Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 83. Sunrise is 6:16, and sunset is 7:34, for 13h 17m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 27.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Lakes Advisory Committee meets at 4:30 PM, and the Finance Committee meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1830, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad‘s new Tom Thumb steam locomotive races a horse-drawn car, presaging steam’s role in U.S. railroads.
Screenshot: RFK Jr. explains that whole dead bear cub incident Screenshot: Stein impersonates a homegrown candidate in campaign video
And look, and look: in an alternative history of our time, there might have been a legitimate Green Party candidate fighting for environmental issues, etc. That’s not Jill Stein. She is Putin’s catspaw: easily a fellow traveler, if not a fifth columnist. Her presence on the ballot serves only to siphon votes from the Democratic candidate. In this way, the right judicial decision (to keep her on the ballot) turns out to be the wrong political decision (Stein’s candidacy serves only those at home and abroad who would weaken American liberal democracy).
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 94. Sunrise is 6:15, and sunset is 7:36, for 13h 23m 08s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 37.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1832, Black Hawk, leader of the Sauk tribe of Native Americans, surrenders to U.S. authorities, ending the Black Hawk War.
The idea for this invention began at Kleinsteuber’s Machine Shop in Milwaukee in the late 1860s. A mechanical engineer by training, Sholes, along with associates Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soulé, spent hours tinkering with the idea. They mounted the key of an old telegraph instrument on a base and tapped down on it to hit carbon & paper against a glass plate. This idea was simple, but in 1868 the mere idea that type striking against paper might produce an image was a novelty. Sholes proceeded to construct a machine to reproduce the entire alphabet. The prototype was sent to Washington as the required Patent Model. This original model still exists at the Smithsonian. Investor James Densmore provided the marketing impetus that eventually brought the machine to the Remington Arms Company. Although Remington mass-marketed his typewriter beginning in 1874, it was not an instant success. A few years later, improvements made by Remington engineers gave the machine its market appeal and sales skyrocketed. [Source: Wisconsin Lore and Legends, p.41]
Last week, advocates for the Green Party expressed alarm that the Wisconsin Supreme Court asked that political party to file briefs in a lawsuit from the Wisconsin Democrats aimed at keeping the Greens off the November ballot. Wisconsin’s high court gave the Greens a tight deadline, leading the party to contend it was being treated unfairly.
Yesterday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court dismissed the suit aimed at keeping the Greens off the ballot. The Greens misunderstood the purpose of the tight deadline to file briefs. Henry Redman reports that
The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a lawsuit from the Democratic National Committee challenging Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s placement on the ballot in November.
With just one day before the Wisconsin Elections Commission decides which candidates will be allowed on the ballot this fall, the Court moved quickly in the case, asking parties late last week to file briefs in response to the Democrats’ petition to the Court before the Green Party of Wisconsin even had a lawyer.
The Democrats had previously filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) against the Green Party’s candidate for president, Jill Stein, alleging she should not be placed on the state’s presidential ballot because the Green Party of Wisconsin does not have official state officers who can serve as presidential electors.
The WEC denied the Democrats’ complaint on a technicality, prompting the party to bring the lawsuit to the Supreme Court.
Earlier this year, the WEC voted to allow the Green Party onto the ballot because it got at least 1% of the vote in a statewide election in 2022.
(Emphasis added.)
The Wisconsin Supreme Court set an accelerated briefing deadline not to burden the Greens but to dispose of the complaint against them before the Elections Commission meeting.
Admittedly, there’s something laughable about an established political party (Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has been running for president, while simping for Putin, for years) whose Wisconsin Party officials whine that
According to Michael J. White, co-chair of the Wisconsin Green Party, his party had no legal representation in Wisconsin when he was notified of the court order.
“That just strikes me as a little bit unreasonable,” he told WPR on Thursday afternoon.
Pete Karas, the state Green Party’s elections chair, said they found a lawyer “around midnight” after “a zillion phone calls.” That lawyer is Milwaukee-area attorney Michael Dean.
The next morning, the party sent out a mass email to its followers asking for donations.
“Lawyers are expensive, and we need your help today to ensure we can pay for these much-needed legal fees,” the mailer said.
Funny that the Green Party didn’t have a Wisconsin lawyer beforehand. One would have expected a better level of preparation from a 2024 vote-siphoning operation.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 76. Sunrise is 6:10, and sunset is 7:44, for 13h 34m 01s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 88.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1902, Theodore Roosevelt becomes the first President of the United States to make a public appearance in an automobile.
On this day in 1920, native Milwaukee runner Arlie Schardt won a gold medal in the 3,000-meter team race at the Olympic Games in Antwerp, Belgium. Schardt was part of a three-man team that included Hal Brown and Ivan Dresser.
These stories aren’t equally useful, and it’s easy to see why. Gilbert wants to highlight continued decline of Democrats in rural counties, but the story head doesn’t match the story itself:
The Democratic Party’s geographic foothold has shrunk in Wisconsin, amid a plunge in support among rural voters in the central, western and northern counties.
The new election map has a lot less “blue” than the old one.
That hasn’t stopped Democrats from winning big elections, which it has done with regularity in the Trump era. Winning statewide races is not about winning the most counties or the greatest acreage, but the most votes.
(Emphasis added.)
Those areas where one finds the most votes are also where most people live, and where legislative districts are situated by population. The headline says trouble (Democrats have to ‘grapple’) but results in statewide race after statewide race say otherwise.
The decline among Democrats in low-population areas is offset by gains among Democrats in areas of high population. Bruce Thompson writes:
The Milwaukee area is following the national trend in which close-in suburbs become increasingly Democratic, while more rural areas become more Republican. Though there are many theories on what is driving this trend, it still remains something of a mystery. But clearly the trend is changing two of the three WOW counties.
The increasingly blue Milwaukee area has a greater population than the rural counties that Gilbert over-emphasizes.
Two analyses, Gilbert’s and Thompson’s, but only the latter presents the key trends perceptively all the way through from head to tail.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 78. Sunrise is 6:06, and sunset is 7:50, for 13h 44m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
UW-La Crosse political science professor Anthony Chergosky considers the rejection of two proposed state constitutional amendments and outcomes of two congressional races in the 2024 partisan primary.
Thursday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 76. Sunrise is 6:02, and sunset is 7:55, for 13h 52m 30s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 78.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1944, Operation Dragoon begins as Allied forces land in southern France.
In suburban Milwaukee, state Rep. Janel Brandtjen, R-Menomonee Falls, lost to state Sen. Dan Knodl, R-Germantown, in a race for the recently redrawn 24th Assembly District.
And in eastern Wisconsin’s new 20th Senate District, former state Rep. Timothy Ramthun of Campbellsport was defeated by state Sen. Dan Feyen of Fond du Lac.
….
Brandtjen lost despite being endorsed by former President Donald Trump ahead of the primary. Brandtjen has promoted false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and has echoed calls for the results to be overturned in Trump’s favor.
These two defeats are not enough, but they are something. Some days one settles for something.
Stonehenge, the Neolithic stone circle on Salisbury Plain in southern England, has captivated archaeologists, antiquarians and sightseers for centuries. For decades researchers have tried to find the origins of the stones, with some being sourced to the surrounding landscape and some from the Preseli Hills in Wales. But new geochemical analysis of the Altar Stone, a partially buried slab of sandstone at the center of the stone circle, suggests that this stone originally came from the Orcadian Basin in Scotland, over 700 kilometers away.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 82. Sunrise is 6:01, and sunset is 7:56, for 13h 55m 05s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 68.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill sign the Atlantic Charter stating postwar aims.
Two proposed Wisconsin constitutional amendments on the ballot yesterday failed decisively:
Statewide, Question 1 (Prohibit Legislature from Delegating Appropriations) lost 57.4% to 42.6% and Question 2 (Require Legislative Approval for Federal Funds) lost 57.5 to 42.5%.
In Whitewater, the questions had a similar fate (combining totals from Jefferson and Walworth counties):
Question 1 (Prohibit Legislature from Delegating Appropriations) lost 68.8% to 31.2% and Question 2 (Require Legislative Approval for Federal Funds) lost 68.6 to 31.4%.
See also No on Amendment Questions 1 and 2 (“Questions written nebulously, and presented to voters on a month of traditionally lower turnout, deserve rejection. Government, and the questions it presents, are meant to be more than semantic trickery”).
Matthew Dominick, a flight engineer on the International Space Station, shared on Monday (August 12) a captivating timelapse showcasing the moon setting among vibrant red and green auroras.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 87. Sunrise is 5:45, and sunset is 8:16, for 14h 30m 58s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 24 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1981, as many as 50,000 demonstrators, mostly women and children, took to the streets in Lodz to protest food ration shortages in Communist Poland.
It’s become a common tactic in Wisconsin (and other states) for a resident to challenge voting rights on narrow procedural grounds. The consequence of this approach is to burden a lawful means of voting until residents are dissuaded from voting by those means. One lawsuit of this kind was dismissed Monday in Circuit Court. Todd Richmond reports Judge dismisses lawsuit challenging absentee voting procedure in battleground Wisconsin:
A Wisconsin judge dismissed a lawsuit Monday that challenged absentee voting procedures, preventing administrative headaches for local election clerks and hundreds of thousands of voters in the politically volatile swing state ahead of fall elections.
The ruling stems from a lawsuit Thomas Oldenberg, a voter from Amberg, Wisconsin, filed in February. Oldenberg argued that the state Elections Commission hasn’t been following a state law that requires voters who electronically request absentee ballots to place a physical copy of the request in the ballot return envelope. Absentee ballots without the request copy shouldn’t count, he maintained.
Commission attorneys countered in May that language on the envelope that voters sign indicating they requested the ballot serves as a copy of the request. Making changes now would disrupt long-standing absentee voting procedures on the eve of multiple elections and new envelopes can’t be designed and reprinted in time for the Aug. 13 primary and Nov. 5 general election, the commission maintained.
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 75. Sunrise is 5:33 and sunset 8:28 for 14h 54m 29s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 90.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1968, Intel is founded in Mountain View, California.
These interactive maps show every candidate listed on primary ballots in August this year as certified by the Wisconsin Elections Commission. They also include additional information about some of the Democratic and Republican primary races as well as information about the most competitive districts identified by a Marquette Law School analysis done by John Johnson, a research fellow in the Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education. In his analysis, Johnson used the results of the 2022 state legislative elections to predict which districts will have close races under the 2024 maps.
2024 Wisconsin State Senate Primary Races (‘Map reflects candidates who will be on the August primary ballots. Odd numbered Senate districts (grey) are not up for election this year’ [link opens in another window]
Watch this quick clip of a butterfly chasing a White-vented Plumeleteer above the platform feeder in Panama. Stay until the end to see a slow-motion replay of the events. It’s unclear exactly what led to this interaction. Butterflies and hummingbirds often compete for the same food sources, and there’s research to suggest both hummingbirds and various insect species will display interspecific territorial behavior near food sources.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 81. Sunrise is 5:27 and sunset 8:33 for 15h 06m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 20.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Lakes Advisory Committee meets at 4:30 PM.
General Henry Atkinson and his troops built Fort Koshkonong after being forced backwards from the bog area of the “trembling lands” in their pursuit of Black Hawk. The Fort, later known as Fort Atkinson, was described by Atkinson as “a stockade work flanked by four block houses for the security of our supplies and the accommodation of the sick.” It was also on this date that Atkinson discharged a large number of Volunteers from his army in order to decrease stress on a dwindling food supply and to make his force less cumbersome. One of the dismissed volunteers was future president, Abraham Lincoln, whose horse was stolen in Cold Spring, Wisconsin, and was forced to return to New Salem, Illinois by foot and canoe.
After years of scheming, Speaker Robin Vos finds himself battling the conspiracy theorists (like Michael Gableman) that he once hired and encouraged. Yet, they are conspiracy theorists at the core, men and women with false, indeed crackpot, notions.
At the event, hosted jointly by the Milwaukee Press Club, Rotary Club of Milwaukee and Wisconsin Alliance for Civic Trust, Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe, Milwaukee Elections Commission Director Paulina Gutierrez and former Republican state Sen. Kathy Bernier discussed how election conspiracy theories have affected the state over the last three years, the impact of last week’s state Supreme Court decision to again allow the use of absentee ballot drop boxes and how election officials across the state are preparing for this year’s elections.
….
At the event on Tuesday, all three speakers downplayed the threat of incidents like that, saying most observers simply sit and watch the process.
Bernier noted that having skeptics get trained to work the polls or come to the polls to observe often helps to assuage their fears when they find the system is carefully designed with multiple checks and the process is generally quite boring.
Wolfe added that having people observe the voting process is a “healthy part of Election Day.”
Many of the conspiracy theories about the 2020 election in Wisconsin have stemmed from the process of counting absentee ballots, especially in Milwaukee. Most communities in the state count absentee ballots at the polling location where each absent voter would have gone to vote in person. In Milwaukee and a handful of other communities, all the ballots are sent to one “Central Count” location where they’re all tallied together.
Under state law, ballots cannot begin to be processed until polls open at 8 a.m. on Election Day.
Conspiracy theories have abounded about the absentee process and Milwaukee’s central count, alleging that Democratic operatives worked to “ballot harvest” and force people to cast absentee votes for Biden or that large “vote dumps” from Milwaukee changed the results for Biden in the middle of the night.
Bernier said that she doesn’t think ballot harvesting really happens, questioning how it would even occur while Wolfe said these allegations are often dispelled with simple explanations to people with questions.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a chance of scattered afternoon showers and a high of 76. Sunrise is 5:23 and sunset 8:35 for 15h 12m 21s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The area was some 10 square miles and contained a large bog. Although the land appeared safe, it would undulate or tremble for yards when pressure was applied. Many of the militiamen were on horses, which plunged to their bellies in the swamp. The “trembling lands” forced Atkinson to retrace his steps back toward the Rock River, in the process losing days in his pursuit of Black Hawk.”On this day in 1832, General Atkinson and his troops entered the area known by the Native Americans as “trembling lands” in their pursuit of Black Hawk. The area was some 10 square miles and contained a large bog. Although the land appeared safe, it would undulate or tremble for yards when pressure was applied. Many of the militiamen were on horses, which plunged to their bellies in the swamp. The “trembling lands” forced Atkinson to retrace his steps back toward the Rock River, in the process losing days in his pursuit of Black Hawk.
Whitewater’s Independence Holiday celebration continues today at the Cravath Lakefront:
Christman Family Amusements Wrist Band Session: 5 PM to 9 PM Civic Organization Food Vendors: 4 PM to 11 PM Live Music at Frawley Ampitheater: Cactus Brothers 5 to 7 PM sponsored by TDS Titan Fun Key (Whitewater band playing ‘70s rock, funk, and blues) 8 PM to 10:30 PM Family Day Powered by Generac: Free petting zoo, pony rides, camel rides 4 to 8 PM
Thismorning, the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued rulings restoring absentee ballot boxes (Priorities USA v. Wisconsin Elections Commission), holding unconstitutional specific statutes that placed the power of the executive branch to carry out the law in a committee of the legislature (Tony Evers v. Howard Marklein), and reversing a lower-court decision that allowed recommitment and involuntary medication without actual hearing notice to the subject individual (Waukesha County v. M.A.C.).
Italy’s Mount Etna has erupted again, sending out spouts of lava into the night sky. Europe’s most active volcano has become a destination for tourists and volcano enthusiasts looking to catch a glimpse of its frequent activity.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 89. Sunrise is 5:16 and sunset 8:36 for 15h 20m 20s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Alcohol Licensing Committee meets at 5:30 and the Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 2023, Titan, a submersible operated by OceanGate Expeditions, implodes while attempting to view the wreck of the Titanic, killing all five people on board including the co-founder and CEO of the company, Stockton Rush, in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Just two days after she announced she was running for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Dane County Judge Susan Crawford received endorsements from all four of the court’s liberal justices — a rare sign of unanimity behind a single candidate this early in the campaign cycle.
In a written statement released by Crawford’s campaign Wednesday, Justices Ann Walsh Bradley, Rebecca Dallet, Jill Karofsky and Janet Protasiewicz all pledged to support her candidacy.
While races for the court are officially nonpartisan, in practice, Democratic and Republican activists are heavily involved. Right now, the 2025 race is shaping up as a contest between Crawford, the choice of liberals, and Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel, the choice of conservatives.
A race between Dane County’s Crawford and Waukesha County’s Schimel might seem a match between Wisconsin’s traditional ideological battlegrounds of left and right, but the WOW counties aren’t as influential statewide for the WISGOP as they once were.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 74. Sunrise is 5:15 and sunset 8:33 for 15h 18m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 25.8 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Involvement and Cable TV Commission meets at 5 PM and the Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1935, inventor Edwin Armstrong gives the first public demonstration of FM broadcasting in the United States at Alpine, New Jersey:
In June 1936, Armstrong gave a formal presentation of his new system at the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) headquarters. For comparison, he played a jazz record using a conventional AM radio, then switched to an FM transmission. A United Press correspondent was present, and recounted in a wire service report that: “if the audience of 500 engineers had shut their eyes they would have believed the jazz band was in the same room. There were no extraneous sounds.” Moreover, “Several engineers said after the demonstration that they consider Dr. Armstrong’s invention one of the most important radio developments since the first earphone crystal sets were introduced.” Armstrong was quoted as saying he could “visualize a time not far distant when the use of ultra-high frequency wave bands will play the leading role in all broadcasting”, although the article noted that “A switchover to the ultra-high frequency system would mean the junking of present broadcasting equipment and present receivers in homes, eventually causing the expenditure of billions of dollars.”
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The same Democrat who led the Wisconsin Elections Commission during the contested 2020 presidential election will be back in the helm in the swing state this year after being unanimously elected Monday by the bipartisan panel.
Ann Jacobs was the only commission member nominated to serve as chair, reprising the role she had from 2020 to 2022. The unanimous vote included one from a Republican commissioner who attempted to cast Wisconsin’s electoral votes for Donald Trump in 2020 even though he lost the state.
The six-member commission administers and enforces Wisconsin election laws, but elections are run locally by more than 1,800 clerks in towns, villages, cities and counties. State law requires that the chair of the commission alternate between a Republican and a Democrat every two years.
Two key departures from normal yet persist on the commission (assuming anyone can define normal, let alone recall when that condition last held sway).
First, Bob Spindell remains a WISGOP commissioner. Yet, he is one of ten fraudulent presidential electors who admitted under a civil settlement that their actions were part of an attempt to overturn wrongfully the 2020 presidential election results. Spindell wouldn’t belong on the elections board of the smallest hamlet on the planet, let alone this state’s elections commission.
Second, Wisconsin’s elections administrator, Meagan Wolfe, remains a holdover employee in her full-time state position. A well-ordered politics would not have holdovers, as the appointments & confirmation process would not be intermittent.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 69. Sunrise is 5:15 and sunset 8:33 for 15h 17m 25s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 17.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Planning & Architectural Review Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1999, NATO suspends its airstrikes after Slobodan Milosevic agrees to withdraw Serbian forces from Kosovo.
It’s possible that Speaker Robin Vos is “in the flight of his life” over a possible recall and then November election campaign, as emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Mordecai Lee contends. See Rich Kremer ‘The fight for his life’: Vos faces 2 challengers in district race who helped with ongoing recall (‘A Republican primary challenger and independent candidate facing off against longtime Assembly Speaker Robin Vos assisted with second effort to remove him from office’).
A Friday press release from the Racine Recall Committee says the group is “extremely confident” it has enough signatures. A statement from the Vos-aligned group Wisconsinites for Liberty Fund posted by WisPolitics last week claims recall organizers have “once again fallen woefully short on collecting the required number of signatures.”
On Friday afternoon, Vos filed a challenge to the Racine Recall committee’s petition, claiming that organizers initiated it in the wrong Assembly District.
A press release from Vos’ campaign called the second recall attempt a failure. It claims organizers allowed hundreds of people to sign recall petitions multiple times and states 2,000 signatures were collected from outside Vos’ old 63rd Assembly District.
Vos is now running in the new 33rd Assembly District, where he will face up to three challengers, two of them people who have helped the latest recall effort.
They include Andrew Cegielski of East Troy, who plans to run against Vos in the Republican primary, Kelly Clark of Sturtevant, who plans to run in the general election as an Independent, and Democrat Alan Kupsik of Lake Geneva.
So is this a political crisis for Robin Vos? At the least, one can say that Vos’s tenure has been a political crisis for others.
There are probably a few people — including in Whitewater — who are obtuse enough to think that dropping Vos’s name still reflects well on them. If doing so ever reflected well on those so inclined, it’s been so long that only historians and archeologists can mark that ancient time.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 73. Sunrise is 5:16 and sunset 8:32 for 15h 16m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 10.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1954, Joseph N. Welch, special counsel for the United States Army, lashes out at Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army–McCarthy hearings, giving McCarthy the famous rebuke, “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
While these years since 2016 have ruined some (Gableman comes to mind), and left others in the past (Walker), a third type has come through better in these worse times. Charlie Sykes is of that last type: an ideological transformation that has shown him to be more principled in less principled times.
On Tuesday, Wisconsin’s Department of Justice brought felony forgery charges against one of the architects of the plan, Kenneth Chesebro. That attorney already pleaded guilty in Georgia to participating in the illegal attempt in that state to overturn the election. Wisconsin prosecutors also charged Trump aide Mike Roman and attorney Jim Troupis, who represented Trump in Wisconsin during the 2020 election. Wisconsin is the fifth state to bring criminal charges in connection with the conspiracy to overturn Trump’s defeat.
The evidence supporting the Wisconsin charges is especially robust, given the volume of communications — text messages, emails, photos, videos and social media posts — that were gathered as part of an earlier civil lawsuit that unearthed more than 1,400 pages of documents related to the conspiracy. (That case was settled after the fake electors admitted they had signed a document that was “used as part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election results.”)
….
Johnson initially said he was “basically unaware” of what was going on, dismissing the attempted handoff of the fake certificates as a “staff-to-staff exchange.” Later, however, he admitted that his staff had been in touch with Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., “about how Kelly’s office could get us the electors because they had it.”
Even so, he continued to insist that he “had no idea that there was an alternate slate of electors.” Referring to Troupis, Johnson said, “He was asking me to deliver some documents.” He said he didn’t know the document Troupis wanted him to hand off was a fake slate of Trump electors from his home state. What did he think the document could have been, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked. Responded Johnson: “I couldn’t have cared less. I’m asked by the attorney for the president of the United States to deliver something to the vice president on that day.”
But documents released as part of the civil lawsuit in March seemed to blow a hole in Johnson’s story. In a Dec. 8, 2020, email to Chesebro, Troupis wrote that he “spoke with Senator Johnson late last night about the Pence angle at the end.” Troupis wrote, “Just wanted to take his temperature.”
….
The documents also show that Troupis texted Johnson personally on Jan. 6, explicitly mentioning the electors: “We need to get a document on the Wisconsin electors to you for the VP immediately.” He added, “Is there a staff person I can talk to immediately.”
That same day, Troupis texted Chesebro, confirming that he had been “on the phone with Mike Roman and Senator Johnson’s COS [chief of staff] to get an original copy of Wi slate to VP.”
Of all the many influences of these last years on the men and women of Wisconsin, one can easily say that Sykes rose, while Johnson descended, to the occasion.
In Paris, among all of the history and glamour, one can find something completely unexpected: a 10.5-mile trail plotted out by American Boy Scout troop leaders. The trail highlights sites of importance to both the French and Americans. Ed O’Keefe brings us along to explore this connection dating back to Benjamin Franklin.
