Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 44. Sunrise is 6:57, and sunset is 4:25, for 9 hours, 28 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 44.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1644, John Milton publishes Areopagitica, a pamphlet decrying censorship.
One reads this morning that the family of Tim Michels, an out-of-state-livin’ man with an in-state business, gave $500,000 to Trump and yet a cabinet nomination still fell through:
Michels, his two brothers and each of their spouses gave a total of $503,600 to a Trump-aligned political action committee, a Trump fundraising committee and the Republican National Committee — all on the same day in late September.
Less than two months later, Trump — known for his transactional approach to politics — offered Michels a position in his cabinet as head of the U.S. Department of Transportation last Saturday, according to sources familiar with the situation.
The deal fell through, however, when Trump’s transition committee insisted that Michels divest his holdings as co-owner of Michels Corp., the family-owned construction business worth an estimated $3.9 billion. At that point, Trump pivoted and selected former Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy for the post.
See Daniel Bice, Tim Michels was offered Trump cabinet job after his family donated more than $500,000, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, November 22, 2024.
That’s it? A mere half million? Michels spent far more than that trying to buy the governorship. He and his family should have understood that a Trump nomination for someone of means requires much, much larger donations than a half million.
Trump’s cabinet nominee Linda McMahon, the professional wrestling owner, received a nomination as Secretary of Education despite being named in a pending lawsuit over her alleged awareness of sexual abuse of boys as young as thirteen. The case is still in litigation, but she received a nomination anyway.
McMahon gave over ten million to Trump’s Make America Great Again PAC in 2024 alone.
Michels should have known: if eight figures will overcome pending allegations that McMahon ignored the sexual abuse of children, then seven or eight figures surely would have overcome a conflict of his business interests.
How odd about Michels: billions, and yet he still thinks small.
Voyagers’ Mission to the Outer Solar System (1977 Vintage Video):