Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 24. Sunrise is 7:06 and sunset is 5:12 for 10 hours 6 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 91.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin found Facebook.
One reads, unsurprisingly, that state Sen. Steve Nass is retiring. For many (too many) of those years his district included Whitewater. In the statement announcing this as his last term, Nass offers no specific reason for declining to run again. Having been in the Legislature for forty years, no stated reason is necessary. (The increasing likelihood of a WisDems majority in the state Senate perhaps played an unstated role.)
There is something about his career worth noting, about both Nass and also so many others in the WISGOP. He and they were once significant local figures in their communities. Nass, in particular, was a bête noire of the center-left, progressives, and the UW System. Through his frequent email blasts, written (or perhaps written for him) in a burn-it-all-down style, Nass was once an attention-getter.
Those were the days.
Were the days, not are the days — this state’s right-wing home office has long ago shifted from Wisconsin to Mar-a-Lago. For the right, Wisconsin has become a mere local branch, a single storefront, of a corporate behemoth with a home office in Florida.
Nass was around for decades, of course, and so retiring by now was to be expected. He stayed long enough, however, to have become a mere afterthought in a movement that looks to others located elsewhere.
Watch the moment a Greenland sled dog steals an AP camera: