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That Which Paved the Way

Daily Bread for 9.25.23: The Special-Interest Hierarchy of a Small Town

 Good morning. Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 73. Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 6:46 PM for 12h 00m 06s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 78.7% of its visible disk illuminated. The Whitewater School Board goes into closed session shortly after 6:30 PM and returns…

Daily Bread for 9.22.23: A Dog-Bite Story (That’s Not Only About Dogs)

 Good morning. Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 76. Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 6:51 PM for 12h 08m 45s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 47.2% of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1862, a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation is released…

Daily Bread for 9.21.23: What’s Left of Old Whitewater’s Politicians Put Past Practice Ahead of Principle or Reason

 Good morning. Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 77. Sunrise is 6:41 AM and sunset 6:53 PM for 12h 11m 37s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 36.5% of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1780, Benedict Arnold gives the British the plans to West Point.…

Daily Bread for 9.19.23: There’s a Reason Some Local Politicians Have No Platform

 Good morning. Tuesday in Whitewater will see morning rain with a high of 69. Sunrise is 6:39 AM and sunset 6:57 PM for 12h 17m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 18% of its visible disk illuminated. The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.  On this day in 1982, Scott…

Daily Bread for 9.13.23: Who Holds the Leash?

 Good morning. Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 66. Sunrise is 6:33 AM and sunset 7:07 PM for 12h 34m 37s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2.2% of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1948, Margaret Chase Smith is elected United States senator, and…

Daily Bread for 9.6.22: The Boosters’ Big Capital but Small Society

Good morning. Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with high of 76. Sunrise is 6:25 AM and sunset 7:19 PM for 12h 53m 53s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 79.9% of its visible disk illuminated.  The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.   On this day in 1803, British scientist John…

Daily Bread for 12.2.21: Kasparov on How Foreign Dissidents Can Help Renew U.S. Democracy

Good morning. Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 49.  Sunrise is 7:07 AM and sunset 4:21 PM for 9h 13m 28s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 4.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Whitewater Fire Department, Inc. holds a business meeting at 5:30 PM and the Landmarks Commission meets…

Local Politics Hasn’t Been Merely ‘Local’ for Years

Over at the Wisconsin Examiner, Henry Redman writes (with concern) that All politics is national (‘Candidates for local office are ignoring community issues, instead highlighting national culture wars’). First, Redman’s case, then a few remarks. Woodman [Kyle Woodman, a Republican running for Eau Claire’s city council] is part of a mostly conservative group of candidates…

Consequences, Accountability, Repentance, Redemption

David Frum, writing of Trump & Trumpism in The Conservative Cult of Victimhood, observes that There is no redemption without repentance. There is no repentance without accountability. There is no accountability without consequences. He rightly concludes that for the Trumpists, the absence of a moral order of accountability and repentance has meant that Even as Trump commits…

Before Man & Movement, That Which Paved the Way

Trump did not spring from the ground; he did not fall from the stars. Neither horticulture nor astrophysics played any role in his rise. Before Trump and Trumpism, there were towns and cities into which he and his movement found receptive audiences. Patients already ill are often susceptible of worse maladies. So it has been…

Whitewater & Walworth County’s Working Poor, 2020 ALICE® Report

The 2020 ALICE® report, on those who are “asset limited, income constrained [yet] employed” is now available.  These latest data were collected before the recent recession – one can be sadly confident that hardship reaches farther now. For Wisconsin, 11% of households were below the poverty level, and 34% (including those below the poverty level) were…

Fox News Won’t Be Enough

It’s a sound position to focus criticism of Trumpism on Trump, His Inner Circle, Principal Surrogates, and Media Defenders. This sometimes includes Trumpism Down to the Local Level. (Those local officials across America who have this past decade spread sugary lies of boosterism during the Great Recession, during its aftermath, and during the opioid crisis are contemptibly…

Foxconn on the Same Day: Yes…um, just kidding, we mean no

One reads that in the course of a single day, Foxconn changed its plans for a major building at its Wisconsin site. Corrine Hess reports In A Day, Foxconn Changes Course, Plans To Build Different Mount Pleasant Building: This flashy building? Sorry, Wisconsin, you’re not getting this. Illustration via Mount Pleasant Development Dept. Foxconn’s plans to build a…

Be Patient, UW-Madison: Only $99,300,000.00 to Go!

If a group invited a guest speaker who said the world was flat, then that group would be rightly discarded as a credible policy advocate. In Whitewater and other towns, crony-capitalist groups of different sizes proudly declared the Foxconn project a boon for Wisconsin. (Trump, himself, declared it a boon for the whole planet: “the…