The Mincing Rascals 7.29.26: Dr. Fauci testimony, 2028 presidential race, school cellphone ban, city-owned grocery stores

The best seat in the theater? That's the one easiest to get out of. Time to call Joint Relief Institute. Fast, FDA approved and covered by Medicare. 708-888-000-00. Today is Wednesday. It's July 29th, 2026, and it's now 240 in the afternoon. Hi, this is John Williams. We are The Mincing Rascals, the podcast for people who care about Chicago. You can listen for me weekdays on WGN radio from 10 to 2 and listen for an edited broadcast of this podcast. Saturday nights at 8 o'clock on WGN. Share us with your friends. We are joined on the Mincing Rascals podcast panel today by Brandon Pope, the multimedia journalist and author of Brandon Pope's Screening Room. That's on Substack. join us in just like literally two minutes. Austin Berg is here, the executive director of the Chicago Policy Center. He authors the last ward on Substack and Chicago journalist Kate Ply's publisher of Rosalind Chicago, 1972 on Substack is here. Everybody, welcome. Brandon, welcome shortly. Kate, somebody sent me a book about Rosalind Chicago and it's not your book, but it's somebody who wrote kind of their own personal memoir about growing up in the 1970s. Phil Seberg, he's a regular contributor to Eric's comment section on the Picking Sentinel. He just sent it to me, so I haven't had a chance to open it up, but it really looks like it's going to be fascinating to read all his family stories from... really early, early Roseland, like turn of the century. You've got a copy. I was going to send you mine, but good. I'm glad you do. A lot of Chicago topics to take care of today. Austin, what you put on Substack, I think, will be something we'll certainly get into here in a few minutes. But just because it's maybe irresistible, I wanted to talk a little bit about the president's performance at the White House Correspondence Dinner. To make sure I used it correctly this week, I googled the expression, hang them by their own pittard. It's not a phrase I often utter. And sure enough, the proper use that came to us from Shakespeare is hoisted them from their own pittard. And that's from Hamlet. And the phrase means... A bomb maker was blown off the ground or hoisted by his own bomb, a ptard. It commonly refers to an ironic reversal in which one is taken down by one's own scheme. And the reason I sought out the phrase was I wanted to describe the president's performance at the dinner. His rambling, unfunny, evidently unrehearsed mean-spirited speech wasn't necessarily surprising but trump is the one who's always accusing everybody else of being unfair to him and yet here he had no one else to blame this was his speech and it laid bare what a lazy and humorless person he can be even as he was lobbying insults at others the injury was borne by him

One internet quipped this week was Iran isn't the only thing he bombed. I saw clips. One joke I saw was very well written, and it was basically a joke that was seemingly about a dictator, but it was revealed he was talking about Bari Weiss at CBS. And I thought that was good, but he didn't read the joke properly. He's not a good teleprompter reader, so he's tough in an environment like that. He's not going to perform well. But I do think this sort of dinner, we've maybe talked about before, it seems like in an age of... extraordinary distrust in most institutions and including media. It's just a bad look for lots of reporters to be in a ballroom with the president paling around, regardless of his performance. You thought that was a pretty well-conceived joke? I thought the writing of the joke was good, but the way it couldn't deliver the joke. But he also remarked that she's gay, which I thought was a pejorative in his mind. I think the reason that that was in the joke was because there was a, there's been talk in Iran that he was, he was trying to compare her to the, the, uh, the, uh, leader of Iran. And then that, that has always been sort of, you know, in the milieu, as an insult that is especially, uh, uh, pejorative in that country. But. Hopefully he wasn't making fun of her for being gay. That's not how I read it. It wasn't the only time he lobbed a gay reference out there and thought that that would be funny in his mind calling someone gay as either an insult or really, really funny. That's how I read it. I thought the joke you were going to reference that was well written was a senator told him that when he came home, his wife said, I want you to carry me upstairs and make love to me. And he said, well, I can't do both. And by that time in the night, the room was so dead to him. Nobody was laughing anymore. It was just crickets that he then paused and tried to explain the joke. He went back in a couple of times, said, you see, when you have to explain either the context of a joke or a joke, it's not a joke anymore. Brandon has just clicked in. Brandon, we were just talking about the president's White House Correspondence Dinner. You've been to a few of those sorts of things. Have you ever been to the White House Correspondence Dinner? I've never been to the correspondence dinner. It's on my list. I'm not sure I'd want to be in that room, though. You mean when Trump is talking? I'm not much of a traditionalist when it comes to... journalism and First Amendment as people know, but when it comes to stuff like this, it feels icky. You know, this is not a normal president or normal presidency. His dealings with the press are not normal. And

Aside from the fact that it wasn't funny, it was an area for him to just parrot lies again, do a Trump rally, and not be pushed back at all. And it just was really weird to be in a room full of journalists celebrating the First Amendment in journalism with just... falsehoods and mistruths spewed across and nastiness. It just, it was a dark chapter. I understand the tradition of the White House correspondence dinner. I believe in it. I just don't know if it really fit for this. They may have to reexamine how they do it and what parameters they use in the future. I think it's a horrible, shameful thing that they do it at all, that they have not figured out over the years that it makes them look bad to anybody who thinks that they should, you know, be trying to be objective reporters getting at the truth and not palling around with their sources. I'm especially surprised that they didn't take this as the kind of excuse that everyone may be needed to just... break it off and just make a clean break. Have a dinner by yourselves and congratulate yourselves. There's just absolutely no need to be palling around with the administration. and giving yourself an excuse to be inviting celebrities to come appear with you at the dinner. It's not a good look for the nation's media. Not a good look at all. I think that's how Eric has spoken about this in the past, too. I think he feels the same way. And it's interesting because even if it was Barack Obama and everybody's chummy with him, that's too chummy. In this case, it's Donald Trump who is anything but, but then there's no pushback. So there they are hosting the person who lies about them and now lies in front of them. So that's a bad look, too. Kate, in your estimation, you can't win either way, huh? No, you really can't. That's right. Doesn't that exactly fit the saying that there's no point in wrestling with getting down in the mud and wrestling with the pig? The pig just enjoys it and you both get money. What if the president, what if they just didn't allow the president to speak? Does that fix the problem? Sort of more of a roast, but usually the person who's the butt of the roast does get to speak. But if you just had the president sit there and had people make jokes about the president the whole time, maybe that works. I think it's clear to everyone that they use it as an excuse to invite all these administration people and invite celebrities and ingratiate themselves with people and pat themselves on the back. So there's just, in no way does it make them look good, just not on any level. But you know, the way Dick Durbin said that he and Lizzie Graham were friends, even though. they were so opposed on so many things. The collegiality, I thought, served a purpose, even if it was just for demonstration purposes. It was like, wow, you know, the president can take a joke and give a joke. The press can take a joke and give a joke. But we can see that they're all sort of in the same room. You know, they're all working together in a way if from disparate angles. I mean, that was the...

That's the gist of the thing, right? I just wondered if you guys also had a chance to see of any of Anthony Fauci's testimony before Rand Paul's Senate Committee today. They were looking into what he knew and when he knew it about COVID-19. He took the fifth over a hundred times. Brandon, did you get a chance to watch any of Anthony Fauci not testify before Congress today? No, I didn't get a chance to check it out. I can do it for you right now. Please do. You say the fifth. What did you mean about the da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. I plead the fifth. They did a few hours of that on TV. Okay, but you have to do that 111 times. You know what you do 111 times, though, is you get to now make your speech. So there's Ron Johnson with great big charts saying people were dying and he didn't care and Anthony Fauci just over and over, to the point where Josh Hawley said, What color is my tie? And he takes the fifth. My reaction to this has been one bad move to have your diary on a government computer. That just felt from a personal level, I was like, oh, my diary was just published for everybody. 1100 pages. Yeah. And I mean, there was a New York Times opinion columnist who just totally ripped him apart today. for talking about all of the media attention and sort of the glitz and the glamour of his new public profile. And I get that. But I also think if you're writing your innermost thoughts in the diary and you're in a completely unprecedented part of American history and crazy things are happening to you every day. I would write those things down too, just because he wrote down that he saw these triple A list people at a party. It's like, well, yeah, you're probably, how many of us have amnesia about COVID already? And we were not in the middle of the global response to it. So I understand writing some of those things down. I think the legitimate criticism was around something like he had uncertainty about whether this was a lab leak. But his personally was open to that possibility. publicly was very dismissive of it and branded it sort of as a conspiracy theory and started sort of the American medical establishment at that time. And I think people are rightfully angry about that. But was that not also what he thought was in service to the nation's health care? He had to try and guess and guide us as best he could. I think that gets to a broader question of how you build trust in institutions. And I think similar to the point I was making earlier about how the White House correspondence dinner kind of feeds into people's worst instincts about the press being cozied up to power in some way. Similarly, if you have someone who's responsible for telling people who needs to be one of the most trusted officials in the country, if that person was not fully forthright and honest about whether they still had uncertainty about whether this could have come from a lab, and instead, for purpose of some greater good, whatever it was,

told people, no, that's a complete farce, that that erodes trust. And that hurts everybody in the long term, even though it maybe, it probably did make his job easier in the short term. I never cared, Kate, that much about... the origin of it. I mean, I know somebody needs to care, but to me, the issue was, should I wear a mask? Should I social distance? Should I be putting disinfectant on my hands all the time? You know, the nuts and bolts, things about how we were going to live. Should restaurants and schools be closed? And we made mistakes in Illinois about that. We were too conservative. We know that now. We didn't know it then. I felt at the city, state and federal level... took their best shot, and to say you're wishy-washy about it, doesn't do anybody a service. You've got to give people some guidance. That was their job. And I don't think that Anthony Fauci was ever corrupt in that, even if he wasn't always accurate in that. He has publicly admitted that he knew masking doesn't make any difference except at the extreme margins, and yet... He eventually absolutely backed everyone's got to wear a mask, mask mandates, which of course he did after first telling everyone not to wear a mask. And his reason for that, which he admitted, was that he didn't want the mask to all get taken away from hospital supplies. Yeah. You know, that's just one example of how these kind of white lies come back and bite you. We know where. And unfortunately, a lot of that went on. I agree with you. At this point, that's relatively minor whether or not people should have been asked whether or not to wear a mask. But what's the origin of the original COVID-19 virus? can never stop being extremely important because If it did escape from the lab in Wuhan, then it is a ironclad example of why no one, including China, including us, should be doing what they call gain of function research, where the scientists actually try to manufacture a virus that's more dangerous in order to then study how it will act. That's what they were doing in Wuhan with the COVID viruses. If in fact it did escape from that lab, that is incredibly important information. And so it is absolutely valid to still be looking at that question. And why did Dr. Anthony Fauci so vehemently deny in public that that was a possibility? These diaries...

It's really unfortunate the way they were released. Senator Paul did himself no favors in the way he did that, releasing them through Twitter combined with just very juvenile insults. I don't know if anybody looked at his Twitter feed, but he was doing things like posting. AI pictures of Dr. Anthony Fauci made to kind of look like a teenage girl laying on her bed in a very like stereotypical teenage girl bedroom writing in his diary. If you go to download the PDF of these diary entries, they're made to look like that. They actually have, you know, like cursive writing. I noticed that. I noticed that. For the headings in pink. Was that the font that Anthony Fauci used? Or was that... But was that the font that Anthony Fauci used or was that Rand Paul corrupting it? No, that's Rand Paul. I think we can... I think even though Dr. Anthony Fauci was foolish enough to be doing this on a government computer. That was the only version I saw. So I... I'm sure that he wasn't selecting the cursive... type and putting it in pink ink. Okay, so then let's go to the non-testimony where he took the fifth over and over again. Wouldn't answer any questions. And I think he felt that it was a foregone conclusion what they were going to surmise from this, and he wasn't going to give any oxygen to it, particularly since prior to this, Paul said he should be behind bars. Anthony Fauci didn't want to give them any reason to further investigate or incriminate him. He was given... immunity by Joe Biden, but not for state crimes or not for future crimes. So in a way, he's still vulnerable. And there before the hearing is Rand Paul saying that he should go to jail. So maybe I don't blame Anthony Fauci. It's a bad look. But maybe that was the smart play. I don't think any of us would want to be in that hot seat with someone who obviously hates you, who has said they want to see you in jail. And maybe the slightest little thing that you say could be taken to be perjury later on, which your pardon does not cover. On the other hand, you know, during the January 6th hearings, were we not all outraged when Steve Bannon? And I forget who else. There was another guy who wouldn't answer their questions. Steve Bannon and the other guy both Dick had sent to jail over that. Yeah, Steve Bannon went to jail. But there were a lot of other people who also didn't testify for that commission. And so that commission wasn't really able to do anything. So it's, he's just become a convenient boogeyman for the right, for the Republicans. I mean, I don't see the purpose in jailing him or threatening him with jail. I think they set it up in a way that. He therefore isn't going to testify. So you guys blew the thing up even before it started. Let's just talk for a couple of minutes about the mayoral race that isn't shaping up. And in my head, I sort of conflate that with Rahm Emanuel, who's not running for mayor, but he was the mayor. He was the chief of staff for Barack Obama. And Rahm is running for president, not officially, but you don't bicycle through Iowa and New Hampshire if you're not running for president. And Austin, I think on Polly Market, you are the official polymarket corporation.

correspondent for I get paid for this. Dimencing Rascals. Are we starting with Rahm then? He's at 1%. And he said to Politico this week, you do not want to be the frontrunner. It's better to kind of be in the back of the pack and work your way up. That's what you say when you have 1%. I think he'd be happy with 19%. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has is double digits. Pete Buttigieg is double digits. Gavin Newsom is double digits. Assoff is double digits as well. Austin, what do you make of his chaotic pursuit of the presidency here? There's a line, he maybe even mentioned this in the interview that Adlai Stevenson apparently said when he was running for president. And he had just made a speech, and someone came up to him after the speech and said, every thinking person in America will be voting for you. And Stevenson said, I'm afraid that won't do. I need a majority. That's sort of what the lien that Rom finds himself in now. And I will give him an incredible amount of credit for just generating. a lot of thoughtful ideas that will improve the quality of the policy debate of the Democratic primary. And he's the only person, it seems like, in the country talking about education. I don't hear hardly any public officials talking about. a really, you know, comprehensive plan to improve reading in math, who's in the position of authority currently. I also thought his, I would highly recommend folks watch the speech that he gave at Tel Aviv University. He's not a sitting public official, but I think we are starved for the type of I won't say that, you know, that was a flawless speech, but at least the intellectual rigor and effort and knowledge that went into it was very impressive and something that we just do not see. And you think about that issue in the wake of the war in Gaza. And we haven't seen a speech like that from hardly anybody in power going through in detail the way that he did and where he did it, invoking his own personal history. I thought was very compelling. Matt Iglesias, I think, gave a great interview on Pod Save America about this where he said, you know, Rahm Emanuel is definitely the type of moderate candidate that folks on the center left would absolutely want to see run, but he would prefer him to sort of be a mentor for the next up-and-coming person to do that rather than running himself because you see every single video that gets posted of him, every comment is about Laquois McDonald's. Still, really? I mean, nationally, people know about or will be made aware of that? I think absolutely that will be relitigated. And it was relitigated in the run-up to him being appointed ambassador to Japan. The inspector general, former inspector general Joe Ferguson, sent a letter that really said, you know, the accusations of a cover-up from the Emanuel administration were not based in fact.

But I don't think it's something that, you know, the public at large is over. They all have some deep, dark, not secret, but an event in their past by the time they get to be. That's what I'm thinking. Not good, but is that? So, yeah. I mean, like we here in Chicago, obviously all feel very strongly still about that, about a lot of people here, of course, will never forgive him for closing 50 schools. That's going to come up all the time because. Education is one of the main things he likes to talk about, as you pointed out, Austin. But people who are not from somebody's local base tend to not be so interested, unless it's right, just an absolutely horrific scandal. So I think it's possible for him to get past that with the rest of the nation's voters. If... he could get to that level of candidacy to begin with. And that we shall see as the political, the political reporter, his whole point to rum over their pizza was, why am I? Like, why am I even here talking to somebody who has universal name recognition and still like 1% in the polls? Yeah, but I agree with you. If Ken Paxton can win a primary in Texas, Rahm Emanuel can get over the alleged cover-up of the Laquan McDonald's story. Why do you have that smile, Brandon? What are you leaning into there? Electorally, the chances of Rahm Emanuel winning... the Democratic primary in this modern version of the Democratic Party is unrealistic. And I think the Lequois McDonald case is a big reason why. Black voters are still the major backbone for winning the Democratic nomination. I don't believe black voters overall have short memories on this. And if they do, they're going to be reminded by. candidates in this race or potential candidates in the 2028 race who are already going to have a big black vote advantage like a Kamala Harris like a governor Wes Moore perhaps like an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez um so i i don't think it's going to be anywhere close to um a realistic chance for Rahm Emanuel to even come close to winning the Democratic nomination because of that. I just think that disqualifies him right away from even having a shot in the modern Democratic Party and the way the Democratic Party is structured. And the way the Democratic Party has also set up these primaries, whether you agree with it or not, but having South Carolina first and Nevada first, he's not going to do well in South Carolina. So I don't see a realistic path for him. Whether, you know, you buy stock in, whether it was a cover-up or not, or his culpability in the Laquois-McDonnell case, the book has sort of been written for him when it comes to black voters. If we come to the conclusion, though, I mean, regardless of what Joe Ferguson said, that he knew and he was sitting on that and that decided not to run because of that, it was not survivable. I mean, we knew the cops lied about it.

It is the question, what did Rom know and when did he know it? Yeah, I mean, look, we're looking way back. So I got to dig back into even my memory a little bit. But Rom's office, the mayor's office, knew well of the video. They had seen the video. There was a public. feeling, whether feeling is fact is to be determined, uh, that there was a cover up there. Um, it had sparked a wave of political activism here in the city of Chicago, um, that has played out in many different ways that many couldn't predict who would have thought a Jamal Green would be what he is based off what the Laquale McDonald case was and, you know, so on and so forth. Ultimately, the idea around policing. and how police treat black people and black bodies. Rom was not viewed in a positive light in the way his office handled that. And he's going to have to come up with answers for that if he wants to be viable in a Democratic primary. He's going to have to demonstrate that he's someone who does believe in more than just the buzzword of police reform. but believes in Black Lives. There's not a lot in Rahm's record to showcase that. That's going to hurt him in a Democratic primary. For the modern Democratic primary, especially with a Kamala Harris, I know people are rolling the rides about Kamala Harris. She's going to be. She's actually the leader right now in the market. The last day I looked. Are you looking at it now, Austin? The polymarket test. She's going to be a tough out. Even higher than Gavin Newsom, is that right? I might be conflating polling of Democratic primary. Well, yeah, yeah, she's ahead in the polls, but not in Calci or Polymarket, oddly enough. It's the complete opposite. She's way ahead in the polls, but then Calcian Polymarket, she's pretty far behind. Yeah. I do think on the, um, an important lesson of that, um, the entire, uh, Laquois McDonald, their, uh, tragedy, there are many, but one was that. What the Inspector General found at the end of the day was that the decisions made about the, with no disclosure or delayed disclosure of those videos, were sort of the policy and practice of the city of Chicago and its law department at that time in general. And those were followed. But the existence of those policies was the problem. And another problem is the fact that the city law department itself is under the auspices entirely of the mayor. The city's corporation council is essentially just reports to the mayor's appointed by and reports to the mayor. Other cities have allowed for the... independent election of their city attorneys, notably Los Angeles, Columbus, I think even Milwaukee, our neighbor to the northern 5,000 elected city attorney. You'll remember that the state's attorney, Anita Alvarez, was ousted in the wake of that, but the head of law department still reports to the mayor. And that appearance of that was a huge problem. Overall, I mean, that time was really about trust in government as well.

Even beyond just the policing issue, you know, these accusations that he faced, you know, this 13-month legal battle suppressed that dash cam footage. It just wasn't a good look optically, right? He's going to have to answer for that as well and have a good answer and explain that. Now, to Rom's credit, though, Rom's a great explainer. He just gave a brilliant speech on Israel. Palestine, Gaza, that the Democratic Party overall could probably learn from, right? He found a way to thread the needle on an issue that it's so volatile. Like, I heard that and I was like, oh, man, he's got some sauce here, right? But he's still going to have to answer these questions because it's dogged him for his whole career. When he was up for nomination for the ambassadorship for Japan in the 2021 nomination, he faced really, harsh grilling from Democrats over this very issue. And who knows? People didn't think that'd be Trump either, right? So we can prognosticate all we want. But at the end of the day, I just, I think it's going to be tough for him. Who would you all guess? Who will the Democratic nominee be for president? I hope it's not Kamala Harris. I saw Pete. Who do we wish or who do we think? I don't even know the answer to that question. I saw Pete Buttigieg on Fox TV Sunday and he just killed. He just killed. He wasn't annoying. It was God bless Fox News for putting him on and having a civil conversation. And he knows the answers to the questions and he doesn't take the bait. Here's what I think is going to be. I can't give a prediction and I won't. But I think that what you're going to see play out is a top four. I think your top four is going to play out like a Kamala Harris, a Gavin Newsom, and a Pete Buttigieg with an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, if she decides to run, being sort of the Bernie of 2016 pushing a Gavin or Kamala Harris to the left. She's, I don't think, that's how I see it playing out. Who wins out of that? Look. I don't know. I still have a tough time believing Gavin Newsom can go to Iowa and talk to farmers in Wisconsin and Michigan and relate to him. We haven't mentioned Andy Beshear and talked about Jon Ossoff that much. But do you agree with Brandon's final four there, Austin? Is there anybody else you'd stick in there? I'd probably put Jon Ossoff up there just because he is an extraordinary communicator. And the way he's been doing these town halls, it's like clockwork. You'll just randomly see, oh, yeah, John Osser just got like thousands of people out and he's just dropping. bangers, just like bar after bar after bar of and then disappears. Great lines. Very disciplined messaging. The problem with somebody like Andy Beshear or any of these folks in swing states is like it's in their interest to not nationalize a lot of things many times because of their own seat. And this is the problem with sort of people running for Congress and competitive swing states too. Everybody complains about like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani taking up all the oxygen on the Democrat Party. Well, it's because they do every single interview because they're in super, super safe democratic seeds. And that is not the case for necessarily Josh Shapiro, even though his favorables are quite high and folks in Georgia, places like this. So they're at a bit of a disadvantage right now, but once the race starts in earnest, they could maybe change that. I'll add here.

Some Democratic insiders I talk to believe that a big wild card in this race will be if Maryland Governor Wes Moore were to enter the race. He has been adamant that he's not. But everybody says that, right? If he were to enter the concern for some Democratic operatism and those who are close to Harris is that, that... major advantage she would have in the black vote that would carry her you would presently through a south carolina and other states um could be cracked a little bit with a Wes Moore entering the race. And then what does that do if Wes Moore's in there? Does Wes Moore have a meteoric rise a la 2008 Barack Obama? Is he a spoiler for a Harris campaign allowing for a Gavin Newsom or a John Awesome for someone else to crack up there and take over number one? He could be a wild card if he decides to run. But man, so many options. We even talked about J.B. Pritzker. There's a poll that's out that says he's polling at 1%. It's J.B. Pritzker, a guy that can come up and dominate. Jay B, I think, has a bigger national profile than Rom. You know, it was a long time ago that he was chief staff. So J.B. makes the rounds. He does really well. I think J.B. is a terrific... Whoever writes his speeches, those are good speeches. And he delivers them well. He's trimmer. We used to talk about that. Maybe it's too early to... interpret 1%. Kate, of Brandon's 4%, are you on page with that? I don't think Kamala Harris's frontrunner status in polls is going to last very long. She has not been a good campaigner, even in her California runs. They were fairly close. She, as we all know, didn't even make it to the Iowa caucuses. She is not a good candidate. So I think once she has to really campaign, it's not going to go well. Because I do not see how she explains away her claims that Biden was just fine. People are very angry about that. So I don't put her among the top four. Does JD Vance have that same problem if he runs for president? Oh, God. I mean, you haven't seen J.D. J.D. is the Republicans. The Republican base is so completely different. Anyway, I don't put Harris in the top four. So I'm going to throw her out. I think Gavin Newsom does hang around. He Pete Buttigieg is so good at campaigning, right? He's going to be up there. Who's going to round it out? I think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will immediately get backed by Bernie and she will immediately have huge fundraising dollars. And between that and her charisma, she's going to hang in there a long time. So I'm going to put her. Definitely in the top four and so forth. And last four, it's got to be Ozoff because he is clearly so serious about this. I cannot get my head around Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a president or presidential candidate. That's, I mean, I follow the news. I know some people do. That is not in my comfort zone.

And that's, I'm sure, unfair to her. You are what you are. And I, and it's not because she's a woman. I just can't take her seriously as the president of the United States. I'd be happy to. Well, how did you feel about Bernie? I don't think Bernie would have been great for the United States either. So maybe it's that wing of the party. I want to leave this topic, though, and go to J.B. Pritzker for just a second, only in that he just signed a cell phone bill from bell to bell in Illinois schools. The students will not be allowed to have their phones. In high school, they'll be able to have them in the passing periods and at lunch, which I think is generous. I don't even think that has to be the case. But I think we're all on board with this. A lot of schools already had something like that. But now it'll be mandated. Even charter schools will have to ban cell phones pretty much all day long for kids while they're in school. I'm 100% on board. 150% on board. Except what you said. I'm kind of sorry that they're giving high schools a choice. of letting the kids have the phones for lunch and between periods because lunchtime is the key socialization time period when if those kids did not have their phones and so that they all had to socialize it would make such a bigger difference so i think that's unfortunate but otherwise i'm i'm 100 percent 50 percent behind it for sure i said that on the radio today and one of my colleagues said okay boomer and i said well Okay, Gen X or too. I don't care. I think most people, younger people I know, millennials I know. It doesn't change. It doesn't change. It doesn't change. Impacted their lives in negative ways. Well, there's two ways I look at it. I look at it from the angle of educator, as someone who's had to educate high schoolers and college students. And then I look at it from the angle of parents. As an educator, love it. Because there's nothing worse than trying to teach a lesson, and no one's looking at you. They are all looking at their phones, and they're playing video games, and scrolling TikTok. Really? And when they friend, I hate it. And it happens so often, right? I think in classrooms, cell phones should be not allowed. I think that makes a lot of sense. As a parent... I'm not a parent currently, but as someone who has young ones, a niece and nephew, I would like them to still be able to have access to their phones at a lunchtime at different breaks, even if you have cell phone breaks, especially when you consider just. safety issues. I mean, kids have a direct line to their parents, to their loved ones. If something happens, you know, you want to check in with them, right? I think it's got to be a middle ground here. I think for classrooms, absolutely no-brainer. I'm glad we have a statewide rule at all. Like, we were one of very few states that had no statewide policy whatsoever on cell phone use in schools, which seems just really crazy, given how pervasive they are.

how much money the state spends on education. You think that the state would want to enforce some kind of policy in this regard. I think of all the available options, I would support this. I'm glad the governor made it a priority. Interestingly, to Brandon's point about educators, the Chicago Teachers Union opposed this ban. And for among several reasons that they stated, but one was that, oh, this is a distraction from what they would call systemic underfunding of schools. And they're sort of just doing this as a, and they're not addressing the elephant, real elephant in the room. I thought that was a very weak reason. We should be able to do lots of things that are not funding related in schools to improve educational. I miss that. The CTO, the Chicago Teachers Union, did not endorse this, is man. So some of the other reasons were, as I recall, sort of what was brought up earlier, maybe like vulnerable students would need these phones. But they carved out exceptions in the law. There was carve-outs. Yeah, this distraction. They're not as medical school funding. An argument that I think is fair is you don't want to have this essentially be an unfunded mandate for schools or really an unfunded work obligation for teachers to police all of the time because that is really hard. And that if you're a classroom teacher and you're constantly having to tell people to put away their phones, that is, if this isn't rolled out properly, I could see why that would be a concern. But most people are for this. So I thought it was very interesting that the CTO. Well, wouldn't you if you were a teacher like to be able to say, it's the law? Like, you might not like it. I don't care. It's the law. Now, I'm sure an eighth grader is going to say, oh, okay, thank you. I'll do whatever the law says. Far be it for me to break the law. But, but. I think that's the support the teachers, the principals need. The CTU's press release on this made just no sense whatsoever. It admitted that most of its members agree that not being classrooms and that they already have to manage them, but then made their whole focus unfunded mandates. in a negative way instead of saying we wholeheartedly agree let's get phones out of the classroom and by the way could you just give us a little money towards helping us make that happen. Instead, they made it a complete, a reason to be against it. In fact, it would help their members in what they already need to do, manage the phones. Now their members won't have to manage the phones because the phones will be taken away from the kids first thing in the morning instead of being in their backpacks. I don't know what the pouches cost, but I mean. For help themselves for individual teachers. Yeah, the kids have to. put them somewhere. I think the schools will decide how to manage it, either they're going to have pouches or whatever. And that is a whole other point. They're not being told how to do it. They can take the expensive way of getting these magnetic pouches that cost like 20, 25 bucks, or they can do something completely free, have a couple of school lockers dedicated to locking up the phones. It doesn't have to be something that's high tech that costs a lot of money.

So I really was trying my best to think of why they were really against it and could not come up with a reason at all. It was just bizarre. I mean, there were only 11 states at this time and now 10 that had no restrictions on cell phones. And it was just bizarre that we were one of them. My old man yells at cloud comes out when it comes to cell phone usage. Because I've experienced the problem. I've seen it. It's annoying. I just left a high school journalism workshop in South Shore. These kids can't get off of them. I'm sick of it. I want to be clear about that because I talk to teachers all the time. And I have the phone on my hand all the time. But like as an educator, if you're standing there talking, they have the phone out and they're playing a video game or doing something while you're talking to them. Is that right? It's happened to me. Yeah, it's happened to me. And then I'll be like, hey, what did I just say? I mean, like, oh, I don't know. It's like, all right. Well, put the phone away, and then you can pay attention. And now this whole thing about teaching is now, you're not even teaching now. Now you're in this stupid fight about a phone. Exactly. And then when you break them, and then when you break them and they say, okay, all right, fine, now they hate you, which is not a great environment to have. I don't know about breaking them. But, you know, can I just say on the safety issue, I actually think that. that having this rule will be a boon to parents too to wean them away from that kind of safetyism. You know what? It's not necessarily so great if all the little kids in a classroom have phones during a school shooting. Because what are they doing? They're all on their phones, texting their parents, live streaming, emailing. They should be... eyes on the teacher, listening to the teacher. It doesn't make the kids safer if they're on their phones. Exactly. They're wasting precious seconds when they should be hearing directions for how they are going to survive. Yeah. In the latest issue of the last ward, Austin Berg's substack, he wrote about how Chicago stops voters from deciding on things that matter. And he provided the current non-binding referenda that we get to vote on in November and February. That wasn't you making that up. Those were the current ballot initiatives, right? And then you compared those ballot questions for voters here to the things that people in New York City are asked. What was the point you were making and what were the points that you used to illustrate that with? So last week, Chicago City Council filled the six available slots, three per election for the next two elections. We have three slots for referenda on the city of Chicago ballots. And all of the news stories were about. how Brandon Johnson lost his preferred resolution. City Council passed all these other ones to fill up the ballot. And at the end of the day, both what Brandon Johnson wanted and what city council passed are basically poll questions. They're non-binding referenda taking people's opinions on things. Things like, should we have a festival space? Should we have shot spotter? Should we try to recover money from the federal government for Operation Midway Blitz? Should we?

have a monument to music and the arts. Questions like this where great, we can ask people these questions, but these are the only things that are not politicians that Chicagoans are going to be able to choose for these next two really consequential elections. And meanwhile, you see in New York City, Zohran Mamdani, one of the first things he did as mayor was convene. a commission that he called like a tongue-in-cheek way coge commission on government efficiency rather than doge department of government efficiency and that commission just put five referenda to voters in new york city this november and they will be meaningful changes in governance in the city uh changes related to permitting city contracting construction of bike infrastructure and rainy day fund contributions. And what voters decide will be what happens versus these questions where voters get a say and nothing may happen. So Chicago, this is just one example of the ways in which Chicago discourages democracy generally. I listed five examples structurally of how we do this. One is this, this idea that there has to be three slots at all. Back in 2018, you might remember Pat Quinn, you got a bunch of signatures on a petition issue. for a referendum to get on the city ballot for term limits. We're one of the few big cities that doesn't have term limits on Marin City Council. The council passed three do-nothing resolutions to fill up the slot, so we didn't get to vote on that. We have gerrymandered awards. We've talked about this. City Council draws their own maps that discourages democracy. We have these crazily timed municipal elections in February where very few people vote. Only big city in the country that votes in February. We have no city charter at all, so we could not convene what Zohran Mamdani did, which was a charter reform commission where people could actually change that. Leader, Cam Buckner is attempting to change this in Springfield, which would be great. And then finally, just who, what kind of offices do we get to elect in Chicago? We have one citywide office that really matters. It's the mayor. And then we have two citywide offices that people wonder why. They should be elected at all, the clerk and the treasurer. Meanwhile, we don't have an elected chief financial officer, as many other big cities do. And as I mentioned earlier in this episode, no elected city attorney as many other cities. Would you put a city manager in that, too? Or is a city manager typically appointed? City managers are typically appointed. They're kind of a functionary, right? And we actually have in city code. a position called a city administrator that the mayor is supposed to appoint and the council is supposed to approve. And this is another problem with not having a city charter. It's just ignored. It's in city code and nobody follows it. We're supposed to have a sort of city manager in Chicago and it doesn't exist. Is your problem with this then that the referenda are non-binding or that they're so limited and that they stack it before the consequential stuff gets in there?

Both. I think some of these questions certainly matter. A lot of them, a lot of them, we don't need to ask Chicagoans. If you're a city lawmaker, Are we really under the impression that a vast majority of Chicagoans don't think we should try to get some kind of compensation from the federal government for dealing with Operation Midway Blitz? Like, that's going to be an 80-20 issue in the city of Chicago. And we're taking up this valuable space that could be used for something that actually changes something about city government and doing it, using up for a poll question. And even if we said, yeah, like, okay, say it was 90-10, like the people really want us to go get the money. That doesn't mean the federal government's going to give us money to compensate us for ICE, right? So, duh, but what are we going to do about it? And Brandon Johnson, Mayor Johnson, his preferred resolution was, should we have a millionaire's tax? The problem with that is the state just did a statewide referendum on this that was non-binding a couple of years ago, and Cook County is putting it on the ballot in November 2026. So. What was the point expending political capital ahead of a really contentious budget season and calling city council members who did not vote on this bad names in the press for something that's non-binding and people are going to vote on anyway at other levels? Actually, that's useful for him for campaigning if. He runs. And it would be something to hold over, I guess, any politician who doesn't follow through with the results of a referendum. I mean, they would do so at their own political peril. Maybe, but people really have to be dialed in on this issue. But I wonder about the millionaire's tax. If that was on the ballot, how would that go? And wouldn't it be amazing if it were binding, if the people really did in Chicago get to vote on that? Well, we had a constitutional... amendment on the statewide ballot, which a millionaire's tax would need a constitutional amendment to do in 2020, and it lost. And ever since then, there's been an effort to run it back and try this again. And that's taken the form of these non-binding referendum to ask people, hey, should we do this or not? And obviously, in the non-binding context where there's not really a campaign for or against, it's just on the ballot, it passes overwhelmingly. But when Illinois has had the chance to vote on this very thing, it wasn't specifically for millionaires, but it was for a progressive tax. It didn't get the votes needed to pass as a constitutional. I'll bet you if in Chicago you could vote on whether or not people pay a higher tax after their millionth dollar of income, that would pass. People would approve of that. I don't know, though. Because you look at Bring Chicago Home. And that was increasing the tax on all real estate transacted over a million dollars. And folks said, we don't trust this administration with that money. And they rejected it. Yeah, I don't trust them either. But I still, it just seems to me to be, it's so simple to conceive of, right? If I just stop people on the streets and said, we don't have, we have a whole new batch of food deserts in Chicago now because save a lot goes bankrupt.

There just seems to be such inequity. And we have so many rich people in Chicago and maybe a million dollars or certainly a million dollars in the value of your property is not make you rich. Anyway, if you just said million dollars, the next dollar gets taxed at a higher rate, would you support that? Austin, you're telling me, evidence shows that that's not a slam dunk. Depends on what the campaign is. So the progressive income tax statewide constitutional amendment, that got 71% of the vote in Chicago in 2020. So Chicago and supported the progressive tax, and that didn't even start it a million. That was contemplating starting at like $250,000. Yeah. So yeah. But again, it's in the political context. And I think what you saw with Bring Chicago Home was it became a referendum on the current mayor. And it was the word tax next to the current mayor. And people voted no. And so I think if that was on the ballot today, it wouldn't be a slam dunk. Kate, here's my new ballot question. The million dollar tax dedicated to X. Not necessarily because we know that all that money is still fungible. You can say that I'm going to put this. towards this specific thing. But all it means is it's freeing up all their money in the city budget to possibly go to bureaucratic stupidity and other things that I don't want it to be spent on. So that's still not automatic. Sorry. And I'm kind of missing the broader point here that Austin was making in his substack. Anyway, I picked one example. But just to go back to your thesis here, we should have more options on the ballot and it should be binding. I mean, would that? satisfy you? Is that what you were arguing for, Austin? Timor elections when people vote. Give people a city charter that they can change via vote. That's a constitution. So the legislature can't say, yeah, we have a city administrator in some city code, but we're just ignoring that. Those are, don't have a limit of three. If people want to get a citizen initiative on the ballot, you shouldn't be able to kick it off with bogus stuff. Yeah, I think those are those would be common sense changes. And one last point about all this, Austin. This is a point you've been making for years on this podcast or as long as you've been with us, that we put too much power into the mayor of Chicago, and the city council is deciding things that they shouldn't be deciding, and the things they should be deciding, they're not. They're not a legislative body right now in the city of Chicago. They are people consumed with a deluge of government service requests. That is mostly what their offices are doing. Potholes, garbage, signage, awnings, sidewalk cafes. They're not thinking about citywide governance. How is the building department governed? What's our zoning code? You know, what's, how should policing work? What should the contribution to the rainy day fund be? How should the budget process work? They do not have the resources to be legislators on those things. And that's another thing that. city charters across the country are well equipped to define and allow voters to change and have that change be lasting. And it doesn't matter as much that you have to have this brilliant Superman leader from on high, come down as the mayor and fix everything. You just have a structure that works and can be updated and changed. I reference the Save a Lot stores which have closed. Not to get all communist on you, but...

Why, again, is it a bad idea for the city to help subsidize or run some grocery stores in depressed areas? Because the guy that owned the company died suddenly. He's a young man. He was mid-50s. They had made some previous bad decisions. And they are trying to sell food in a challenged area. So they're closing. I asked my friend Pastor Corey Brooks, who... runs a church and is building an opportunity center on the south side. I said, how do you feel about it? And he said, absolutely not. The government doesn't do things well to begin with, let alone try and run commercial enterprises. He said, if you want to get people in the stores or make stores viable, make the community safe, make it less burdensome. lower the cost of doing business. I don't know how the city is making it expensive to do business. Maybe they are, but he didn't like the idea of city-run grocery stores. In the absence, though, of other stores, I think it's essential. I understand the pastor's point that if Chicago was doing its job well in terms of criminal justice and policing, then... The crime would not, crime rate would not, for instance, be chasing Walgreens out of Chatham. But I don't think that that means that now that those six stores are built out, that we don't go in there and try and find another store in better shape with much better management. But that's completely different than the city running its own grocery store. That... would be a disaster, I am sure. We're going to put half a billion dollars into infrastructure to build a soccer stadium for a billionaire. Even if it's a loss leader, it's more than the quality of living. It's living. People need to have relatively easy access to pretty good food at a price they can afford. But listen to what you just said. We're giving money to them. to help them build their stadium. We're not going to build the stadium. We're not going to run the soccer team. So, yes, help the store, help help a private operator operate some stores in various different ways, support them. Maybe so. In places where it can't be done otherwise. But if, but if, but if, but if, but if, but if, but if, but if, but if, but if, but if, opening and running its own store. If your reason for saying that is because you don't think the city can run a grocery store. The city can run a grocery store. It just might not do so profitably. I mean, you put the can of soup on the shelf and then somebody buys it. You're a grocery store. The question is, can you do it profitably? And maybe you can't, but I'm not so interested in the amount of... money the city makes or loses on that as long as we provide food for people that they can purchase in their neighborhoods. I'm surprised that you think it would be so easy for the city to do that. I think it's easy to run a grocery store. I think it's not easy to run a grocery store profitably. The private market doesn't have the luxury of not worrying about if they're profitable or not. They have to make money.

The city doesn't have that same burden. The city provides services. Not everything the city does is done for the purpose of... generating income. I agreed, but I just also don't think the city has the ability to develop the distributorships and know how to manage the produce. I mean, it's a very difficult business. They sometimes have as little as a 1% margin. Is Zohran Mamdani doing this? Wasn't this one of his proposals in New York City? Are they going to do this? This is this thing. They're doing it. And I think that to that point, I mean, On kind of a larger scale, and this kind of plays into what we talked about with the presidency and people running for the Democratic nomination. In the midst of an affordability crisis, the appetite for voters to hear the word can't is not there, especially in an era where you have a president who just does things, whether you can or can't. And so Zeramam Dani in New York kind of along the same playbook. People are telling him, hey, you can't do that. That's not possible. Can't make buses free. Can't do it X, Y, Z. And he's like, yeah, sure I can. Boom. Now, will it work? That's the big question. In an era where voters are saying, we don't want to hear you can't do something, you know, I wonder, is Chicago going to reach that point as well, especially as we approach our mayor-war election and all romantic elections? It's something to watch for sure. The mood right now nationally is. for at least the Democrat side is we don't want to hear no and we can't do things. We want to hear the can. But as far as Maabani's store is concerned, he is also not going to have New York set up and run its own store. He is going to get a private grocery operator and then have an agreement with them. But the way he's marking down the prices is really. Yes. 30% lower off whatever the normal medium cost is risky. on a certain basket of goods. It's risky. Why do you say risky? I mean, it just raises a bunch of questions about the market and how that plays out. Obviously, the 30% less steak is going to be what I go to over the steak at Kroger. Like, I... Right. This is like the Trump, this is like the Trump gas, man. It's like the Trump's making gas stations and Zohran Mamdani's making grocery stores. And neither are good. We want to have a competitive market where people are trying to serve us at the lowest possible price. And I would be really, really.

hard done by if I was a family grocery store or corner store near some one of these stores and the government's setting up something that's going to put me and my my firm and people I employ out of business and it raises a lot of these questions of fairness and maybe just to take this question on a completely different direction How long is the modern grocery store going to keep running in its current form? Like in 10 years, how many people are going to get their groceries delivered? Do people need to have a huge retail presence, like in their immediate vicinity much anymore? Or is it like everything else? Is it going to be more and more delivery? And should that play a role in how we subsidize, which we absolutely should, getting people to a basic standard in terms of food. Maybe it can be delivered. Brandon and I are walking down the street this weekend, downtown Chicago. Here comes one of those coolers on wheels, one of those little robots, came up to us, made a left turn, made a right turn, went right around us, seemed to be able to manage it. We'll have drones dropping our bananas from sky. DoorDash announced today drones. Drone, drone from 3 p. DoorDax. Oh, God. This is how the robot takeover begins. It's underway. All right, let's do red light, yellow light, green light. I'll go first. My yellow light is regime change, the Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan book. I'm reading it about 100 pages in. It's as good as you might imagine. It's depressing. So that's my yellow light. I mean, it's vital. It's interesting. It's well researched. It's fly on the wall. And if you don't want a deep dive into how bad it is or how... corrupt or complicated it is, don't read the book. I'm reading the book and I can't say how much I'm enjoying it. That's my yellow light. I have not seen the Odyssey movie yet, but I am reading the book first. I read the Eliot, but I'd never read the Odyssey. So that's one of the great things really about when something like this comes out. It spurs you go read some great work of literature you hadn't before. And I want to give it a green light specifically the book. because a lot of people will assume, oh, it's too long and it's too hard. I can't do that. It's not like reading Shakespeare. And that goes for the Iliad as well. The translations are translated into English that is easy to read. And when you sit down with one of them, you're not going to be pulling out a dictionary and trying to figure out what anything means. And while you might not want to wait to see the movie before you finish reading it, it's well worth getting a copy and getting started. I did that after the movie. I went out and bought the book, and I don't want to brag, but I'm on page five now. Way to go. Well, now, almost any addition you get will have a pretty long introduction, you know, giving you the history of Greek epics and all that. Now, that can be a little bit much to get through. But you know what? You can just skip that, especially if you already saw the movie. Did you review the movie on your platform? Yeah, I did. I love The Odyssey. I think it's Nolan's probably second best film. It's just, it's incredible. And I've seen it twice. I wanted to cry the second time. It's that good. But I'm going to give my green light this time, though, to a movie coming out this Friday. It's a superhero movie.

but it's one of the best ones you're going to see. Spider-Man Brand New Day. This to me is a top three Spider-Man film. We've had a lot. Up there with Sam Ramey's Spider-Man, too, which is considered by many to be one of the greatest superhero movies of all time. It's a great story about grief, about isolation, about loneliness, and loss. It's coming of age, and it really gets back to the origins of what makes the Spider-Man and Peter Parker character resonate. You know, it's a great, great film. You're going to have a great time. It's going to make a billion dollars. So definitely check it out. On the town podcast this week, Matt Bellamy said if you had one intellectual property, it would be Spider-Man. That is the safest bank for the next decade. And what's the number one Nolan movie, Brandon? Oh, boy. Oppenheimer? I still got the Dark Night. I still got the Dark Night number one. I got Odyssey surpassing Oppenheimer and then prestige and all those. Interstellar? Interstellar's 5. I went to the music box theater and saw their new third screen for the first time, which green light to that. They got a million dollars from the city to do that, by the way, which is ridiculous. We should not be paying a million dollars to an indie movie theater as much. I love the music box more than anyone. Which is as viable as any independent movie theater in town. They're crushing it. I know. They always do. They're great. And I saw a film there that I loved as a documentary that was released 40 years ago that they were screening there called Sherman's March. And it's a single camera, it's a guy with a 16 millimeter camera on his shoulder doing all his own sound. The plot is basically he gets a, he's living in Boston, he gets a grant to do, he's from the South, gets a grant to do a film about the town, the cities of Sherman's March. And right before he goes down, he gets broken up with. And the whole movie is basically him falling in love with four different women across all of these towns. And it is so funny and it's such a beautiful, depiction of america and in america prior prior to people being constantly used to being filmed also and stylistically you can see it as a predecessor to stuff that's more popular nowadays like how to with john wilson which is a amazing show on hbo uh this was sort of the progenitor of that Sherman's March, really good. I think it's on streaming now. If not, it will be soon because it's getting restored. Can I give one more? Are you guys watching Larry David's show on HBO Max about U.S. history? I haven't gotten to it yet. It's fun. It's really fun. What's the title of it? It doesn't have a kind of a funny title, too. I'm trying to remember when it came out. I'm going to remember what it is. It's a funny title, and Larry David's, it's a funny guy. I'm going to give it a yellow light, because not every episode is awesome to me. It's called Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness. There you go. But it's a fun rift. If you're a history buff, U.S. history especially, you're going to have a good time with it, I think. That's Brandon Pope. We also heard from Austin Berg, Kate Plyse. I'm John Williams.

Produced by Ben Anderson and Pete Zimmerman. We'll drop another podcast on you next week. Very good, guys. Lots of stuff there. We haven't done a remote in a while. We've got to get out to some place and drink some beers and do this in front of a small crowd. Not in tornado season, though. Oh, man. Yeah. No kidding. Let's hope not. What is this studio, John? I don't know if I've seen it. This is at WGN Radio. They have a new podcast studio. And the one behind me, I think you can read News Nation unreported. And I think it's a conspiracy theory. podcast series and it's audio video they also do one about gamers and gaming because you see all the uh game stuff over there so that's kind of like a wall of uh of uh game consoles and things like that a game boy tetris Stuff like that. And just to show you where the Mincing Rascals fits in all of that, I'm in their studio. In the grand scheme of things. All right, guys. Talk to you next week. But does J.B. Pritzker listen to them? Yeah. Exactly. We got the governor listening to this one, y'all. There you go. Goodbye. I'll see y'all. All right. See you guys.

Subscribe to the Mincing Rascals podcast on iTunes or the Google Play Music Store. You can now also follow us on Spotify, or you can keep listening online at wgnradio.com. I'm gonna