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Business, CDA, City, Daily Bread, Development, Local Government

Daily Bread for 9.23.24: Six Points on a Supermarket in Whitewater

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 69. Sunrise is 6:44, and sunset is 6:49, for 12 hours, 5 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous, with 63.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 5:30 PM. The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 6 PM, and the full board in regular session at 7 PM.

On this day in 1846, astronomers Urbain Le Verrier, John Couch Adams, and Johann Gottfried Galle collaborate on the discovery of Neptune.

Whitewater once again has a stand-alone supermarket, and like so many residents, this libertarian blogger is pleased to see ALDI in town. Note well: the public policy of recruiting a supermarket is not the matter of a single business, but of how local public officials have managed through public bodies (like the Whitewater Community Development Authority) under public laws and principles. However hard it has been, and remains, for Whitewater’s declining old guard to grasp, each of them (or any of us) is no less — but no more — than 1 of 15,000 in the city.1

Of a supermarket, consider these two claims:

From FREE WHITEWATER on 9.19.24:

Unquestionably right. The old Sentry closed in ’15, and Whitewater went years fumbling with old-guard CDA attempts to bring a dedicated supermarket. They accomplished nothing of the kind. 

ALDI is in Whitewater because the city has a new municipal administration that brought ALDI here.

As part of a post at the Whitewater Community Foundation’s Banner on 9.20.24 :

Larry Kachel indicated that the prior property owner [DLK related] had been in discussion with ALDI beginning in 2017, but the company had concluded that the traffic counts and population did not meet their minimum criteria. Kachel hastened to add that the late Jim Allen’s persistent efforts over many years to attract a store should also be recognized. Tom Howard, ALDI’s regional real estate developer, told the Banner that the city became a viable possibility for a store as a result of the success that the company has recently enjoyed with other stores in rural areas. Jon Kachel indicated that discussions have taken place with a variety of prospects regarding the property located between ALDI and Culver’s, but nothing has come together yet.

I’ll offer six remarks:

First, the City of Whitewater — through its taxpayers — had to spend $500,000 of public money to remediate — to clean up — the site of the prior private property owner, DLK Enterprises. In the language of a consultant’s assessment:

The existing structures on the property will be demolished and the site remediated, including the removal of asbestos and lead in the buildings. This cost is significant and potentially cost prohibitive for any new development.

I’m glad the City of Whitewater accepted this proposal, yet one should be clear about what this means: ordinary people had to pay to clean up the prior, local owner’s mess. The local business did not pay this money — ordinary people did. This municipal administration, under law, through the Community Development Authority and the Whitewater Common Council, had to pay this money up front to make the deal possible.

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See Letter on Developer Agreement (two pages) and Development Agreement (forty-three pages) that I received in June through a public records request.2

Second, It seems likely, if not certain, that the publicly-funded remediation has made the remaining area more suitable for sale. (The Brothers Kachel are free to thank the taxpayers of Whitewater at their earliest convenience.)

Third, and admittedly, the Banner‘s paragraph is a poor specimen on which to rely. There’s nothing quoted here; it’s a conversation or conversations related from one person to another, as though people were talking along a fence line. There isn’t even a claim to word-for-word accuracy: it’s an account of what someone “indicated,” not what someone said verbatim. It’s also told from a narrow perspective in which every reader should know the local people mentioned and in which the local men cited should be taken at face value3.

Fourth, the corporate real estate developer for ALDI, at least as recounted here, reasonably states the obvious about why ALDI would pick this city (once the property was cleaned up, of course). That statement says nothing about the many prior, fruitless local efforts to find a supermarket.

Fifth, I have no idea why someone from ALDI, whether in Batavia, Illinois, or an office in Germany, would want to be pulled into a discussion that’s more about local public policy over the last generation than ALDI (or whether he was even told accurately what the local issues are before he was asked to comment). ALDI’s corporate representative is presumably unfamiliar with the public policy mistakes at yesteryear’s Whitewater Community Development Authority, or the controversial past actions of Whitewater CDA (and the role of local landlords on that body). See Meeper Technology Loan Investigation Memo, professional reporting from WhitewaterWise, City officials: Internal investigation finds CDA engaged in ‘lack of proper documentation, communication and transparency’ when it ‘wrote off’ more than $750,000 in loans, and blogging from FREE WHITEWATER, Meeper Technology Loan Investigation, Memo and Documents.

Sixth, equally puzzling is why anyone at the Whitewater Community Foundation’s Banner would look for answers from ALDI before seeking public documents from his or her own city. The foundational issue is about years’ long local policy to seek to a supermarket, and conduct at the Whitewater CDA across a decade’s time, not any given business arriving recently.

What portion of this libertarian blogger’s contention — ALDI is in Whitewater because the city has a new municipal administration that brought ALDI here — is accurate?

All of it, every last word.

I’m glad ALDI is here — one should be clear about how she’s here.

  1. Denoted as a fraction, these aged men of the old guard would each look like this: 1/15,000 or 0.000067
    ↩︎
  2. The request, submitted and received under Wis. Stat. §§ 19.31–19.39, has more than one use.
    ↩︎
  3. The Banner‘s author writes in his paragraph with a credulousness that suggests no awareness or no appreciation of the challenges to the modernization — normalization, truly — of local government over the last two years. ↩︎

Business, City, Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.19.24: Whitewater Again Has a Dedicated Supermarket

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with a high of 84. Sunrise is 6:39, and sunset is 6:56, for 12 hours and 17 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous, with 96.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1796, George Washington’s Farewell Address is printed across America as an open letter to the public.

After years without a dedicated supermarket, Whitewater has an ALDI @ 1380 W. Main Street.

There was a ribbon-cutting this morning.

Before today’s grand opening, I stopped in last night and found ALDI clean, well-organized, with wide aisles. (I had never been inside an ALDI before, although we have ordered from the Janesville location through Instacart.)

Quite sharp, and a welcome business addition to Whitewater.

Updated, morning of 9.19: I added a reply to a post comment. I’ve also reproduced that reply below:

Unquestionably right. The old Sentry closed in ’15, and Whitewater went years fumbling with old-guard CDA attempts to bring a dedicated supermarket. They accomplished nothing of the kind. 

ALDI is in Whitewater because the city has a new municipal administration that brought ALDI here.

Bear sends group running after climbing out of car’s window:

Books, Business, Daily Bread, Education, Facebook, Fact Checking, Populists, Reading, Reasoning

Daily Bread for 9.5.24: Formation Hasn’t Stopped Mattering

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 81. Sunrise is 6:25, and sunset is 7:20, for 12h 55m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 5.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1905, the Treaty of Portsmouth, mediated by President Theodore Roosevelt, ends the Russo-Japanese War.

Three years ago, during the pandemic, pondering the social media scene, I posted on Formation, General:

Some level of formation, of structure and learning, is needed to make sense of a difficult subject.

Come now the conservative populists, who are convinced that there is no field, no topic, that requires more effort than their own ‘common sense.’  They ask — they demand — that others who have committed years of formal or self-study recognize unconsidered or ill-considered populist opinions as valid as any other opinion.

They sometimes simply don’t know what they don’t know. Their ignorance of substantive study is matched by their arrogance in insisting that substantive study doesn’t matter.  Someone might tell these conservative populists that arrogance invites Nemesis, but it would take some reading for them to make sense of those cautionary words.

Why have medicine, for example when any populist can spend a few moments on Facebook and diagnose any condition? (I’ve argued, for example, against amateur epidemiology, even when well-intentioned. See Whitewater’s Local Politics 2021 — COVID-19: Skepticism and Rhetoric.)

Modern medicine, architecture, or materials science requires dedicated study. Anyone, in any era, might have said he or she possessed ‘common sense.’ And yet, and yet, those people from those earlier times often lived short lives in filth and misery.

The conservative populists enjoy lives in an era of technological and scientific accomplishment dependent on the efforts of the very experts they denigrate.

When common sense fails for these populists, when they misread medical texts and legal documents, they make the excuse that the topics were too hard or too confusing for anyone to understand.  No and no again: the texts and documents were too hard only for those who had not committed the proper amount of study to the topic.

The lack of formation —of a learned foundation in politics, history, science, or even ordinary English usage — leaves the conservative populists unimpressive to anyone outside their circle.

Still true, years after the pandemic.

Underwater bridge gives clues to ancient human arrival:

Mallorca is the largest of the Balearic islands and the sixth-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, but despite its size and location research suggests that it was among the last Mediterranean islands to be settled by humans. But exactly when people arrived on the island is a subject of much debate, with current estimates placing it at around 4,400 years ago. However, an ancient stone bridge in a flooded cave may call that timeline into question. By dating mineral deposits in the cave scientists have given a new window for when they suggest humans actually reached the island — at least 1,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Business, Confidence Schemes, Daily Bread, Dog-Crap Company, Trump

Daily Bread for 9.4.24: Trump Media, Nothing But a Meme Stock, Keeps Falling

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 6:24, and sunset is 7:22, for 12h 58m 04s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission holds a Training/Review of Open Meeting Laws & Visioning Session at 6 PM.

On this day in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford University, found Google.

NBC reports that Trump Media, owner of Trump’s money-losing Truth Social venture, has “fallen to its lowest levels since the company started trading publicly following a merger in March. Former President Donald Trump and other major investors will be allowed to sell their shares in the Truth Social parent company later this month.”

Like his political ideology, Trump’s business ventures are gaudy confidence schemes.

The real reason the morning train was delayed:

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Business, Daily Bread, Development, Foxconn, Technology, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 6.25.24: Wisconsin Tries to Leave Foxconn (and Its Misguided Boosters) Behind

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny in the afternoon with a high of 89. Sunrise is 5:18 and sunset 8:37 for 15h 19m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 84.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1950, the Korean War begins when North Korea invades South Korea.

Scott Cohn reports Wisconsin wants to be a tech mecca. After Foxconn’s broken promises, the state says this time is for real. The story comes in three principal parts: then, now, and the future.

Then:

In 2017, then-President Trump and Wisconsin’s governor at the time, Scott Walker, announced that Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn had chosen Wisconsin for a huge manufacturing and technology complex, designing and building giant video displays.

The company promised to spend $10 billion and hire 13,000 new employees for a new campus in Mount Pleasant, about 30 miles south of Milwaukee. At a groundbreaking the following year, Trump said the new facility would be “the eighth wonder of the world.”

Wisconsin pledged more than $3 billion in state and local subsidies — by far the biggest such deal in the state’s history — and Walker proclaimed that the region would henceforth be known as “Wisconn Valley.” But it soon became clear that most of that was hype.

Within months, Foxconn began scaling back its plans, citing labor costs. As the company missed hiring target after hiring target, Walker, a Republican, lost his reelection bid in 2018 to Democrat Tony Evers. Evers’ administration renegotiated the Foxconn incentive package, but not before the state and local governments spent hundreds of millions of dollars on infrastructure improvements and land acquisition, displacing more than 100 homes in the process.

Now:

There are some glimmers of hope in Mount Pleasant. In May, Microsoftannounced it was increasing its investment in Mount Pleasant. The company announced last year it would spend $1 billion to build a data center on land that had been set aside for Foxconn. Now, the company said it would more than triple that investment to $3.3 billion, and that the data center would focus on artificial intelligence, adding more than 2,000 permanent jobs.

Racine County Board Chairman Tom Kramer, who came into office after the Foxconn deal was signed but dealt with much of the fallout, said the Microsoft deal proves that all the spending on infrastructure was not such a bad idea after all, even though the site was built for a massive factory but will get a much smaller data center instead.

The uncertain future:

[Mount Pleasant resident Kelly] Gallaher bristles when people suggest that all’s well that ends well in Mount Pleasant.

“We’ve watched our village go through a few years of desperation,” she said. “One of the worst aspects is the cynicism that it has caused among people.”

She said that cynicism extends to both Microsoft and the Tech Hub.

“The idea that we’re going to put our faith in our future in one company, I think should make every community pause,” she said.

Gallaher’s response is what reasonable people can and should expect after past policymakers talked big but delivered small, when they fumbled through project after project, and bemoaned any critique of their development failures.

See also A Sham News Story on Foxconn and FREE WHITEWATER‘s dedicated category on FOXCONN.

How to keep your dog cool in the heat:

AI, Business, Daily Bread, Technology

Daily Bread for 6.22.24: How Nvidia Surpassed Microsoft and Apple to Become the World’s Most Valuable Company

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Good morning.

Saturday will be cloudy with afternoon thundershowers and a high of 84. Sunrise is 5:17 and sunset 8:37 for 15h 20m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1943, McCarthy Breaks Leg in Drunken Accident:

Future Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy breaks his leg during a drunken Marine Corps initiation ceremony, despite a press release and other claims that he was hurt in “military action.” Although nicknamed “Tail Gunner Joe”, McCarthy never was a tail gunner, but instead served at a desk as an intelligence officer. In 1951, he applied for medals, including the Distinguished Flying Cross, awarded to those who had flown at least 25 combat missions. The Marine Corps has records of only 11 combat flights McCarthy flew on, and those were described as local “milk run” flights. Many of McCarthy’s claims were disputed by political opponents as well as journalists.

On this day in 1944, President Roosevelt signs into law the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the G.I. Bill.

How Nvidia Surpassed Microsoft and Apple to Become World’s Most Valuable Company:

Nvidia’s rise to becoming a $3 trillion happened in record time. The chip company makes the high-end computer chips that power AI tools like ChatGPT and the cutting-edge data centers that more and more companies need access to. But now rivals like AMD and Intel are trying to catch up. Can they take market share from Nvidia, or has the current leader in AI chips gotten too far in the lead? CNBC’s Kif Leswing breaks it all down.

Creating Masterpieces for Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and The Pope:

Embark on the captivating journey of Kim Young-Jun and Gabe Sin as they revive the ancient Korean art of Najeonchilgi. Kim, a former financier turned master craftsman, has created intricate mother-of-pearl masterpieces for icons like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and even designed a chair for the Pope. Alongside him is Gabe Sin, a visionary hairstylist who draws inspiration from these timeless designs, integrating them into elaborate creations showcased on the cover of Vogue. Discover how Kim and Gabe are redefining Korean art for the modern world, blending heritage with innovation in mesmerizing ways.

Business, China, Daily Bread, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 4.23.24: Becoming Accustomed Again to Having Adversaries

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 67. Sunrise is 5:58 and sunset 7:47 for 13h 49m 22s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.8 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 5 PM.

On this day in 1985, Coca-Cola changes its formula and releases New Coke. The response is overwhelmingly negative, and the original formula is back on the market in less than three months.

People should desire (and libertarians, among others, do desire) peaceful relations with nations across the globe. It’s been years since Americans understood through consensus that we do have adversaries — enemies — abroad. Ronald Reagan more than once accurately observed that it takes two to tango. We may want good relations with the Chinese or Russian peoples, but dictatorships in both those nations have other desires, ambitions, and plans.

As our forefathers had to do, so we, too, must steel ourselves against the schemes and depredations of others. Wisconsin daily feels the reach of a foreign dictatorship, as an ongoing Investigation into China’s unfair trade practices supports Wisconsin shipbuilding:

U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin said a new federal investigation into China’s shipbuilding practices is the first step toward addressing the country’s alleged unfair trade practices and to protecting the industry in Wisconsin and across the country.

Baldwin held an event Monday at Fincantieri Ace Marine in Green Bay to highlight the investigation. The company builds vessels for the U.S. Navy and commercial customers at the Wisconsin shipyard. She was joined by officials from the United Steelworkers union and the nonprofit Alliance for American Manufacturing.

She said the United States Trade Representative is leading the investigation, which will collect data about trade practices that allow Chinese shipbuilders to undercut domestic manufacturers.

….

Last year, China built more than 1,000 commercial vessels, while the United States produced fewer than 10, Baldwin said.

That imbalance, she said, drove her to push the Biden Administration to take action to address the issue.

“For years, China has gotten away with tilting the playing field, and it’s American workers and our national security that are paying the price,” Baldwin said. “We cannot let China eat our lunch. That’s why I’ve been so proud to work alongside the steelworkers and other workers across the country to say enough is enough and call on the Biden administration to take action.”

Often, one does not choose an adversary — it is the adversary itself that imposes a hostile relationship.

So be it.

Dozens of aftershocks rattle Taiwan overnight:

Business, CDA, City, Conflicts of Interest, Daily Bread, Development, Local Government, Special Interests

Daily Bread for 2.1.24: Private Company, Public Company, Public Agency

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 Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 47. Sunrise is 7:08 and sunset 5:08 for 9h 59m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 63.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Ethics Committee meets at 5 PM. 

On this day in 1942, Voice of America, the official external radio and television service of the United States government, begins broadcasting with programs aimed at areas controlled by the Axis powers.

There’s a difference between a private company, a public company, and a public agency. Ordinary people understand this difference, but special interests conflate these three different arrangements to maximize their influence over wholly public agencies. 

First the distinctions, with help from Matt Levine’s description of Elon Musk’s influence on private companies as against public companies. A private company is held individually or by shareholders with shares that do not trade on a public exchange. A public company is a private enterprise with shares that do trade on a public exchange (e.g., the New York Stock Exchange). Levine writes of Musk’s considerable leeway with a purely private company like SpaceX:

At all but one of his companies, he could stroll into the boardroom, throw a big bag of ketamine down onto the table, and say “I need the company to spend $50 million to build a giant golden statue of me riding a rocket,”1 and

  1. the board would be like “yes definitely let’s do it,”

  2. the board members themselves probably are, or represent, big shareholders of the company, and as shareholders they would happily go along with the statue plan to keep Musk happy and dedicated to their company,

  3. the other shareholders, the ones without board seats, are probably even bigger Musk fans, and are probably working on their own Musk statues in their garages anyway, so they’ll be fine with the company spending their money on a corporate gold statue, and

  4. nobody else really has any standing to complain.

And so in fact when Musk went to SpaceX and asked to borrow $1 billion until payday so that he could buy Twitter Inc., the board was like “here’s the check, we’ve left the amount blank, take whatever you need.” And, look, was there a Wall Street Journal article saying “hey that’s weird”? There was; it was weird. Did anything come of that? No. SpaceX could just do that: Musk controls SpaceX, the board loves him, the shareholders love him, nobody in a position to complain has any complaints, and everybody else is in no position to

SpaceX is a bigger version of many private companies: these companies may have one or more owners, and those owners may be shareholders, but those shares are not available for ready trading by the general public. These owners have considerable leeway. 

By contrast, a public company is also a private enterprise, but it offers shares on a public market to which the general public has access during trading hours. Trading on public markets comes with public — governmental — rules & regulations. (There’s a Securities and Exchange Commission, after all.) Levine explains how rules for a public company like Tesla limit Musk:

Tesla is a public company, which means that, even if 99% of shareholders love him, if 1% of shareholders don’t, they can sue.3 They can say: “Look, the board has a fiduciary duty to manage the company on behalf of all shareholders. Giving Musk a giant golden statue of himself is not necessary, or a good business decision, or fair to the shareholders; it’s just the controlling shareholder fulfilling his own whims with corporate money, and an ineffective board of directors giving him whatever he wants. He should have to give it back.” And they will go to court, and the shareholders will make those arguments, and the board will say — accurately! — “no you see giving him this giant golden statue is necessary for us to get more of his incredibly valuable time and attention,” and that will sound bad in court. And then a judge will get to decide whether the deal was fair to shareholders or not, and if it was not, the judge can make Musk pay the company back. Even if the board, and 99% of the shareholders, want him to keep it!

Levine’s description of Musk ends here, understandably, because Levine is writing about Musk’s role in private and public companies. An analysis of these companies is distinct — as Levine knows intuitively — from public agencies and governmental bodies. 

Special interests, however, don’t see it that way: they look at public bodies (a town council, a school board, or a community development agency) and expect that they can manipulate and control that public institution like a private company. They see a public body as another of their private possessions. 

No, and no again: formed only by statutes and ordinances, maintained only under statutes, ordinances, and publicly-adopted policies, these councils, boards, and agencies are public from alpha to omega. 

Special interest men in Whitewater take public bodies and illegitimately and wrongfully refashion them through catspaws into versions of private companies. In this way, they place their hands around a public agency and squeeze until it does their private bidding.  

Which appointed officials come along matters less to the health of this community than that special interests meet their match from among residents until attrition and exhaustion take their toll on that scheming faction. 

What’s in the Night Sky February 2024: 

America, Business, Daily Bread, Food

Daily Bread for 12.18.23: So, What Did Happen to Wonder Bread?

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 Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 32. Sunrise is 7:20 and sunset 4:22 for 9h 01m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 35.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater School Board enters closed session shortly after 5:30 PM and returns to open session at 7 PM. Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM. 

 On this day in 1865, US Secretary of State William Seward proclaims the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, prohibiting slavery throughout the United States.

What Happened To Wonder Bread?:

Wonder Bread’s annual sales sits around half a billion dollars for its owner Flowers Foods, despite healthier alternatives like whole grains and sourdough dominating the fragmented U.S. bread industry. While consumer preferences started shifting away from white bread starting in the 1960s, Wonder Bread still enjoys a 94% brand awareness according to Flowers Foods. Watch the video above to learn more about how the once beloved American staple has stuck around a century later.

Chapters:

00:00 — Introduction

01:45 — White bread in America

04:40 — Saving the brand

06:10 — Stable contributor

Small owl living in a family’s Christmas tree goes unnoticed for four days:

Bad Ideas, Business, City, Confidence Schemes, Corporate Welfare, Daily Bread, Dog-Crap Company, Failure, Foxconn, Innovation Center/Tech Park

Daily Bread for 8.16.23: Foxconn Bails on “Innovation Centers”… Of Course.

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Good morning. Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 6:03 AM and sunset 7:54 PM for 13h 51m 52s of daytime. The moon is new with none of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1930, the first color sound cartoon, Fiddlesticks, is released by Ub Iwerks.…

Business, Common Council, Culture, Daily Bread, Entitlement, Freedom of Speech, Lobbyists, Local Government, Populists, Public Meetings, Regulatory Capture, Special Interests

Daily Bread for 2.24.23 More Convenient than a Cat’s Meows from the Rafters

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Good morning. Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 23. Sunrise is 6:37 AM and sunset 5:38 PM for 11h 01m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 22.8% of its visible disk illuminated.  On this day in 1803, in Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court of the United States establishes the…