Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 54. Sunrise is 6:36, and sunset is 4:36, for 10 hours, 4 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent, with 23 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Eight years ago, after an election night, I wrote a post entitled Unexpected and Expected. The first paragraph from that post, with a few changes, is fitting yet again:
Last night’s election results are both [generally] unexpected (nationally) and expected (locally), I’d say. Few thought that Trump would win the presidency, but many of the other results for Wisconsin or Whitewater were easier to predict.
Trump’s victory nationally will be the big topic for years, first about its cause and then about its effects. Because I believe that national shapes local (and that purely hyper-local assessments are short-sighted), Trump’s win (coupled with a Republican Congress [Senate and possibly House] and a conservative Supreme Court) will transform this city as it will much larger places.
None of us can say how this story unfolds, and in any event it matters still more how we in this small city respond to what unfolds. Each day, one begins anew, confronting the challenges of the moment.
Tuesday in Whitewater will see afternoon showers with a high of 66. Sunrise is 6:34, and sunset is 4:41, for 10 hours, 7 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent, with 15.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1872, in defiance of the law, suffragist Susan B. Anthony votes for the first time, and is later fined $100.
Monday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 69. Sunrise is 6:33, and sunset is 4:42, for 10 hours, 9 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent, with 8.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On August 12th, Johnson attended a meeting of the Whitewater Planning Board. At that meeting, Johnson spoke during public comment on a proposed apartment complex on the east side of Whitewater.
“Good evening. I’m Scott Johnson, I’m not from this local community…”
Johnson does not live in Whitewater, and he does not live anywhere else in the district. It’s lawful to do what Johnson is doing, but it’s irresponsible and selfish.
The proper order for a candidacy goes like this: live in the district, learn about the district, and runonly after you have lived here.
This reasonable & responsible sequence applies to Republicans, Democrats, and independents.
All the rest — claims and counterclaims, opposition research and replies — should be secondary and subordinate to a candidate’s residency in this community before he runs for office.
I have always — always — encouraged people to move to Whitewater. Johnson should first sell his out-of-district residence, move here to Whitewater (his best option) or elsewhere in the district (a second-best choice), live here with us, and only then consider a candidacy after living with us.
It’s beautiful here. Whitewater has options for homes and apartments, including among them several senior living facilities.
If Johnson does not believe this district is good enough for a residency-first approach, then this district is too good for Johnson.
An isolated plateau in the highlands of southeastern Uzbekistan in Central Asia, looks like an expanse of rolling hills. But look closer and a shard of pottery or the stony remnant of an ancient wall might hint at an archaeological secret hidden for hundreds of years. Now a team of archaeologists have used drone-mounted LiDAR to virtually peel back the layers of sediment and vegetation. Revealing two ancient cities, much larger than previously imagined, built 2,000 metres above sea level. The finding of these urban centres, called Tashbulak and Tugunbulak, at such high altitudes, may mean that highland areas may have played a more important role in medieval trade than previously thought. Read the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158…
Sunday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 60. Sunrise is 6:32, and sunset is 4:44, for 10 hours, 12 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent, with 4.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1943, five hundred aircraft of the U.S. 8th Air Force devastate Wilhelmshaven harbor in Germany.
The U.S Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division will post election monitors in four Wisconsin locations Nov. 5. The news comes as Wisconsin’s top elections administrator says local clerks have been preparing for any potential election day problems since 2020.
The DOJ announced Friday it will “monitor compliance with federal voting rights laws” in the cities of Milwaukee, Wausau and the Rusk County Towns of Lawrence and Thornapple during Tuesday’s presidential election.
The DOJ sued the Towns of Lawrence and Thornapple in September, accusing local officials of breaking federal law for not making at least one accessible voting machine available to voters with disabilities during elections in April and May. The Town of Thornapple is currently appealing a preliminary injunction requiring it to bring the accessible voting machine back for the upcoming election.
Wisconsin wouldn’t need federal monitors it didn’t have crackpots and conspiracy theorists interfering or lying about voting in the state. Yet, as we do have crackpots and conspiracy theorists interfering and lying about voting here, it’s best to have monitors.
Arcadia turns military scrap into iconic Glastonbury stages like the Spider and Dragonfly. Founded by Bertie Cole and Pip Rush, their creations host DJs like Fatboy Slim, thrilling festival audiences worldwide.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 57. Sunrise is 7:31, and sunset is 5:45, for 10 hours, 14 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent, with 1.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The UW-Whitewater Homecoming Parade takes places at 10 AM, beginning at the corner of Prince and Main and ending at the corner of Prairie Street and Starin Road.
On this day in 1960, Penguin Books is found not guilty of obscenity in the trial R v Penguin Books Ltd, the Lady Chatterley’s Lover case.
Commissioners unanimously approved the communication, which includes information about recount deadlines, information needed to determine recount fees, minor revisions to the recount manual and about how commission staff plans to compile unofficial county results to track recount margins.
A recount must be requested within one business day of the elections commission receiving all the completed county canvasses. The deadline for a recount would be Nov. 30.
“We’ve presented a timeline that shows exactly when the various aspects of a recount would take place, so that again our local election officials and any potential parties to a recount would be able to prepare for that possibility and understand when that recount could potentially occur,” Wolfe said.
The communication will also include information to help clerks make preliminary estimates of the cost of a recount. Wolfe said election officials should plan ahead so that if a candidate is within the recall margin and asks for a recount, officials can produce a cost estimate quickly, which the candidate must pay for. In 2020, former President Donald Trump paid $3 million for recounts in Milwaukee and Dane Counties, which confirmed President Joe Biden’s victory.
“We don’t want to be thinking about it for the first time when there is some type of recount pending,” Wolfe said. “We want to think about it ahead of time and make sure that everybody’s prepared to provide that information in a very expedited way.”
Wisconsin has a decentralized election system with 1,850 Municipal clerks and 72 County clerks — a total of 1,922 local election officials. On election night, municipal clerks will report unofficial results to their county clerks. The Commission plans to go to each county’s website, see the unofficial results that have been posted, and enter the data in a spreadsheet for the federal contest and for any other state-level contest where the margin may be close and post it publicly.
This month, catch planetary views of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, witness a close pass of the Parker Solar Probe by Venus, and get ready for an occultation of the bright star Spica by the Moon. 0:00 Intro 0:20 November planet highlights 1:38 Venus & Parker Solar Probe’s flyby 3:03 Occultation of Spica 4:25 October photo highlights 4:38 November Moon phases.
ALDI. This administration brought ALDI. Whitewater wanted a supermarket and the new administration brought one. Well done. The old guard mucked around for years and brought nothing (but they did benefit from the tax-incremental dollars they fight against elsewhere). SeeSix Points on a Supermarket in Whitewater.
City Administration(City Manager, Finance Director, Municipal Administration). Direct is a benefit, candor is a benefit, and high-level argumentation is a benefit to those who care about good policy. This municipal administration has those traits, and anyone else in the government (city, school district, or university) or those who follow this government (residents including this libertarian blogger) benefits from these traits.
And look, and look, it doesn’t matter whether I agree as much as I and others should expect (regardless of agreement) a high-level of discussion & presentation from this municipal administration. This city manager and this finance director deliver more and better argumentation than their predecessors. Far better.
Whitewater spent a generation with less; this is how a normal government operates. If that’s too hard for the old guard, then it should be a reminder (yet again) to them that they squandered their years on below-average work, above-average self-praise, and conflict of interest after conflict of interest.
Common Council. The new Common Council (since April) is far better run — smoother, more productive, less vindictively obsessive — than the majority before.
Community Development Authority (New Majority).An order of magnitude better than the old guard’s poor performance and ceaseless, dumb-show posing.
Government Speech.Go ahead, city team, keep writing the memos you want the way you want. (Demanding that it all stop and be “Done!” reeks of weakness.)
Let’s say that one day, for whatever reason, this city’s finance director writes a memo outlining 345 reasons that I’m wrong about a topic. (Quick aside: Ms. Blitch, that wouldn’t be economical — you should be able to refute me more quickly and succinctly than that.)
My response to a memo from the finance director (after utter surprise, as I have noting but love in my heart for everyone working in the field of municipal finance) should be either (1) to reply responsively to the points she raised (whether conceding or attempting to refute) or to (2) say nothing.
Whitewater needs more speech, including government speech, not less. Keep going.
Housing. Lots of new building. Keep building! The old guard interfered with market forces for a generation, and hijacked the CDA’s principal purpose for those years, to protect a few incumbent landlords. That’s not a market approach, it’s an incumbent landlord protection racket.
I’d rather there wasn’t tax-incremental spending for these projects, in the same way that I’d rather illness could be cured without major surgery. Major surgery is called for, however, to redress a generation-long oligopoly in this town. Note well: private does not guarantee free markets but can entail impermissible monopoly or oligopoly. (That’s why there’s anti-trust law.)
Individual Liberty. The library held firm against attempted censorship of a movie for teens, and the city and university (along with many businesses) have shown support for an annual Pride Rally. As it should be: individual liberty deserves a defense, and from that individual liberty springs the right to associate freely with others. Whitewater is, and must be, a place for all people. (The Pride Rally started, a few years ago, in the smaller area beside the Birge Fountain. It’s now by Cravath, in a larger and more spacious venue.)
Innovation, Generally. Plaudits are deservedly delivered for trying new things: a startup award and a pedestrian walkway come to mind. Not every new idea will work, but lack of fresh ideas will leave the city only with a stale & stagnant past.
Innovation, Specifically (Innovation Center, Tech Park). No one, no one in our city of 15,000, has been a more consistent (and correct!) critic of the Innovation Center than I have. Go ahead new municipal team (as I believe you’d like): make that Tech Park something beyond the reach of legitimate criticism. You’ve innovated elsewhere, and here’s your chance to bring real innovation to this part of the city. I’d much rather the Park succeed than for it to be a basis for further criticisms.
Referendums. Asking voters is a good idea. Let 15,000 decide (or express an opinion) for 15,000.
The list runs in reverse order, from mildly scary to truly frightening.
10.Crazed Foxes. For many years, I’ve warned the city about the dangers of a coyotepocalypse. A harbinger of that danger came our way in 2024, when a marauding red fox — infected with mange, rickets, ebola, something — arrived in town. Most of us took it in stride, and waited out the calamity until the arrival of a SWAT team or 101st Airborne or whatever. Next time may be worse.
9.Complaints Over Pedestrian Walkways. Whitewater is a college town, and so it has a college, and the college has students, and the students have to travel to different buildings in which they live and study, and not all of the buildings are next to each other. The city sensibly proposed a two-week test of closing a small portion of Starin Road to vehicles during daylight during weekdays, Monday to Friday.
Here’s a map of the affected area (indicated with a black line):
The hew and cry over simple and reasonable accommodations to the students who keep this town going is confirmation of some residents’ clinical hypersensitivity. There’s gotta be a pill for that; Big Pharma works 24×7 on new concoctions.
8. Restrictions on Speech.The Whitewater School Board wants you to be very careful about what you say during Public Comment, so they’ve helpfully listed a series of warnings and restrictions on residents’ remarks:
Citizens may speak under Public Comments, but no School Board action will be taken. Issues raised may become a part of a future agenda. Participants are allotted a three-minute speaking period. A Citizen Comment Request should be filled out prior to speaking. In accordance to Board Policy 187, personal criticism and/or derogatory remarks directed at School Board members or employees of the district will not be tolerated. Should there be a number of citizens planning to speak, the President will announce the total time for citizen comments and divide the time between speakers equally with no more than three minutes allotted to each participant. The Board will not be able to respond to individual questions at the meeting. Complaints against an employee should be sent to the Superintendent or Board in writing with your signature.
Please keep in mind that students often attend or view board meetings. Speakers’ remarks should therefore be suitable for an audience that includes Kindergarten through 12th grade students. The Board President or officers of the Board may interrupt, warn or terminate speakers’ statements that are unrelated to the business of the School District or inappropriate for K-12 students or disruptive to an orderly, productive meeting. The time estimates noted for agenda items are for informational purposes only and may not be reflective of actual discussion during the meeting.
Oh, dearie me: I didn’t realize that the boardmembers were Vanderbilts or Windsors with the delicate sensibility and refinement that requires shielding from common men and women. Not one of their surnames suggests by itself a connection to the upbringing of Charles the Third, “by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His other Realms and Territories, King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith,” but ya never know. If I should ever be in a restaurant with these men & women of the school board, I’ll ponder carefully to make sure that I pick up the right utensil at the right time.
7.Fear and Anxiety Itself. Residents censor themselves, limit themselves, often by their own worry that they’ll upset someone or some tradition. No and no again. Break old traditions and break new ground: these tired old boomers f-cked the town up enough for ten lifetimes. Go ahead and say it.
6. Projection and Confession. For some, every accusation is a projection (what they feel inside) or a confession (what they themselves have done). So they look at others and insist that everyone else is what, in fact, they have said and done. The conservative populists are constantly yammering about how everyone else its triggered, etc. If all these big, bad, tough men were what they claim to be, they wouldn’t be tantrumming in public (what, what?, what!, arms up, outraged).
5. VIs. Some towns escape this fate, but other places wind up with a maladjusted village idiot.
De idioot bij de vijver (The Idiot By the Pond), 1926, Frits Van den Berghe)
4.Annoying Obsessives. I’m not a government type, but I have sympathy and compassion for any resident who has to serve in government beside an annoying obsessive who hectors in meeting after meeting, raises dozens of trivial points, demands endless inquiries, and hijacks proceeding after proceeding.
No matter what they look like outside, they all look the same inside:
There’s not enough Excedrin Extra Strength in the world, to be honest.
3. Fear of Referendums. Whitewater needs more, not fewer, referendums. Residents are free to vote them up or down. The alternative is one in which an entitled boomer and his operatives, catspaws, stooges, and Trojan Horses try to run the city by manipulating boards and commissions. These types don’t care to count to 15,000; they care only to count to four on a seven member board.
Let the whole city decide. Go to voters as often as possible.
2. Auric Goldfinger and Oddjob.Whitewater is a small town of fifteen thousand people, no one higher or lower than another. That’s a truth that a few will not accept. And so, and so, in meetings where their pecuniary interest is at stake, Auric Goldfinger and his manservant Oddjob walk into the room with a combination of entitlement and bluster wholly disproportionate to their very average abilities.
The amount of eye rolling before and after they speak would keep an ophthalmologist in business for years.
1. Nativism. No more serious risk than this: that some would ruin the lives of others who have come here only to make a new start for their families.
Again, this year: although I am a tragic optimist, it’s optimism that forms my fundamental outlook. We’ll come through.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 76. Sunrise is 7:27, and sunset is 5:49, for 10 hours, 22 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent, with 3.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1938, Orson Welles broadcasts a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, causing a panic in some of the audience in the United States.
The U.S. economy expanded at a healthy pace during the third quarter, keeping fears of a downturn at bay while Federal Reserve officials eye further interest-rate cuts.
Inflation-adjusted, or real, gross domestic product grew at an annualized rate of 2.8% over the three months ended in September, according to the first estimate by the Bureau of Economic Analysis released Wednesday. The consensus call among economists surveyed by FactSet was for growth of 2.6% in the third quarter, though Bloomberg’s forecast was for 2.9%.
Wednesday’s solid third-quarter growth is a tick slower from real GDP growth of 3% during the second quarter. The economy expanded 1.6% during the first three months of the year.
The third quarter’s real GDP growth was primarily driven by increases in consumer spending, as well as federal expenditures and net exports, the bureau said Wednesday. Imports, which act as a drag on GDP, did increase markedly during the past quarter and weighed on the overall growth. Economists noted Tuesday, however, that this uptick in imports is likely a short-term trend due to the threat of the longshoremen strike in October.
….
Wednesday’s data included a quarterly update on the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, the personal consumption expenditures, or PCE, price index. During the third quarter, PCE inflation increased 1.5%, putting it lower than the Fed’s 2% target. That should make it easier for policymakers to justify additional rate cuts. It also marked a slower pace of price growth than the 2.5% rate logged during the second quarter.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 79. Sunrise is 7:26, and sunset is 5:50, for 10 hours, 24 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent, with 7.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1969, the first-ever computer-to-computer link is established on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.
Glassdoor, the online platform where workers go to dish on their employers, has placed an alert on its Sunwest page stating that it has detected an attempt to “inflate reviews” for the $3.3 billion financial institution.
“We have evidence that someone has taken steps to artificially inflate the rating for this employer in violation of our Community Guidelines,” states the Glassdoor alert on Sunwest’s page. “We have addressed the issue. Please exercise your best judgment when evaluating this employer.”
The company says it posts such alerts in the “rare instances” that it identifies “particularly aggressive attempts by employers or others to influence or manipulate the integrity of reviews.”
Glassdoor did not say who it believes is responsible for Sunwest’s reviews.
After removing dozens of questionable reviews, the overall rating for Sunwest has dropped from a 4.9 overall score out of 5.0 to a 3.1. Hovde’s approval rating as Sunwest CEO has also been lowered from 98% to 79%. And the percentage of people who say they would recommend the company to a friend has plummeted from 98% to 43%.
But wait, there’s more! The Journal Sentinel investigated further:
Journal Sentinel data journalist Eva Wen ran each of the company’s 105 reviews through GPTZero, a platform that identifies text generated using artificial intelligence.
Everything appeared to be on the up and up between 2012 and April 2024. But that all changed on May 22, three months after Hovde entered the U.S. Senate race.
Beginning on that date, GPTZero identified 15 of the 30 reviews as AI-generated with 100% certainty. There was more than 75% certainty that two others were also created via AI — meaning more than half of the recent reviews were AI creations. The AI-generated reviews are all overwhelmingly positive or give high ratings.
Honest to goodness. Out-of-state life, out-of-state bank, can’t bother to the study farm bill that matters to our state: Hovde’s a copy of a copy of a copy of a serious candidate.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 65. Sunrise is 7:24, and sunset is 5:51, for 10 hours, 27 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent, with 13.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board holds a budget hearing at 5:45 PM, goes into closed session shortly after 6:15 PM, and resumes open session at 7 PM. Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 5:30 PM.
Unlike most other states, Wisconsin’s election system is decentralized. Administration of elections is handled by the 1,850 municipal clerks working across the state. Each clerk is responsible for the election within their community.
At a virtual event hosted on Friday by Keep Our Republic — an organization that has spent four years trying to rebuild trust in the election system by explaining to skeptics exactly how the system works — former Wisconsin Congressman Reid Ribble said that if a person can’t trust politicians that the system is safe and secure, they should trust their local clerk and their friends and neighbors who volunteer as poll workers.
“Elections in Wisconsin are fair and safe and the 1,800 county and municipal clerks that are running those elections, and the thousands and thousands of local volunteers and poll workers, are working very hard to do their jobs in a non-partisan manner,” Ribble said. “I’ve often told friends of mine and other citizens … I get it if you don’t trust politicians. One person you should be able to trust is that — usually a senior citizen — poll worker at your local precinct that’s checking your ID and giving you a ballot and making sure that everything is done correctly. You often see these people at your grocery store. They might sit two or three rows in front of you at church and these are your friends. They’re your neighbors. They’re people that are concerned about defending democracy and seeing it unfold in front of their very eyes.”
Once polls close on Election Day and the votes are tallied, unofficial results get sent to county clerks, who report those preliminary numbers. It’s from those initial reports that media organizations use statistical processes to “call” races, declaring who has won. But the actual winners aren’t officially declared until the results are certified at multiple levels.
This multi-step process gives election experts another layer of assurance that despite continued conspiracy theories, Wisconsin’s system is resistant to meddling.
No one can be certain, but we in Wisconsin can be confident.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 59. Sunrise is 7:23, and sunset is 5:53, for 10 hours, 30 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent, with 20.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1682, Philadelphia is founded in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Early voting in Wisconsin has increased by nearly 40% over 2020 as of Friday, Wisconsin elections officials said.
Early in-person absentee voting began Tuesday in the state, and as of Friday morning 292,702 people had voted, the Wisconsin Elections Commission said. That’s compared to 209,665 as of the morning of Friday, Oct. 23, 2020.
Nearly 1 million absentee ballots have been requested by Wisconsin voters and more than 715,000 ballots have already been returned to clerks, either by mail or by those voting in-person absentee, elections officials said.
Voters cast a total of some 640,100 absentee ballots in 2008, then 665,340 absentee ballots in 2012; 824,736 absentee ballots in 2016; and about 1.9 million absentee ballots in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Election officials said Friday that 921,832 total absentee ballots had requested so far for the 2024 election.
The type of early voting (prior to 11.5) may shift between absentee balloting and early in-person voting, especially as against a pandemic year. The trend toward voting before Election Day, however, so that Election Day becomes Election Days, is undeniable.
