Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with snow this evening and a high of nine. Sunrise is 7:13 AM and sunset 5:01 PM, for 9h 48m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 53.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred ninth day.
On this day in 1888, the National Geographic Society is incorporated.
Recommended for reading in full:
The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign writes Walker Far Outspent Evers in Election:
Republican candidates and the special interest groups that supported them spent an estimated $57.7 million, which was about 63 percent higher than the more than $35.3 million spent by Democratic candidates and groups. Minor party candidates spent about $32,550.
The 20 major and minor party candidates for governor, and the two major party lieutenant governor candidates who won their primaries, spent more than $52.4 million. Former GOP Gov. Scott Walker and his running mate, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, led candidate spending with nearly $36.2 million. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and his running mate, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, spent a combined $10.8 million.
Independent expenditures and phony issue ad groups often funded by wealthy, secret contributors that represent ideological, business, and labor interests, spent $40.6 million (see table below). Groups that supported Walker and Kleefisch spent about $21.5 million and groups that supported Evers and Barnes doled out more than $18.6 million. Three groups also spent about $427,000 to support unsuccessful primary candidate Mahlon Mitchell.
All told, nearly $58 million or 62 percent of the $93 million spent on the governor’s race supported the Walker-Kleefisch ticket.
(Eight years as the incumbent governor and still – with millions more in campaign contributions, Walker lost. Craig Gilbert is right: “In short, the man who dominated Wisconsin politics for nearly a decade was never terrifically popular.” )
James Rowen writes Gerrymandering Costs Taxpayers Millions:
The Wisconsin GOP’s principles include “sound money management should be our goal,” but its legislative leadership is spending money on itself like it won the lottery.
Self-anointed shadow Wisconsin Governor and ‘man slapped silly by the same Federal judge twice’ Robin Vos just revealed under pressure the $840,000 contract he approved for a Chicago law firm to fight for a partisan gerrymandering plan already ruled unconstitutional by a federal appeals court.
Recall that Legislative Republicans had already spent more than $2 million in state funds to write their plan in secret, as I’ve previously written:
It has become known that redistricting work took place, though publicly-funded, in private attorneys’ offices near the State Capitol into which GOP legislative leaders’ staffers were moved, and Republican legislators who were invited to those offices to review maps and boundaries proposed for their districts had to sign agreements requiring them to keep quiet about what they’d seen seen.
The Journal Sentinel now computes all the costs of redistricting litigation to state taxpayers at $3.5 million, which must be why the GOP’s principles said sound money management “should” be the goal, not ‘must be.’