Good morning. 
Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 64. Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 4:21 PM for 9h 02m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 88.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Technology Park Board meets at 8 AM.
On this day in 1903, Italian American food cart vendor Italo Marchiony receives a U.S. patent for inventing a machine that makes ice cream cones.
Alan Rappeport reports Republicans Who Assailed Biden’s Stimulus Bill Are Embracing the Money (‘Republican governors who criticized the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill as wasteful are championing state projects funded by the money’):
WASHINGTON — At her annual budget address this month, Gov. Kristi Noem, Republican of South Dakota, blamed President Biden’s economic policies for rising prices, derided the “giant handout” of federal stimulus funds and suggested that she had considered refusing the money over ideological objections.
But like many Republican officials, Ms. Noem has found it hard to say no to her state’s share of the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief aid that Democrats passed along party lines in March.
Ms. Noem explained to fellow legislators how critical those federal funds were to South Dakota and outlined how she would use some of the nearly $1 billion slated for her state to invest in local water projects, make housing more affordable and build new day care centers. For those questioning her choice to take the money, Ms. Noem, who has opposed Covid restrictions including shutdowns and mask mandates, said any pandemic-relief funds she rejected would have just gone to other states.
“It would be spent somewhere other than South Dakota,” Ms. Noem said. “The debt would still be incurred by the country, and our people would still suffer the consequences of that spending.” No state has declined the relief money, and if they had it would go back to the Treasury Department, not to other states.
Republican leaders across the country have been engaged in a similarly awkward dance over the past few months as they accept — and often champion — money from the $350 billion bucket of state and local aid included in the stimulus bill, which passed Congress without a single Republican vote. In some states, like Ohio and Arizona, Republican governors are spending the funds while attempting to undercut the law that allowed the money to flow. Other governors are faulting Congress for not giving their state enough money.
And, like their counterparts in Congress, many Republicans have blasted Mr. Biden’s stimulus bill for fueling inflation, even as they take the funds, and criticized Democrats for pushing for additional government spending plans.
Of course, they’ll criticize and then take the money — Trumpism has no firm economic position except the enrichment of the Trump family subsumed under the general principle that hypocrisy is a virtue.
Look around small towns where Trumpists talk about fiscal prudence, and you’ll see that they (and others) waste money on artificial turf, etc., at the first opportunity. They’re fiscally prudent until they want something for themselves, all the while they’ll accuse others of their own, repeated actions.
They don’t have a coherent economic position — they have a collection of aching emotional needs that have to be satisfied. Explain their position coherently from moment to the next? Nah, why bother? They believe that explanations are for weaklings, suckers, socialists, communists, anarchists, anthropologists, meteorologists… whomever.
There are many sound reasons to oppose Trumpism, recognizing that alternatives to it bring their own, (far) lesser risks. One can believe that the Democrats are spending too much, as I do, and yet support resolutely their broad-based coalition against Trumpism’s autocratic nativism. Never Trump, after all, means Never Trump; never Trumpism means never Trumpism.
The Trumpists’ thorough-going hypocrisy is, in fact, another reason to oppose them.