Think you can tame the national debt? We play WaPo’s budget game to see how we’d do. It’s like a Cosmo Quiz for policy nerds.
Then we talk to Senator Mellisa Agard about her Grass Routes Tour to push for the legalization of marijuana in Wisconsin.
Guest: Melissa Agard
Check out this episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts!
It’s crunch time for the debt ceiling and negotiations are not going great. Despite the appearance of some progress last week, the White House and Republicans remain far apart on an agreement to raise the debt limit (though House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he and President Biden will meet again today).
The main sticking point: government spending.
The White House offered to freeze domestic and defense spending next year as a concession to Republicans, but they rejected that offer, according to the Washington Post. The GOP wants more than a freeze—it wants a reduction in nonmilitary spending.
But with all this talk about balancing the budget, WaPo made a Cosmo Quiz for Nerds so you can see what kind of fiscal hawk you are.
Ann Jacobs talked to WISN about the accuracies and inaccuracies of the Milwaukee plot point in the final season of Succession and what would actually happen if Wisconsin lost 100k votes.
State Senator Melissa Agard joins the show to talk about her ‘Grass Routes Tour’ to push for the legalization of marijuana in Wisconsin.
“Wisconsin is increasingly an island of prohibition,” Agard said in a statement when she launched the tour. “Every day that we wait is one more day that we are less safe, less prosperous, and less equitable. Simply put, it’s not a matter of ‘if’ marijuana will be legalized in Wisconsin but ‘when.’ It’s past time we do this in a manner that bolsters Wisconsin businesses, honors personal liberties, promotes criminal justice reform, and brings revenue back into our state that is currently flooding across our borders to neighboring states.”
You can still catch two of the last tour dates:
Who is the hero and who is the villain in this story? A traumatized orca called White Gladis may be behind the rise in killer-whale attacks on boats in the Atlantic Ocean, scientists said.
While most orca interactions with boats are harmless, there has been a spike in aggressive behavior toward boats since 2020, Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, told LiveScience. As Insider recently reported, there have been three cases of the distinctive black-and-white creatures sinking vessels by ramming into them.
It seems orcas may be learning this aggressive behavior from other killer whales — López Fernandez said one female named White Gladis could be the culprit.
Experts believe White Gladis may have had a “critical moment of agony,” such as colliding with a boat or being trapped during illegal fishing activities, LiveScience reported. This event may have traumatized her and caused her to start ramming other boats.
Now we just need the writer’s strike to end so we can get this movie made.
