 Hello, welcome to this week's legislative update. I'm Jim Baumgart, your host and the co-host is Nanette Boulevage from Elkhart Lane. Yes, I'm glad to be here. Thank you. And of course, we have a good friend and a long time citizen of the county and state, Cal Potter. Oh, former state senator and As are you? As I am, but he's got more of the wisdom. Oh, okay. Great. What's this leaving? This program, we just want to have a discussion issue on talking about our democracy. How is it guaranteed? Is it this beacon of light in the world that people have found safety and freedom? Is that guaranteed, Cal Potter? I think some people think it is. I think we think that we make progress with every passing year, but history books tell us there are numerous examples of civilizations that have risen and fallen and this civilization that we have can change as well. I mean, just look at what technology has done to the security of the system. I think we all thought in the past that when Walter Cronkite gave us the news or Chet Hailey and David Brinkley or someone like that, that that was something that was honest, straightforward, we could believe it. Now, we've just gone through an election where social media financed much by the Russians have produced character assassinations of both Democrats and Republicans. I think everybody thought it was Hillary and the Republicans kept their mouth shut because so what if it happened to her? But there are people who have been interviewed who are in the Cruz campaign and others who said, yeah, there were strange things that appeared on social media about my candidate that seemed to be leaning towards helping Donald Trump in that primary, not only in the general elections. So we have a whole co-opping, I think, of the social media into becoming the known news media source for people, but yet can we tolerate this inaccuracy and these perversions of the truth into the future and expect democracy to work the way it should work? Yeah, I just, as a sideline, I shouldn't, I read an outdoor column every week and I went to the internet to get the date of the dear gun season in Wisconsin, which is always right towards the end of the month and I brought it up and I said, oh, that's sort of a late date. It turns out to be an incorrect one and the internet that, I don't know who put it there, but it was the wrong one and I put it in my column and people started calling me because they knew it wasn't right. So you have to be careful. You have to double check when something doesn't look good. I think it requires us now as consumers of news to be a lot more proactive to not believe you can trust the old news sources. I mean, newspapers, local newspapers, national newspapers, New York Times, Washington Post, here in town, Sheboygan Press, The Review, The Sounder. Those are all run by reputable people and that's great, but they're losing funds. Not the New York Times, actually, they're doing better, but local newspapers have less influence than they used to. It's much more online. So that requires us to go and look for other sources. I always recommend people go to WisconsinI, WisconsinI.org. It's a great organization for finding information on the internet. Right. Yes. But it's run, you know, check that I always go to the contact page for any place I look online, any website that tells you who's behind it. If it's a reputed group, sometimes if it's a foreign Russian name, well, any of it would be suspicious. But you're right. Facebook, Twitter, those are not good places to get sources of information unless it's a link to a reputable source. Then you can trust it. Well, people need to double check and the safe areas are pretty safe, but areas that are new, the internet, news flashes that come out may or may not be right because it may come from the wrong place. But if people get involved, you're involved with the women's group that just reorganized into Chabotin County and there are people considering to run their office. Well, that's the point I want to make. I understand that, Cal, the former history teacher, the long-term legislator is, you often are cynical and I get that, but there's a lot to be cynical about. I think in my life, I started getting involved politically in 1968 in the Gene McCarthy campaign and I served as county chair of the Democratic Party in 1972 and 1973, elected in 1974. So I take those years and say, look at it today and look at it then. So that's my perspective. And I think things are in worse shape today as far as morality in politics, in big spending, sources of news. So am I a pessimist? In that context, I am. I guess if we go back to 1820 and look at the world at that time with slavery and all kinds of things, yeah, we've made a lot of progress, but I think we have taken in sort of modern times a step backwards. But the day after the election, friends of mine, we were all, you know, all of us in our party were certainly disenchanted and it was a wake up call, but a group of us met and started organizing. So I see a lot of energy right here in Chabotin County. I'm a member of Forward Chabotin, which is a progressive grassroots advocacy group. We've partnered with other groups. We've been meeting nonstop for over a year now, ever since the election. We do fun things like pints for progressives once a month. If you just want to come and drink beer and vent, you can do that. But we voted we've organized candlelight vigils. We work with other groups. Some of us are involved with the League of Women Voters. I think we started seeing something in January when the day after the inauguration of the new president, millions of people all over the world marched, women, the million women's march. And here in Chabotin County, we had two of those marches and they were huge. Chabotin, we had over 250 people march from Fountain Park down to Walgreens and back, then a bunch of us went over to Plymouth and there were over 100 people marching. We were making a statement. And what was really heartening about being part of that group and the cold and the snow and the wet was as we walked down the downtown streets, people honked at us showing their support. We feel a whole new energy. So there's forward Chabotin, there's League of Women Voters in Chabotin County. We just formed. Now that's nonpartisan. So you can be conservative and join that so you can be involved. There's the Progressive Women in Chabotin. There is our Wisconsin Revolution, Bernie Sanders Group. There is Voices de la Frontière. There are organizations like the Refugee Support Group that is working with new immigrants from Somalia, working out of the local, one of the local churches. Unfortunately, a lot of these are they spread their news on Facebook. So if you're on Facebook, you can be keyed in just by doing a search for these groups. If you're not on Facebook, then it's kind of tough because as we said before, newspapers are not necessarily the best place to get community news. They don't they don't have room for it. They have they have to make money and have advertisers or they'll put a lot of sports because they know people read that. So what I would encourage people who are on Facebook to do is get a friend to help you do a couple of searches. And then you can be go on an email list for which we have something called Marching Orders where every Monday morning we publish a list of things we're concerned about this week, things that national the federal government might be doing, people at the state level and local news too. Things that those people who are opposed to the golf course opening up a near that's been proposed for Terri Andre Park, Kolar Andre Park. They formed a group called Friends of Black River. We've we've supported those as a group. If you like the golf course, that's great. There are so many other organizations you can be part of anything from drinking to knitting to books on tap, reading books, talk groups, go to Paradigm Cafe, go to other coffee shops, go to the library and look on their bulletin board. There's so many places to get information. I guess my major point is you don't just have to sit and take it. You can make a difference in your own community. Well, and it's your own committee that is the important one because grassroots is from the local community. And if you are active positively in Sheboygan, Sheboygan County, then you might be active in this Lakeshore area. And if you're active in the Lakeshore area, you may have people active throughout the whole state. And then it can make a big difference. Well, I think I think this is wonderful. But I did think the poof will be in the pudding is who will vote in the future. We saw a downturn and it's being analyzed today as to why. Maybe it was the fact that we didn't have an African-American running for president. And so the African community wasn't there. Hispanic vote was down. Maybe it was because of the fear of coming out and being exposed to not having your proper green card. We saw voter intimidation through the photo ID. They say there are maybe 28,000 people. I think they pretty well documented didn't vote in Wisconsin. Well, did before. Yes. Yeah. And if you look at then the three states that gave Trump his victory in the electoral college, it was a total of 72,000 votes. So you can see very clearly that there was a downturn in the participation. So I would hope that this energy that these people are expressing through various good groups will translate into an activism at the polling place as well, because you know, the Koch brothers are going to continue to come in with hundreds of millions of dollars. And you know that special interests are going to continue to try to manipulate the vote. And some people, they will put all these negative ads on there because they know that suppresses the vote. People just get so disgusted. I'm not voting. Well, we are encouraging people to vote. My friend, John Binder in Plymouth has here's what he's doing. I think it's just an amazing thing. You know, if you know John, I know John, he's an amazing person. He's going to he's found out. There are 22,000 people in Sheboygan County alone who are eligible to vote who aren't even registered. So he's on a one man mission. But now he's getting help to register those people. So he's going to start sitting in St. Vincent de Paul and other of those stores starting this Wednesday, I believe he's going to be there all day with volunteers. As people walk in, it's nonpartisan. Nobody's urging telling you how you should vote. We're just saying, why aren't you registered to vote? Here is how to do it. You need an ID. Do you know where to go to get that? Those are what those volunteers are going to be doing. They're sitting there all day and that's just a start. That's the Plymouth, St. Vincent de Paul. We hope to be in other places all over the county. We've got a year now before the general election. But the other thing to bring up is in April are very important local elections. And hardly anybody bothers to vote for those. Much less run for office. As both of you know, I ran for state assembly last year. It was a life changing events. But the average woman has to be asked to run eight or nine times. And that was true for me. You know, the first time. Oh, I can't do it. I'm not busy. I got my kids. You know, I don't think men have to be asked that often. If you did just a count in Sheboygan County alone and looked at the municipalities, the city councils, the village boards, the town boards, we are over half of the population. We women in Sheboygan County, we make up. We are outnumbered in elected officials nine to one out of all those municipalities together. Why aren't we running? That's where we can have our voice. And then you can move up if you like to. So I'm on a mission now. You can take out papers in December to get nomination papers to get a certain number of signatures. And it's not that much. And in April, you can run for office. We've seen our work. It's not that much. But people have to listen. And now we have to end this program. Good timescale. I know. But please take the time with Cal Potter and Nanette Bulabush, suggesting being involved in different approaches. It is important because you and your family and your children and your children's children are all important. And if we don't participate, we get the government that we let come in. And that is, of course, up to us. But it's the wrong thing to do it, be involved, do the right thing to do. Until next week. Be involved. It's energetic. Do it. Anyway, until next week, this is the legislative update. Thank you for coming. Thank you.