New University of Wisconsin Athletic Director

The Mark Belling podcast is presented by ULINE. For quality shipping and industrial supplies, ULIN has everything in stock. Visit youline dot com The Mark Belling podcast is a production of iHeart Radio podcasts Obviously, there's a problem with Iran . We've had a problem with Iran ever since the shab fell and they took our hostages back when Carter was the president . And every president has either ignored the problem, tried to address it, or resolved to address it . President Trump, I think, is resolving to address it . But it hasn't been fixed . And I don't know right now that we can fix it . I think we've done about as much as we can do because there's a problem right now . And there's been almost no coverage of what that problem is. I want to open up the America two hundred and fifty weekend podcast by discussing that . As we go along today, I'm going to have a lengthy discussion on where we are as a nation and how the threat we are facing from within now is as grave as the threat that was faced from without from outside two hundred and fifty years ago. When it comes to shipping, packaging, industrial supplies, and equipment . Many suppliers offer endless aisles of product. ULII knows what you can't do with endless aisles of product. You can't test the quality of each product, ensure everything is in stock, ready to ship the same day, and have a team available twenty four seven to answer your product questions. Uline only carries supplies and equipment they have tested, tried , and often use in their own business . Experience the ULINE difference today . Visit Uline . com . We've had ever since the ceasefire was announced and this memorandum of understanding was released . There's been a back and forth and a back and forth and a back and forth and I think most of us know what's going on here . Iran is jerking us around . On the other hand , Iran clearly needs us right now . If you think we're suffering from instability in the Strait of Hormuz, how about Iran ? They're the country whose economy is premised on a will. Nonetheless, they're jerking us around . Statements from our own government have been an attempt, I think, let's be honest , by the Trump administration , to make things look better than maybe they are. Here's Vice President Fans. President Trump's directives are clear . The talks are going well, and we will give and we will give we will give negotiations every chance to succeed . No, I think that's accurate . He says the talks are going well , we'll give negotiations every chance to succeed, but they're opening they're leaving the door open to the notion that they won't succeed . That's realistic . As for Trump , he said there have been some very good meetings at DOA Qatar . As far as things are going, this is Trump . The denuclearization of Iran is moving along well . We hit them very hard , but we're getting along very well . There's an elephant in the room, and that is the fact that Iran isn't talking directly to Trump . Here's the problem . I think that a lot of people, and you know, there's three sides to this issue. There are other people who don't want us to do anything with Iran . They can't stand Israel. They don't think Iran is a threat. They think America first means not protecting America's vital interests. They didn't want the war. They don't want anything to do with it. And then there's the other side, the side that wants us to obliterate Iran , knock them back and knock them down so hard that their government falls . As you know, I believe that that second position is unrealistic I don't believe you can totally knock off a government without an invasion. You can't win a war entirely from the air unless the other side simply is realistic and surrenders . Iran isn't realistic . And I don't believe that we can have a ground war on Iran. I don't believe that it is worth it. So I think that that third option of knocking them out, knocking 'em out, knocking them out, knocking 'em out is a no go . The knockout will have to come from within . And that's always very difficult, but it's not impossible. Tyranical governments have been overthrown as long as they've been to radical governments . But if Iran now doesn't, if Iran keeps jerking us around in these talks , why not just go back and blast them for another three months? That's where the problem comes in . And I'm not saying this hasn't been covered, I'm saying that it's getting almost no coverage in the media . I don't think we have the weapons to do it . The Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS has published a rundown of the number of and it goes through all of the different weapons, but there are two key ones that jump out of me, two missiles, the Patriot missiles and the Tawak missiles . They estimate that the inventory that we had prior to the war beginning was three thousand one hundred . They're estimating that over one thousand of those tomahawk missiles have been used in the war with Iran . It says one thousand plus . Let's just give our country the benefit of the doubt and say it's only twelve hundred . That means we not we use up forty percent of our tomahawk missiles already in Iran . What are we going to do? Use them all up and have no missiles ? No, the patriot missiles . The estimate was that we had two thousand three hundred thirty of them prior to the war . The CSI estSimate is that we have used between one thousand sixty and fourteen hundred and thirty of those missiles. That's more than half if you're on the high end of that range . What if something else comes up somewhere in the world . Without being overly crude, I'll just be partially crude by censoring one of the words. We shot our you know what already ? We head around really, really , really, really hard, but as I've explained, this goes back to the war wars of Iraq. You just can't win a war on the ground. The first Iraq war, the one that the first Bush won , we did win, but we went in on the ground, but we never had to go all the way to Baghdad . We stopped at that point , which left Saddam in place which resulted in the second war that had to occur. We can't keep firing missiles at Iran because we've run out of missil es . The CSIS report indicates the amount of delivery time necessary to go from ordering one of these missiles and getting them. By the way, the cost of a I'll admit I would not have known this . We don't have Jason today. We have Dave Michaels. I could pick on him. I could have him try to guess what the cost of one tomahawk missile is because I know that your answer, no one has any idea and I probably would not have been able to I would have I would have been , I think I would have been within one hundred percent . That's very good guess. You said two million. It's two point six . The patriot which are more sophisticated at three point nine million . The delivery timeline for a patriot is forty two months , forty seven for the tomahawk . So it's not like we can just tell our defense contractors, hey, give us another couple two thousand of these things . It takes years I suspect the Iranians know this and I suspect that the Iranians know that Trump is bluffing when he talks about resuming the war and blasting the hell out of him . But we have not done is take out Carc Island . Because if we did that that screws up the world's oil supply and gasoline prices and it's just a bridge too far for Trump to be able to do. Now we could do that without a massive use of a lot of missil es . But to go out and hit them farther there and knockout civilian installations all of it requires more missiles . There's a second takeaway on this. The result of this war is going to have to be an increase in our defense spending as we rebuild the stockpiles from what we've used in Iran . I've been arguing the same point since the beginning of the war. Are it again ? There is nothing wrong with saying we've done enough . Was that well then you're saying Iran won the war? No, I'm not. Iran did not if we if the war ended in negotiations ended , it is idiotic to say Iran won the war . We've sustained no loss at all other than some loss of American poop life, but way lower than people would have thought, and we've lost these missiles . Iran has no infrastructure left, it has almost no military left. Its leadership has been knocked out . The nuclear scientists, many of them were killed in that initial blast . We've sustained massive damage on them . And even if there's no deal, they've been set back years in terms of their nuclear program and secondly , their financial ability and military ability to cause trouble in the rest of the world has been significantly degraded . So if there is no further deal that we can come on . I certainly think that we still inflicted significant damage on Iran, but some of these war hawks have to be pretty careful. Go, keep pitting them, go keep with what ? These numbers are real . Let me move to another story . The frustration that many on the right have with conservative Supreme Court justices who don't always rule with the president . In particular, John Roberts, the Chief Justice and Amy Coney Barrett . There are six conservatives if you count the two of them Three are rock solid . The fourth virtually rock sol id , but Roberts and Barrett go back and forth . Benny Johnson, who's a conservative pundit, podcaster , Gadfly, a bunch of other things . He posted the following Amy Coney Barrett was sold to us as a rock solid constitutionalist. That part is true. Clearly she was Handpicked by Trump, backed by the Federalist Society and confirmed with hopes riding high , she looked us in the eye during her hearings and promised fidelity to the law , not politics or personal agendas. Now , she's stabbing the base in the back , siding with Roberts and Liberals to protect birthright citizenship schemes , male in voting loopholes , and other pillars of the swamp agenda that conservatives fought to dismantle. The very people who fought to get her on the court are now openly calling for her resignation because this isn't judicial independence, it's betrayal . Let me comment on that . Giving her the benefit of the doubt . You could make the case and I'm not making it. I'm saying giving her the benefit of the doubt. The case could be made that she's doing exactly what she said that she is ruling on the basis of what the law says and what the Constitution said. As I said in a discussion earlier this week on birthright citizenship , even I have a problem pretending that the fourteenth Amendment does not exist . It does seem to say that if you're born in the United States, you're a citizen. It seems to say that to me . Now on the other hand, I'm also a believer in when interpreting the language of the Constitution to go back to the intent of the framers. That in this case, these weren't the founders. This was the Congress in the post civil war era. That's when the fourteenth Amendment was adopted . They were not adopting anything that had to do with foreign nationals coming into the United States and poppin' out babies . It had to do with slavery, and they wanted to make it clear that all people born in the United States, including slaves, former slaves, and going forward, all black people in the South that these are citizens . That's the point of it. And that was their intent . So as I say, you could go both ways with regard to interpreting birthright citizenship . And I certainly think it is ridiculous to interpret something as saying somebody can fly over from China eight and a half months pregnant, pop the kid, go back with the kid to China, never have the kid ever return to the United States again and say that that kid's an American citizen who can vote in our elections. But 's what's being done . Or if people can violate the law and bus into the country illegally, pop out a couple of kids, have them declared American citizens , and then say, Now you can't deport us because our kids are American citizens . But to give Farret the benefit of the doubt, you could argue that she is ruling on what the Constitution actually says. And if you don't like what the Constitution actually says, then you change it, or at least pass a law clarify it. On the other hand, I will acknowledge that this is not the first time that someone who seemed to be a core conservative with his or her track record has gotten onto a high court and not been anywhere near as core as you thought. In Wisconsin we had, the Hegadorn problem. Hegadorn's now a good problem . He's conservative some of the time as opposed to the overwhelming majority of the court, which is radical all of the time. But when he got on the bench, especially when he became the deciding vote, he didn't always vote with the Conservatives. And he said the same thing that I'm sure Amy Coney Barrett would be saying, I'm just going along with how it's written . This never happens with the lefties . Name the last Leftist Judge named to the Wisconsin Supreme Court or the United States Supreme Court that was put on by a lefty president who said that they were a lefty justice and moved over to our side. It does not happen happen . Of course, there are cases where you get eight one or nine O rulings from the Supreme Court where they do move over and join the Conservatives, but those tend to be open and shut type cases. These five, four and six three rulings that you're seeing from the United States Supreme Court that go the way of the left . There aren't that many seven, two, and eight, one or nine O's on critical issues where the leftis come over to our side . And look at the Wisconsin Supreme Court with the radical women that are on the court I'm not going to deny that there have been some rulings favorable to conservatives under this liberal accord , but in all of the big ones you there's not one instance of any of the five women that were elected as left who's got flipping around and joining the conservative bloc almost all the time. It almost never happens . Next point . I believe that those of us on the right have to stop considering that membership in the federalist society is an automatic qualifier as a conservative jurist . We've been given grave deference. The Federal Society is a conservative legal organization. That's all it is. So you would assume that if somebody's in a conservative legal organization, they're conservative. But there've been a whole lot of people that have come out of the Federalist society who have been very disappointing . One other point should be made. On some of these issues that the court is ruling with regard to Trump, Trump clearly is pushing the limit. But that's what he was elected to do. He was elected to push the limit . This birthright citizenship thing has been on the books ever since the late eighteen sixties . No president , even though I suspect many of them thought it was ridiculous, no president ever issued an executive order saying that no, that's this is not what it means . Trump is pushing the limit on all of these things to see how much he can get through the court and he's getting a lot through. They did, for example, affirm his right to fire all of these agency heads this week . It wasn't thought earlier presidents didn't think they had that power A school burned down in Milwaukee a couple of days ago. You saw this story, didn't you, Dave? Lincoln Avenue School. For those of you who don't know where Lincoln Avenue School is, I used to I used to have fun with Paul and his. It's on Lincoln Avenue. It's not always a given. Sometimes you actually like Milwaukee's third ward is actually not in the third ward . It was the third ward back in the day, which is why I have that, but they change district lines all the time. Lincoln Abbott school is on the south side of Milwaukee. Is it about twelfth? Did you set in Linking , there's a fire there, burned out . All right . Here is to me the fascinating part of this story . And I mean, I just swear the, overwhelming majority of people in this world simply can't analyze anything. They read this story, they read all the details out of it, and some things that really don't jump out at them. And I joined it never jumps out at anybody in the media . I'll read this line from the Fox six report, a massive fire completely destroyed the one hundred nine year old Lincoln Avenue school building . It was a hundred and nine years old . And apparently until this fire , it was functioning just fine . So all of your people out there in the suburbs, why do you keep telling us after a school is thirty years old, it's obsolete . Oh, well, it's that way, we can't have this anymore. We can't have that anymore. They keep telling us that buildings that were put up in the nineteen eighties and nineties have to be replaced. Yet Milwaukee, whose schools are the biggest money grubbers in the state of Wisconsin, they were perfectly okay with they've passed a zillion referendums in it well, two big ones . They didn't feel the need to get the kids out of the Lincoln Avenue School . Now, the good thing is MPS hoard schools. They own a ton of empty buildings and enrollments declining precipitously, they'll simply have to reassign the kids to other schools and so on. But my takeaway on this is hey all you people in Wawatosa remember when they ripp ed out all these schools to build up all these news? Oh, they're obsolete . Even the lefties in Milwaukee were making the Lincoln Avenue school work. You know what that guy Dave Ramsey is ? Yeah, he's with this TMJ carry a show anywhere . I don't even know I don,'t know what they do over there. They seem to have it just seems to be nothing but podcasts over there by people who do podcasts that nobody would ever want to listen to. But I think they might have had him out at one time or maybe they do not. He's just what? Yeah . He's a personal finance guy and he's kind of he's conservative in terms of his advice and he thinks you know, we waste money, we do this, that the other thing . He's weaning in , I think he's kind of weaning in his replacement . Her name is Rachel Cruz . She's got a personal connection to Dave Ramsey and she's the co host of the Ramsay Show . She's his daughter . And she's made some comments that got some news coverage this week . And it's about she says the total recklessness , financially speaking of millions of young American men . She's referencing the numbers of them that are wiping themselves out betting on sports . This is an interesting take. We all know the history . The only place you could legally bet on sports for the longest time was Las Vegas . But then when the internet came around , a number of companies set up shop outside the United States and you can gamble with them. The government said it was illegal , but it's hard to enforce. So some people started to do that, but it was still illegal and you still had to go through the process of getting money to an offshore thing and getting it out problematic. So there weren't that many people that did it . But now as time has gone on, casino gambling has expanded across the United States and with it, legalized sports gambling . We're soon going to have online and much of it has gone online, meaning you don't have to go into any casino at all. We're going to have it soon in Wisconsin gi,ven the fact that the legislature has agreed to allow the Wisconsin tribes to offer online sports betting to have a monopoly doing so. They still have to cut agreements on the contracts or compacts to do so with the Evers Administration, but that's going to come. So we're going to have it here . So people that are betting online in Wisconsin and Sports are currently doing it ill egally , but you can do it legally in more than half the states , and you soon will be able to in Wisconsin. And for those of you who know nothing about this , you can bet as much as you want , as often as you want. It isn't anymore, just take the World Cup soccer game last night . You can bet on the United States, bet on Bosnia and Herzegovina, better on the tie They go to a shootout then You can bet in the game on any number of things. Take a football game . There are sometimes hundreds of propositions that you can bet on before a game. How many receptions will the guy have? How many interceptions will he throw and how many fumbles will there be? And then during the game they, keep updating the point spread. You can repeat again and again and again and again and again. And it's all just there you know, on your smartphone . The point that Rachel Cruz is making is that there are many young men who have simply taken all the money they have, they put them into these apps and they're betting all of it. And if we know anything about sports betting and most betting, the overwhelming majority of people lose . There's a house edge built into sports bets. There are people who can and do win and can and do win big . What many people who ever do is they don't have good money management. If they get in a roll and they're winning they increase the size of their pets . So then they go on the inevitable losing streak and all that they want is gone Or they tend to bet on emotion. I got to bet on twenty nine things tonight . And the point that Rachel Cruz is making is the amount of money that they're losing is money that they could have set aside for savings that you're going to be staring at a lot of these people that are forty forty five, fifty years old, and they're going to have nothing to show for themselves because they've been betting it all the way on sports because they can't stop doing it because they're addicted. Furthermore , most of these accounts you can fuel by tapping into a credit card . And even if you don't directly fund it through a credit card, you can take money out of your credit card and use it to fund the account . So in addition to the fact that people may be using up all of their savings, they may be going deeply into debt here . Now, back when gambling was limited, you either had to go to Las Vegas or bet illegally through a bookie . This is one of the big industries that the mafia was involved in. The convenience of betting with a bookie is you didn't have to come up with the money upfront . The downside was if you lost, you owed the money and if you didn't have the cash available, they'd start charging you interest . Big interest . And if you couldn't pay it, they'd beat the hell out of ya . That system actually worked. Most people didn't want the hell beaten out of them . So they controlled their betting. And also , after a certain point, the mob wasn't going to continue to allow you to pile on additional money because you don't pay it back, then the mob that was taking the bets, you know, they're gonna lose . This system now though , where people can keep placing bets and placing bets and placing bets and placing bets and placing bets , it requires the same degree calm r,ational , non emotional thinking that anything else does with her money . Let me quote from a portion of the story in Fox News. The daughter of personal finance expert , Dave Ramsay singled out sports betting as especially risky to young men. Quote, it is usually guys in their twenties that are doing this , and so staying away from that is so crucial . You're throwing your money away to sports betting . It really is taking down a generation economically. This by the way , I think is one of the hidden I've talked, there's so many issues that are just hidden that are impacting our society. Nobody ever talks about them. And one of those I would say would be the addiction to porn. You never see anybody discussing that. I think it has a lot to do with the decline in the birth, right? It has a lot to do with the fact that millennial men and women never hooked up and got together . And now there's this . Maybe one of the reasons that so many younger people seem to be embracing socialism because they have all of these financial worries is because the money that they did have, they're farting away . And I'm not condemning betting on sports . Nothing wrong with it. Nothing wrong with buying a boat . There's nothing wrong with buying a more expensive car than you need . But you have to do it and be realistic at the time that you're doing it and limit how much you're doing. Furthermore , you have to decide if you're good at it or not . I firmly believe the estimate is based on most sports bets, some of these online bets, it's worse than this. You're charged a ten percent commission on losing bets. That's how the gambling operations make money. In other words, to win fifty after bit fifty five You charge no commission when you win because you get the whole thing back. But if you lose, you don't lose fifty, you lose fifty five . I think that the number is like fifty two point seven percent. If every bet was based on that, in order to be profitable, you'd have to win fifty two point seven percent of your bets. And I clearly think that some people can do this. The problem is some of the ones that do so then screw up their money management . They met more on some games than others . And then they lose on those games . But if you simply had a plan and you study and you're very , you know, get your emotions out of it. I certainly think you can win . But I think the overwhelming majority of people don't, just as the overwhelming majority of day traders lost . Some clearly could win. Remember where day trading was the big thing? You don't hear much about it anymore, do you? That's because the people who do and this is the twenty years ago, people in the twenties twenty years ago , they mostly got wiped out . Hard to do. This is not an argument for banning it . And in my criticism of giving the tribes in Wisconsin the monopoly online sports betting, I made it clear, I'm not opposed to online sports betting. Just I'm not opposed to any of these things that may be highly risky because the majority of people who do it don't ruin their lives . But some are . And I think some of these younger people who don't have the same, you know, I've been around gambling my whole life . I have a sense of perspective about the whole thing . Some of these people who are in their twenties who, you know, and a lot of it's big talkers too You know, you know, everybody knows with the Gardener Sports, the big talking blowhearts who just think there's certainty to all of these things. Well, then they back up their certainty though, I'm put going to my money where my mouth is. And suddenly the big talking blow hard doesn't know as much as the big talking blow hard thinks that they do . When you see athletes like Soresby, the quarterback who now is going to enter the draft next year , trying to transfer to Texas tech and even though he was found to have gambled on games at an earlier school , he's going to be able to go into the NFL next year after sit out a year for doing it. Here are people that have everything to lose. A former Buck Malik Beasley just got charged with the Freds for betting for tipping off gamblers to his own performance. When he was at the bucks, he would, for example, if there was a game in which the over under a number of rebounds per game he would get is like two or three . He might tip off better as I'm just not going to get any rebounds . A, I might fake an injury or B. I'll just manage the ball's coming over in my direction. I'm not going to grab too hard at it or the other way . Say it's over that. I'm going to get every I'm going to stay under the basket even not supposed to get it. He's in charge of doing this. He's got doing it in the NBA. Here's if this guy is doing this knowing that he could face prison and being banned from the sport for life , if that didn't deter him , how are we going to deter some twenty eight year old that's got nine hundred dollars to his name who farts away the nine hundred dollars and now starts tapping into credit cards and so on . Again, I'm not forbanning any of this stuff. But I think no matter what it is that you do in life with money , you got to take a deep breath and be responsible. Everybody's a cheapskate in certain things and everybody spends there are people asking I can't believe you spend that much money on a car . But I'll drive around the block like six times to avoid going parking in a parking lot that 's charging fifteen dollars . But everybody's got their thing As I've said repeatedly, I cannot, in my own mind, justify going in and buying coffee at one of these places . It's not saying I never have . If I'm traveling on the road, you know , or the airport's another one, you know, you can't take your, I mean, I guess you can't take a beverage past the checkpoint. Stuff like that . So I'm not saying I've never done it, but I'm not one of these people that every morning has to stop at Starbucks or one of those and blow twenty five dollars on the coffee that I can make out of my own coffee maker and put it into a mug and take in. Now someone say well the convenience . that So's my thing in which I'm weirdly cheap skatish . Everybody has something . So no matter how much money you have or how little money you have , you still have to think things do and not be reckless about the whole thing while also understanding that part of the enjoyment of life is to do some things that you like that there may not be a return for . But when you see some of these people where we've heard these , you know, it started when Mr Wonderful Shark Tank guy, I'm forgetting his actual real name , the ball guy, Kevin O'Leary, Kevin O'Leary . He went on something and he was yapping about these people in their twenties going every day in and every day and buying buying this expensive coffee and then whining that they don't have any money. He said they're idiots. And they all retaliated and said, You don't know how different it is There is again some truth to that . Some of these younger people are actually doing quite well in terms of their income, but they haven't controlled their spending. And betting on sports is part of spending . Now we're picking on the sports thing here. You could say the same thing with regard to I mean, when I've gone into Poto, it blows me away. The people that I'll see at the fifty dollar black shack tables that don't look to me like they have anywhere near enough money to be doing. Now looks can be deceiving . I know a lot of really wealthy guys that look like bums almost almost half the time , but I don't think that's who those people are. But at least that requires you to actually get up and physically go there and sit down furthermore . You have to pull out cash. I mean, you can do credit there and so on. There's some restriction on it. There's just something enticing though . And you know that there's a house edge against you when you're betting at a casino when you just think you know with regard to the sporting event that you know you've had a far better than fifty fifty chance of being right , you think you know , it can be tantalizing to keep doing it and doing it and doing it and then there's the whole addiction problem aside from people who just liked it . They get addicted to doing it and they love the action even as they're wiping out their net worth . I think it's, as I said, one of those issues that is bigger than most people are aware of. You're listening to the Mark Belling podcast . Charisma Customs and Delafield, their sponsor , they're also where I took my car. They do a lot of things to make your car look really good and stand up to all that we have to put up with on Wisconsin Roads. The package I took included ceramic coating, which makes the vehicle look really good. Paint protection for all of the chips and stuff that comes off of our roads, the wheel pack age, and a tint job that adds to a little bit of privacy and security . They handle all sorts of cars there from regular old family drivers to exotic spectacular cars. Anybody who wants to protect their car like I do or make it look really good like I do, check out Charisma Customs in Delafield. They're right off the freeway that's Charisma Customs in Delafield It's not overstating things to say that the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the United States is being treated as nowhere as big a deal as the two hundredth was. And the reason that the two hundredth anniversary in nineteen seventy six was such a big deal is virtually everybody in America was celebrating it. We now have millions of people who simply hate America and don't want to celebrate it Secondly , we have in this country millions of people who claim that they are patriots and claim that they support our country, but in fact don't The Declaration of Independence, I believe, was divinely inspired . It's simply too good not to have been . It not only laid down incredible and at the time unheard of principles for a nation , it did it with incredible eloquence . The declaration was written long before the Constitution . We didn't set up a Congress and have a president until seventeen eighty nine . We existed vaguely under the Articles of Confederation after we won the revolution . I've done this a few times in the past. I'm going to read the Declaration of Independence And I think that there's a staggering number of people in this country that don't know what's in it. And you'll often see this. The last couple of buzz with this language here or there, separation of church and state, where does it come from? That comes from the Declaration of Independence. No, it doesn't . And I'm going to comment a little bit as I go through it , written largely by Jefferson with the assistance and input of some of the other founders . The unanimous declaration of the United States of America . By the way, when they wrote it, they did not capitalize united . This would later come to be the name of the nation. What they were saying at the time is these states , the colonies, they're states now . They're united , thirteen United States of America , wherein the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another , and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's god entitle them , a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. Who's saying here is when we have rights that God gave us that are being denied , and we're going to separate ourselves from the people denying them, we better lay out the case as to why we do it. We have a moral imperative before we do this to make our case, then it continues. We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness , that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . Let me pause. How many people believe in that? How many leftis believe in that? The consent of the governed , the number of times in which Lefties have supported doing things that trample over the wishes of the majority certainly makes it clear that they don't buy in the notion that governed have to consent to all of this, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principle and organizing its power in such form , as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness . Prudence, indeed, will dictate the governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes , and accordingly, all experiences have shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to write themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed . But when a long train of abuses and usurpations , pursuing invariably the same object events is a design to reduce them under absolute despotism. It is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security . Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies , and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former system of government. The history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of repe ated injuries and usurpations all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states . To prove this , let facts be submitted to a candid worldate. He has refused his ascent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good . He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance unless unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained , and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them . He has refused to pass other laws for the accommod ations of large districts of people , unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestible to them and formidable to tyrants only . He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures . Sure seems to me that that could have been said about COVID, continuing . He has dissolved representative houses representatives house repeated for opposing with manly firmness . He has invasion on the rights of the people. He has refused for a long time after such dissolutions to cause others to be elected , whereby the legislative powers , incapable of annihilation , have returned to the people at large for their exercise, the state remaining, in the meantime , exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without and convulsions within . He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners , refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither and raising the conditions of a new appropriation of land . He has obstructed the administrative administration of justice by refusing his ascent to laws for establishing judicial power . He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices and the amount and payment of the salaries. He has erected a mult itude of new offices and sent hither swarms of others to harass our people and eat out their substance . He has kept among us in times of peace standing armies with the cons ent of our legislatures . He has effected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power . He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution and acknowledged by our laws , giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us, for protecting them by a mock trial from punishment for any mur ders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states for cutting off our trade with all parts of the world for imposing taxes on us without our consent I'll interject . Do you think any of the Mandani Marxists are agreeing with this? Oh man, alive, did they support imposing taxes without our consent continuing? For depriving us in many cases of the benefits of trial by jury, for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses , for abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an ar bitrary government and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for inducing introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies . For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments . For suspending our own legislatures and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever , he has abdicated government here by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us . The point that they're making here is we were being attacked right and left you, know at, the time . There were the colonials that came from other countries that were attacking us and he wasn't allowing us to be defended is the argument they're making back to the declar ation . He has plundered our seas , ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. Sounds like Gavin Newsom. Oh , he is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny , already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfety scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous of ages and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation . He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country , to become the executioners of their friends and brethren or to fall themselves by their hands . He has excited domestic insurrections among us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages whose ran rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexism, and conditions. Let me interject . Very clear that the framers of the Declaration of Independence believed that it was the responsibility of Britain to help these colonists from defending themselves against the Native Americans or American Indians . That is language obviously that many would find controversial today . And it may not be lauditory today , but it is critical in understand ing where they were coming from , for better or in this case likely , for worse . In every stage of these oppressions , we have petitioned for re dress in the most humble terms . Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury . A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which, may define a ty rant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people . Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our British brethren . We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us . We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to the native justice and magnanimity , and we have and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations which would, inevitably, interrupt our connections and correspondence . They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity . We must, therefore, that's a word that hasn't held up over time . Cons anguinity . I mean sanguinity, I'm sure was a state it's sanguine and con would be the opposite of that. Anyway , they too have been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguity. We must therefore acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation and hold them as we hold the rest of mankind enemies in war in peace friends , we , therefore representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World Clearly that's a god reference , for the rectitude of our intentions do , in the name and by authority of the good people of these colonies , solemnly publish and declare that these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states , that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crowd , and that all political connect ions between them and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved and that as free and independent states they have full power to levy war , conclude peace , contract alliances, establish commerce , and to do all other acts and things which independent states may have right do . And for the support of this declar ation , with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence , we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor . Now some comments . If you wanted to give the cliff notes of this , they were saying that the rights that were given them by God were We're being taken away taken away and therefore in the name of God , we are declaring our independence . So for all of these people who want to argue that the intention of the founders is to create a society with out religion and without God . This country was based entirely on the rights inalienable to us because they were given to us by God were being denied After the war and then after the Constitution , taxes were limited . There was no real safety net. There was no welfare state. There still wasn't even much of them until Franklin Roosevelt came around in the nineteen twenties and thirties . This country was set up to be a country in which people had the right to pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, language in there and suffer the consequences of if it doesn't work out . There are, I think, a lot of people who just reject this though . They believe in the old British system of taxing people to death , and having nobody responsible for their own actions whatsoever. We set ourselves up to be a nation utterly independent with the latter document, the document that came around thirteen to fifteen years later, the original Constitution and then the ten amendments to it, the Bill of Rights , we actually created a government that just enumerated over and over and over not the rights of the government. It limited the rights of the government and said everything else belonged to the people and then enumerated specifically the rights the people had . Boy, there were a lot of people uncomfortable with that These founders would never have imagined that you could be mandated to have to take an experimental vaccine . They never would have imagined that after a certain level of wealth the government would confiscate the overwhelming majority of their income . They didn't set us up to be that . Having freedom requires capitalism . Because capitalism is simply the freedom to try to go out and be productive and make money . If you're not allowed to keep your money , you're not free . The people that are looking for the free lunch are proposing to have a country here that is the antithesis of the ones the one that the founders created . For almost all of my life , people on both the left and right embrace the First Amendment , embraced freedom , embraced that we are a nation under God . We also held the belief that we had a moral responsibility to look out to some extent for a fellow man , I would argue preferably through private charity , somewhat argue through a government safety net . It is only now that we have so many people not willing to offer any sacrifice at all , maybe because they're drugged out, maybe because they're lazy , maybe because they simply don't have the energy to go into a risk heavy world in which the rewards are great, but the potential for falling flat in your face may be even greater . What I can tell you is the reason our country became the world's great superpower is because of these two documents the Declaration and then the Constitution . It laid the groundwork to be able to create a nation with the prosperity and freedom that we had , many have argued Reagan among them that all the freedoms that we built in all of these years now two hundred fifty can die within one a generation . I think the next twenty five years could kill off everything we have if the Democrats indeed become the Marxist . And it looks to me like they are because the actual mainstream Democrats, the regular Democrats refuse to fight back against the Marxist. They won't attack their ideas. They won't call them Marxists. They won't call them irresponsible . And they keep losing to them . For the individual Democrat voter, depressed, unhappy, whiny ass people with their hands constantly out , this is what they want . It won't work . And the survival of our nation going forward will require not the war in terms of armament and rebellion that the colonists engaged in after the passage of the Declaration , but an effort just as great to , through the preservation of our government and winning elections to resist and fight off this threat which I contend is as existential as not the threat but the reality that the original colonists were living under As many people know the fourth of July is my birthday . So therefore, I've always had an interest in the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the country and either do or you don't. Just like almost every guy of my generation, in other words, the generation that was born after World War Two was fascinated by World War two stories. I mean, there are channels that were on cable TV that was all they are in the military channel history. ninety percent of the content seems to be World War two . When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the arguments over the founding of our country. The musical Hamilton, which not everybody liked , I thought actually a fair handling of the founding of the country. It was set after the Constitution was ratified, well, the big debate in which we created this government and you had the two wings , the federalists, the George Washington, John Adams wing, who believed in a strong central government . And the people came at the time to be known as Democrats who hated a central government who believed that all of the power should remain with the states . What did they say? Yeah, it was the it was the Thomas Jefferson world and so on. And they clashed . And the great reality, and again, I think to say that this was simply dumb luck is naive. I think it had to have been divinely inspired God's will , is the truth was somewhere in between . In order to survive as a nation, we have to have some central form of government to look out for us collectively . But we can't make people to South Dakota live under the thumb of the Governor of California and their beliefs , which is precisely why we have some states that are rotting and going to hell that are run by Marxists and others that are thriving because they're run by capitalists . But anyway, the affinity that I have for just learning and there've been many great there was a HBO series, I don't know, maybe fifteen, twenty years ago called John Adams, about John Adams. What? . What was it? It was Paul Jamati. Yeah, he played he played John Adams and it covered that particular area, I thought very fairly without going toward one side or the other. Celebrating the founding of this nation is celebrating the greatness that we have achieved . Were it not for us , all of Europe would be run probably to this day by Nazis . Were it not for us , how many advances in commerce would have been delayed or have never happened ? We are a country that has shown more generosity for its own people and I don't mean just government generosity, private generosity that almost any other . We become dominant in virtually everything that's mattered, the things that we're not dominated in are things that we either have chosen not to be particularly involved in or that became too expensive for us to do? Look at the giant tech companies of the world, the giant AI companies they're still American . Thomas Edison who prior to Musk was the greatest inventor ever . It wasn't French . I believe this. I believe the people who don't want to celebrate the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of this country are just unhappy people . And as I've argued, as long as I've had a career, rationalization being the second strongest human drive, they have to rationalize their unhappiness and blame it on something and they blame it on the country . And their unhappiness is fed into by fraudsters , often Muslims who just as in Europe want to destroy our way of life and create their theocracy here , the Mumdanis of the world by telling everybody how miserable and awful and terrible the whole thing is so that they be given power to make everything worse. And once they get that power , ignore that, bring back all the arguments of the Declaration of Independence every time a country goes Marxist, it takes away everyone's rights. And do you know why they do it? Do you know why Hugo Chavez, who by the way, was elected initially ? Do you know why he took away everybody's rights in Venezuela. It's the same reason why when Castro and Guvera had the revolution in Cuba and took over the country then took away everybody's rights. It's the same reason why Stalin's communist and his successor communists took away everybody's rights. It's precisely why when the Soviets essentially annexed and put under their wing the countries of Eastern Europe that they took away all of their right s . The reason that they take away everybody's rights is what they do doesn't work . And they know that if people can willingly make a decision, they'll get rid of this . You're seeing right now in Latin America, one country after another after another rejecting Marxism and embracing capitalism. This is because they've lived forever under the hellish conditions. Fortunately, many of those nations still had free elections . Venezuela may be salvageable . Cuba is likely to fall anytime now. It will then be salvageable , but it's only going to be because of external forces. You know, they had an election in Venezuela a couple of years. They rigged the election. They have to rig the election because people who live under this end up hating as much as the founders hated living under the tyranny of the king of England . But boy, old boy, when this stuff is marketed and sold, a lot of people fall for it . So people that are miserable and unhappy with their lives rather than rather than trying to make things better on their own and taking some responsibility for the conditions that they're in, blaming on the country So they end up hating the country. And when you ask them which one is better , they can't come up with one because it would mean that you would have to call their bluff and say, well, why don't you go move to that paradise that you think is so much better . So I think this is a bittersweet, happy birthday. We hit number two hundred fifty , with certainly one of our two political parties being taken over by Marxists, with the rest of the members and leaders of that party not bowing down without a fight . You know what the mainstream Democrats in this country are the French . They put up the same resistance that France puts up when tyrants try to overrun them . And just as with France, it's going to require the rest of us Americans, the patriotic ones to save not only ourselves, but the left from the left . 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, makes 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 both management. Give them a call, know the difference . Three, two, one . We alluded to this story briefly on the Midweek podcast. It's now official. The University of Wisconsin has a new athletic director. His name is Sean Eichorst. He certainly qualified . In fact, I think the qualification is almost perfect. They went out and they got a number two from one of the most successful in terms of athletic programs in the country, Texas . But that number two also has experience as a number one. He was the AD at Miami and then left to go to Nebraska. His tenure at Nebraska was largely successful. It was not successful in terms of football . So went over to Texas and became essentially the number two of that huge program with all the stuff that's going on with it. The guys got Wisconsin ties in backroad . So I think they're certainly bringing in somebody qualified to lead an athletic department in the age of NIL and money where athletic success is largely dependent on being able to raise enough money to pay the best athletes out there to come to your school . Whether you like it or not, that's the reality of the environment that we're in. There are many people I know people people I know some people that are in Madison circles that were closer to what was going on at UW Madison than me and they felt that Chris McNosh was in over his head . From the outside, I didn't agree with that because while there's certainly have been struggles with regard to the football program , the rest of the athletic department of Madison seemed to be thriving . Women's basketball was never any good either, but the other sports that are there , men's hockey and a little bit of a dry spell before the rebound now. Very good. The women's hockey program, one of the greatest the country, the volleyball program, one of the greatest of the just numerous athletic programs over there that were doing very, very well. The men's basketball program , you're in your out largely competitive and the football program was very good until recently . But these people were arguing that the ability to raise money, the ability to run a massive operation in the environment that we're in now that McIntosh was in over his head. I honestly don't know because I wasn't that close to the inner workings of that athletic department. But I think in hiring I course, it looks like they've hired a good guy. Now here's the, concern for fans of the football program, or maybe it's something they're excited by . Almost everyone who comes into a new job likes to in key positions, get rid of what's there and bring in their own people . Luke Fickle, the football coach, I think, is very likely to be fired unless they have a really good season this year. Icorst has even said his first priority is to evaluate what's going on with the foot ball program. I happen to think that Luke Vickle is the right coach for Wisconsin. I think he made a terrible mistake when he came here . I think he decided to embrace the air raid offense, which may or may not have been a mistake, but they hired he hired the wrong guy to do it . A guy who I think benefited other schools from having head coaches that were offensive minded. And in one case, North Carolina simply lucked into having a spectacular quarterback come in . But the offense that he ran at Wisconsin and the players that he brought in to run it , it didn't work . And Fickle has tried to change it all back and go back to square one, which takes time. But in the meantime, the defense, which was his calling card, Wisconsin's defense this past season and I think is one of the best in the country . And the recruiting seems to have improved over the last year or two, whether or not it can be it can continue to prove and they complain with the big boys is going to largely depend on whether or not ICorps can start getting alumni and other donors to start coming up with not five thousand dollars a year, but five million or ten million . The Indiana turnaround in sports occurred at the same time that Mark Cuban, who went there decided to stick tens of millions of dollars into the sports program. Some of the schools of Texas where many of the alumni are big giant fat cats in the oil business , they take their large S and put it back into their universities . One of the hardest things in the world to do is fundraise . Asking people for money is not an easy thing to do and there aren't many people that are really good at it. But that's going to be a big portion of the responsibility here for the new athletic director and then the evaluation of the personnel that he has, the coaches that are there . And then the whole thing of complying with the rules and all of the other minefields and just one of the big challenges so far as it seems to me with regard to people running these sports programs is to keep their pants sipped up and not act inappropriately. Look at the whole mess that's going on at the University of Michigan . I'm sure he's been vetted in that regard and the fact that , you know, he's no spring chicken. He had the Miami job and you know, that's a he's responsible by the way for did Miami win a national championship under Lauren.or I donang't think they they did. But went to the final four a couple of times. They hired a great basketball coach. He just recently reached but that happened under his tenure. The football program was underachieved for the longest time in Nebraska. They have a great athle tic department. Top to bottom with the exception that their football programs kind of been like ours lately, under achieved , but he left Nebraska in ' seventeen. He was considered the football coach hire that he made there, Riley who came from. I think Oregon State didn't work out . But boy, to get the job at Texas , where I mean, they're obsessed at the University that was winning and everything and having the number two, I think he has a good background . Yeah, he Dave points out he was actually the athletic director at Whitewater before all of this and it's starting to change a bit but Whitewater has been the dominant school in the state of Wisconsin in terms of athletics. It looks like it's shifting back to Lacrosse top to bottom, which it was in the era that I was there and you know why Lacrosse was always good in so many sports ? Huge physical education major . And obviously there's no scholarships in Division Three. So kids, men and women that are going to major in Fiat are usually pretty good athletes. And all right, we clearly wanted a field . Anyway, that's it for