solely because the less qualified candidate is a Marxist and that's what's selling in Democrat primaries. The most perfect example of this and it's close to perfect is this Democrat race for governor . The front runner is Francesca Hawg . She's a Marxist . And she's got a paper trail of statements that is unabashedly Marxist. This is a woman who says she doesn't want us to have any presence . She calls herself an anti capitalist . She's not using that lingua anymore, but she said it . And there's not a lot of disavowing of this . In the same way that the Mamdani back candidates in New York and Mamdani himself, they didn't back away from it although we're socialists . The only and I've done a couple of segments on this and I wrote a newspaper column on it. So I don't want to be this one. But the only people who can stop this are the Democrats themselves . Right now, a lot of the Democrats strategist . They're trying to figure out how to stop Hong because they think the biggest chance the Republicans have of winning is if the Democratic candidate is somebody who's Essentially a communist who calls herself a socialist and advocates policies that are clearly Marxist There might be a bridge too far . One of the problems that they face is the guy that's in second place of the pools, they don't want him either Mandela Barnes because A he's an idiot. B, he's got a closet full of skeletons and C, he's already won run statewide and lost. He lost statewide in a big democrat year . twenty two . twenty two was a big year for the Democrats. They won the governorship that year with Tony Evers winning a second term, and it wasn't it was close, but it wasn't real, real close when he beat Tim Michaels . But Ron Johnson still managed to keep his senate seat because Mandela Barnes was such a terrible candidate that some swing voters act who voted for Tony Evers went over and voted for Ron Johnson, a clear conservative. So they work at they don't want Mandela Barnes either . They're alternative appears to be to try to rally all of the mainstreamers around, Sarah Rodriguez . She seems to be winning the primary within a primary of the non Marxist Democrats. David Crowley would be another one who's in the non Marxist category. Missy Hughes was. She's already out of the race . Joel Brennan's another one . Yet , they had another one of their forbes . Sarah Rodriguez refuses to call out Francesca Hong . She simply will not attack her Marxist policies . And all over the country Democrats are refusing to attack the Marxist for being Marxist . It's actually the damnedest thing because the one thing that Democrats want is power . And this is the rare case of where you have different groups of Democrats vying for that power . It's remarkable for me to see Sarah Rodriguez is a lefty . Be so timid about winning the election . You're not going to beat Francesca Hong who's the front runner unless you knock her down a few pegs . You've got to take some of these Democrats that are leaning toward her but aren't completely insane themselves and call and call her out for radicalism . If you don't, she's going to win . One of the biggest reasons that the Democrat Socialists, the DS A people, the socialists are winning is they're eviscerating the regular Democrats. Mamdani's back candidates in the congressional races lit up and torched those incumbent Democrats , all of whom were really liberal . And the regular liberals didn't respond . They were terrified of attacking these people. Now I get the people that they would be attacking and getting into this bleeping match with really dirty . And now they're getting some of the medicine that my sites had directed from them from the unhinged radical left . My belief is that the Socialists are just taking over the Democratic Party because the rest of the Democrats are refusing to fight back and try to stop them . History . You want a history lesson? This is actually history that occurred before I was born . World War two . Now Now I'm not even being overly condescending because as I've read so many emails over the years from first millennials and now Gen Z , a lot of them talk about how they came upon my program in the right they became long term listeners is they learned all this stuff from me because nobody else ever explained anything in a way that would make sense to them. World War two . There were two teams , the Axis and the Allies. And again, I know most of you know this . The Allies was Western Europe and us and Russia . And the Axis was Germany , Italy and Japan. It was a two front war, the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific Russia was on our side Hitler not only wanted to take over Western Europe, he wanted to take over Eastern Europe . Germany is kind of in the middle of Europe . On its rear end , you Poland, Romania . And as you keep going the other countries, Yugoslavia, which is north , you go farther back, you've got Russia . They wanted all of that on the rear end and they wanted to push then forward. I'm just using the visual of left versus right . And as they pushed forward, Western Europe fell . There was a battle going on for Britain, but France had already fallen , the Netherlands had fallen, those sides had fallen . But there was a monster war in it we weren't so much involved in this war, we were fighting the war in Western Europe. The Russians were fighting the war in Eastern Europe . So the war ends. Germany lost, Japan lost. Russia was our ally in this war . Russia was communist . We fought the war because this is clearly a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend . The Nazis were looking for total domination . The Russians didn't want that. We didn't want it. So we're on the same side . All right, now the war ends. Remember, the Russians are communists, our pals in this . This was before communism was totally disproven. Again, we're talking nineteen forty five is when the war ended . There were lots of American left ies who were communist , not just the ones that Joe McCarthy said were communists, there were out and out communists. It was a major movement in this country , and there was an even larger group that were socialists . They pressed for control of the Democratic Party in the United States . One of their leaders was Henry Wallace , who was a powerful inside Democrat He was in the Roosevelt administration . When Truman got the Democratic nomination, Henry Wallace ran as a third party candidate . There was a massive fight within the Democratic Party for the regular Democrats to beat the socialists. By the way, the same battle was going on in Milwaukee through the first half of the twentieth century . The Republicans existed, but it was basically Democrats and Socialists and they battled a lot The Union movement was strongly anti socialist , very Very anti communist the AFLCIO , George Meanie and that bunch, very anti communists. They believed in workers' rights, but they didn't believe in socialism. They were capitalists . And the regular Democratic Party won that fight . The socialists were driven into an irrelevancy . Only one to two percent of Americans would call themselves socialists and they ended up running third party candidates for the next twenty to thirty years. Even when the Democrats turned left , when they went to McGovern in nineteen seventy two , it was forty years, fifty years nearly before any of them would ever admit to being socialist , even though they were pushing socialism like my point was that they held off the socialist because they attacked and fought. Where's the fight now? So until I see some sign of willingness to take these people on, and one of them would be to start going after Francesca Hong and saying , We're Wisconsin Democrats. We're not communists. This woman's like communist loon from Madison. She isn't going to win the general election and she's terrible for our state. If they don't say this, they're going to lose their whole damn party . But so far as I say , they're wimping and barely peeping , which brings us to this . Speaking of Francesca Hoang, she's just paid her credit card bill . Now, this is such a revealing story . It was reported a couple of weeks ago that Hong has a ten year old thirty thousand dollars credit card bill that she hasn't paid for a decade . When the story goes perfect, what a surprise that a Marxist doesn't think she should have to pay her bills . And she muttered out some explanation, well, a struggling person trying to make ends meet all this crap that people say. In reality, she didn't pay the credit card yet because she was she was able to get away with not paying it . Usually you have to file for a bankruptcy, but in this case she, must have held them in abeyance , but they eventually filed suit against her. And it was probably one of those cases, the credit card companies level when you have a high balance and you make the minimum payment every month because the minimum payment is just the interest . They're making a fortune off of you . But when you stop making the minimum payment, that's when they freak out because now they're afraid that you're not going to pay the whole thing at all, and they're going to be the ones holding this big long term bag. So they suitor This reminds me. This goes back a number of years. I don't have to be specific about it anymore. But I used to write my column for two separate newspaper companies. Now , my column appears only in the Conley Media Newspapers, Walker Shaw Freeman is one of them and if you see my column and printer on their website in one of the papers , I'm in one of them. But there's another company that I also wrote a column for. I wrote a separate column. I won't name it . They must have been struggling because they were always a slow pay . And anybody who's in business knows that when you have a slow pay , you often put up with it because ultimately they always paid. It was just slow . Well it got worse and worse and worse and worse. And I made numerous appeals and I'm just thinking, I can't believe they're not paying me. I could go on the radio and call this company a bunch of deadbeats. Why are they of all the people to stiff? Why are they stiffing me? I hired a lawyer. We filed a suit . The next day payden full . Obviously I should have sued earlier. On the other hand, I got the money. I stopped writing the column form. I don't need to mention who it is, but because this goes back this is fifteen, twenty years ago . My recollection is correct . Obviously , if they paid me the day after I filed the suit, they could have paid me all along. Same thing with Francesca Hong. She could have clearly paid this all along. So what's the explanation here? According to the story on JS Online , friends and family paid it off for her . She was able to pay it off to family support and personal sacrifice , campaign spokesman Becky Cooper said . Why didn't she make the personal sacrifice before the story was in the newspaper while she's running for governor? Again, it reminds me of the company that wouldn't pay me for the newspaper columns. You would think that Francesca Huang, okay, I'm running for governor that her credit card detadbeat isn' going to come up. Now again, they just suit her and maybe they suit her knowing she's running for governor. She can't stand this publicity. Maybe we'll finally get money out of this deadbeat. This speaks to her character . She just figured I don't have to pay and now that it was now something that was clearly going to be used against her. I don't know if any of the Democrats were going to use it against her because I say they're just whimping around with her. But if she won the nomination, trust me, Tiffany's campaign would have been using it right and left. So she had to pay it. Now , if this debt is being paid by campaign contributors off the books, that's a crime . If this is simply a bunch of key Democrats who wanted to win, that's a contribution and contributions need to be listed in. There's a max on them. There's no law against me giving Jason a lot of money. But if I'm giving Jason a lot of money to avoid a negative story, well Jason's running for office, then that's a campaign contribution that has to be declared family support, etc . Why did she get it before ? And the answer is because she's a deadbeat. Some people are deadbeat simply because they get in over their heads with problems, they get medical bills, too many kids often , you know, these overspending by one spouse leads to divorce. I've seen this a million times. I would say money more than anything else is the number one reason why couples get divorced. Would you agree with that, Jason? Yeah . There's lots of reasons, but I'm just saying that would be the number one. But Francesca Huang, she's bet in the state legislature . Do you know how much money they make? She only gets half the per diamond, but she gets a per diam. The per diamond is the travel is the expenses that they give, say, a legislator from Green, Bay or Superior who has to obviously overnight in Madison. They either have to have a monthly rental. They've got to buy restaurant food, they've got to stay in hotels and so on. She lives in Madison . They give them the Dane County representatives get half the per diam of everybody else. Why do they get Eddie? She gets to go home and sleep in her own bed . The pave for members of the let's I don't know what it is it's up there. It's sixty se toventy or so for a part time gig and many of them have other jobs Anyway , she paid it off . I've yet to see a story in the media from anybody pressing her and sticking a microphone in her face saying , Why didn't you pay it off before if you could pay it off now ? I tell you this, if Tom Tiffany was running around with tons of credit card debts, there would have been no first of us, candidates, candidacy would be finished . If a Republican businessman has a bankruptcy in their past, they have a startup and it doesn't work. You'll hear about it to no end . This woman's been running around in Madison, gallavaning around, flitting around the hoady toighty marks of circles in Madison . And I don't know how many other debts she has. The only reason we know about this one is because they suit her Now this is this podcast being recorded every afternoon. It is appropriate that we have a heat wave now hitting Wisconsin and so far as I can tell, it's hitting the whole country . The whole country's over ninety right now. There's like the northwestern part of the US is the only one you see those color coded weather maps, everything's that really orange color. The whole country , with the exception of the Northwestern United States, it's appropri ate to bring this up because Europe beat us to the punch. For the last several weeks, there's been a real heat wave in Europe . When I saw it was over ninety in London, that just boggled by London's always cold . When I went to Royal Ascot when our horse ran there about a decade ago , it was in the low seventies and everybody said, boy, you got the warmest week I've got in the line. I mean, it's banking in France . There's a story to be told about that, and I'm going to tell it in just a brief moment here on the Mark Belling podcast. Charisma Customs is not only a sponsoring partner of my podcast, it is a partner in my car . After getting my newest vehicle, I wanted real protection without all the maintenance. Charisma customs made it simple. Paint protection film for chips, ceramic coating for long term shine, and ceramic tint for comfort and privacy , you'll be stunned by the finished result. My car looks better than the day I bought it. Charisma Customs Delafield. If you want your vehicle done right, see Charisma . This is the Mark Belling podcast. I find this story amusing . I know you are not supposed to take del the light in problems of other people . There's a term for that. Do you know what the term is? I mentioned it made Paul remember it because I said it so many times. You know, Jason , long German word Scheidenfreud . It's taking mischievous delight in the misfortune of others . Like you see somebody like you know they may get hurt, but like when somebody trips and falls adm ititted's always funny. I mean, I don't want him to get hurt or anything like that, but if some goof that you know is well, like, you know, if Jerry Bott was walking down the hallway here and he tripped and fell, tell me you wouldn't find that hilarious. Or for that matter me, can you imagine if I tripped and fell and everybody saw it ? I mean God doesn't want us to do this , but I can't help it in this instance . There are this story was reported at the t ail end of last week . We're in obviously , the huge European vacation season Overwhelming numbers of tourists go to Europe in the summer because they're winters other than weight in Northern Europe . Their winters are milder than ours, but their summers they're beautiful . And they're all these American tourists in France raising holy hell, demanding their money back because their hotels aren't air conditioned. Apparently a few of the really big five star ones are , but the countryside inns and villas , the public places, the restaurants, France has this thing. They've prided themselves on this for years. You know, French are just so up they have this sense of incredible superiority based on absolutely nothing . France is known to be good for cooking. Other than that, what is France known to be good for ? Well, that's what I'm saying. It's something in which there's actual success . You know, you just don't associate much. But despite this , the French have always had this attitude of superiority , even over the rest of Europe and the French distay in air conditioning . It's interesting that this is one of the few holy toy lefty global I'm holier than thou causes that our left has an embrace that I know what it is. Our lefties don't want to be sitting around sweltering either. They want they'll take the air conditioning . Anyway, there are all these Americans over there demanding refunds because there's no air conditioning. You know how much sympathy I have for them? None . I mean, I really think I should have some sympathy. But you know, all the hotels , if you look up at the travel guides, they all say which ones are air conditioned and which ones aren't and usually , you know, it can get hot in the center of the country, but even along the Riviera, it's usually rather temperate in the summer because of the breezes and so on . The thing with the French is they believe that air conditioning is bad for the environment because of air conditioning requires the use of fossil fuels to power electricity and it's bad for the planet, all that crap. Now it's not just the American tourists, it's the Frenchies themselves. I mean, it's been like a hundred in parts of that country for like three weeks . It's way hotter than normal for almost and again, France is a big country north of south . The south of France is always, you know, that would be like almost our Pacific coast, the Riviera, but the center of the country can get really, really, really hot. And it's really hot, not only in France, but in all of Europe, and the heat wave has been going on for some time and the French people themselves are now suffering. And I got to tell you something . There are certain places where you don't want to be where people are all sweated out and France is one of them . The percentage of women on the planet that don't shave their armpits, I swear France has half of 'em . Those of you gone, friends, admit it. There are places in which it just sm isell y . Now, of course, I can have this opinion because I'm not in Europe right now . And it's like when ever there's a problem on a cruise ship . All the people who don't take cruises because they don't want to spend the money on a cruise, they kind of like that. They oh that ship is strated at sea or this problem have good, good, good, good . I don't want to fall into that category, but okay, I'll feel a little badly for a European country that has air conditioning where people are suffering in the heat and they're not prepared for it and all of that. I have zero sympathy for the French and I have zero sympathy for American tourists who are going over to the, you know, and they come they go over there at seventy one degrees and they have the windows open. Oh you don't need air conditioning. They're so much more enlightened and progressive than us. That's what they all come in. So they're over there hotter than hell . Now , the heat here in Wisconsin is just now starting. I know I have listeners obviously all over the country, but this big, big heat wave, it was actually very cool last weekend . It's just moving in now and should last for the entirety of the week. And one of the I think most cliches are true, which I've explained this many times. How they how would something become a cliche unless it was true? One of the truest y, it's not the heat, it's the humidity. Well, it's true eighty five with low humidity is, I think, wonderful . eighty five where the dew point is eighty four is rather oppressive, I say rather . And we've had weather like this forever . The TV stations and the media are just so over the top right now with everybody's going to die from this. We're going to be closing everything all week. You just know that this is coming. And because it's tied to the weekend of the fourth of July, you watch . Most companies have the third as a holiday already. They're gonna start closing businesses on the first and the second so that people can turn this into like five day weekends . I love that. We have to close the business . Whoa , that doesn't mean how do people avoid the heap because they've closed the businesses in fact, I would think that more businesses are air conditioned than homes . Now, I admit, I wouldn't want to work on a road crew during this. I wouldn't want to be somebody doing construction. I don't want to be up on any roof in any, you know, at a time like this. But I mean the level, of over reaction that we have is okay . I was just in Florida a week and a half ago in South Florida. It was in the low nineties and very muggy, hot even there. It's hot right now everywhere. Usually Florida in the summer gets in southern Florida to the upper eighties . It was I mean, it was hot even there, but they're used to that. They get ninety, they get that kind of weather all the day. I didn't see anybody dropping over dead. You always have to worry about the elderly and people whose houses get really hot and they don't have AC and they don't have much money . But that problem isn't any greater now than it's been at any other time in our history . Not of this story , I'm telling you, if you want to find a fascinating American sports story right now , it's the WNBA . This Caitlin Clark thing, which is now this is it boiled over isn't the right word. This story has simply exploded . The W NBA has been in comparison to the amount of money that was spent promoting it, been one of the most unsuccessful sports leagues ever . They've been subsidized by the NBA , which is what kept them afloat . They have alm hadost no general fan interest at all . Most casual fans could name in the history of women's basketball two to three players . Then this phenomenon occurred and it started when she was in college, Caitlyn Clark . She's kind of a throwback player in that she's just a great shooter. She's entered the WNBA , which has elevated the platform of the W NBA, games that she's playing, especially the first two years that were on national television got ratings five , ten, fifteen times higher than you normally get for a WNBA game . With her being there, they've been able to raise the pay scale for players in the league . Suddenly, the league has a following . I would compare this to the big break in America where pro basketball became more popular than college basketball was when Magic Johnson and Larry Byrd went from college to the NBA was seventy eight, seventy nine somewhere in that era . And then the second big wave was when Michael Jordan came in , where individual superstars elevated the entire sport . The best example of this, I think, is the impact Tiger Woods had in golf . Golf in terms of fan interest was really lagging after the era of Palmer and Nicholas Trevino , there were not a lot of stars that casual fans paid any attention to. A lot of the players were generic and lacked personality, then Tiger Woods came along . And interest in professional golf exploded and sponsorship revenue came went up, TV ratings went up, and therefore the purses, the overall payout to the players exploded All golfers benefited from Tiger Woods' presence in the game . The thing that's fascinating about the WNBA is the players and just about everybody else associated with the league , they're not happy about this . The simplest explanation is she's white and they don't like that . Now some of them have essentially come out and said this Brittany Grinder's mom and a white girl . There are many others say the only reason any of you are paying any attention to the WNBA is because she's white . Well, let's imagine that's true . So what? You're the beneficiary of it. By the way, I don't think that there's much to back that up . The two big, I think elevations the NBA had were when A , an African American and a white star came in Bird and Magic , and then Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan was one of the most popular athletes ever when he came in. This black guy . You didn't need to have a white guy come in to become the star and face of the league and become a figure that people non basket, one of the most recognizable faces on the planet . The fact that Caitlyn Clark is white might have something to do with this was to say it's the only reason just it's not borne out by the history in any other sport that we have . But even if it was true I'll relate this to my own career . Rush Limbo created careers for hundreds of talk show hosts . There was almost no conservative talk radio at all before Rush came around The station that I was at in Madison go back to down nineteen eighty eight was one of the few stations that was doing full scale talk prior to Russia. And we were an original Russian affiliate. The first day he signed on, he was on our station over there. There only's like sixty stations initially . He ended up being on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stations. And these stations that put him on , Russia's show was three hours a day, even if you did a replay, which many stations did in the middle of the night , max six hours a day, what are you going to do with the other eighteen ? These stations changed formats and became talk stations, which meant there was a need to hire all of these talk shows. Rush was obviously the most successful and made way more money than any of the rest of us . I've never heard a single talk show host begrudge the money that Rush Limbaugh made. Why would you? He put talk radio on the map . When I came to WISN , Rush was not yet on the air here, but they put him on shortly after I was here as they sort of move toward full actual talk station here, but it was soft talk, you know , the kind of stuff that TMJ had been doing forever. It wasn't really issue oriented. And it certainly wasn't opinion driven and it was not conservative, but I came on . Rush was growing Rush boomed immediately . They put him on , my show My show was one of the few in the country in which I outperformed Rush on WISN. Most of these stations Rush did way better than the local hosts, but that created the opportunity for us to hire everybody else. J Weber came only a couple to three years after I was here. He ended up with a career off of that based not only on success of Rush, but on the success of my J Weber begrudge my success The guy that begrudged my success was Charlie Sykes, he went over to WTMJ was hell ben on beating me . I never wanted to hear that Charlie was taking a pay cut or anything . If I ever found out and I never did, what Charlie was being paid over there, and it was more than me, I first say, I got to be paid more than him . And I'm sure he would use that to me. It's good for everybody in a field if somebody thrives . So why do the WNBA players hate Caitlin Clark so much ? They didn't hate any of the other they didn't hate Brittany Griner when she came in . The story has taken on a greater meaning this year . Her coach, she's with the Indiana franchise, the Indiana Fever, came out last week and blasted the league saying players are fouling Caitlin Clark harder than other players and nothing's being called , the NBA, the men's sport for the longest time , had special treatment for its superstars . I mean, anybody who followed the NBA knew that you couldn't touch Michael Jordan The thing that was so upsetting about that is you didn't need to give Michael Jordan breaks . And back in the era in which the NBA had these high profile, almost celebrity refs, there's huge home court advantages because the superstars got all the calls, especially when they were at home . The NBA has tried to stop that . And I think that largely they have. I don't think there's anywhere near as much star treatment as there was in the past. And just the treatment that Yannis got in Milwaukee, every time he went to the basket, it seemed to me that he was followed and rarely were those things called . It may still exist, but it's at a minor level. The odd thing with Kaitlyn Clark is, according to her coach , you hit a certain player when they go into the lane. You hit Caitlin at the exact same level. They refuse to make the call. And she's now getting hurt constantly. Some of the hits on her are that she's being punched in the throat . And rather than crack down on the goose that's laying the golden egg, the league itself is doing nothing. The Nata Francis say through the coach. The coach is just beside herself . That her player is being banged around and now injured bad back . She's being slammed to the ground, hit in the throat , that she's being that not that she isn't getting star privileged, that she's not being treated fairly at all . All right , the players, hotheads, jealous of her whatever reason the owners of the teams and the people who run the league, how in the world are they so dumb that they're letting this happen Since Clark entered this is a story from the athletic dot com, since Clarke theeditedag Luee, opponents have defended her with zeal as one would expect. Sometimes their fouls have been flagrant and they haven't always been called that way on the court . Has Clark been targeted while the league's officials have declared open season on her ? Or is the league merely treating her like any other player This week it felt like the former . In other words, that the league was simply refusing to provide any protection for her, as Clark faced two uncalled cheap shots, her coach's words, by members of the Phoenix Mercury . It's not clear if those players led to the injury that now has Clark on the shelf . Some of the roughing up of Clark has been over the top , unnecessary and uncalled There was no reason why Alyssa Thomas needed to press her fist on Clark's neck during a loose ball scramble Wednesday . The league agreed after the fact when it was ruled the play was a flagrant two and gave Thomas the Associated One game penalty . You can see why the fever are angry given Clark's injury history . Here's clearly what's happening . She's battered goods right now . If you follow any professional sport , once an athlete starts developing injuries , it just spirals . They become injury prone . There's nothing that would indicate she's a malingerer, she's quite the competitor . This is a fascinating story , however, in which and I really can't come up with a parallel , where a sport and its participants and officials so resented the emergence of a transcendent player that even though it's brought them all associated success , they don't water . It's as I say, it's bizarre. And I mean the only other thing I can come up with is historical. I mean, there was tremendous resentment when baseball broke the color barrier when Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play baseball . And a lot of the white players and some of the fans didn't want to see a black player play. Well , that door was opened very quickly because after Jackie Robinson , African Americans came in huge numbers, and it turned out to be great for the game. All sorts of black superstars came in. There was a time in which in the fifties and sixties, where I would say more than half the great players were black. It's certainly not that way anymore in the United States. Nonetheless . That was simply out and out racism. And so maybe that's how we explain this. But at the time when Jackie Robinson came into baseball right away that first year, it didn't make baseball more popular. Gradually it did , but Caitlin Clark immediately changed the popularity of that league because she came with so many people who had followed her from college. If you work at a business in which employees are pitted against one another, maybe there'd be that type of resentment . But what she has done is elevated the salaries and level of interest and marketability of everybody . For all of the teams in the league, when her team comes into town to play, they sell more tickets . Yet they seem to not stand her . And as I say, it's one thing when some of the there's this player Angel Reese who she's like the bad girl of the N NBA. She's also overrated. get traded again and she's one of those when they do the analytics not as good as some of her sats are because of the number of she just shoots all the time. She's a ballhog and she misses a lot of shots and she just resented Caitlyn Clark and she goes elbowinging her and bang her own. Okay, that's one thing. You've got to loose cannon over there. Sports have always had that . Players had just resented another star . That doesn't explain the ownership of all the other teams . They control the commissioners. If the league wanted to end all of these non calls against Caitlin Clark, they tell the referees start officiating the game on the straight up, but clearly even some of the refs don't Liker . It's not a sexist thing. I've just never gotten really into women's basketball . There are all sorts of women's sports that I'm a fan of . I'm particularly a fan of the sports in which the women's version of the sport is really like , you know, I have a long background in fast pitch softball. It almost has non existed at the male level, but it's a big big, college sport, the college softball world series . I like watching those games . I like women's hockey because the Wisconsin team is whenever you have your own team is really great. The Wisconsin program is the greatest in the history of the sport. I follow that. It's just the style of WNB, I don't know. I watch the games and I just never really got into it If I had been one of those that started watching every game once Kaitlyn Clark came in because she is her highlight reels are incredible. She's just a great shooter. I think what's the point now if she's not gonna play if she's constantly hurt and you're just watching the player that you really, really like not just taking hard follows and being treated the same as all the other women, being cheap shoted to de ath . This would not be tolerated in the men's game in the NBA . When players would cheap shot Yannes . His teammates would be right over there . If somebody in the NBA clotheslined Steph Curry, you know, swung an arm and hit him on the jawline of the throat to make him slam down and land on his rear end and maybe his head . Massive suspension . There wouldn't be a failure . Look at the NFL and the rule changes they made to protect the stars of the game, the quarterbacks . The W NBA thing is just odd . And the only explanation that makes any sense is simply over racism that can't stand that a white girl is the most popular player in the game even if they have benefited from her popularity . Going back to the Tiger Woods example, and no one would deny that Tiger Woods elevated golf as much as any athlete has ever elevated any sport. In his case, he was the rare golfer. Tiger says Tiger doesn't consider himself African American because he's multi ethnic, but he certainly has dark skin color . If the Caitlin Clark's phenomenon is just simply because she's white, then why did the Tiger Woods phenomenon occur? Because he clearly have all the things he is, one of them is not white . I've said many times, Trump derangement syndrome is real . It is, I think, a real mental condition. This is not just cuteness on my part. I think it's real . So many people have done things that are so self destructive harm themselves because of their loathing of Trump. Were it not for Trump Derrangement Syndrome, Trump would not have won in twenty twenty four. After the twenty twenty election, whether it was stolen from him or not, he would have been finished. The biggest reason he came back is because they stomped on him so badly that it created a groundswell of support from Republicans who knew what was going on and none of the other Republicans running for president against him in twenty four had a chance after that . And when the truth came out that so many of these stories were lies , there was there was a vindication . But there's examples beyond that . Look at the number of people who've wrecked their lives with their insanity toward Trump . John Bolton is now a convicted felon . And the thing that's beautiful about this is the pompous ass pleaded guilty. He admitted he's a criminal . Bolton's crime was taking classified records to personal use . The president is the only person that can class ify records in the first place. Once you leave government, you can't take anything classified . Bolton did. Now let's be honest about this. People have been doing this in government forever . And nobody much gave paid any attention to it because unless you were talking about some like the nuclear codes or something, there's a lot of things that government classifies as secretive that doesn't need to be. And it's been going on, I'm sure for many, many years that somebody was secretary of state, somebody who was in high some high fallutin position , they saved some stuff, especially now that things are electronic . But But this all started . When they raided Mara Lago , raided at dawn , armed agents going through Melania Melania's lingerie drawer looking for so called classified records that the president took out of the White House. They never sent a letter saying, Hey, Mr. You believe you took some of these things you can,'t have those. Who knows if Trump would have complied? They never did that . They instead raided his home as if he had stolen jewelry . Trump pointed out Joe Biden after he left the vice presidency and as vice president, he has no access to classified records only the president can classify. Took stuff out of the White House and had it sitting in his garage with his corvette . Well, one of the people that got up and sanctimoniously condemned the lack of patriotism for Trump for so being so carelessly classified records was John Bolton. So John Bolton is from the regular Republican Party and he's one of those that simply couldn't stand the fact that the Maga wing took control of the party . And that level of ego, they just he became obsessed and deranged with regard to Trump . So here he is pointing at Trump when he's doing the same damn thing. Why do he take the classified documents? Because he wanted to write a book and in order to write the break the book, he wanted to be able to cite these records and use the information that he had there . He did it just so he could make money by writing his book that how many people would have bought it anyway. It just allows him to go on the book tour and act again like this senior statesman and instead he's a crook . I don't know that the Justice Department would have been looking at people like Bolton had the press it not been started when they went after Trump . Because as I say, people have been taking classified records and they've been leaving government forever and ever and ever. Trump was the first guy that they decided to make a stink about it. People have talked about the LBJ library and all of the stuff the information that 's been based down there . Again, this has been going on for the longest time . But once they decided to try to criminalize what Trump did, it opened the door to criminalize the people who actually had zero right to classified information and had a lot of it, including Bolton. So now he's not only in shame , he's a laughing stock but he did it to himself . On the program last week, I did a segment in which I commented on the Arrowhead School District not allowing students at the graduation, students were able to make like a twenty to thirty second statement sometimes shorter that they put in a slideshow that they scrolled along as the graduates went on stage and so on . Several of the students had statements in which they made comments about the importance of God in their life . The school district banned those . One of the students went to the school board and complained after the graduation was over . She had quoted a Bible verse and I never did find out whether or not she put the Bible quotation at the end of it or she just had if the verse . The verse itself does capitalize the word it was either He or Him . So clearly we're talking about God, but it wasn't even it was an Old Testament verse so it wasn't even Christ . But they didn't let her do it . And I raised questions about this. I said, legally, they may have had the right to do so, but that didn't mean that they had to do it Someone who truly accepts the Christian message is told that Christ needs to be the center point of your life and nothing is secondary to Christ. So if you're a young person and you believe this and you're supposed to make a statement about the defining statement as you leave , that is something you'd say . They didn't let us say it. So I called them out on this, particularly when I heard that they said we got legal advice . Now the law firm that represents an inordinate number of school districts in southeastern Wisconsin is Build Better . I don't know if that's who gave them their advice , but I will tell you this . I butted heads with that law firm again and again and again and again and again over their crappy advice to school boards in how to defy the open records law and the open meetings law . So I contacted the superintendent Conrad Farner and asked him a series of questions about this . He did give me a lengthy reply . Since I commented on this issue last week, I'm going to read his reply. I may interject a couple of times to explain what it is that he's referring to. Mr. Belling, when a public school has district staff created when a public school has district staff create a graduation slideshow on district time, using district equipment at a district sponsored event on district grounds set up and supervised by district administrators, the law generally views it as school sponsored speech, not a public forum. I had made the point that the courts have repeatedly ruled that a graduation speaker can talk about religion and god if they want because you don't have the right to censor someone's religious views. You do as a government however have a right to censor the individual views of government employees, which is the distinction that he's making here. Under the Supreme Court ruling in Hazelwood School District versus Culmeyer , school administrators have the right to edit, restrict and otherwise control school sponsored excessive activities, expressive activities as long as their reasons are reasonably related to legitimate educational concerns . Now, again, I haven't particularly quarreled with that, but having a right to do something and for it to be the right thing are separate things, continuing. Maintaining an environment that is neutral, respectful of all faiths and viewpoints, and focused entirely on celebrating the graduates meets this legal standard. Portraying this as anyone being refused anything is not accurate, but just nonsense. She wanted to say something and she wasn't allowed to do it. Of course that was refused, but he's priviling with my use of that word. It is accurate to say a few students did not follow unambiguous directions and were simply told to do so Now we're at a semantic game . No, you can't do this. You have to do that. Is that refusal? Of course, it's refusal, but I understand. He continues . Here are the exact directions given to students. So this is what they told them . And by the way , if he since he responded, it does not surprise me he gives me the exact instructions that were given to them. It's helpful to hear them, but of course they had instructions on this. I mean , if the kids are going to have like a thing in a slideshow instead of just saying, say fifteen seconds worth of something that's meaningful to you, of course there's gotta be rules and regulations because this is government. Here it is . Seventy five characters max . Now I would have done it by the amount of time, but there has to be a limit. You don't want some blow hard kid to go on for nineteen minutes. Type your post , type your post secondary plans or a thank you to your family. Example. Thanks, Mom and Dad, please don't cancel the credit card. See , Lefty should never try to use humor or I will be studying education at the University of Michigan because it is the best. Inappropriate comments will not be considered. In accordance with policy, comments that are political, religious or reference protected classes, including but not limited to race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or national origin are not permitted. By defining the boundaries of the slideshow ahead of time, including the topic strictly to family thank yous in future career college plans, the expectations and limits were clearly articulated and established. The slideshow was never meant to be a form for any religious or political viewpoints. It is an extremely brief picture of each graduate that allows for an extremely brief thank you or future plans. Again, the slideshow is district sponsored speech, not a public forum. Students were not required to submit any comments and many did not. For those that wanted to include a statement, we set clear expectations . For the extremely rare case where students did not follow the simple straightforward directions that were given, we simply indicated that they needed to follow the directions. They were still able to submit a comment. It just had to meet the expectations. When the students are given assignments, the product is expected to meet the expectations of the assignment. They cannot turn in whatever they want. This is common sense. Now, I could quibble here and claim that if they're graduating, they're not really students, and this isn't an assignment, but I get the point, continuing . We make every effort to consistently hold all students to the same standards and expectations. When students do not follow directions about a simple task, we redirect and guide them so that they meet the expectations that are able to complete the task. When they do not understand a direction in class, we do not refuse them. We help them recognize what they did not understand and work with them so that they can correct and modify their work and understanding until they until they m astered what is expected. While public schools are government entities and must respect the First Amendment, they are allowed to restrict entire categories of speech and school sponsored media provided they do so neutrally . By consistent by consistently not allowing any religious or political commentary, it is legally appropriate. All students are expected to follow the same directions. The same expectations apply to all students. I think he's being redundant here, but as I say, I'll read the whole thing. As a public school district, we need to remain consistent and neutral. The graduation ceremony is no different from being in class during a school day or at an athletic event or a play. If people want to say a prayer after an event at a public school, the courts have upheld that practice. But when you have an entire captive audience at a public school event expression of personal political or religious views can be limited as long as that expectation is applied consistently . Now I'll interject here. I don't think you could find a more benign Bible verse than the young woman used. The notion that that is a viewpoint that was somebody else is going to come up with a viewpoint what would be the opposite of me. God didn't have a damn thing to do with me graduating high school. I suppose that would be the alternative . And I suppose he's saying he's fearful that if we allow the student to make reference to God, we can make allow a student to get up there and say that I don't believe in God and God didn't help me in my high school at all. That is what he's trying to say. That if we don't ban all of it , we wouldn't be able to ban somebody from saying something like this . I think that's stretching a point, but again, he's making his point. Here now we get to the answer of where this legal advice came from. A W ASB that's the Wisconsin Association of School Board's attorney. I don't know who the law firm is for the WASB. It would not shock me if it's Build Veter. Their fingerprints are on every obnoxious decision school districts have handed down for the last thirty years of Wisconsin. Anyway , a WASB attorney has advised us that if we allow religious and political views, we have to allow all such views. If that was allowed, there was no controlling what sorts of statements might be submitted. Was the student's statement of view? I thought it was a personal statement about herself, but again , there would be significant number of questions as to what is appropriate at a public high school graduation ceremony. We are limited by what our resources allow us to do. We have neither the time nor the staff nor the inclination to assess and determine, debate with students and parents which religious or political expressions are appropriate or not appropriate as part of a graduation ceremony. No, I disagree with that because that's what they did. They went through everybody's statement and they gave the acts to this. So he says they don't have the time to say what's appropriate or not, but they did go through it to decide what was appropriate or not . Parents and audience members will also start expressing whatever views they hold, and there will no doubt be strongly held beliefs for many perspectives and ideals. We have no interest in creating such a circumstance , we cannot manage such a circumstance. There was no open public forum for religious and political expression at graduation before we ever created a slideshow. There was no intent for that to change merely because we have a large scoreboard with video capability. We want our graduation ceremony to be the same positive, greatly appreciated event it has been for years, and then the kicker at the end. Moving forward, we will not utilize a slideshow at graduation. Well, I think that's the correct decision here . If this thing , if a student who is very religious can't at the end of her high school career and they ask him to say ten or fifteen seconds of banalities out there, make a reference to the importance of God in her life, then don't even have it . Because if everything is, simply don't cancel the credit card, mom. What was the point of putting that thing up there in the first place ? The comment that I made last week , if you can't even so much as acknowledge the existence of God at all out of your own voice and your own words in a public school . It's again, my great argument against public schools . If a Christian isn't making God the center of their life, they're sinning. That's what Christians are taught . And if there can't be the slightest a combination of Christianity , this wasn't you know, the statement wasn't endorsed by anyone. If they can't have that , it's just another argument to get kids out of public schools and get them into religious schools where values are not considered poisonous. The other point that I want to make about, well then we have to treat all things the same. This is this whole thing that occurs with the left . If we allow anyone to say anything, then if we allow someone to say this, then we have to allow everything to occur. And the next thing you know, you're going to have somebody up there making a statement about promoting insist. This is the loss of common sense that has occurred in a society in which the people who are in charge have a set of values inconsistent with the way anybody else lives their life . Final point on this before I go to the break . There are numerous government bodies in the United States that open their session with a prayer . That is the government itself actually putting on a prayer . This notion that we have to allow anyone to utter anything that is religious in nature . It's not new . And there is some moving back in the correct decision with regard to this. But it's one of the things that I think has wrecked our society . The loss of widespread religious belief has resulted in the dramatic increase of immoral and self destructive behavior It has dramatically resulted in the increasing sense of hopelessness and feelings of being lost by kids who have been raised without any religion in their lives and feel a sense of emptiness that of course you would feel if you felt that there was no purpose in life and if there isn't a God and there isn't anything for which to live for, why would you feel that sense of purpose? The Constitution of the United States has been around since seventeen eighty nine, was signed and ratified, I think it's seventeen ninety one. Declaration of Independence was written in seventeen seventy six. And it wasn't until about sixty years ago that we got into this notion that we have to excise God and religion from every element of any type of public life at all , and it has not been to our benefit to do so . I do wonder this , had they not censored the statements, and apparently six or seven kids had statements about God , would there have been complaints ? It's again one of those things of which there's no way of knowing, but the superintendent did respond, Conrad Farner in I shared his response. You're listening to the Mark Belling podcast. How much would it take for you to be wealthy and financially comfortable? Schwab recently asked Americans that question, most said at least two million dollars . You might have a different number for yourself. Make sense, since you have your own ideas about travel, retirement, and the legacy you want to leave. That means you need custom advice building a personalized plan. The team at Annex Wealth Management is ready to listen and help. Annex Wealth Management, give them a call, know the difference . This is the Mark Belling podcast . Now, I will admit that I have been wrong about Serena Williams more than I have been wrong about anything else . I declared her washed up, I mean fifteen years ago . She just keeps coming back and coming back and coming back and coming back. And now she gets on one of the GLP ones and her body has shrink. She seems to be a shell of herself and she's now playing tennis again . She's competing in Windbullen . She's going to first of all compete in the doubles or their sister . Since she is again competing , that means she's subject to drug testing . And she's now bitching about it . Serena Williams over the weekend launched into a diatribe about how onerous the drug testing is on athletes . Most sports that are doing drug testing do out of competition testing. That's what we refer to it in horse racing. If you simply test the horse on the day of a race in no other time , the illegal crap they've been pumping into the horse's body may have cleared their siftens by that point, but the advantage that they had gained is still there . So in horse racing, they have out of competition testing, meaning you can test the horse whenever you feel like testing the horse. And in sports like tennis, they don't just simply test you the day that you have a tennis match . They can test you any time they feel like it. And that's what Serena Williams is complaining about how inconvenient this is for someone as busy as her . Here's the Here's the quote. It's grueling , first of all , no matter what she says from this point forward, it's not going to be grueling. They don't drug test in the workplace here at IHAT Media because if they did, there'd even be fewer than the five employees we still have left . But I don't think it would be grueling they changed the rules . I didn't know some of the rules . So apparently if you miss a test outside of your window , it still counts as missed . Well, yeah . See, if you miss a test , you get a strike against you. This is me and not the statement. This is how drug testing would work. If the person doesn't show up for their test , it's like a strike and it's marked against you. The reason for that is obvious. What's the biggest reason someone would miss a test ? Because they know what they have in their system. So again, without regard to whether or not she's saying something was in her system, she's saying. So apparently if you miss a test outside of your window, it still counts as a miss. I'm like, I guess I can't go pick up my kids , she said. They don't require the test at three eighteen in the afternoon precisely . Furthermore , every athlete that competes in professional tennis has to undergo the exact same thing. Is she the only one with kids then? It's unprofessional. I hate it . I think it's necessary, but I think a lot of the stuff if I want to go places outside of my window, I should be able to go with out it having count as a mist test . So she's griping about the fact that they have these windows and she's got to be tested during the window . First of all, the governing association here, the International Tennis Integrity Agency says they have not changed the rules. They're the same rules that they have had for many, many years. So her statement that they've changed the rules is not operative I'm just going to make the observation . I have almost never seen cases where people who weren't on drugs objected to drug testing . I'm not saying she's cheating, but I will say that if she's just undergone significant weight los s . She would certainly benefit from something that would increase her muscle mass because one of the things that the GLP ones do is they really erode muscle mass the. great And strength that she had was that she was very muscle bound . So she's certainly someone that you would wonder would be taking something artificial. Again, I'm not saying that she has, but she's opened this question by talking about how inconvenient it is . I haven't heard any of the others bitched about it . I believe it was out of competition testing that is how they caught Cornicova a number of years ago. I'm not sure that of, but I think it was. Now this story , Waymo has a voluntary recall of about three thousand eight hundred vehicles . Waymo is the self driving automobile company that 's part of Alphabet, Google . There are way more cars operating now in a handful of cities . They're used for things like ride sharing. They're not being widely used because it's really expensive . Obviously , the thing that they're doing the recall here for was necessary because it said that the software was having difficulty with road construction hazards . In other words, you know, the software is built in that it can, you know, the self driving car sees everything in front of you so that if it sees a vehicle, it slows down. If it sees a kid in a bicycle, if it sees anything, like that, apparently it was having a hard time dealing with either traffic cones or block signs and not understanding if it could continue to go through it so they're recalling the tweak the software . Here's why I bring this up . I had a first . I mentioned I was in Florida a week and a half ago, weekend before this last phone . I saw for the first time a WAMO in traffic . I knew that there were some of them in Miami that had been reported, but I'd never seen one. The street that I was on, I mean some of you will know this area, most of you won't. It's the one hundred it's one hundred sixty third street. It's one of the streets that you can cross the bay from say Miami Beach and the cities on that side of the coast right on the ocean to get over to the larger metro area on the other side of the bay. There's only a handful of streets. Most of them are called causeways that have a bridge that goes across the water. Hundred sixty third street very heavily traveled because the next street north to go over is one hundred and ninety second, twenty nine blocks to the north, and I think the next one south is one hundred and thirty fifth. So if you want to cross over the water, you're either going to one hundred thirty fifth or up to one hundred ninety second, one hundred sixty third in between. So everybody that's on one side of the other that needs to cross between say about one hundred and forty fourth and one hundred eightieth is going to take one hundred sixty third. So it's a street. It's really wide. It's like six lanes in each direction. And you know, when there isn't much traffic, I think the speed limit is forty five. But there almost always is traffic because as I say, it's just to get from one side or the other across the bay or the inperco depending on where you are, you have to cross that. And I mean, I knew what they look like. They've got like these things. They look like , you know, the lights that a police car has on top of them, but there's like a gadget. There's a machine with the camera and the processor and it's sitting on top of them and they paint the way more thing on the side . And I'm driving on this one hundred sixty third street, which as I say, is a very, very , very busy street and often when you're not in rush hour, it's busy, but you can still be going at speed like thirty five or forty miles an hour . And there this, there this way is. So I moved to the right of it and looked over and I went over to make sure there was no driver in there . I think that street is one of the biggest pains in the asses of any street that I've ever been on , especially during rush hour and when I'm down there I have to take that thing all the time. If Waymo can work on that street , it can work anywhere . Of all the advances in technology that have been thrown around out there, the one that I've just been the most skept ical as to whether or not it could ever actually work is the driverless automobile . And we simply don't know because there's so few I mean Tesla and Musk, they're obsessed with this. The Robotaxi, that's why this Tesla stock price keeps going up. The Robotaxi he believes is going to change transportation and he eventually thinks that all of us are going to be in the driverless cars. Alphabet, another giant tech company also sees this. Their company is Waymo, but we are in such the early st ages. There's only a few of the vehicles and they're only in a few cities and they're barely being used at all. We're nowhere near the point where like say twenty five percent of the cars in the road don't have a driver in it. I'm just skeptical that we can ever get there . It's the one thing with regard to technology and automation that I'm seeing way too many way too many reasons to think that it isn't going to work. And among them is just I just think it's going to make gridlock even worse because the drivers are so safe the way you know, when you're in one of these things in which you're just bum per to bumper , is the Waymo going to be leaving too much space between the car and front of it, meaning everybody's just going to cut in front of the Waymo and that they, you know, the Waymo certainly aren't going to drive recklessly . But there's a thing with regard to being too cautious and too safe when you're in constant traffic. Okay, and here's the okay, the Waymo has to switch over three lanes of traffic . We've all had to do things like that. You size up your lanes, you look over your shoulder, and you increase your speed if necessary to get over there, you try to do it when there's enough clearance . I just would think that some of these automated automated cars they're going to be so careful that there's never going to be a time that they're going to come over and do they take into consideration the unanticipated guy who's going seventy five miles an hour in the right lane that you never thought would have gotten there at the time . But I've seen my first one . It's also Miami was also the place I saw my first Tesla. When the Teslas first came out and when was the first test? Was that eleven maybe? Does that sound right ? Yeah, it was parked in front of Joe's Stone Crab at the Vale. And I swear it was somebody who was just when it's like the cyber truck now. The cyber tr uck is like the unusual vehicle that draws attention now. There's a zillion of them in Miami and people who have those need the reason to have had cars like that is so people look at you using them. Obviously, the Teslas are ubiquitous now, but the first Tesla that I ever saw