Tuesday, May 23rd at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of Dead for a Dollar @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Western/Thriller
Rated R (violence, language); 1 hour, 47 minutes (2022)
Now for something, totally different: a Western! Chihuahua, New Mexico Territory, 1899. A bounty hunter is hired to find a prominent businessman’s wife being held hostage in Mexico. But, all is not as it seems… A rousing tale of deceit, deception, and gunfights. An excellent cast features Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, and Rachel Brosnahan.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 74. Sunrise is 5:28 AM and sunset 8:14 PM for 14h 45m 57s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 1.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
Assembly Republicans announced several last-minute changes to their local government funding plans Wednesday afternoon, including a bump in the payments that local governments would receive and some slight changes to other requirements they would need to meet.
Just hours later, Assembly Republicans passed the amended bill, AB-245, despite the governor’s statement earlier in the day that there is more negotiation to come on the measure and a call from Democrats for the bill to be sent back to committee. Senate Republicans also have not signed on yet.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) said his caucus will not accept any more changes and that they’ve worked on it in “good faith” for several months. He said the changes made Wednesday were meant to address concerns raised by Gov. Tony Evers.
“Everybody has to take their own position, but we are done negotiating,” Vos said while standing alongside his caucus outside of the Capitol. “We are not going to take changes. We are not going to change the bill substantially. Before us is the deal that we are going to send to our colleagues in the state Senate.”
In a floor session that stretched past 8 p.m., the bill passed 56-36 with Republicans Reps. Chuck Wichgers (R-Muskego), Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) and Scott Allen (R-Waukesha) voting with Democrats against it.
Under the new proposal, almost all local governments would receive a minimum increase of 15% in existing county and municipal aid, instead of the 10% initially proposed, a change Vos said was requested by Evers. Milwaukee would still get the minimum 10% increase.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 65. Sunrise is 5:29 AM and sunset 8:13 PM for 14h 44m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 5.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1673, Louis Jolliet, Father Jacques Marquette, and five French voyageurs departed from the mission of St. Ignace, at the head of Lake Michigan, to reconnoiter the Mississippi River. The party traveled in two canoes throughout the summer of 1673, traveling across Wisconsin, down the Mississippi to the Arkansas River, and back again.
A confident claim: policymakers in the city who do not appreciate that the Great Recession was the most significant socio-economic force in Whitewater in eighty years are either ignorant or incompetent. As it turns out, that also describes many who were in local office from 2007 to 2009, whose responses in that time and for years afterward were ineffectual. Some from that time still trudge on, substituting self-promotion and grandiosity for meaningful accomplishment.
How very sad, indeed tragic, that during the Great Recession (and since!) those who claimed to have a special love for the city, and insisted that they above thousands possessed unmatched skills and insights, were truly the weakest leaders the city could have had.
And look, and look — the Great Recession’s effects persist. Colleges’ problems with declining enrollment, including declining enrollment at UW-Whitewater, are a consequence of demographic changes begun during the Great Recession. Kevin Carey observes that
In four years, the number of students graduating from high schools across the country will begin a sudden and precipitous decline, due to a rolling demographic aftershock of the Great Recession. Traumatized by uncertainty and unemployment, people decided to stop having kids during that period. But even as we climbed out of the recession, the birth rate kept dropping, and we are now starting to see the consequences on campuses everywhere. Classes will shrink, year after year, for most of the next two decades. People in the higher education industry call it “the enrollment cliff.”
Among the small number of elite colleges and research universities — think the Princetons and the Penn States — the cliff will be no big deal. These institutions have their pick of applicants and can easily keep classes full.
For everyone else, the consequences could be dire. In some places, the crisis has already begun. College enrollment began slowly receding after the millennial enrollment wave peaked in 2010, particularly in regions that were already experiencing below-average birth rates while simultaneously losing population to out-migration. Starved of students and the tuition revenue they bring, small private colleges in New England have begun to blink off the map. Regional public universities like Ship [Shippensburg] are enduring painful layoffs and consolidation.
In this and other ways, Whitewater and many other places never truly climbed out of the Great Recession: some effects lingered, and others are now felt as aftershocks.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 79. Sunrise is 5:30 AM and sunset 8:12 PM for 14h 42m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 11.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Wisconsin’s budget forecast dipped slightly Monday, but the latest projection still calls for the state to collect about $6.9 billion more than anticipated by the end of June.
The projection from the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimates that taxes collected over the next two years will be down about $755 million, or about 1% less than the previous forecast made four months ago. Taking into account other short-term cost savings, the surplus shrank from $7.1 billion to nearly $6.9 billion.
The new projection comes as lawmakers, Gov. Tony Evers and others are trying to strike a deal on a new, multibillion-dollar aid plan for local governments ahead of a vote Wednesday in the state Assembly.
The new forecast also comes ahead of votes in coming weeks over tax cuts, funding for K-12 schools and the University of Wisconsin System and a host of other priorities and programs as lawmakers piece together the next two-year state budget.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 70. Sunrise is 5:31 AM and sunset 8:11 PM for 14h 39m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 17.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Alcohol Licensing Committee meets at 6 PM, and the Library Board meets at 6:30 PM.
Twenty-five-year-old Matt Gill grew up in the Fox Valley. After a stint at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, he left Wisconsin last June.
“The reason I left is because I started working remotely after COVID, and my girlfriend got a job in Utah,” he said. “We will probably come back in the future to be closer to our family, but it depends on how her career goes.”
Gill works in information technology, or IT, while his girlfriend is a naturalist educator at a nature center in Utah.
But their story isn’t unique. Over the last decade, the state lost 106,000 people under the age of 26, according to a recent report by Forward Analytics, the research arm of the Wisconsin Counties Association.
If Wisconsin doesn’t improve efforts to attract and retain young people, its labor shortage could get worse by the end of the decade — but there’s no simple solution to address the issue. And, if demographic trends continue, the state’s working-age population could shrink by about 130,000 people by 2030, the report found.
“Attracting and retaining these young people is critical for Wisconsin,” said Dale Knapp, director of Forward Analytics, in a statement last September. “Attracting and retaining them would not only grow the current workforce, it would also help long term as many of these young adults will soon be starting a family and raising the next generation of workers.”
Doing so, however, requires a combination of promoting IT jobs already in the state, recruiting industries young people want to work in and embracing the state’s growing diversity, according to local government officials, researchers and regional economic development organizations.
Dave Egan-Robertson, a demographer for the UW-Madison’s Applied Population Lab, said Wisconsin has traditionally been an importer of high school graduates and an exporter of college graduates.
He said the state generally sees a net gain in people between 15 and 19, but experiences a net loss of individuals between 20 and 24.
Young people have to want to come to Wisconsin and stay in Wisconsin. Young people have to want to come to Whitewater and stay in Whitewater. It’s their wants, and their needs, that will determine whether they’ll stay.
That’s the challenge for everyone else: recognizing that those needs are different, and then being willing to meet those different needs. ‘This is how we’ve always done it’ is the surest expression of how communities keep doing it the wrong way.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 59. Sunrise is 5:32 AM and sunset 8:10 PM for 14h 37m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 27.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1973, Skylab, the United States’ first space station, is launched.
Mather:
Following a day in the life of Demelza Mather, musician and mother, “Mather” is a film told through contrast. 16mm and digital, color and black and white, drums and mums.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 72. Sunrise is 5:33 AM and sunset 8:09 PM for 14h 35m 47s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 38.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1862, the USS Planter, a steamer and gunship, steals through Confederate lines and is passed to the Union, by a southern slave, Robert Smalls, who later was officially appointed as captain, becoming the first black man to command a United States ship.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with intermittent thunderstorms and a high of 73. Sunrise is 5:34 AM and sunset 8:08 PM for 14h 33m 39s of daytime. The moon is in its third quarter with 49.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Under the GOP bill, every community would see at least a 10 percent increase in state funding, but larger cities like Green Bay and Racine receive millions less than they would under the governor’s plan. Some small towns would see increases of several hundred percent, though the total dollars they’d receive would be relatively modest.
“I’m not hearing anything about a big change in the formula,” Novak said of the ongoing negotiations. “But that may change.”
The Republican bill also attaches far more strings for local governments to receive the money. They include:
A ban on local advisory referendums on issues ranging from whether the state should legalize marijuana to whether all-terrain vehicles should be allowed on local roads.
New restrictions on the power of local health officers that would prevent them from unilaterally closing businesses for more than 14 days to control an outbreak or epidemic.
Wednesday, May 17th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of All Quiet on the Western Front @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Action/Drama/War
Rated R (war violence); 2 hours, 28 minutes (2022)
A German retelling of the classic story of a young German soldier’s terrifying experiences and distress on the Western Front during World War 1. Academy Award winner: Best International Film, Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, and Best Production Design. This film will be shown with the original German dialogue and English subtitles.
With the help of 18 domestic cats (8 females, 10 males) with a job history of at least three years in a cat café, experimenters tried four different approaches to getting a cat’s attention: using visual cues, using vocal cues, using both, or using neither (as the control).
This was far from the team’s first rodeo in exploring cat behavior around humans, which meant they approached the experiment with some idea as to what might happen.
“Knowing that cats have developed specific vocalizations for interacting with humans, we hypothesized that they would be keener to approach a human engaging in vocal communication compared to visual communication,” they explained. However, cats aren’t famous for their cooperation.
The results of the different experimental conditions revealed that actually, cats interacted significantly faster in response to visual and bimodal (both visual and vocal) communication compared to vocal cues alone. Interestingly it also showed that failing to acknowledge a cat completely may stress them out, as the most tail wagging was observed in the control condition where the experimenter ignored the cat.
It seems that if you want to catch the attention of a cat on the street, you’ve really got to go for it.
“Taken together, our results suggest that cats display a marked preference for both visual and bimodal cues addressed by non-familiar humans compared to vocal cues only,” concluded the authors. “Our findings offer further evidence for the emergence of human-compatible socio-cognitive skills in cats that favour their adaptation to a human-driven niche.”
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 79. Sunrise is 5:35 AM and sunset 8:06 PM for 14h 31m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 63% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Aquatic and Fitness Center Subcommittee meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1997, Deep Blue, a chess-playing supercomputer, defeats Garry Kasparov in the last game of the rematch, becoming the first computer to beat a world-champion chess player in a classic match format.
And so, and so, the CNN town hall with Trump went as we of Never Trump expected it would: the spectacle of a lying autocrat and his braying supporters. It’s worth watching in full, every word, every gesture, every audience response.
Trump is predictable and so are his extreme supporters. Not a word Trump uttered, not a claim he made, was one he had not made many times before.
As it turns out, this means that a reasonable person can accurately predict Trump’s fate:
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 75. Sunrise is 5:36 AM and sunset 8:05 PM for 14h 29m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 73.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater will hold a Role of Government training at 4:30 PM, the Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM, and the Police & Fire Commission meets at 7 PM. The Whitewater School Board goes into closed session shortly after 6 PM, to resume open session at 7 PM.
On this day in 1869, the first transcontinental railroad, linking the eastern and western United States, is completed at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory with the golden spike.
Of Tammy Baldwin, Bruce Murphy asks Is Baldwin Vulnerable? Or Unbeatable?The question arises (only) because some national pundits have Baldwin on a list of vulnerable U.S. Senators:
According to The Hill, the Capitol insider publication, Wisconsin’s U.S. SenatorTammy Baldwin is “one of the eight most vulnerable Senate Democrats in 2024.”
Wisconsin, the publication warned, “remains a crucial battleground state with a propensity to swing wildly from one election to another.” I guess we’re a little wacky here in Wiscoland.
CNNrated the seat number six on its list of the 10 senate seats “most likely to flip,” cautioning the competitiveness of Wisconsin “shouldn’t be underestimated.”
Murphy correctly notes that, by contrast, those with a better grasp of Wisconsin politics (rather than list-makers looking to fill out a card) recognize that Baldwin is in a strong position:
Baldwin [is] currently looking a good deal less vulnerable than some of those rankings suggest. “It was telling that [Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell recently mentioned four Senate races he is focused on,” [pollster Charles] Franklin noted, “and did not include Wisconsin on the list.”
Murphy’s own assessment is good — Mike Gallagher would be a stronger opponent for Baldwin but he likely won’t run; Tom Tiffany will be a much easier opponent for Baldwin and he likely will run.
(Tiffany, slathered in insurrection, would be a worse version of Leah Vukmir. It would be as though central casting sent over the nuttiest, dog-crap-quality opponent they could find to run statewide against Baldwin. Someone should check if Baldwin has a relative in the WISGOP who’s pushing Tiffany as a choice.)
In a post from two weeks ago, this libertarian blogger assessed Baldwin as the prohibitive favorite. See Baldwin as the Prohibitive Favorite.
