There’s no politically predominant group in Whitewater. Strictly speaking, a subculture implies a dominant culture, but it’s less dramatic to describe Whitewater as several subcultures than as balkanized. One might call the city multicultural, but that term often implies an acceptance of different cultures, and neither Whitewater’s traditionalists nor populists can be described as friends of multiculturalism…
Whitewater is a collection of subcultures sitting beside, and sometimes mixing, with each other.
It was the claim – the insistence, truly – of Old Whitewater that there was one town, with one people, and one message for them. This claim lingered long past its expiration date; it lingers in some minds still.
The height of that view was 2006-07, before the Great Recession. There are few towns where a local politician would publish an online news site and be taken seriously. Old Whitewater took all of this seriously. A traditional conservative outlook was simply assumed as the default outlook of each and all. Boosterism was the patina of that time in this city, but beneath that coat of whitewash there were genuine grains from different timbers.
The Great Recession and its aftermath broke apart any credible claim – if ever there were one – that the city was of one type of person or outlook. (Failure to understand the enduring influence of the Great Recession on Whitewater and other small Midwestern towns is a significant misunderstanding.)
What Whitewater was below the surface then is more evident now: about half college students, half non-students, White, Latino, Black, and each of these groups of more than one politics (some in support of this more diverse city, others opposed to the very idea of diversity).
(For many years, I waited patiently and hopefully for more publications, of varying viewpoints, to sprout here. They have. Residents with recourse to digital tools now publish dozens upon dozens of local pages through Facebook, stand-alone sites, Twitter, or Instagram. There may be no person in the city happier about this than I am.)
No doubt local government would like one quick stop, one easy touch, but a normal community – let alone a vibrant one – seeks more than that.
There’s much from publishing that Whitewater still needs, but a more competitive publishing environment is a better environment.
That more competitive publishing environment is a consequence of the shift from one (presumed) dominant politics to several competing political factions.
Monday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of 58. Sunrise is 6:15 AM and sunset 7:34 PM, for 13h 18m 39s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:00 PM.
University of Wisconsin System interim President Tommy Thompson is continuing his push for a system-wide approach to online education. Thompson says a unified front on behalf of all UW System campuses is the best way to compete with out-of-state colleges spending heavily in Wisconsin to attract working adults to take courses.
During a UW Board of Regents meeting on Thursday, Thompson sounded the alarm about increasing competition for working adults with some college credit but no degree.
“The barbarians are at the door,” said Thompson. “Arizona State, Western Governors, University of Southern New Hampshire is a big one, coming in and advertising. And they’re taking approximately, I would say, 35 to 40 percent of our students.”
According to a UW System review of 25 online programs with the most Wisconsinites enrolled during the 2018-2019 school year, UW System campuses had 37 percent of the total. Wisconsin technical colleges enrolled 32 percent while out-of-state universities enrolled 37 percent.
The best answer to Russian and Chinese strongmen who offer thousands of vaccines to countries that say nice things about them is to flood the market with millions of American doses, helping everyone regardless of what they say about the U.S. or anyone else. After Trump, the American political system won’t win much admiration again anytime soon. But if American democracy is no longer a trusted product, American efficiency could be once again. Within a matter of weeks, a majority of American adults will have had their first dose of a vaccine. What if the U.S. then begins to pivot from mass-vaccinating its own citizens to mass-vaccinating the rest of the world? Americans can’t do social trust, but we can do vaccines, plus the military logistics needed to distribute them: planes, trucks, cold-storage chains. The best cure for propaganda and disinformation is real-life experience: If people see that the vaccines work, they will eventually get one. We can end the global pandemic, improve the economy for everybody, protect ourselves and everyone else, and create the relationships that can help us deal with crises to come.
Democrats, having achieved unified control of government, are threatening to reverse the major corporate tax cut Republicans passed in 2017. Yet corporate America is criticizing Republicans, and for something unrelated: legislation in Georgia, Texas and other states that threatens to strip Americans of their voting rights
…..
these corporations aren’t criticizing anti-voter bills out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re doing so because speaking up is good for the bottom line. They’ve crunched the numbers and determined that promoting voting rights is more financially valuable than whatever they stand to gain from slightly lower tax rates.
Among those at risk of disenfranchisement, after all, are these companies’ customers and employees. And it’s not such a great business move to endorse attempts to take away your customers’ and employees’ civil rights; even staying neutral on the issue — as some companies tried to do before the Georgia law passed — can alienate consumers who are either direct victims of the law or allies of those victims.
This is the fifth in a series on Whitewater’s local politics of 2021. Whitewater, Wisconsin is a small town where about half the residents are university students. Town-Gown conflicts here aren’t the most in all North America, but they’re not the least, either.
The University of Wisconsin-Whitewater is beset with challenges apart from politics: long-term structural limitations of the UW System’s funding, a declining demographic of typical college-age students, short-term revenue losses from the pandemic, two unsuited chancellors in a row (Telfer, Kopper), a mediocre media relations shop, and a current chancellor (Watson) who undermines any chance of improvement whenever he stoops to that media shop’s stale or false talking points.
The direct influence of the university on the town’s local politics is probably overstated: many university faculty or staff members do not live in the city, and students attend UW-Whitewater for reasons understandably more important to them than city politics. (For those who do live and vote in the city, national or state elections draw more participation than wholly local races.)
It’s indirectly, as a topic, that the university plays its key political role: as an economic resource (although, again, an often over-stated one), as a source of pride, frustration, or controversy. Old Whitewater – whatever the politics of the residents – has never been comfortable with the university (especially as it grew larger from 2006-2016). Some of Old Whitewater wished the university never grew, others that it grew only on campus, and others would have preferred that the whole city look more like an extended nursing home or library than a college town.
There have been landlords who have profited from this public university’s rise during that time, but not all residents have seen benefits so tangible. (These landlords are, mostly, self-identified business conservatives who owe their livelihoods to a state-funded public university.)
It’s as a source of continuing controversy among those unaffiliated with the university that UW-Whitewater exerts the most influence over city politics. That’s the unsolved Town-Gown problem, one that is no less a problem now than it was ten or twenty years ago. Structural limits, misconduct, and unforced errors have left UW-Whitewater a public-relations failure within its own divided city.
Some small towns’ residents universally ache with love and pride for their local campus; Whitewater is not one of those places.
How many people from the university vote in any given election is less significant to the city’s local politics than the indirect influences of the campus.
Sunday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of 55. Sunrise is 6:17 AM and sunset 7:33 PM, for 13h 15m 51s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Donald Trump devoted part of a speech to Republican donors on Saturday night to insulting the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell. According to multiple reports of the $400,000-a-ticket, closed-press event, the former president called the Kentucky senator “a dumb son of a bitch.”
Trump also said Mike Pence, his vice-president, should have had the “courage” to object to the certification of electoral college results at the US Capitol on 6 January. Trump claims his defeat by Joe Biden, by 306-232 in the electoral college and more than 7m votes, was the result of electoral fraud. It was not and the lie was repeatedly thrown out of court.
Earlier, the Associated Press reported that it obtained a Pentagon timeline of events on 6 January, which showed Pence demanding military leadership “clear the Capitol” of rioters sent by Trump.
Trump did nothing and around six hours passed between Pence’s order and the Capitol being cleared. Five people including a police officer died and some in the mob were recorded chanting “hang Mike Pence.” More than 400 face charges.
(Mar-a-Lago: where cannibalism’s the preferred cuisine.)
A father and his teenage daughter walked into the Hyde Park police station last August and reported a heinous crime.
The girl said she had been repeatedly molested from age 7 through 12 by former Boston police union president Patrick M. Rose Sr. Five more people soon came forward, accusing Rose of molesting them as children over the span of three decades, including the girl’s own father.
Rose being tagged as a child sexual abuser was news to the city when he was arrested and charged last summer. But it wasn’t news to the Boston Police Department where Rose served for two decades as a patrolman.
A Globe investigation has found that the Boston Police Department in 1995 filed a criminal complaint against him for sexual assault on a 12-year-old, and, even after the complaint was dropped, proceeded with an internal investigation that concluded that he likely committed a crime. Despite that finding, Rose kept his badge, remained on patrol for another 21 years, and rose to power in the union that represents patrol officers.
Today Boston police are fighting to keep secret how the department handled the allegations against Rose, and what, if any, penalty he faced. Over the years, this horrific case has come full circle: The father who brought his daughter in last summer to report abuse by Rose was the boy allegedly abused at age 12 in the 1995 case. The department’s lack of administrative action back then may have left Rose free to offend again and again, from one generation to the next.
Prosecutors now say the boy recanted his story under pressure from Rose, a common phenomenon for young survivors of abuse when faced with demands from their abuser. Though the criminal case against Rose was dropped as a result, a separate police internal affairs investigation went forward and concluded Rose broke the law.
This is the fourth in a series on Whitewater’s local politics of 2021. The largest political gathering in Whitewater in 2020 was a rally for racial justice in Whitewater following the death of George Floyd in Minnesota. Hundreds attended. It was not, however, an allowedly progressive event – the small local group Whitewater Unites Lives invited anyone, and many (if not most) who attended surely did so without considering themselves progressives. (I’m not affiliated with either group.)
Official reactions to that broad-based rally, and to a separate group of Black Lives Matter protesters, show that Whitewater is not a progressive city. It’s not even a center-left city.
If Whitewater were a progressive city, or even a center-left city, then her city manager would not have been confused and frustrated at the simple observation that (1) ‘Black Lives Matter’ simply means ‘Black Lives Matter [as much],’ (2) would have readily understood that ‘All Lives Matter‘ is a rejection of ‘Black Lives Matter [as much],’ (3) would not have gone to another city and complained about the reasonable expectation to understand these points, and (4) the Whitewater Common Council would have addressed all of this more confidently, responsively, and openly.
The reception for that BLM group, of which two university professors were core members, shows limits of progressive politics – or any significant political changes – in the city. Some of those limits are structural and some are cultural. SeeBuilt Against Substantive Change.
(These progressive efforts for change, including presenting several enumerated demands, would not have been my approach, in any event. One does not demand what one cannot lawfully take, and there was no chance of compelling immediate change from Whitewater’s city government or agencies. In the absence of a lawful power to demand, successful efforts are attritional, not immediate. An approach that looks at many parts of an institution at once – from bottom, sides, and top – is less practical than a focus on one part. If one wishes to negotiate with leaders, that’s a lengthy process of discussion. If one opposes leadership, then a long attrition campaign should stay focused on those leaders, without additional goals. Lengthy means lengthy, and long means long.)
And yet, and yet — what part of their free exercise threatened others? Would Dr. Thomas have called down lightning from the sky? (How convenient, then, to fly a kite and key.) Would Dr. McFadden have sent a flock of flying monkeys into the city? (It seems unlikely; having seen Dr. McFadden and her friends march through town, her complexion shows no tint of green.)
About those BLM protesters, marching day after day in the summer, a simple observation: it’s a loss of composure, if not of reason, to have overreacted to them as though they were a danger to this city. If lawful marches and lawful discussions are too hard for Whitewater’s residents and officials, then the deficiency lies with residents and officials rather than these protesters.
Saturday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 52. Sunrise is 6:19 AM and sunset 7:32 PM, for 13h 13m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 2019, scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope project announce the first-ever image of a black hole, located in the center of the M87 galaxy.
In one of the most comprehensive looks at nursing home safety during the pandemic, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation has found that 1 in 3 Wisconsin facilities violated coronavirus protocols, including by asking COVID-positive staff to keep working, not screening visitors for symptoms and not isolating infected residents.
Even when inspectors were present, employees at several facilities didn’t always wear face masks. Two homes substituted flannel shirts or plastic aprons for gowns, despite having an ample supply. At least five nursing homes didn’t tell residents or their families about coronavirus cases for days or weeks.
According to the Journal Sentinel review of hundreds of state and federal inspection reports from March 2020 to January 2021, officials cited 133 of Wisconsin’s 360 nursing homes for coronavirus-related violations, with some of them incurring multiple violations.
Two-thirds of the violations occurred in August or later, months into the pandemic, showing that even with more time and better access to masks and testing, some nursing homes still failed to take basic measures to prevent the spread of the virus.
Trump appointees in the Department of Health and Human Services last year privately touted their efforts to block or alter scientists’ reports on the coronavirus to more closely align with President Donald Trump’s more optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to newly released documents from congressional investigators.
The documents provide further insight into how senior Trump officials approached last year’s explosion of coronavirus cases in the United States. Even as career government scientists worked to combat the virus, a cadre of Trump appointees was attempting to blunt the scientists’ messages, edit their findings and equip the president with an alternate set of talking points.
Science adviser Paul Alexander wrote to HHS public affairs chief Michael Caputo on Sept. 9, touting two examples of where he said officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had bowed to his pressure and changed language in their reports, according to an email obtained by the House’s select subcommittee on the coronavirus outbreak.
Last June, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki made a big promise to help Black YouTubers.
“We’re committed to doing better as a platform to center and amplify Black voices and perspectives,” she wrote in a blog post, announcing a $100 million fund to support them. “At YouTube, we believe Black lives matter and we all need to do more to dismantle systemic racism.”
But an investigation by The Markup found that YouTube parent company Google blocks advertisers from using dozens of social and racial justice terms, including Black Lives Matter, to find YouTube videos and channels upon which to advertise.
At the same time, Google offered advertisers hundreds of millions of choices for YouTube videos and channels related to White supremacist and other hate terms when we began our investigation, including “all lives matter”—a phrase frequently used as a dismissive rejoinder to Black Lives Matter—and “White lives matter.”
This is the third in a series on Whitewater’s local politics of 2021. There’s a joke that a Democrat told me at the turn of the century about Democrats in Whitewater: “Do you know who’s the head of the Whitewater Democrats? No? Well, neither do we.”
Those days are long past.
The Great Recession (‘07-‘09), its lingering aftermath, and a divisive statewide politics under Walker led to the rise of a more visible group of Democrats in town. The traditional conservatives in the city were shocked, simply shocked to see that residents were protesting Walker, collecting signatures for a recall, or campaigning more openly than before for Democratic candidates.
Politicking that was normal and ordinary for other cities breached traditional Whitewater’s cultural perimeter fence. About a decade ago, a traditional conservative worried himself about “pickets” protesting on a sidewalk, and sought to reassure others that the protest was under the watch of a strong law enforcement presence. Oh, brother.
Now, a decade on, Democrats in the city are more visible than before.
They will self-define as they wish, but I’ll divide the city’s Democrats into two main types: the center-left and progressives. While these terms vary from person to person, the distinction here is between someone like Biden (center-left) and someone like Sanders (progressive). Some ham-handedly misidentify distinct type after type, and fling terms with disregard (e.g., center-left, progressives, socialists, Marxists, Mauritanians, Lithuanians, whatever…). There are obvious & meaningful distinctions.
It’s the center-left that predominates among Democrats in Whitewater (as they do among Democrats in most places).
They are now, and are likely to to remain, a group that can easily recognize its own, more-numerous members.
Whether they develop as a group that acts confidently for its views, advocating and defending locally, will determine their future in the city. (Conservatives in Whitewater, by contrast, consistently assert and defend their own views. They are outspoken. The traditional conservatives speak by habit, the transactionalists by calculation, and the populists by instinct. For decades conservatives predominated in the city, and saw themselves as the eternal, unalterable default politics of the city.)
While the center-left has grown more numerous, and so more visible, it is notably less assertive than any kind of conservative in town. Perhaps a memory of being less common makes them softer spoken and more deferential. It’s evident that the center-left in many other cities, including nearby ones, is more assertive than the center-left in Whitewater.
The local center-left is chiefly uniform in manner and expression, so that (unlike the conservative populists) the messaging of some would not likely undermine the messaging of others (but there’s an exception to mention later in this series).
They face two big challenges in Whitewater.
First, as some among the center-left now have opportunities for boards and commissions that they did not have before, a tendency for compromise and concession makes them vulnerable to conservative transactionalists’ proposals and deal-making. (While many conservative populists consider deals with the center-left inherently unacceptable, the transactionalists know the value of a temporary deal that makes them look fair-minded while concurrently redistributing public resources to their right-leaning cronies.)
Second, they’ve the tendency of many in Whitewater to ignore local political adversaries in the hope that those adversaries will simply go away. Doubtless, some adversaries will fade away. It’s a mistake, however, to think that all of one’s political adversaries will go away. The traditional conservatives lived behind a cultural perimeter fence of their own construction, convinced they could ignore anyone beyond, and it’s brought them only decline.
Friday in Whitewater will see a morning shower with a high of 58. Sunrise is 6:20 AM and sunset 7:31 PM, for 13h 10m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 6.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
The City of Whitewater will hold a Board of Canvass this afternoon at 2:00 PM.
Those involved are, by and large, older and more professional than right-wing protesters we have surveyed in the past. They typically have no ties to existing right-wing groups. But like earlier protesters, they are 95 percent White and 85 percent male, and many live near and among Biden supporters in blue and purple counties.
The charges have, so far, been generally in proportion to state and county populations as a whole. Only Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and Montana appear to have sent more protesters to D.C. suspected of crimes than their populations would suggest.
Nor were these insurrectionists typically from deep-red counties. Some 52 percent are from blue counties that Biden comfortably won. But by far the most interesting characteristic common to the insurrectionists’ backgrounds has to do with changes in their local demographics: Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges.
….
When compared with almost 2,900 other counties in the United States, our analysis of the 250 counties where those charged or arrested live reveals that the counties that had the greatest decline in White population had an 18 percent chance of sending an insurrectionist to D.C., while the counties that saw the least decline in the White population had only a 3 percent chance. This finding holds even when controlling for population size, distance to D.C., unemployment rate and urban/rural location. It also would occur by chance less than once in 1,000 times.
Put another way, the people alleged by authorities to have taken the law into their hands on Jan. 6 typically hail from places where non-White populations are growing fastest.
The political arm of House Republicans is deploying a prechecked box to enroll donors into repeating monthly donations — and using ominous language to warn them of the consequences if they opt out: “If you UNCHECK this box, we will have to tell Trump you’re a DEFECTOR.”
The language appears to be an effort by the National Republican Congressional Committee to increase its volume of recurring donations, which are highly lucrative, while invoking former President Donald J. Trump’s popularity with the conservative base. Those donors who do not proactively uncheck the box will have their credit cards billed or bank accounts deducted for donations every month.
The prechecked recurring box on the N.R.C.C.’s WinRed donation page
The prechecked box is the same tactic and tool that resulted in a surge of refunds and credit card complaints when used by Mr. Trump’s campaign last year, according to an investigation published by The New York Times over the weekend. The Trump operation made the language inside its prechecked boxes increasingly opaque as the election neared. Consumer advocates and user-interface designers said the prechecked boxes were a “dark pattern” intended to deceive Mr. Trump’s supporters.
This is the second in a series on Whitewater’s local politics of 2021. There are three principal kinds of conservatives in Whitewater. There are more kinds than this, of course, as there are many kinds of cats within the family Felidae; it’s enough for now to focus on the most common species within that family.
Whitewater’s three main conservative types: traditional, transactional, and populist. A description of each follows.
Traditionalists. Mostly local born, conservative socially before ‘cultural conservatism’ was a distinguishing term, short-term in outlook, plain in manners, speech, dress, and spending, with expectations of a social hierarchy in which a few town notables decided for the whole community. It is this group – or at least some of its prominent members – who have advanced boosterism in Whitewater as though it were a secular religion. However defending of orthodoxy they may consider themselves, they’re truly heterodox: their theology mixes with their social outlook so that its hard to tell which matters more to them.
Theirs was – and still is for their remaining numbers – a creed in which one accentuated the positive, ignored unpleasant observations or questions, and made sure that there was a (metaphorically) narrow perimeter fence that kept outsiders and outside discussions to a minimum. Babbitt would read like an instruction manual to them. There’s a Japanese expression that reminds of this outlook (although it is sometimes mistakenly attributed as Scandinavian): ‘the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.’
They contend that this imposed order is necessary for the common good.
Along with boosterism, this type has another core belief: conflicts of interest principles do not apply to them. They are certain that, although it may be impossible for others, they can perform multiple, conflicting roles without bias or prejudice. It would never occur to them to doubt their own judgment.
This group wanes a bit more each year. They’re no longer the leading conservative force in Whitewater.
The most zealous of the boosters, however, were not locals at all, but new officials who became converts to the traditionalists’ boosterism so that they might have a place at the table. (Sometimes they weren’t even conservatives, but it was a conservative table setting.)
Newcomers were expected to learn how to conform, so that they might truly arrive in that small social circle. What a shame, truly, that these newcoming men and women did not see — or were not reminded by others – that they arrived from the moment they were born.
Transactionalists. A second kind of conservative – transactional ones – began their advance while the traditionalists were still dominant, took some of the traditionalists’ views, discarded others, and mixed the resulting concoction to promote their particular business interests.
There are few of them, but no group of conservatives in Whitewater has been so skillful. They are deal-and-business oriented, so long as the deals and businesses are theirs.
These are not pro-market men (where markets are voluntary private combinations of capital, labor, goods, and services). They are pro-business men, and while the language of markets may be useful for them, the underlying principles mean little.
Unlike the traditionalists, they’ll gladly form relationships, and adopt the styles, of others if doing so redounds to their advantage. When they no longer see an advantage for themselves, they’ll discard those relationships. They are hardy and adaptable.
They contend that the public money they direct into their preferred capital projects is necessary for the common good.
Like the traditionalists, they do not believe conflict of interest principles should apply to their dealings. Unlike the traditionalists, they are far better at manipulating rules and agency actions to their own advantage. They conceal the extent of their maneuverings by co-opting others, who become provisionally useful to the transactionalists’ ambitions.
Populists. While there have always been populists (of right or left), Whitewater has never been fond of outspoken men and women. Large-scale conservative populism has only flourished in the last ten years, in Whitewater and other places like it. Most of these conservative populists are Trumpists, but not all. In any event, whatever their movement comes to be called, Trumpism will outlast Trump.
They contend that they uphold conservative tradition more truly than the traditionalists and conservative economics more effectively than the transactionalists. They see themselves variously and contradictorily as either facing ruin or assured of success.
Some are new to politics, some have been around. Some are well-read and literate, others not. Unlike conservative traditionalists or transactionalists, who are mostly like other members of their respective groups, the conservative populists vary widely in ability and sophistication.
All the populists share a desire to speak – they’re highly motivated and outspoken – but their varying abilities leave some at risk of confusing or detracting from the messages of others. (When a group is uniform in members’ abilities, some won’t detract from others because they’re all of similar strength.)
The populists are often underestimated. I have been – and am – a critic of these rebranded Trumpists, but have never underestimated them.
These populist conservatives are not deal-makers: they want what they want, on their terms, as soon as they can get it. As the traditionalists fade away, the question among conservatives in Whitewater (and other places) will be whether the deal-makers or the populists dominate right-of-center politics.
Thursday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of 64. Sunrise is 6:22 AM and sunset 7:30 PM, for 13h 07m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 12.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1820, the Venus de Milo is discovered on the Aegean island of Milos.
The opposition is rooted in a mix of religious faith and a longstanding wariness of mainstream science, and it is fueled by broader cultural distrust of institutions and gravitation to online conspiracy theories. The sheer size of the community poses a major problem for the country’s ability to recover from a pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of half a million Americans. And evangelical ideas and instincts have a way of spreading, even internationally.
There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated against Covid-19, making them among the least likely demographic groups to do so, according to the Pew Research Center.
“If we can’t get a significant number of white evangelicals to come around on this, the pandemic is going to last much longer than it needs to,” said Jamie Aten, founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois.
As vaccines become more widely available, and as worrisome virus variants develop, the problem takes on new urgency.
Wayne LaPierre, who positioned the National Rifle Association as an uncompromising lobbying powerhouse over the past three decades, admitted Wednesday that he did not disclose free trips he took on a luxury yacht and acknowledged that some top NRA officials were not informed in advance of his plan to seek bankruptcy protection for the group.
Under questioning on the third day of a federal bankruptcy hearing, LaPierre defended his leadership of the gun rights group and the benefits he and his family received from NRA contractors.
But his testimony undercut arguments by NRA lawyers this week that LaPierre has effectively cleaned up ethical and governance problems since 2018, when the organization was first alerted by New York state officials of possible fiscal mismanagement.
Last year, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) sued the NRA, alleging that LaPierre and three other top officials used the group’s resources for their own personal benefit. She has sought to dissolve the organization.
(No group has done more harm to legitimate Second Amendment rights than LaPierre’s NRA.)
Vance E. Perry, 57, was released from the William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital on Dec. 30, 2017, following treatment for ongoing health problems, including a mental illness known to cause confusion and disorientation. Perry had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was at the hospital for a medication check, according to the family’s attorney.
The Army veteran never made it home. Perry was found dead a day later in a parking garage.
“He couldn’t care for himself. He couldn’t remember anything you told him from one minute to the next. If you told him, ‘Wait here for the cab,’ he wouldn’t remember that you told him that two minutes later,” said attorney Terrence Polich who represented Perry’s family in a lawsuit against the Veterans Affairs Hospital.
Today’s post will summarize the local election results and offer a few observations; subsequent posts in the series will expand on particular, and notable, local political conditions.
For the Whitewater Unified School District, the district saw three active candidates on the ballot for two seats on the board. Unofficial results from Rock, Jefferson, and Walworth counties: Maryann Zimmerman 1354, Larry Kachel 1322, Tom Ganzer (I) 1075.
In the City of Whitewater, for an at-large council seat, unofficial results show Lisa Dawsey-Smith with 708, Dan Machalik with 328. In the fifth aldermanic district, Greg Majkrzak (I) received 62 votes, with Neil Hicks receiving 60. In the first aldermanic district, Carol McCormick (I) ran unopposed, as did Brienne Brown (I) in the third aldermanic district.
The center-left candidate in the statewide race for schools superintendent, Jill Underly, carried Whitewater over the center-right candidate, Deb Kerr, by 842-379.
A few remarks:
Voters won’t help an incumbent who won’t help himself. One expects an incumbent to advance his record confidently and defend himself thoroughly against criticism. People aren’t inclined to do for a politician what he won’t do for himself. Advancing and defending are not assurances of re-election, but their absence makes defeat likely. It has been a tumultuous year; passivity is not a winning response to tumult.
Underly’s Performance. Jill Underly performed meaningfully better in Whitewater than Tom Ganser, the incumbent school board candidate. They were ideologically similar candidates with different local receptions. It’s not broad ideology, but particular local circumstances, that account for their different levels of support.
The election invites consideration (among other topics) of the kinds of conservatives in Whitewater, the city’s center-left, the city’s few progressives, managing Whitewater’s common council, the intermixing of city & district politics, demographics, marketing, and majoritarianism in the school district, and the limits of political change in the city or school district.
Tomorrow: The Kinds of Conservatives in Whitewater.
This is the sixth in a series on Whitewater’s local politics of 2021.