Mark Belling Podcast #104: An astonishing video exposes the depth of the Minnesota Somali scandal, two really dumb ideas gain traction in Wisconsin and the astonishing bull market in precious metals

The Somali scandal explains everything: crooked Democrats, insane immigration policy, an inept media, a welfare state easy to defraud and the nincompoopery of Tim Walz.  Also, the price explosion in gold and silver, a proposal to remove huge chunks of Brewers parking and are smartphones making children myopic (literally, myopic)?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 2 (00:25):
There's a lot of cliches that address the point I'm
about to make. The iron every cloud is a silver lining,
No pain, no gain. I'm referring to the Minnesota Somali scandal,
which it's turning out to be way worse than even

(00:46):
we had suspected only a couple of weeks ago. Now,
I'm not saying that this is good that this has happened,
but it's certainly possible that a greater good will come
out of the fact that we have found out about it.
Every now and then you come across a story that

(01:08):
explains almost everything, and this story really has it all.
The abuse of our immigration system, how welfare programs are
so vulnerable to massive fraud, to the ineptitude and blindness

(01:32):
of much of the media, to Democrat politicians that have
simply become married to the welfare state because their political
base includes so many people that are either on the
dole or abusing the doll or making money off the door.

(01:58):
Over the weekend, a massive expose came out and it
didn't come out on sixty minutes. Maybe Barry Weis will
eventually fixed that enough that a story like this will
be on sixty minutes. It wasn't anywhere in the mainstream media.

(02:18):
It tied together a lot of this with remarkable visuals,
audio facts and so on. And it's done by this guy,
Nick Shirley. Many of you have heard of him. He's
about twenty three years old. He's a so called independent journalist.
He posted this on his various sites, on YouTube, x

(02:40):
and so on the day after Christmas. The number of
views is now running nearly one hundred and twenty million.
I don't think that there's a news out in an
America that can match that reach. So people are finding
out at this and understanding the depth of it. And

(03:03):
as I point out all the time when I say
of the need for those of us on the right
to say I told you so, that's what's critical. When
something goes on that completely is a disaster and blows
up and so on, it is critical for those of
us on the other side to point out I told
you so. So people learn from this. So that's where

(03:28):
we're going to begin today's podcast. You Line moves fast.
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(03:49):
twenty four to seven to answer your questions, help you
quickly and easily place an order, or assist with any
other business needs. Visit you line dot com. One summary
of the depth of just one component of the Somali

(04:12):
fraud posted on x by Wall Street Apes. I want
to read their summary. Two more Minnesota Somalia immigrant run
daycares that are supposed to have one hundred and two
children but don't have a child, five point one six
million dollars in funding and not a single child. And

(04:33):
then Nick Shirley, We're going to hear from him in
a moment, or only hear for a portrait of his
video in a moment. This is Nick Shirley, the independent
investigative journalist. Essentially a kid, very calated and not blinded
by bias and in fact liberated by having a conservative
point of view that allows him to see things that

(04:55):
the rest of the media either refuses to see, doesn't
want to see, or supprise a summary from him. It's
from the State of Minnesota website. It says, you have
one hundred two children here, and you got two point
sixty six million dollars this year in funding in two
point five million last year. We're just wondering where the

(05:16):
kids are. No children inside of the daycare center. Let
me interject, We've had some of these scandals here in Milwaukee.
I've talked forever about of all the types of welfare
program to rip off, the child daycare program is about
the easiest. You say you're running a daycare Quote the

(05:40):
famous line from Francis McDormand and Fargo that I quote
all the time. Well, how do you know, all right,
I'm taking care of twenty three kids? Do you seriously
think maybe those of you who believe that government is efficient,
do you seriously think anybody checks they already have? Checking
is to look at the paperwork. I would say a

(06:04):
better way of checking is to go over to the
place and stick your head inside. We're going to get
to that in a moment. Nick Shirley later confirmed that
there are fourteen Somali healthcare companies in one building. Fourteen
shady healthcare companies registered to one Minneapolis building, not doing

(06:26):
anything but stealing our tax money. Then Liz Collin interviews
a Minnesota government worker about the Somalia immigrant fraud taking place.
She says, they all reported it to all levels. The
worker is blurred to protect her from retaliation. And by
the way, I'll interject on that from what I hear,

(06:46):
there is serious fear that Eddie whistleblowers who come forward
at this point are fearing for their lives, fearing that
Somali's will kill them, the Democrats will kill them. That
might be a little bit firefetch, but I understand in
Minnesota that Democrats there are prone to insane violence. The
Waltz appointing going out and killing a Democratic officion. Further quote,

(07:14):
I know we were all this is the source. I
know we were all reporting at all levels, all of us,
and we had several meetings discussing how we felt something
very fraudule it was going on. And we had several
meetings discuss how we felt something very fragile was going on,
and we were all expressing it. Clinical directors, supervisors, County Workers'
Mental health workers. We were all reporting Tim Waltz and

(07:39):
so many Minnesota Democrats need to go to prison. Now,
I obviously don't want you to watch it right now,
but when the podcast is over, I would encourage you
to watch Nick Shirley's video. I have posted it on
my account on x under Mark bellingh Show, but it's everywhere,

(08:01):
and as they say, last I checked, it was on
one hundred and fifteen million to one hundred and twenty
million views. We're going to play a small portion of
it here and I'll do this setup. All you hear
here is Nick Shirley introducing a guy. There's a guy.
He's just a regular guy. He worked in one of

(08:23):
the buildings where a number of these Somali so called
healthcare operations were set up. And he's a dog a guy.
They're only using his first name here. Again, it's just
revealing to me how people This just reminds me of,
you know, the mafia back at its heyday, where people
who testified it against them and so one would have

(08:44):
to worry about their lives and about how he began digging.
It wasn't until this thing all drew the attention of Finally,
years later, a couple of mainstream media outlets that the
whole world, including people like me, found out about it.
There's been scan follow up in the mainstream media. So

(09:11):
far as I can tell, Tim Watz has not yet resigned.
I don't see there's been. The Justice Department is moving
in to investigate here. And before I get to the video,
as I'll point out, it is not to me shocking
the tens of thousands of Somalis moved to Minnesota and
immediately began rip it off the government because what they

(09:37):
found when they got here is our government is easy
to rip off, and if you cozy up to them politically,
they'll let you rip it off. They have to be thinking,
what a country. Amazing that these people seem to hate
the United States. You'd think they'd love this. So this

(09:59):
is you'll hear Nick Shirley for just like two seconds
at the beginning of this, Depending on did you edit
this so we hear Nick Shirley in here? You claim
you did, but I know I'm just asking did Nick
Shirley get into this what Paul claims it is? So
if you don't hear Nick Shirley, you can hear it
from Paul. By the way, Paul did not work on
Friday because he outrageously claimed it was a station holiday,

(10:21):
which it was. Nonetheless, do you know that I threatened
to fire you? Oh, he didn't even listen to the podcast.
I think that that would be just Paul has two
shows left, this one and the next one, and then
he's going on to whatever it is that you're going
to be doing. We all kind of go off and
do something else and never claim that we're retiring. I
I'm still doing this, and I'm claiming that this is

(10:44):
what I know. I'm just I'm not gonna go pump
all the things that you're doing. But he has two
shows here. I just think it would be hilarious if
I fired you with like two shows left. Don't you
think that would be hilarious? I just I mean, and
then like, but not explain that you only had two
show left. I mean, I could fire you right now.
And the only problem is I need somebody to run

(11:05):
the rest of the podcast. Yeah, there's nobody in there.
There's not been anybody in the building for a week.
I did bring in Christmas cookies all week, so somehow,
even though there's only four this is a sort of
cassic story. Right, there's only five people in the building.
They get cleared out every day, even though five if
the building was actually fully staffed. I mean I swear
that they would be gone before I actually even put
them out. I'd be walking in from the car and

(11:26):
they would be somehow gone. Some of you out there
who have no patience, are you gonna play this? Yes?
So this is Nick Shirley introducing David, who's a very
well organized guy and just starts. It's not very long.
He sais going through all what.

Speaker 3 (11:45):
He found and to make this happen, I met up
with a man who's been doing his own investigation for
years now as he has seen the fraud firsthand. His
name is David. Let's get into this and be prepared
to be shocked. How deep is this fraud here inside
of Minnesota.

Speaker 4 (12:02):
It is far worse than anybody can imagine. You heard
it's seven to ten billion and maybe more, and now
the numbers have been revised and put out there publicly
that they think it's more like eight billion. How I
got involved is that where my office is here in Minneapolis,
I'm sort of in the heart of all of this fraud.
And I would see these childcare centers. I said, well,

(12:24):
there are any kids there. It's the middle of the day,
and all I see are a couple of guys standing
out front smoking. And then I'd go buy another daycare
and I'd see the same thing. I said, well, where
do these kids play? And so I started to go
online and look and I said, this place is licensed
for eighty children. They had zero children. Every time I
went by there, they never had a single child there.
Then I started to see all these transportation companies going

(12:46):
around and it was always a Somali driver and I said,
well that's great, they're out there transportation contributing, but they
never had a passenger, never ever once. And I said, well,
what is all this transportation? What are they doing? So
then I found out that in Minnesota they have something
called non emergency medical transportation, so this is going to

(13:08):
the dentist office, therapy, whatever it might be. And I said, well,
how many of these companies are there? And the research
came back that there are one thy twenty of them
and more than eight hundred of them are Somalioned. Nobody
from the state of Minnesota ever cross checks to see
if any rides were ever actually provided. All they did

(13:29):
was write the check.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
No, we only played ninety seconds here. It's a forty
two minute video, and that's this staved guy who on
his own has been trying to dive into this for years.
But just in the brief little segment there, there's so
much to pull out. He mentions that these companies exist
all over the place non emergency medical transportation. We've got

(13:54):
companies here in Milwaukee, here in Wisconsin that do the
same thing, and therefore, exactly to describe somebody who doesn't
need an ambulance but needs transportation to go see a
healthcare provider, he said that, And I don't know if
he meant the state of Minnesota or just in the
Minneapolis area, but he said that there're oneenty and twenty

(14:15):
license providers of this eight hundred ver Somali. Why we're
eight hundred Somali. Well, in a close knit community like this,
One Somali who realizes this is a scam tells another
Somali who tells this is a scam, and they all
time one another, this is a scams. Ano. They're all
who wanted in. They're all just astonished that they're getting
all of this money. They're not driving anybody to anybody anywhere,

(14:36):
but they're all making money, so they tell everyone else.
And you would think after a certain point that it
my Dawna and some of the officials in Minnesota. Why
are all of these Somalis doing it? Now? I understand
there are certain ethnic groups that get into certain fields.
We saw in Milwaukee, for example, I don't know when
it started late eighties or early nineties that a number
of six Sikh from India started buying gas stations. At

(15:01):
part there was I don't mean this pejoratively. I'm kind
of a godfather of the community and other there's a
real influential leader of the community. He bought a number
of them and he got helped out a lot of
others to get involved in that business. There's nothing wrong
with that. That's simply you know people who come to
the United States and they look for a field to
work in, and you get connections and somebody tells you
how to do this. We've seen a number of Arab

(15:23):
Americans open grocery stores in the Central City, but this
medical transit that doesn't seem like any of that. Secondly,
just looking at the numbers, whether it's the state of
Minnesota or just Minneapolis. That seems like a lot of companies.

(15:45):
And secondly, the one thing that most urban areas are
not lacking is transportation. We still have taxis at ubers
if it's not an emergency. Really, and I get the
there are some people that are really really ill, but
they're not life and death and elderly and may need

(16:06):
some people to drive them, or they have mental conditions
or something or another. But when you saw these numbers,
so here's this guy David pointing out, they're just sending it. Okay,
I gave this guy a ride, this guy or ride
this guy, I ride it. Nobody's checking anything. Let me
remind you, because this is connected to this, that this
is the same government that runs our elections and in

(16:27):
some states doesn't even have photo YD with regard to
the whistleblowers. And by the way, that dollar figured that
they throw at eight billion, the GDP of Somalia the
country is twelve. Just the welfare fraud of this handful

(16:52):
of some aliens estimated one hundred thousand that moved to
Minnesota is equivalent to the GDP of the our entire country,
which is a population in the millions. Now imagine you're
sitting over there and somaliing you're hearing from over there
in the United States. These people are making all of course,
they're all going to try to ditch out, and they

(17:13):
need to be able to claim refugee status if they
want to come into the front door. And most of
them are legal immigrants, see the check. The trick here
is you don't want to come in illegally and then
apply to run all of these programs for fear that
that might run flag you. So they come in and
claim that the refugees in indeed Somalia is war torn.

(17:33):
One resume overthrows the other and so on, so they
use this as the cover. Now it's been exposed that
ilan Omar's family is actually part of the regime that
was doing much of the oppression or pressing. When they
got overthrown, she and her family all claimed refugee status
so that they could come into the United States, supposedly
to escape. Now the whistleblowers kept pointing out and they

(17:56):
say that we were told to telling we were telling
me or telling I would say, first of all, if
they're reporting it up the ladder, what good does that
do the ladder? See because and this is the key
to this, that a lot of people who don't like
to politicize everything and resisted hearing it the ladder is
all democrats. It was like reporting a lot of the

(18:22):
social welfare abuse in Milwaukee up the Milwaukee ladder, whether
it be SDC or back in the day, OYC, or
any of the number of other social welfare agencies that
turned out to be almost entirely corrupt. If you're running

(18:46):
these agencies and you're running tons of money through them,
you're gonna kick a lot of that money back to
politicians so that they keep giving you the grants to
run these programs. And it goes on until it doesn't
go on. At some point, the thing becomes so big,

(19:07):
greed takes over, that the scandal becomes so big that
it has to come out. And I think what happened
with regard to the Somali fraud in Minnesota is that
given the relatively small number of people involved, the dollar
figure became insane. You understand the context of a state
government eight billion and just in like two or three

(19:28):
or four different welfare programs. So they say that they
were reporting it up the food chain, Well, that food
chain wasn't the right place to report it because they're
simply reporting it up the ladder of Minnesota government that
happened to be the government of Tim Waltz, Tim Walls

(19:52):
is It's one of those unanswerable questions. Is Tim Waltz
more corrupt than he is stupid? Or is he more
stupid than he is corrupt. It's an unanswerable question because
I think that the two feet at one another. First
of all, Tim Wallas is clearly an idiot, you know,

(20:12):
a liar and a bs or, and a bad politician
and so on. But he also made a conscious decision,
as many of these Minnesota Democrats did. It's the same
decision that he made with regard to the lefty mayor
of Minneapolis who let his city burn down. The Democrats

(20:32):
realized that a huge segment of their voter base are
people who, in one form or another, are on the door.
And we all know what happened after the George Floyd riots.
The people who did the riots and the people who
backed the hole defund the police movement that got a
fortune out of it. Go back to Milwaukee. We had

(20:55):
three or four people that were leading these street marches
in Milwaukee, three of them were running goldfundmeans at the
very same time. One of them, the guy with the
faked redlocks, who was otherwise I can't say ball. This
is a cue ball because he's African American. He got
out of the racket. How he made so much money
that he just got out of the business. Another one

(21:17):
was investigated in ten was arrested and charged in Tennessee
in connection with violent crime. Well, that's just raising it
from the general public. All these other grants and social
justices and and the other thing. The people that are
on the receiving end of this are smart enough that
they're going to go back and use their organizations and
their money to bank all these politicians. So if you're
Tim Wilson, you were, you got to stay on the

(21:38):
good side of these people. This is your voter base. Minnesota,
as we saw in the most recent election, is like
a fifty four to forty six state Democrat. Now you
have one hundred thousand people moving into a state of
about I don't know it's Minnesota five six million. If
they all vote for you, that could swing a lot
of elections. Not to mention when they're all making a

(22:01):
fortune off the government they're going to kick a lot
back in campaign contributions. Now, it's unfair to say that
nobody in the media was reporting on this, because there
was some reporting in Minnesota. However, it was never the
reporting of putting it all together. It was the reporting

(22:22):
of one individual case rather than the larger picture of
every Somalian. That seems to me that it was getting
one of these, that they were all in on it together,
and secondly that they were empowered and enabled by the
top of Waltz's administration. The ilan Omar part, she's like

(22:46):
the queen of the Somali community in Minnesota, incredibly powerful.
Other Democrats in that state simply are terrified of crossing her.
First of all, shall call your racist. He's backed by
what's essentially almost a crime family. We don't know how
many Somalis are criminals. We do know that almost none

(23:07):
of them were telling on one another. But part of
that clearly has to be fear of what happened to you.
When you see Minnesota bureaucrats demanding that they're facing you know,
as a regular old person working at the breakers you
have on the face blurred on. Imagine if you're a
Somali person who's bothered by the fact that there's so
much overt criminality and fraud and shaking down going on

(23:33):
the teaching moment. Don't think for a moment that this
stuff isn't going on everywhere. It just isn't going on
at the scale that this is the reason this blew
up is because it was so extreme such and also
the common denominator of almost everybody being Somali, whereas much
of the other kind of welfare fraud and stealing from

(23:54):
government programs and so the one that goes on in
the United States, it's just a lot of people picking
up all this as an easy to do rather than
all being part of one ethnic group or an ethic community.
So much of the COVID fraud that went on there
were two types of grants that came out in COVID
to replace lost income, and then there was the one
for businesses that if you stayed open, we're gonna give

(24:15):
you money because you're staying open rather than shutting down.
During COVID, very weird thing. The government was locking all
these things down, but if you actually didn't lock yourself down,
you get a ton of money. Well, a lot of
the businesses that were getting a ton of money for
staying open. In fact, we're not open, figuring nobody's gonna check.
My guess is the overwhelming majority of them got away
with it. A few got caught. But if the government

(24:40):
program is one the example I've always used because I
just like using it and it's so easy to understand,
I don't even know whether or not this is I
don't know if Trump has killed off this program or not.
One of the good things about Trump coming in is
a lot of these programs are just being eliminated, which
drives the lefties crazy because they actually really believe that

(25:00):
these are well but childcare for children, parents, you know,
or the working poor and so on. They need child care. Yes,
they do need childcare. But when the program is set
up to make it so easy to scam, there has
to be a better way of doing it than this.
One of the things that I've come to believe is

(25:22):
that when government privatizes operations. In other words, when you're
doing the work of the government and the government is
your only client, it may actually be worse than the
government providing it, because when the government's providing it, there's
at least some level of oversight, not much. You know,
Tony Rivers still has the State of Wisconsin employees and

(25:43):
working at home. But when the government takes government money
and gives it to somebody else and say you go
ahead and do this, then the level of oversay can
go down, especially in a corrupt government, to nearly nothing.
And I certainly understand this is a huge problem the

(26:05):
people that are lower income and actually working, as opposed
to second off of welfare program. Who's to take care
of the kids. It is an issue, and there is
a place for government for it. There's an even bigger place,
I think for charities. Nonetheless, it is a legitimate issue. However,
what an easy thing to scam? Now? The thing that
we saw in Milwaukee, and I reported on this at

(26:27):
nauseum over twenty years ago, in every now and then
people would get caught. Often it was the small daycare
four kids and you know why four kids? And this
is a long time ago that I reported on this
and tried to explain to people who don't understand scamming.
I always loved to explain scamming to Paul, because Paul
doesn't understand scamming at all. You don't, I can't believe

(26:51):
you haven't been scammed. See, I think your wife probably
stops you from being scammed because she just strikes me
as being more cynical and suspicious. Why four, All right,
let's just take two women. I'll use generic names so

(27:14):
nobody wants to claim that it's races. Mary and Helen.
Mary has four kids, Helen has four kids. Here's are
the scam works. Mary's four kids spend the day at
Helen's house, so Helen builds the government for the daycare.
Helen's four kids spend the day at Mary's house, so
Mary spends Neither of them are working. Both of them

(27:37):
are claiming that they're taking care of kids. It's just
the other's kids. And of course for those who well
why would they send They don't send them over there,
They just claim that they are. There is a ton
of that, the small level of just swapping kids around
on paper for the purposes of getting these grants. And again,

(27:57):
why that type of progium, because it's it's so easy
to do. Now. In the case of Minnesota, apparently you know,
and Nick was quoting. Nick Shirley was quoted from the
website of Minnesota Notifications that they set out you don't
seem to have any kids here? Where are they? Okay,
they actually catch out to this, they might be front.
They send up papers and non compliant letters and so on,

(28:19):
and this can go on for years. In the meantime,
the money keeps flowing because somewhere above that, when it
gets to the level of a high muckety got close
enough to walls that just let this alone. Let this alone. Now,

(28:39):
certainly scandal is possible among Republicans. I'm not suggesting that
only Democrats can be crooks. There is, however, a distinction
most actual Republicans. If they would find out that a
st type of scandal like this was let's imagine it
wasn't home health care, but it's something in business or whatever,

(29:02):
grants for certain businesses that are not of the up
andy up, and you're not doing any work. Most Republican
voters would be appalled and would be appalled that the
Republican engaged in the corruption. Most Democrats, I think in
Minnesota are unbothered by this. So they ripped everybody off.

(29:22):
So what both are senators and Democrats? The governors a
Democrat we carried the state for Kamala. He allowed Omer's
a lot more Democrats, she rips Trump. What do we care?
The price of this is And Democrats tend to pretend

(29:45):
to be outraged that everything a Republican not only does
but is accused of doing. The fake outrage over the
Russia collusion of Trump, even if Trump was colluding with
the Russians, they weren't outraged by it. They were outraged
that he won. He wasn't outright, But they don't even
pretend to be outraged by their own scandals. I'll prove it.
You want me to prove it right now? When right now,

(30:11):
how many Democrats in Minnesota are calling for Waltz's resignation. None.
The story's out there, the whole world knows it, yet
none of the Demomand by the way, Minnesota, I almost
said something that I don't know this for a fact.
I believe in Minnesota that it's like Wisconsin that if
the governor resigns, the lieutenant governor takes over and they

(30:31):
run as a ticket. So, for example, in Wisconsin, if
Ever's quit today, and by the way, I think Evers
is going to quit next year, assuming Sarah Rodriguez is
the nominee for governor, that would make her the incumbent.
If she wins the Democratic nomination anyway, you'd still have
a Democrat. Now it may well be in Minnesota they

(30:52):
run separately as tickets, but I just should have looked
at that. I'm just saying, I think if if else
was forced out, there'd be just be another Democrat that
would take over. But how many Democrats in Minnesota are
calling for Waltz's resignation over this? And again you might
find like one guy in some corner of the state,

(31:12):
like one of those cities in Minnesota that they shoot
one of the one of the episodes of Fargo in
I think that's just one of the many things hilarious
about far which, by the way, is there gonna be
another season? The last one was really good. John ham
was in John Hamm was in it, the actor from
mad Men. He played like some insane, crazed, power hung hungry,

(31:34):
sex crazed sri from somewhere out there in the in
the boonies. It's straying away. The stories are straying away
each season a little bit more from how the movie was.
There's always spreads of the component of the movie, like
there's always a lady cop that's trying to do the investigating,
and some they seem to work the wood shipper into
each thing, and anyway they would. The thing that's gonna

(32:00):
say it so funny about Fargo is almost never is
Fargo in Fargo. It's usually in Fargo. Is in North Dakota.
It's usually a thing in Minnesota, and there's gonna be
like a connection to North Dakota. The one this this
pasture was like the Feds that were investigating this, I
think we're from Minnesota and John Ham might have been
out of there in North Dakota or whatever. And then

(32:21):
the wife is kid. The wife runs ones away and
is hiding out under a fake identity and married to
another guy, and one of live of Minnesota. What was
it Dakota zoa someone anyway, see Paul's who was braided.
They actually set one of the years of the TV
show in Bimidgi and the other in Brainerd and I
never remembered, which I you know, how people mix up

(32:42):
Wisconsin in Minnesota. I'm in Florida. Would not believe the
number of people who think I live in Minnesota. They
just turned it into one state, which I mean, I
get that we're sort of similar, but It's not like
North and South Dakota. I would understand if somebody is
down there that I met from South Dakota, I might
think that they're from North Dakota or something or another yeah,
or carolineas I mean, you get a lot of that

(33:03):
as far as I'm concerned. Brainerd and Bemidgie are the
same city. It's just I've never figured out. I don't
I could know where one of them is, but I
don't know which one of the one that it is
and which one is the other one. And they're probably close,
but they were both in one was in one of
the the TV episode seasons of Fargo and the other
ones in the movie. There might have been both. It

(33:24):
might have been that didn't like the U Francis McDormand
when she went to he was in the Twin Cities though,
wasn't he? Was it William H. Macy and the Twin
Cities the car Dealer? Yeah, but she was from like
either Brainerd or a Midge or whatever it was Braider
Paul cleinss Brainer Fargo. There was one season of the

(33:49):
TV series, not this last of John Ham, the one
that whatever number that is I forget, but the one
that was before that that wasn't that good. But otherwise
they've all been good. In the movie, of course was good.
But they they need to do another one, now, don't they.
They leave a gap. And because the stories are independent,
itself contained, it's not like the Sopranos, where it's the
same characters at everything. It's just every season the plot

(34:12):
has KUIs or connections or echoes to things that they've
done in the past. Now, let me get back to
this corruption in Minnesota, the complaining up the food chain
and why it didn't do any good from the people
blowing the whistle. You were always complaining to people who,

(34:34):
in the end, even if they weren't in on it,
were indirectly in on it. You were complaining to Democrats who,
as I say, we're not going to they weren't bothered
by it, and they just assume that you not find
out about it because they felt they were benefiting on it.
Democrats are not bothered by any crime committed by other
Democrats at any level. Seriously, I think if elan Omar

(34:56):
pulled out a gun and shot and killed the Republican,
I think Democrats perfectly fine with it. And we see
how the number of them celebrated, for example, the Charlie Kirks.
I just it's the thing with Democrats, you shouldn't lump
all of them in there. Okay, find me this long,
massive list. The only Democrats that are gonna be calling
for Watson's resignation in Minnesota are other Democrats who are
eyeballing running for that seat. At some point, Emmer, who's

(35:30):
the Republican housewhip congressom from Minnesota, is pointing out that
one of the buildings that was housing these setters had
the following sign in front quality leering setter. They spelled
learning wrong. They were I mean, talk about a tip
off that there wasn't any kind of youth childhood education

(35:52):
going on to the thing. They didn't even spell the work,
which again would just be a red flag that what's
going on here is not legitimate. Now, the point that
I was making why this got exposed eventually is it
was so massive. But again it took years. But this

(36:14):
type of thing goes on all over our country. Way back,
when trying to think where I worked, I think I
might have been working in Springfield. It might have been Madison.
There was a news organism. I was still in the
media that I wasn't a talk show host yet called
investigative reporters and editors, and it was Investigative Reporters and

(36:37):
I was a member of this. I only go to
conventions that they're really close. I think this one was
in Chicago. Might be wrong about that. I was still
a reporter. So this is many, many many years ago.
And they have one of these panels and there's a
you know, a moderator, and he has a couple of
other people and their people. It's like one of the
breakout sessions and there's forty people there, and it was

(36:58):
one of these things you're brainstorming on the kinds of
to look into, and I said, I found that one
of the best areas to look into is social welfare agencies,
do gooder agencies. And people stared at me blankly because
what they wanted to investigate was corp re fraud and
big businesses at the oil company. Well, the reason I

(37:21):
brought it up, I've told the story a zillion times.
I worked in Saint Joseph bet and Harbor, Michigan. Was
the second full time professional job that I had. I
went into that city that was just nons It was
just corruption, all over the place, and nobody had ever
bothered a report on it, because I don't think there
was actually a breathing reporter whoever worked in that city.
And all you had to do is start looking into it,

(37:42):
and you got tips right and left, and I found,
I mean everything, Saint Joe is not corrupt at all.
Benton Harbor was totally corrupt. Saint Joe was very wealthy
and affluent. Betton Harbor ran an outside government aid which
created all of these social welfare programs, and I just
it was the level of corruption was incredible, and it
was one of the things that was that was the

(38:02):
first beginning of the multi year stage of me going
from being a lefty to a conservative is I realized
that the social welfare programs weren't helping anybody. Benn Harbor
was destitute, yet all this money running through it and
it never got to But boy o, boy o, boy
was it wasn't being skimmed. It just never got to
the bottom. Wasn't like they're skimming off the top, They're
taking the whole thing because who's to look at it,

(38:27):
who's to expose You're doing a wonderful thing. Public education
is the same thing incredibly overstaffed, people, incredibly overpaid, quality
of the product crappy as can be. I mean, I

(38:48):
think you could compare the Wahwatosa public schools to the
Somalis in Minnesota. It's you could say, their children actually
going inside the schools in Wahwatosa, I suppose. But look
at the number of buildings that they built in a
school district with declining enrollment, and look at all of
the contracts that they were caught handing out to cronies

(39:09):
and relatives of friends. Then they say that they've got
a massive budget deficit, and the guy who is the
business manager who they forced out ends up getting hired
and hired up in Kewaskam. If the program is run
by the government, it is easier to rip off than

(39:31):
if is run by an individual. Now this is not
to say individuals can't be ripped off. I mean the
comment last week, it seems like the people that do
the ripping off over the Internet are Nigerians and the
people who actually come here in person to rip you
off our Somalis. It's a generalization and it may sound racist,
but again, every internet's corruption scheme that you seem to
find tends to be from Nigeria, and we talked about

(39:53):
the dating scams that it by the way, I mentioned
the U the app or the company, the outfit that's
on YouTube and so unexposed. This is just called catfished,
and they do these things in which somebody I think
I'm being scammed online by somebody who says that they
love me, that I've been going that I've been sending

(40:14):
money to for four years, but we've never met. Well,
so catfish does high tech things to expose them and
invariably at somebody in Nigeria pretending to be a handsome
young man you know, and whatever the you know in
the United States wooing the other person there is, so

(40:35):
you can scam individuals and those that are naive, trusting,
or as I say all the time, you are likely
to believe something is true if you want it to
be true. So if you're like an old, fat guy
and some hot twenty three year old woman says she
loves you and wants to spend the rest of your
life with you, well you want to believe that. Now,
I'm a cynic. I don't believe people that are shared
with people. Somebody can be telling me the truth that

(40:56):
I think that they're lying. I just come to the
point which I don't believe anybody about anything. I can't
help it. I mean, you do my job and look
at the stuff that I You know, Okay, Trump colluded
with the Russians. You get the COVID vaccine. You'll never
get COVID. I'm just go on and on and on.
This is my whole lifeful. I sent it to this.
You'd be like this too. You still a naive. I've
made you well. Now that you're gonna finally leave the

(41:17):
show here, you might revert to your naiveness. Yeah, I
think it. I think it won't stick. I think it'll
It'll slide right out of your brain. We'll find out. So, yes,
it can happen with individuals, but it genuinely can only

(41:39):
happen to the extent of how much money the individual has.
It is fire likelier to scam the government. Why, let's
imagine you're trying to scam. I mean, I'm a bad example.
I'd be a hard person to scam because I'm just cynical.
But if you're scamming me, every dollar I send, that's
money I don't have. Who in government cares if they

(42:02):
don't have the money, talk about no skin in the game.
It's unfortunate that there was the falling out between Musk
and Trump early on because Doge had the potential to
dive into all of this stuff. And you saw, of
course the resistance from even among some Republicans when they
tried to cut some of these sorgures. Some of the

(42:23):
stuff that it does is like usaid, it's like very
similar to these types of programs that we had in Minnesota.
I'm sure some legitimate things were done, So you throw
out the legitimate things in order to get rid of
everything else, because most of it is crap. Well, you've
got to be willing to give up the legitimate things
in order to get rid of all of this crap.

(42:47):
As I say, for people who are going to try
to argue that Democrats are not perfectly fine with scandal,
find me the prominent Democrat. Never in mind Minnesota, anywhere
in the United States. Skin would it be off the
back of say aoc to call for will it's to reside,
and the skin off her back would be her good

(43:09):
buddy is zilan Omar And they all have to stick together.
And Democrat fus she's not body by it. She'd rather
make up a lie about Trump to be outraged about
it than be outraged about actual ripping off of people.
Another story here. This is from Maine, and I suspect
what's happening is some of the reporters around the United

(43:32):
States that aren't comatose and brain dat are starting to
look into some of these daycare programs in healthcare programs
and child programs and so on in their own state.
Or if you've got a state that in again a
huge percentage of the Somalis settled in Minnesota. If they've
settled in your state, you might want to take a
look at it. This is from Maine. Apparently there's a

(43:56):
fair number of Somalis that have settled in Maine. Maine
suspends Medicaid payments to Somali charity after audits and cover
more than one million in fraud nicolin dime compared to Minnesota.
But somebody in Maine spotted at charity, some Mallion charity
in Minnesota crooked. This is all over the late JJ

(44:26):
blind and I quote him all the time on this
when he was on Building and Company. Once he my
whole TV show. For those are wondering he made this
comment that I quoted forever. Running an anti property program
in Milwaukee is a license to steal. That always hacked
off the lefties that were on the program. But it
is a license to steal. It doesn't mean you would steal.
For instance, I could have a driver's license and not drive.
Not every anti property program is illegitimate. I donate to

(44:49):
many of them. I'm just saying that if you do
run one and the majority of your money comes not
from a private donor but from government, it is a
license to steal. The greater percentage of money that the
nonprofit gets from private owners, the less likely it is
to be stolen from because the private owners and boards
of directors who are kicking their own money, and they're

(45:09):
they actually believe in the mission of the organization and
they don't want it ripped off. I'll give you another
example here. Then there are the ones in which it
just it seems dubious, but they were performing services, which
is way many standards better than what happened in Minnesota.

(45:30):
Janetta Robinson, who's got a street named after him Milwaukee,
and so does her mother. She ran a program for
Central City kids for many, many, many years. She did
offer services, and for all I know, that was very worthwhile.
But a lot of money ran through there, drove a cadillag.

(45:51):
You might say that's a bad look. It wasn't a
bad luck. Nobody seemed to care. In addition to that,
every year she took these kids out of to Jamaica. Now,
how does it benefit the lines of these impoverished children,
poor the necessarily impoverished, poor black kids in Milwaukee to
go to Jamaica as opposed to say, go to six Flags.

(46:14):
The answer is it benefited Janeta. She got to go
on somebody else's time to Jamaica. But again, at least
she performed services. And some people say that she was
a good role model in a mentor and so on.
But you just look at these things and it's just
so easy to say how easy it is to scan
these things, and how many other people on the left

(46:34):
will give you cover. They're the offensive line and the
scammers of the running backs. We have a response from
Tim Walls, by the way, and the Knicks. I mentioned
a few moments ago that won my podcasts and some
of you are saying, when will it end? Not that long? No,

(46:55):
watch the video. I've linked it up on X. You
can find it anywhere else, but I've made it easy.
Just go to my side on X. So this thing,
as I said it, I'm doing the podcast very early
in the afternoon on Monday. By late morning, it was
pushing one hundred and twenty million views, which, by the way,
that's just that's huge. It's just it's that's just huge,
which shows you, by the way, that there's a market

(47:16):
for this kind of contented reporting. People are interested in
this stuff. So Fox News is reporting that Tim Watz
has now responded to this, because when you get to
one hundred and twenty million, I mean, that's just that's
a real number. So Tim Waltz is offering a response. See.
The thing about Tim Waltz is obviously we know that
he's gonna bs except unlike most Democrats, he's a really

(47:40):
bad bser. Have you ever seen anybody the two word?
I mean, Bill Clinton was a great liar. Biden is
a bad example because he was you know, his mind
was shot. Kamala has just inapted everything. Kama will like
make things up. But I mean, if you wanted to,
I just I think if Tim Waltz was telling a
true it would seem like he's lying, right, I mean,

(48:03):
plus every story that he tells. Oh as a football coach,
we took he was an assistant, you know, I you
know all the valid that he lies about his military record,
lied about the rank that he left in, lied about
whether or not he was ever in combat, just on what. Yeah,

(48:24):
there was something with shooting a gun or hunting or something.
He never really hunted and didn't he didn't he load
the gun wrong or what did he was it was
it loading the gun or pointing it he didn't know
how to load it or something or another. And anyway
you want to hear the Tim Waltz response to the
video on this Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz's office is pushing

(48:46):
back against fraud allegations. It's pushing back against frauday allegations
after a viral video showed visits to multiple childcare settings
of the state, including one that allegedly received millions of
dollars state funding, despite a peer appearing largely inactive. Responding
to questions about the alleged allegations and the video posted

(49:08):
by independent journalist Nick Shirley, a spokesperson for the governor
told Fox News that Waltz has spent years working to
crack down on isn't that the lbs? First of all,
it's just it goes back to my whole thing about
stupid or corrupt. If he actually has been working years
to crack down the front, it shows you what an

(49:30):
incompetent that he is. So again, is he lying or
is he an epp? It's all it feeds on. It's
up for all we know. Maybe he was trying to
crack down. Good job on that. Good job, Kim, You've
done a great job cracking down on your fraud there
Why nothing seems to go on? You're trying to let

(49:50):
me get finished the thing and ask the state legislature
for war authority. I love. This is the same line
that Biden and Kamala said about the border. Remember when
they kept saying we had a PAS some bill Trump
comes in. They didn't pass any That border was sealed
in like three days. Ask the leg The legers said,
you're in Minnesota, by the way, is democratic to take

(50:11):
aggressive action. He has strengthened oversight. See I mean no,
this is the spokes rassen from walls talking. She's gotta
say something, right. I could tell a joke, but people
wouldn't understand that it was a joke. It's gonna claim
that the new spokesperson is KJP, but people would think

(50:34):
that I was telling the truth about time. Yeah, I
loved Tim Walton. I've got I need, I need some
help on my messaging. Here's KJP, including launching investigations. He's
not gonna invest it years. Tim Waltz is gonna invest
in it, going to next Shirley's thing. The investigation is

(50:54):
all there into these specific facilities. What of Whittress are
he closed? Money's right? He closed one of them. There's
thousands another post right X On the general issue, our

(51:19):
government is a multi trillion dollar a year theft in
money laundering operation. The American tax beyers are the victims.
The American people are sick of being robbed and then
called racist or Islamophobic for calling out the robbery. Elon Musk.
The radical left has been using fraudulent government programs for

(51:39):
a long time to import and retain vast number of
illegal and legal, in some cases immigrants, to win elections
in turn America into a single party stayed, destroying any
real democracy. The more you look at it, the more
you will be horrified at what your tax money is doing,
and the fact that if this is not reversed, your

(52:00):
vote will mean nothing. The most obvious case example is
the Somali voting block in Minnesota, a state that historically
had zero Somalis, electing Ilan Omar to the US Congress.
The same is happening in Europe, UK, Canada, Australia, and
New Zealand. It's like what Milton Friedman said, money is
most poorly spent when you're spending someone else's money on

(52:21):
people you don't know. That's the federal government. In my
next segment, let me cover this one. Now. There are
some stories that don't require a lot of dissection because

(52:44):
after a certain point, everyone becomes aware of them. I
think unless you're just one of these people that's not
aware of anything, you're probably aware of the unbelievable price
explosion in gold and silver. I'm doing this podcast on Monday.
I did not check today Monday, and both are overdue
for a pullback. But gold and silver, and part of

(53:09):
it it's suddenly traded the day after Christmas. On Friday,
both exploded. Silver went up more than eleven percent in
one day. Gold and silver, gold is in the past,
was always about one hundred times more than silver per ownce.
Silver is now way ahead of that because while gold
has boomed, silver has just exploded this year. I mean

(53:29):
silver would move up and down in pennies per day,
and gold and a buck here and a buck there,
and it's been doing nothing. Both have been doing nothing
but going up here here in twenty twenty five, and
for whatever reason on Friday, it just whether or not
it's the bubble being it's the last blast of the

(53:51):
bubble or what, or this is still the beginning stages
of a massive correction in gold and silver being incredibly
undervalued again. I don't know everything what goes up comes down.
I don't know if it's coming down tomorrow or if
there's a lot more to run, but it's I mean,
the last I saw on Friday, silver had gotten up

(54:12):
to seventy eight dollars in ours. I remember doing a
segment on the show, and it wasn't that long ago,
I don't know, three four years. It was when silver
was fourteen, and I talked about the risk reward ratio
and how so many people can't evaluate risk. We have
the fear of the unknown, for you know, the people
that are running around. The twenty five year old people
running around wearing masks for fear that they're gonna get COVID.

(54:33):
Not understanding there. So okay, you get COVID. None's gonna happen.
In the meantime, you got to run around with this
mask on. And I always use the one hundred percent rule.
What's the worst thing that can happen if you put
money into something? You lose it? All? Right? Well, when
silver was fourteen dollars, I said, well, it can't go
to zero. I mean, silver won't ever be free. We

(54:56):
need silver for certain things. Plus you know there's lots
of app location. You can argue that fourteen dollars is
too high, but silver can't be free. It's not like
even a company that can go under because of bad finances.
Silver itself is a commodity, has to have some value
because it's needed. So let's imagine the lowest would be six.
You can even say zero. I said, what's like there

(55:18):
that silver will at some point in my life go
to twenty eight or zero. Twenty eight would be doubling
one hundred percent. Fourteen down to zero would be losing
one hundred percent. And I said, silverwhelmingly more likely that
it would double, and probably more likely that it will
do a firewar than double. And the worst that I
could do is lose my money. But they're you know,
flip a coin, Paul, and I bet heads are tails

(55:38):
for a dollar. One of us is going to lose
a dollar, one of us going to win a dollar.
But imagine if the winner of the heads or tails
made twenty nine dollars and the loser only lost the
one dollar. If there's some way of being able to
construct that so and I just and I've made that
comment forever that silver, particularly when the goal just struck
me as a no brainer investment for the ages that
it just seemed to be way, way, way too cheap.

(56:01):
Now it's stayed around that level for a while, and
finally this monstrous move has occurred. There are numerous theories
that they're signaling inflation, that the lack of credibility in
some cryptos I don't know. There are other theories. You
need lots of silver to produce the chips and the

(56:26):
computing power for AI. In general commodity inflation, even cheaper metals,
non precious metals like copper are going up or simply
that this was. You know, silver had been depressed for many,
many years, and people will say, Okay, silver's gone up,
but so is beef. Not to the same extent, but

(56:47):
a lot of the commodities that were depressed forever suddenly
we're not. Now. I don't do a daily radio show anymore.
So the sponsors that you hear on the show. By
the way, people listen to our company nationally will drop
in on the national level some spots that have nothing
to do. But we have our local sponsors that are
here and they buy on an annual contracts, so we

(57:08):
have the same ones for the entire year of record.
I was doing radio. We were running like, how many
minutes an hour are we running on my old radio show,
It was like twenty, wasn't It might have been more
bazillion things. And I always said that you could tell
when gold and silver were overvalued, and that's when we
were running three commercials an hour for buying gold or silver.
And the reason for that is it people tend to
play follow the leader. They're sheep. They buy something after

(57:32):
all of their friends told them how much money they
made it. Well, that means they're the last one to buy.
They're getting in at the top and you know the bottomfuls.
The time to buy gold and silver is when there
isn't anybody running any ads. So I actually don't know
how many of these ads are running, because radio was
always a place that a lot of the ads were running.

(57:54):
And I'm not giving you any guidance. I can only
tell you that I did earlier this here sell a
little bit of platinum. Platinum pulled the way, by the way,
in this month, the loan platinum is up sixty percent.
I but it was I just had a little bit
of an ita for cash, and people are giving me
brief over that I have way, way, way, way, way

(58:16):
more gold and silver and I haven't sold any of it.
And part of it is you just gold and silver
to me are hedges against chaos and everything else going
to hell that you need to have some means of investment.
Some people think diamonds or the other diamond values have
been crushed by the whether you call them fake diamonds
or lab diamonds, that's altered their value because unlike gold

(58:38):
and silver, it's become easy to mimic them. The problem
with mimicking an element like silver that has an industrial
application is they have not figured out a way to
mimic the properties of silver that are needed in the
industries in which they use it. Anyway, I'm not going
to tell you whether or not there's still farther to
run or not. But obviously silver is a less compelling

(58:59):
by its seventy eighth than it was when it was
at thirty five just a few months ago, or fifteen
two or three years ago. In my next segment, I
want to talk about two unbelievably stupid ideas and something

(59:19):
you probably figured but never really thought through. You follow
that You sure I can't fire you? I just I
just think that would be funny God for you? What skin?
It isn't off your back? Oh they do docure for
one show left. They wouldn't even do that, would they.

(59:41):
Well you might even be well I mean yeah, I
mean if I fired you, they could constantly. I'm gonna
fire you for cause they would. I need what? But yeah,
I know what the cause is. You didn't show up
on Friday. There's there's gotta be something. You're wearing a
stupid cap to day. That's my cause. This is the
Mark Elling podcast. This is the Mark Belling podcast. I

(01:00:06):
said a moment ago. I have two stories about really
dumb things that are being proposed. It's almost like they
are myopic. What does myopic mean? You have short vision,
you can only see things up close, you can't see
the big picture. Before I get to those, I have
another story about myopia myopic. There are many people who

(01:00:33):
have made the point that children have lost all perspective
of the big picture. Kids in general don't see the
big and you see like a kid of eighteen nineteen
committing suicide because you know something bad happened to them.
Your all life's in front of you. Guess what you'll
live another seventy years, eighteen thousand. Bad things are gonna

(01:00:55):
happen to you. They're all gonna be worse to this.
But you lack the perspective of realizing that in the end,
your girlfriend, dumpy, or somebody in front of you on
social media is who gives of rats pitot In a
few years you'll have a lot more positive things going
on and a lot more negative things than that. But
they can't see any kind of perspective but that social
media has made this worse. But this piece is addressing

(01:01:20):
whether or not it's the most abused current word in
our language is literally, but this case that actually applies.
They're making them literally myopic. And as I said going
into the segment, my guess is that we all kind
of knew the kids, especially younger kids, spending hours a

(01:01:40):
day looking at these screens, that this is not only
very bad for them, it may be wrecking their eyes.
And just hearing it, you kind of said, well, no kidding,
it's probably bad, especially for developing eyes to be looking
at these lit, highly pixelated screen mean for all of
these hours a day. Alicia Finley and The Wall Street Journal. Today,

(01:02:04):
parents and politicians are waking up to how social media
and smartphones can harm young people's mental health. How many
realize that sting its staring at screens all day can
make kids literally short sighted. Ophthalmologists are raising alarms about
an epidemic of childhood myopia. Are you short sighted or alongsided? Well,

(01:02:29):
I mean, if you don't have your glasses on, are
you still able to read up close? And you don't
see things so far away? What you can't see far
away but you can see close up, That's what I am.
I mean before my eyes were corrected, when I had
the cataract surgery I mean my glasses off. I could

(01:02:49):
read something old up in my eye, but by steering
fifty feet away, I mean, I didn't know if that
was a crane there or Jordan Love, I didn't know. Well,
that's back to the piece. Near Sightedness typically developed between
ages three and ten, when eyeballs are rapidly growing, though
it can progress through adolescents and into young adulthood. While

(01:03:12):
genetics plays a role, spending more time focusing on things
up close, whether reading books are watching YouTube videos, significantly
increases the risk. It causes the eyeball to grow longer
from front to back, making it harder to focus farther away. Ever,
wonder why children who buried their heads in books were
more likely to wear glasses. Now you know. Studies have

(01:03:34):
found that the more time kids spend outdoors, the less
likely they are to become near sighted. Sunlight stimulates the
release of dopamine in the eyes, which slows lengthening Alas
children these days spend many of their waking hours indoors
fixated on screens, The incidence of myopia is highest in
Southeast Asia, maybe not surprising given the heavy cultural emphasis

(01:03:58):
on academics, where an estimated eighty percent of students who
complete who complete twelve years of school are myopic. Rates
are somewhat lower in the US forty one percent in
urban areas and sixty percent of rural areas, but have
increased following the COVID school shutdowns. The story goes on.
If you want to find more, it's Alsia Finley on
the Wall Street Journal. Sometimes Wall Street Journal stories are

(01:04:20):
behind a paywall. Often you get a few free ones
a month. Most of those sites are set up that way.
All right, I have two proposals in front of me.
One they're both really stupid. One is a newer one
and the other is one of those idiotic ideas. That

(01:04:40):
was it? They kept coming back? Was that Freddy Krueger?
He killed him? And then they do another movie? Was
he a Halloween or not? I know, I get them.
I never watched any of them. I just I just
knew it. But one of them kept coming back, and
do you kill him? And then there they do another
movie and he's back. Whatever it was. Let's go to

(01:05:02):
the newer one. The government agency that oversees American Family Field.
Remember the Brewers have a long term lease on the property.
We have a government agency that controls the overall property.
The government. Officials are appointed by various levels of government,
and most of the levels of the government right now

(01:05:24):
are Democrat. Obviously everybody local would be a Democrat. The
evers appointees of Democrats. There are Republican appointees on there
as well. They have this idea that you have all
of this land around American Family Field, and what is
all of that lad Now, for those of you who
are listening far away, unless you're like talking Wrigley Field,

(01:05:48):
you can probably visualize what's all around a Major League
Baseball stadium. Parking goes out and on and on and
on and on and always. I'm always marveled at how
far some people have to walk parking their cars. The
parking goes all the way to thirty fifth Street. I mean,
the stadium is on the other side of forty third Street,

(01:06:09):
the Miller Park. But that's how far to the west
it goes. Paul says, the one north of ninety four.
I mean, I have gold preferred parking and is like
that I'm walking along. I mean, it's just a lot,
but you know, you got all these people who want
to go, and this is why all these crowd constant
they do that there are nine million people. I always

(01:06:30):
know that they're bs. The number of parking spaces that
they have an American Family Field is twelve thousand, which
means in a sold out game, the average number of
people per car is three and a half times per car.
But obviously some people come and buses, some people walk,
and a lot of people come together. But on a
sold out game, they're all filled. Well, the people who

(01:06:52):
oversee the stadium area, they look at all of this parking,
what do they see waste? They want to develop it.
There are two separate studies that are going on. One
is to take much of the parking that is to
the east of it's now called Brewers Boulevard. It used

(01:07:13):
to be called Miller park Way. It's one seventy five
is you all know it if you know the Milwaukee
era where the freeway branches to the south for like
two blocks is a freeway, and then it goes on
to the old Miller Parkway south forty third Street and
so on. The parking to the west of that. They've
put their eyeballs on that, and one of the proposals

(01:07:35):
is to take fourteen hundred. Another one is a couple
thousand of those spaces and develop it with housing and shops.
They think that given that there's all of that land there,
that you could do housing. Now, before I completely ridicule this,
I will point out again that whenever the development community
sees vacant land, they see the potential for development. I

(01:07:59):
will point out, how however, that much of the city
of Milwaukee we have housing stock that is currently empty.
We have other homes that are being knocked down. Now.
Part of that is there are neighborhoods that people don't
want to live in. And the notion is is that
you've put an apartment buildings in an area that isn't
a neighborhood because there's nothing there, it won't be as
crime infested in so on as some of the areas

(01:08:19):
where you have this problem. That much of the Monominee
Valley has been developed industrial and commercially with a massive
jumpstart from Pottawatabe. This would be the way area that
links say American Family Field the Pottawatamie. And they think,
and the City of Milwaukee loves this idea because the
only area of housing growth in Milwaukee in the last

(01:08:41):
thirty years has been the lower east side downtown to
the third ward. They think this is another area where
can develop housing. The problem, of course, with taking out
sixteen hundred and three thousand spaces out of a twelve
thousand seat parking lot is you've just given up places
for three thousand people to work whether to park. The

(01:09:01):
second proposal. If you know the ballpark, you know that
there's a Little League field in the parking lot called
Hellfare Field. This proposal would be to take out all
of the parking in the area that is directly adjacent
to the stadium, in other words, the preferred lots. That

(01:09:22):
would be the lots where you're on the good side
of the interstate and so on, in other words, Hellfare Park,
and then all the way around the left field line
and so on the bulk of the parking near the
stadium and develop that. The idea is that, for whatever reason,
people like to live near sporting venues. I was surprised

(01:09:42):
at the apartments in the parking garage near Fiser Forums
sold out, But they did their booked as far as
I can tell, and they believe that you could turn
this into and I know where they're coming from. They
sized up Title Town in green Bay, and they think
that you can do this at the ballpark. The difference,
of course is this is that Lambeau and the Green
Bay thing is iconic. Secondly, they didn't use the parking lots.

(01:10:06):
They use the land that's a little bit down. And thirdly,
while there is housing and all of that, it's mostly
like destination restaurants and so on. I guess there are people, yes,
title Tom green By and in northeastn Wisconsin on the packers.
What do you have in Milwaukee. This idea of turning
this into a destination is if this proposal would writ

(01:10:28):
the second proposal to take out the parking in the
actual main lot itself would take out four thousand parking places.
The studies are being conducted by brails Fred and Dunlaby.
By the way, I guarantee you the studies will say
it's a good idea. Here's the thing on studies. I've
explained this many times. When you're hired to do a study,
you always come back with the conclusion that the people

(01:10:49):
that are paying you want to hear, because otherwise you're
not going to be hired to do studies. So they're
going to come back and say yes, we ought to
do it, and they're gonna say the lost parking can
be dealt with by will more book an uber, you
can have merimass transit and all of this. The reason
that Bud Ceiling did not want the stadium downtown is
because he knew that the Brewer fan base was almost

(01:11:10):
overwhelming the people who drove to the ballpark, the tailgating component,
all of that. That if you had this ballpark downtown,
nobody would be able to drive to it. There weren't
gonna be any parking there, that they'd have to figure
out a different way to get there, and so on.
In other words, like Wrigley Field, there's almost no parking,
but Riglyfield is in a dense urban area. It's a
different kind of thing. I think that this idea is

(01:11:32):
unbelievably stupid to sacrifice. You know, one of the things
in Milwaukee that works as Brewer attendants from a marketiz size,
the Brewers drew every draw every year, at least two
and a half million in that range. To take away
this much of the parking, or force the parking even
farther away than it is turns going to the game

(01:11:54):
into an enormous hassle the Brewers. In the end, we'll
have the final say on this, and I would certainly
hope that the Brewer's ownership and I get you know,
you can say the five serf form thing again, it's
a different animal. The bus owners are the ones that
developed the entire area and five serf form and they've

(01:12:14):
made a killing off them that they bought that land
for a dollar and it's not a knock on them.
They were that land was available and nobody was touching
it for years and years and years. Herb Cole didn't
build a new stadium on his own. The Box owners
realized that with a new stadium, you would turn this
into a magnet for development, and it has been. And
if the Brewer's ownership sees the dollar signs here on,

(01:12:35):
well how much are we getting off of parking? But
understand one of the reasons they changed the whole parking
system so that you can just drive in and pay
via and app is the biggest complaint they had with
a backups getting into the parking lot. Imagine if you
take away half the parking and everything's zillions of miles away,
what it's going to be like stupid? Right, and then

(01:12:56):
then this one. Every time I bring this up, people
say to me, Vicky McKenna disagrees with you. Why do
people think talk show hosts have to agree on everything? Well,
by the way, do you think she maybe she does care.
I don't care what Vicky McKenna's opinion on anything is,
and I'm pretty sure she'd I don't care what Jay
Webber's opinion anything is. I don't care what Dannel Donald's opinion.

(01:13:17):
I don't even care your opinion is on anything. Well,
I mean that's these his vice president. I mean, I
mean she disagrees with me on this. She's wrong, I'm right.
This is an unbelievable idea of allowing these wedding barns
to operate under rules that nobody else has to operate by.

(01:13:39):
It's back there. I the only good thing about wedding
barns is that a few people make a buck off
of them. But if you're not one of those few people,
what do you give a crap? They're very stupid and
dangerous ideas. The laws in the state of Wisconsin say
that if you are serving or selling liquor on premise,

(01:14:01):
you need to have a liquor license in adition to that,
in order to have a liquor license, you have to
have approval of the community. The neighbors can object to
what's going on and the thing, and you're generally required
to have certain amounts of liability insurance, et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera. The problem with these barns, and this started

(01:14:22):
with a bunch of people who have barns that aren't
being used for farming anymore, thought, well, let's have a
wedding out. You're in charge less money than say the
Elks Hall of the Knights of Columbus Hall or some
banquet hall in a city would charge. And we got
all this parking because we all have all this land
and to be an easy thing to do, which of

(01:14:45):
course cuts into the business of all the private businesses
that have to follow all the rules with regard to
liquor licenses and so on. I just don't see what
anybody's benefit is other than well, I get to pay less.
What the hell do the rest of us care about
that that you're trying to do something on the cheap?
Now Here are the downside? Where are barns generally in
rural areas? Can you think of a worse saying, Now

(01:15:10):
you would know more about weddings than most people. Right,
Paul was in a band that played wedding You don't
still do this, I hope seven hundred and fifty in
your life. Have you noticed that just an obvious thing
between your years of going to bars and your years
of being at the weddings, where are people likely to
get bombed out of their minds the weddings? So now

(01:15:33):
you've got this thing out of the middle of these things,
in the middle of nowhere, and everybody then drives afterwards.
What a prescription for disaster. And then in rural areas
view you don't have the same number of emergency vehicles,
the same number of police to patrol the roads and
so on. In addition to that, you're at gorod distance.
What another thing that happens at weddings? E Well, I

(01:15:55):
actually think I know what it is. Partly it's drunk
and partly you have two families that are being forced
together in laws at all of this stuff. There's a
staggering number of fights at a current weddings. I'm sure
you've seen a number of these, and Paul, they going
the Okay, now imagine this goes on in the town
of Bumpusville or whatever it is. And what Constable Fred

(01:16:15):
is going to be the guy that comes and responds
to the all out riot of one hundred and fifty people,
Or how about the likelihood of guns being brought to
these things? My guess is that if something ran a muck,
the wedding barn operator is going to be very underinsured

(01:16:38):
and there's going to be nobody to be able to
collect any kind of damages from next one. You think
at some of these wedding barns, maybe a lot of thirteen,
fourteen and fifteen year old kids are going to be drinking.
I think they are. A bar has the fear of
losing their liquor license hanging over their head. They're there

(01:16:58):
fear of having their insurance canceled out from underneath them.
They also have to comply with a fair number of
rules and regulations. When I say bar hotels, the private
wedding venues, the VFW halls, and all the others that
are in it, there's certain rules that they have to apply.
And what these wedding barnes want to do is not
follow any of these rules, not have to have a
liquor license, not have to have it anything, and make

(01:17:18):
money off of this. And again I understand why they
want to do it I just don't know why we
should do it for them. They want to leech off
the rest of us and compete against legitimate businesses that
have all of these other costs to zero benefit to anyone. Now,
some of them give money to politicians, and other people
claim that it's entrepreneurial. Well, there's nothing wrong without fornialism entrepreneurialism,

(01:17:40):
but the new entrepreneurs shouldn't be able to break the
rules that everybody else has to follow, especially if the
rules are, on their face, idiotically dangerous. So we passed
this liquor license reform in Wisconsin last year, and it
gave the wedding barnes some ability to compete and operate,
but under significant restrictions. And now they're back again. Andre Jacques,

(01:18:03):
who couldn't get himself elected to Congresses, now he's still
in the state center proposing dumb ideas, got a couple
of Democrats in here, a couple of Republicans, and they
say that this is a compromise bill and that it
will put a limit on the number of dates they popen,
except the number of dates is in the thirties. Under

(01:18:25):
the provision, wedding barnes and other private event venues planning
to serve alcohol will have two options. Obtain a liquor
license and operate like other license establishment. So again, you're
not going to see them do that because they don't
want to get the liquor license and they don't want
to operate like the other establishments. The whole point of
operating here is that they want to beat the system.

(01:18:46):
Or here's what they're looking for. Obtain a no sale
event permit, which would allow renters to bring in their
own burea and wine, but not liquor. Okay, first of all,
they will bring in liquor even if they're not allowed to. Secondly,
those things are even more dangerous because when you bring
your own, you're spending a lot less than when you're buying.

(01:19:07):
And if there's anything I've known after years of observing
people consume liquor, one of the things that holds back
people from overserving themselves is how damn much it costs.
And again, if you're in a bar, and I'm not
saying that bars don't overserve, and the bars don't let
people get drunk and that they can't be fights us.
But there's at least some level of check on this
because the bar has a vested interest in not losing

(01:19:28):
their license. What does the wedding barn operator have on this? Now,
there are a couple of restaurants I go to in Florida.
You're the little tiny places. They don't have a liquor license.
She can bring your own I just I don't. I mean,
I'd have to have a date that was a drunk
and she has to have something to drink it order.

(01:19:50):
But you'll see people like bring in and I don't
even mean that, they'll bring in their one bottle of
wine and have two glasses and cork the thing back
up and then get in an uber and leave. And
it's usually the places that have like six or seven seats.
You know what I'm saying, the notion of bringing your
own bottles to some raucous thing with And by the way,
when they bring up wedding, do you think this is

(01:20:11):
stopping at wedding? Then it's going to be prom parties
and then it's going to be a bunch of gang
bangers from the inner city that I look at it
having some wild ass thing that they could never get
away with it. Oh yeah, it just goes on motorcyclics.
That's so on. And again, what public good comes out
of this other than somebody wants to do something for
cheap and somebody who's got a barn here wants to

(01:20:32):
make a cheap buck off of it. Again, it's hard.
You know, restaurants are going out under right and left
in Wisconsin for a zillion reasons. Food costs are up,
the economy's tough. The bar business has simply changed, I
think because of all the pot that's out there. It's
just amazing me. I'll drive around down to Milwaukee. I

(01:20:54):
don't mean in a Monday night where they're all closed.
A Thursday night dead, except you know, maybe on the
third ward and maybe still with someone on Water Street,
but a lot of Water Street, even the people going
into the bars and the hangers on that are outside.
It's a tough enough racket that's out there. So you
want to take businesses that have been in business in
Wisconsin for decades and give an advantage to these newbies

(01:21:17):
who want to come in, and I think act utterly irresponsible.
Vicky disagrees with you again, I'm not here to debate
her bus for one thing, She's not here. Paul talks
about the backyard weddings that you the difference though in

(01:21:39):
the backyard wedding is by size. There's only so many
people who can be at it. These barns that can
become three and four hundred, and that's when you run
of the out of control type of thing. A lot
of the backyard weddings, they're smart enough. There's three limos involved,
and somebody's gonna drive them all back and back in
all of that and so on, and nobody's ever really
enforced those things. And you know, the the sheer number

(01:22:01):
of this is what I think just makes it a
bad idea. But it's going to keep coming back because
people are looking to make a racket off. And then
you know, eventually you're going to have a few of
these things and twenty seven kids are going to be
killed when they're joy riding. Leave it a thing after that,
and people are going to wonder, how in the world
did we let that happen. Paul said, Well, if they

(01:22:22):
own the property, they have to pay property taxes. But
a lot of these properties are assessed at rural rather
than commercial in terms of paying the taxes. You talk
about the ultimate under the table type of business where Okay,
I'm renting your thing and I'm paying you in cash.
It's the whole Well, I mean, they can certainly incorporate

(01:22:45):
as a small business and do all of that. I'm
just suggesting that if you're involved in the alcohol business,
you should follow the same kind of rules that everybody
else who's in the business of entertaining people and putting
on a mass event and serving alcohol. This is the
Bark Belling podcast. This is the Mark Belling podcast. I'm
holding in my hands the box office report from the

(01:23:08):
weekend from Variety dot Com. Not surprisingly. See, let's like,
unless you know nothing about movies, and I'm at the
level of next to nothing, you know at least something, right,
what was the big movie that opened over the week
and no, no, no, no, no, no, nationally no, the big, big, big,

(01:23:32):
big this movie that you know, the big huge movie
over the week? At the Avatar movie opened Avatar ninety
six or whatever what it is. So you didn't it's
Avatar three. You didn't know that this was the you know,
I'm just saying, Okay, Paul knows I said, I knew
next to nothing, but I knew this that the Avatar
movie was opening on Christmas. It was obviously a number

(01:23:53):
one at the box office. In threw eighty eight million,
which is more than every other new film released this week.
In no more than every other film this weekend drew.
If you took every other movie, it didn't equal what
Avatar grew in. If you're wondering where the movie featuring
the real life story of Milwaukee couple songs Sung Blue finished,

(01:24:15):
it finished sixth at seven point six million. I think,
based on what i've that seven point six million half
camp from around here. I think every showing at every
screening in southeastern Wisconsin was sold out. The number of
people who told me that I called it. I checked
every hour and they were all sold out. They were
all sold out there. Well, it's like when an iPhone

(01:24:37):
comes out, you don't have to go with the first
and I get the Christmas Day is a big movie
going day and all of that, and I never want
to be the first to do anything. It's always I
always use the Las Vegas buffet thing. First of all,
you're in Las Vegas. You don't have a body clock,
right I'll eat the dinner at four pm or nine

(01:24:58):
I'm gonna go with There isn't a lot and where
I just I don't want to go to anything when
it's going to be too crowded. There's the line unless
the crowd is simply a part of the deal, or
it just anyway. The song sung Blue Dead seven, which
was pretty good, but that's not my point in bringing
this up. The second big movie. I've heard that this
one's is pretty good, This Marty Supreme movie. No, I'm

(01:25:20):
not going to see Avatar. I'm going to Florida Friday.
On Friday, I'm finally escaping this weather. One of the
things that I've that I've figured out that a dumbbell
like me should do on a weekday afternoon is go
to a movie. There's a massive mall a couple miles
from where I live, and it's got one of those
multiplex Paul, I think there's thirty screens in there. Actually
I think I'm low So, you know, two thirty in

(01:25:43):
the afternoon. Old fart like me, nothing else to do
when I go to a movie. So I've done that.
I want to see this Marty Supreme. I'm not going
to tell you the story because it's about the songs.
I'm blue thing. Anyway, Variety covers the movie industry, so
they give you way more detail than the other stories.
And in the description of Song Sung Blue, a couple

(01:26:04):
of things in here that just jumped out at me,
and no, I want to find that it has to
do with who it was specifically that went. I want
to get the exact code here because I want to
get the number right. A lot of it goes on
Marty Supreme and wants a hit at the Avatar thing here.
Song Sung Blue seven point six million over the weekend

(01:26:24):
and twelve million to the four day holiday frame. The
holiday frame, I don't know that means no, No, it's
it's over. It's a four day I would have thought
that maybe they Christmas Day. Was that a Thursday? Maybe? Yeah?
The holiday weekend is Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Yeah, I'm guessing

(01:26:46):
that when they say frame, it's the four days. Any
of the four day holiday frame twelve million, So probably
the frame includes Christmas Day because that's such a big day.
So it did twelve million dollars and the movie only
costs thirty millions, so I already got twelve million. Of
it back and this is before international the twelve million.
That's just in the United States, before the international and
before the big money occurs, which is streaming and so on.

(01:27:07):
So it wasn't bad, but it was not anywhere near
the top of the list for the weekend. Then, continuing,
Craig Grewer directed the thirty million dollar budget movie featuring
Hugh Jack Benn Kate Hudson and the true story of
two down on their luck musicians who form a Neil
Diamond Privit band. Opening weekend. Prods dug the film, which
graded which earned in a grade on Cinema Score. You

(01:27:28):
know what Cinema Score is. It's a company that surveys
people after movies. It's different from Rotten Tomatoes in which
you have to This is a company that proactively goes out.
It got the highest grade of any of the movies
released this weekend, so the audiences that went did like it,
but the best mark among any of the new releases
in terms of ticket buyers, sixty five percent were female.

(01:27:54):
I guess I would not have thought one way or
another about that other than you know, it's the movie
doesn't have Neil Diamond in it, but it's music. I
think Neil Diamond was more popul among women than men. Right,
But here's the next one. Fifty five percent of the
audience were above the age of fifty five. I know
this about people over fifty five, then I'll go to movies.

(01:28:17):
I mean, the movie business has just changed. It's almost
entirely young people who go to movies and old fart's
like me. You wait for the movies to come out
on streaming and they watch it there. So the Song
Sung Blue movie to do as well as it did
given that more than half the people were over the
age of fifty five, Now, obviously the story is going
to relate to people more over the age of fifty

(01:28:37):
five because the couple in the movie there were in
the thirties and the forties as portrayed in the movie,
and that's when Thunder and Lightning the age they were
when they hit and the music of Neil Diamond will
Neil Diamond first hit in the nineteen sixties, so that
would be it, I do think. And also, there aren't
really any young people's storylines in they're the only young
people are the kids of Lightning and the Thunder in

(01:29:02):
the movie. But Paul says Zoomers, they never heard of
Neil Diamond except you know what I know is when
they go to the ball. First of all, everybody knows
Sweet Caroline because whenever they play it, everybody sings along,
and it's always like people I don't sing along, it's
like somebody who's eighteen. A couple of other Neil Diamond
songs do tend to be like on soundtracks that you'll

(01:29:22):
see like at a sporting event and so on, and
you know, all these not so much millennials, but the zoomers,
who never really had any popular music of their own generation,
they don't care about hip hop that much, or at
least some of them don't. They've gravitated toward not so
much the old style rock and roll as old style pop,

(01:29:44):
sixties and seventies stuff. So they do know Neil Diamond's music.
But whether or not, when they see the brief little
summary Neil Diamond Tribute Act, it just sounds like something
that Paul and I would want to see rather than kids.
But fifty five percent according to that we're over the
age of fifty five. My guess is that the movie
will hang on for a while on word of mouth,

(01:30:04):
because the word of mouth is good, but the real
hit is going to be the same way I see
virtually every movie is when it gets to streaming and
people watch it then because that's where the target audience is.
And with that, we're out of time for today's podcast,
last podcast of the year, Paul Swansaw it's still tempting

(01:30:27):
to fire you. Will be Wednesday, and that's and will
of course be doing since the last end of the year,
last podcast of the season. We'll be doing the football
contest in preview on the Wednesday podcast as well. Talk
to you then by The.

Speaker 1 (01:30:43):
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