Mornings with Pat Kreitlow

Pat and Courier Newsroom's political editor Keya Vakil discuss the week's news, including a judge in Georgia dismissing the Donald Trump election interference case. Also: fun with Greg Bach. Mornings with Pat Kreitlow is powered by UpNorthNews, and it airs on several stations across the Civic Media radio network, Monday through Friday from 6-9 am. Subscribe to the podcast to be sure not to miss ou...

Hear some of our favorite interviews from the last few months as we take a break and spend our Thanksgiving sleeping in a little. In this hour, hear from Chuck Collins, Dr. Kellie Snooks, Tom Nelson and Greta Neubauer. Mornings with Pat Kreitlow is powered by UpNorthNews, and it airs on several stations across the Civic Media radio network, Monday through Friday from 6-9 am. Subscribe to the podca...

Hear some of our favorite interviews from the last few months as we take a break and spend our Thanksgiving sleeping in a little. In this hour hear from Fred Clark, Rahul Powar, Bryan Kennedy and Amy Pechacek. Mornings with Pat Kreitlow is powered by UpNorthNews, and it airs on several stations across the Civic Media radio network, Monday through Friday from 6-9 am. Subscribe to the podcast to be...

Hear some of our favorite interviews from the last few months as we take a break and spend our Thanksgiving sleeping in a little. In this hour hear from Carmen Solis, Shawn Phetteplace, Ingrid Kundinger, Laura Bird and have a little Wisconsin town name fun with James Kelly. Mornings with Pat Kreitlow is powered by UpNorthNews, and it airs on several stations across the Civic Media radio network, M...

There are a lot of factors that drive up prices. Unnecessary trade wars come to mind. But you can also connect the dots between food prices and a changing climate. In this week’s Climate Check, we’ll examine how droughts, heat waves, and more frequent flash floods are impacting crops and animal welfare — and driving up prices at the grocery store. Later we are joined by Tom Nelson, author of “Wrec...

A problem only stays a problem if there’s no willingness to put a solution in place. That’s the case with Wisconsin’s convoluted school funding system. Last week, we visited with two members of a 2017 Blue Ribbon Commission charged with simplifying the way we pay for schools. Those solutions are still waiting for some political willpower — or maybe just some changes to who’s in charge in the Legis...

Political karma sometimes requires a long wait, but it comes. In 2011, Republicans in the Legislature and Gov. Scott Walker enacted a law changing how to handle court challenges to gerrymandered maps. At the time, it made sense because the state Supreme Court was controlled by fellow conservatives and they were given power to appoint three-judge panels to hear the cases. On Tuesday, the state Supr...

It’s easy to look at occasional mass protests like the “No Kings” rallies and conclude that not much is being done to stand up to things the Trump administration is doing to our country, but recent events show how individual Americans are coming together and pushing back effectively. We’ll talk to COURIER’s Cam Stevenson about how an expanded ICE presence in Charlotte, NC was thwarted, how Home De...

We’ll talk to state Rep. Angela Stroud of Ashland about the recently completed fall sessions of the Wisconsin Assembly and Senate, what got done and what’s still undone. Charly Ray of nearby Washburn has seen enough that’s not getting done, so he’s thrown his hat in the ring for the 25th state Senate seat in northwest Wisconsin. We’ll ask him about his decision to run. Mornings with Pat Kreitlow i...

Tuesday of Thanksgiving week sure seems like an odd place on the calendar to announce the big, beautiful health care plan that’s been promised for many years, but maybe the president is serious this time. Or maybe he’s only thinking out loud about potentially reversing himself and backing an extension of tax credits that keep health insurance affordable for millions of American families. Either wa...

Author Laura Bird is back with her monthly batch of book recommendations, this time with an eye on books that match the sentiment of the season: thankfulness. She tells us about eight books: “Maggie; or a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar” by Katie Yee, “A Marriage at Sea” by Sophie Elmhurst, “Everything is Tuberculosis” by John Green, “Birds of the Great Lakes” by Dexter Patterson, “Unabridged: the...

UpNorthNews reporter Salina Heller talked to the father of a Wisconsin-based member of the cast of “Wicked: For Good” about bringing her talents to Hollywood along with her wheelchair. And we’ll find out what the group Fair Wisconsin has been doing to continue the fight for fairness for the LGBTQ community. Mornings with Pat Kreitlow is powered by UpNorthNews, and it airs on several stations acros...

We’ll review the Green Bay Packers’ dominating win against the Minnesota Vikings as they head toward a Thanksgiving Day matchup with the Detroit Lions. And we’ll review the weekend’s news headlines that include the death of DOGE, a small payday for Marjorie Taylor Greene for quitting Congress, and what press reports call a “Trump peace plan” for Ukraine that his own Secretary of State admitted was...

Once upon a time, it seemed like the most shocking thing far-right politicians could do was require that women seeking abortion care first allow themselves to be violated through the use of an invasive type of ultrasound. They somehow found a way to make things worse. We’ll discuss a proposal by Wisconsin republicans that would require women who endure a lost pregnancy to scoop up the pregnancy ti...

We’ll review some of the week’s big stories with journalist Mark Jacob and former US Attorney Jim Santelle, who probably has some thoughts on the new US Attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. Among the stories: The US Coast Guard changes its policy on swastikas. Add that to your list of “words we never thought we’d type in 2025… or ever.” At the end of the hour we play a week in review ga...

When Robert Kennedy Jr. was nominated to be the next US Secretary of Health and Human Services, he promised a member of Congress that the website for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would continue to say that vaccines do not cause autism, despite Kennedy’s anti-vaccine beliefs. Now we are shocked (shocked!) to discover the CDC website now makes unsubstantiated claims about vaccines...

A new campaign of political ads warns voters in the 7th Congressional District up north about the dangers of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani. One problem: Neither is running for office in Wisconsin. One’s a New York City member of Congress and the other is the incoming mayor of New York City. But you’d never know that from a group running ads in order to put lots of shady out-of-state...

Despite getting a full-time salary from taxpayers, the Wisconsin Legislature won’t be addressing any more challenges in 2025. Did you get your money’s worth from so many salaries and so few days in session? We’ll review what did and didn’t get done. Also: Sean O’Malley reviews the trickle of economic data coming out since the government shutdown ended. It turns out President Trump talking about li...

Imagine a proposal that improves women’s health, making it easier to get critical health care during and after pregnancy, supported by nearly three-fourths of the Legislature — Republicans and Democrats alike — and one man is blocking it, using dirty tricks when necessary. If it were a Democrat, there would be a very public revolt. It might not surprise you to hear what happened when Republican As...

This week’s Climate Check adds to a string of stories we never thought we’d see in this nation again. The Clean Water Act of 1972 is landmark legislation that helped un-do generations of pollution. Now, the Trump administration wants to restrict how the Environmental Protection Agency can limit pollution dumped into wetlands. It’s a victory for industry and developers — and a real threat to everyo...

Wisconsin’s school funding system is a mystery to most people, but there’s an even bigger mystery out there: Gathering dust on a shelf is a comprehensive bipartisan plan to simplify and improve school funding in our state. Whatever happened to it? We’ll talk to two members of the 2017 Blue Ribbon Commission on School Funding. It was praised as a model for how Republicans and Democrats could work t...

You might have heard how some politicians are described as either workhorses or showhorses. Somehow, Wisconsin ended up with a pugnacious pony. We’ll talk about Congressman Derrick Van Orden’s latest utterances, which are utterly embarrassing — especially if it turns out the Epstein files have something in there that would cause Van Orden to rethink his take on capital punishment. And speaking of...

With the government shutdown ending, Congress can get back to work doing… very little work. We’ll talk to COURIER’s Cam Stevenson in Washington, DC to see what kind of “normal” is returning to Capitol Hill. He also tells us about the searchable Epstein files database that he made with what is already available. And we’ll talk to Dan Shafer of The Recombobulation Area about Wisconsin political news...

The GOP wants to add more red tape to struggling families who need food aid and now Wisconsin Republicans want to police what people on SNAP are buying. How does that work when someone struggling to pay their bills gets a raised eyebrow for trying to buy candy canes for the kids at Christmas time? Also: Hans Breitenmoser on the crackdown on undocumented immigrants on farms. Sheila Everhart joins H...