Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 04m 25s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred twenty-ninth day.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 2000, the United States Supreme Court hands down its decision in Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000).
Recommended for reading in full:
Chris Rickert writes Lafayette County resolution that sought to prosecute reporters began at the top:
Lafayette County resolution that sought to dictate, under threat of prosecution, what media can report about a controversial water-quality study had its origins in the elected leaders of two of the three rural counties where the study is being conducted, records show.
According to emails released through a state public records request, Iowa County Board chairman John Meyers on Oct. 31 sent Grant and Lafayette county officials suggestions for the resolution, including to stress to the media that “under no circumstances are they to be allowed to glean information and selectively report it in order to twist results.”
“Maybe make the press sign a cooperation agreement,” Meyers wrote to Lafayette County economic development director Abby Haas and Grant County Board Chairman Bob Keeney. “Threaten to prosecute them for slander.”
His suggestions also included censuring board members “caught distorting information intentionally.”
The resolution, which surfaced in early November, drew widespread condemnation from open government and First Amendment advocates for likely being illegal, unenforceable and unconstitutional. The Lafayette County Land Conservation Committee approved a modified version of the resolution on Nov. 12 and it was stripped of other controversial provisions and tabled by the full County Board later that night.
(Government restricting a lawful discussion of environmental quality – these officials are as ignorant as they are autocratic. See public records requested by the State Journal, below. A publication that receives public records should publish them. The links in the low-quality newspaper chain in the Whitewater area – Janesville Gazette, Daily Jefferson County Union – don’t do so.)
[embeddoc url=”https://freewhitewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Lafayette.pdf” width=”100%” download=”all” viewer=”google”]Bruce Vielmetti reports DMV made a woman walk without her cane before it would renew her license. She fell and broke her wrist:
A Wisconsin Division of Motor Vehicles worker told a 78-year-old woman she had to walk across the room without her cane before she could renew her license. Under protest, the woman complied, and in the process fell, broke her wrist and was denied renewal.
Was it illegal discrimination or careful screening of a potentially dangerous driver? A federal court may decide after the woman’s estate filed a civil rights lawsuit over the incident.
Before she went to renew her driver’s license in West Bend last year, Mary Wobschall visited an optometrist to make sure her 78-year-old vision was still fine. Diagnosis: No corrective lenses required for driving.
But she hadn’t expected a DMV worker to make her walk across the lobby without her cane, which she used since double knee replacement years earlier.
Her husband, Ronald Wobschall, objected and asked the examiner how walking without her cane related to his wife’s license renewal. The examiner insisted, and Mary got up, without her cane, and tried to follow orders.
She fell and broke her wrist.