Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will see occasional showers with a high of 53. Sunrise is 6:34 and sunset is 4:42 for 10 hours 8 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning crescent with 13.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1872, in defiance of the law at that time, suffragist Susan B. Anthony votes for the first time and is later fined $100.
When a major event transpires in a community, it’s reasonable to ask two questions: What are the community’s needs now and what role will one play in addressing those needs?
Perhaps there’s a preliminary question: Was this a major event? For Wisconsin politics, the answer is undoubtedly that 11.3.2026 was a major event. The former chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Mike Tate, is quoted in the Journal Sentinel this morning describing the recent election:
I remember standing next to a colleague who had been through all of these wars going back to 2010, and I don’t think there’s ever been anything like this in my career or in my lifetime…. It’s 2010 in reverse.
Yes, that’s right. Tate was less effective than his successors (notably less effective than Ben Wickler), yet he has assessed the significance of the election accurately. Whatever comes next, what came before from Walker locally and from Trump within the state has been brought to ruin. There will be Republicans and Democrats, of course. There will also be those who hold tenaciously and ferociously to Trump’s brand of authoritarian populism. Most officeholders in the state, however, will look beyond the Walker and Trump approaches.
That leaves those of us who are politically or ideologically oriented to assess what we believe matters for Whitewater and our own particular approach within this beautiful city. One can see that some of these assessments — without regard to an express perspective of ideology — were made by respondents to a recent community survey. (Note well, Whitewater: Scattered criticisms of that survey’s methodology were deficient; the survey was methodologically sound. On this point, see Whitewater’s Community Survey.)
In my own case, my list of concerns is most easily found in posts that present ‘what ails, or what heals’ or in my annual list of the scariest and most reassuring Whitewater developments over the prior year.
This libertarian blogger is still uncertain how these statewide political developments might reshape FREE WHITEWATER‘s latest lists. (At another, younger site, with a focus expressly on libertarianism, I’m still sorting priorities out. My best guess over there: a reckoning over how and where much of libertarianism failed in the face of authoritarianism, with the exception of those few of us who remained faithful to our principles as Never Trump libertarians. Then, suggestions for the reconstruction of our ideology. Those are not local topics, but they are pressing ones for those of us who, so to speak, kept the faith.)
In all of these matters, alongside so many others in this city and beyond who have been true to their worthy beliefs, one can be certain of this: If we have come through so many challenges in the years since the Great Recession set our contemporary times in motion, we will certainly not be yielding now.
It’s diligent and zealous, so best as we can achieve it, for so far ahead as the human eye can see.
Here’s hopeful news of the natural kind — Scientists discover that dying coral can be revived through contact with healthy coral: