Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 42. Sunrise is 7:19 and sunset is 4:21, for 9 hours, 2 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board goes into closed session shortly after 6:15 PM and resumes open session at 7 PM. Whitewater’s Library Board also meets tonight at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1773, members of the Sons of Liberty disguised as Mohawk Indians dump hundreds of crates of tea into Boston harbor as a protest against the Tea Act.
If rural America matters, and if it needs what advocates for rural America insist it should have1, then there’d be a new Farm Bill by now. The best that these advocates and professed defenders of rural America will produce, however, is likely to be a second extension of the existing legislation:
Wisconsin’s federal lawmakers are blaming the other side of the aisle for getting in the way of extending the farm bill.
The legislation is renewed every five years to fund programs around agriculture, conservation and food assistance.
Congress failed to pass a new farm bill in September 2023 and have instead extended the 2018 bill in order to keep programs operating. After making little progress on new legislation this year, federal lawmakers are expected to pass another extension as part of a deal to fund the government into early 2025.
See Hope Kirwan, Partisan approach to farm bill delaying updates for Wisconsin farmers, Wisconsin Public Radio, December 16, 2024.
Rescuers seek cyclone survivors in devastated Mayotte:
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- Not what this libertarian blogger insists rural America should have, but what professed advocates of rural America (from both parties) insist rural communities should have. ↩︎