Good morning.
Just a bit of snow for Whitewater this Tuesday, with a high temperature of forty-three.
It’s primary election day in Wisconsin, for those communities (or parts of them) where there are a few challengers for an office.
On this day in 1918, a controversy over political dissent:
On this day, a move to denounce Sen. Robert LaFollette and the nine Wisconsin congressmen who refused to support World War I failed in the State Assembly, by a vote of 76-15. Calling LaFollette “disloyal,” the amendment’s originator, Democrat John F. Donnelly, insisted that LaFollette’s position did not reflect “the sentiment of the people of Wisconsin. We should not lack the courage to condemn his actions.” Reflecting the majority opinion, Assemblyman Charles F. Hart retorted that “The Wisconsin State Legislature went on record by passing a resolution telling the President that the people of this state did not want war. Now we are condemning them for doing that which we asked them to do.” [Source: Capital Times 2/21/1918, p.1]
Via Wisconsin Historical Society.
Google’s puzzle for today asks the name of a public-spirited man: “I once paid off the U.S. national debt. How much was it when I began my term?”
NASA’s recorded images of plasma on the sun, images that are both lovely and startling —
The accompanying description:
Darker, cooler plasma slid and shifted back and forth above the Sun’s surface seen here for 30 hours (Feb. 7-8, 2012) in extreme ultraviolet light. An active region rotating into view provides a bright backdrop to the gyrating streams of plasma. The particles are being pulled this way and that by competing magnetic forces. They are tracking along strands of magnetic field lines. This kind of detailed solar observation with high-resolution frames and a four-minute cadence was not possible until SDO [Solar Dynamics Observatory], which launched two years ago on Feb. 11, 2010.