Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of 86. Sunrise is 5:48, and sunset is 8:13, for 14h 24m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 3.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1932,  the positron (antiparticle of the electron) is discovered by Carl D. Anderson.

At Urban Milwaukee, Bruce Murphy has telling finds about Eric Hovde’s views of Black men and welfare policy. Murphy writes Hovde Blasted for ‘Bigoted’ Comments on Black Men (GOP US Senate candidate says Black men have lived on ‘handouts’ and ‘welfare checks’):

On the Jay Weber show on WISN on April 5, Hovde declared that “a lot of people in the minority communities, particularly young black men… are moving in the conservative direction” and “no longer want to just live on just getting welfare checks. They want to be part of the American entrepreneurial dream.”

Hovde repeated these kind of statements on other programs, including on Fox News on April 4, where he said that “Young Black men… want to get off of welfare, they don’t want to be stuck with handouts.”

Murphy reminds, as anyone who understands welfare policy would know, that

The old AFDC system of welfare was eliminated in 1996, in favor of the TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] program, and is used by states to provide non-welfare services, including educational services, job training and pregnancy prevention services.

As for the idea that welfare increased the percentage of out-of-wedlock births in the Black community, research has shown “welfare benefits could not have played a major role… because benefits rose sharply in the 1960s and then fell in the 1970s and 1980s, when out-of-wedlock births rose most,” as the Brookings Institution noted. The causes are far more complex and one key factor was the devastating post-1970s decline of manufacturing jobs in the U.S.

Hovde has a bigot’s view of Black men as check-collecting layabouts, when that’s false because they’re not, and no one of any race or ethnicity could be. TANF and W2 (Wisconsin Works) — as part of TANF do not operate the way out-of-touch Hovde must think they do.

The first rule for a U.S. Senate candidate from Wisconsin (other than living here full-time) should be to understand the federal and state policies that affect this state. Hovde evidently doesn’t.

One would almost think that it’s Hovde who’s a dividend-check-collecting layabout looking for a free ride to the U.S. Senate.

Previously at FREE WHITEWATER: Eric Hovde Treats Wisconsin as a Side Hustle,  It’s Not Going So Well for Hovde, Eric Hovde Should Fire His Political Consultants and Hire a Therapist, Tim Michels 2.0 Eric Hovde Announces U.S. Senate Run, and Another Vanity Candidate.

One year since wildfires ravaged the Hawaiian island of Maui: