Playing With Fire
Comstock's back, the governor's race won't sit still, is Mitch McConnell still in the hospital? — plus a legendary Milwaukee bike ride that defines community.
It’s the dog days of summer, and everything is on fire
Once again, our air has been dangerous to breathe. Wildfire smoke drifting down from Minnesota and Canada pushed air quality past the records set in 2023 — records that felt like an anomaly two years ago and now feel like a preview for even more challenging times ahead.
The political air isn't much better. Todd Blanche — the nominee for Attorney General — signaled plans to revive the 1873 Comstock Act to restrict mailed abortion medication during his confirmation hearing. It's still worth sitting with: an 1873 law, aimed at gutting telehealth access to mifepristone, a drug with 25 years of evidence behind its safety and efficacy. And that law didn't start out just about abortion. The original 1873 text banned mailing contraceptives too. Reviving Comstock means reaching back for a law that saw birth control and abortion as the same offense. The fearmongering keeps spreading. The evidence doesn't change.
I get it if you’re tired. I’m not. Let’s go.
The Dr. Kristin Lyerly Show: Kelda Roys on the chaos and KeldaCare
A few weeks ago, Wisconsin’s Democratic primary for governor got turned upside down. Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez dropped out amid a campaign finance mess. Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley jumped back in — less than two weeks after dropping out himself. And the August 11 primary keeps bearing down like nothing happened.
I sat down with gubernatorial candidate State Senator Kelda Roys for a special edition of the show to make sense of it all, and to dig into KeldaCare — her plan to let every Wisconsinite buy into the same nonprofit health insurance plan state employees already have. We got into the buy-in mechanics, eliminating prior authorization (a fight close to my heart), and the reproductive health protections built directly into the plan. It’s strong, cost-effective, and would protect access to healthcare for many of us who would otherwise be forced to go without.
Learn more and read the full bill at keldaroys.com/keldacare. And catch every gubernatorial candidate interview — Roys, Hong, Barnes, Crowley, Brennan — over on my YouTube playlist: Wisconsin Governor Candidates..
The Wisconsin Politics Group Chat gets spicy
Candidates in, candidates out, endorsements flying, the establishment freaking out — nobody knows anything right now, but we tried to make sense of it anyway. I joined Pat Kreitlow (UpNorth News), Kate Duffy (Motherhood for Good), and Dan Shafer (The Recombobulation Area) to break down the chaos: the Crowley/Rodriguez flip, why the Marquette poll results come with asterisks, whether Kelda Roys’ strong policy is breaking through, and if Mandela Barnes’ stock is falling.
We also got into Tom Tiffany — arguably the most far-right candidate to ever run a statewide race in Wisconsin — and the real-time news breaking about whether Wisconsinites who already voted absentee can change their vote.
Who’s got YOUR attention? Tell me who you’re watching, and why.
The Situation Womb: Comstock, a $20 billion moonshot, and weaponized grief
This week’s Situation Womb goes deep on the Comstock Act threat — what it could mean for telehealth medication abortion access, and why the safety fearmongering doesn’t hold up against 25 years of evidence. Then some genuinely good news: ACOG, the Society for Women’s Health Research, and partners just announced a “women’s health moonshot” — a push for Congress to invest $20 billion over the next decade to close the research gap in women’s and obstetric health. Erin, Chris, and I walk through why this could be huge.
The conversation turns harder when we get into anti-abortion groups manipulating real patients’ stories for propaganda — including the case of a Wisconsin woman whose fatal fetal diagnosis was twisted into an anti-abortion narrative online, and the legal effort now underway to hold those groups accountable. And we ask the question everyone in this space is asking: will abortion drive voters in 2026, or does it get absorbed into the broader affordability conversation defining this year’s midterms?
Mitch Watch: back in the barrel with Amy McGrath
Quick gut check: Mitch McConnell has been hospitalized since mid-June. His office has said almost nothing. “Continues to improve” is doing a lot of work for a man who hasn’t cast a vote in over a month. He finally surfaced-ish on July 12 to say it was a fall and a case of pneumonia — but weeks of silence bred exactly the speculation you’d expect, and plenty of people still aren’t buying the full story.
Nobody is better positioned to dig into that than the woman who actually ran against him. Amy McGrath challenged McConnell for his Senate seat in 2020, and her podcast, Truth in the Barrel, has a running segment for exactly this moment: Mitch Watch. I joined her this week for the unfiltered episode — we also got into Pete Hegseth’s “testosterone test,” the cyclospora outbreak linked to lettuce, the state of women’s health under Trump, and everyone’s new favorite bit, The Dirty Swill.
Amy’s a veteran and a former fighter pilot, I’m an OB-GYN — we complement each other pretty well. This is becoming a regular thing, and I’m here for it.
What do you make of the McConnell silence? The Hegseth testosterone plan?
New show alert: On Call by Paging America
I want to make sure you don’t sleep on this one. On Call by Paging America is a new short-form series — quick, timely videos sitting right at the intersection of healthcare and politics. Consider this me putting it in front of you before everyone else catches on.
Two episodes with me dropped this past week, and you will see plenty of other familiar faces, too. Dr. Rob Davidson and I broke down a Florida press conference where RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz announced a Medicaid “waste, fraud, and abuse” crackdown — targeting Minnesota and California specifically. Singling out two Democratic-led states doesn’t add up, especially given Florida’s own history with Medicare fraud.
Then, fresh from my own doctor’s appointment where a shortage of a generic medication forced my doctor to use a substitute, I joined Miles Baker to unpack Trump’s Truth Social announcement of a 100% tariff on imported generic drugs within two years, escalating to 200% the year after. The math doesn’t work: generic drugs run on razor-thin margins, six in ten Americans already worry about affording their prescriptions, and India supplies roughly half of U.S. generics by volume. If the administration were serious about making prescriptions affordable (and available) again, we’d be talking about realistic Congressional initiatives like the PILLS Act, MMEDS Act, and MAPS Act — not blunt-force tariffs headed for a legal fight.
Featured Race: Fred Clark, Wisconsin’s 7th
Wisconsin’s air has been dangerous to breathe, and Fred Clark has been sounding the alarm from a unique vantage point — 35 years spent working in the same forests now filling our sky with smoke. Fred is a career forester and the frontrunner in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District — the seat Tom Tiffany is vacating to run for governor, and for the first time in years, it’s genuinely competitive.
He served three terms in the State Assembly representing Sauk, Columbia, and Marquette counties, chaired the Assembly committee on forestry, parks, and outdoor recreation, chaired the tourism committee, and served on the Natural Resources Board — a combination that puts him in a rare position to speak to what’s at stake for Northern Wisconsin’s economy as smoke keeps visitors away.
We talked about what pulled him out of retirement in Bayfield, where he thinks Democrats have gotten this district wrong, and why he believes he’s the one who can finally flip it.
What’s Coming Up
Next week: former WisDems Chair Ben Wikler joins me to talk about his new book: This is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy. I’ve got a sneak peek reel up on Instagram right now if you can’t wait.
The People’s Holiday
My son Abe and his girlfriend Rachel invited me to Riverwest 24 this year — the legendary bike ride in what might be the most progressive neighborhood in the state — affectionately dubbed “The People’s Holiday.” The vibe kicked in before we even got rolling: my OG Mongoose had a flat, so we wheeled it into the packed bike shop near the starting line, where a mechanic named Michael stepped up to fix it. While he got things tuned up, we bonded over his Softstar Shoes — my son Julian’s favorite brand, and the life’s work of my high school friend. Small world, apparently, extends to bike shops in Riverwest. The race started before I could pay him, so we went back twice to settle up, then to grab some lights, and kept running into him all weekend. Michael is now officially Abe’s bike mechanic.
That’s Riverwest 24. If you’ve never been, put it on next year’s list (and start thinking about your costume).
Until next week, you can find me here and everywhere!
There is a 25th Amendment (presently underused) to deal with an incapacitated president.
Perhaps there should be one also for Senators who are still clinging to power at 84 and miss important votes.
By the way Senators who are ill get sick leave… even though they are doing everything they can to deny it to the rest of us.
Senate rules prohibit a senator from leaving his/her seat vacant, but I don’t know the remedy. Given the havoc and nonsense McConnell is responsible for wreaking—denying Democrats a SCROTUS seat because “six months was too close to an election,” then hypocritically seating Comey-Barrett within a breath of an election—he’s probably cold and dead. Or cold and comatose. Time of death will be recorded on the last minute possible to ensure that the cheating GOP gets its advantage. My suggestion? Adopt a page from the repukes’ playbook and take dramatic action to take the seat. Let them squeal after the fait accompli.