Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 62. Sunrise is 7:11 and sunset 6:57 for 11h 46m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Planning Board meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1941 President Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act into law, allowing American-built war supplies to be shipped to the Allies on loan.
By Lehnmat – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=89016154. “Incredibly Safe!”
The Associated Press reports Trump supporters hoping to oust Wisconsin leader say they have enough signatures to force recall:
MADISON, Wis. — Backers of an effort to oust Wisconsin Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos from office over his opposition to former President Donald Trump announced Sunday that they’ve collected enough signatures to force a recall vote.
Supporters of the recall campaign plan to present signatures Monday to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, saying they have more than the required 6,850 signatures from voters in Vos’ southeast Wisconsin district.
“With more than 10,000 signatures on our recall petition, they’ve said it loud and clear: they’re tired of the status quo and demand new representation,” Matt Snorek, who started the campaign in January, said in a statement.
Vos has dismissed the recall attempt as a waste of time and resources, which he reiterated in a statement Sunday. He questioned the group’s tactics and the validity of the signatures, promising that a team he had assembled would “evaluate each individual signature.”
NASA’s Design for Message Heading to Jupiter’s Moon Europa:
I’m laying in a stash of popcorn, so I don’t have to go out to get more before November. No, not Vos’ popcorn, although I will be eating it while watching him. The world’s finest popcorn, Baby Rice, comes from Krinke’s Farm Market in Reeseville, WI. Yum!
Vos is going to be busier than Michael Gableman cashing state-tax-funded checks, soon. The WI SC hasn’t weighed in on just what district he will have to run in, presuming the MAGAs have collected enuf valid signatures. It will likely be his present, heavily Gerrymandered, district and there will be a MAGA insurgent opposing him. Ben Wikler is no doubt recruiting someone sane to get into the mix. Vosians and MAGAts splitting the vote might just let someone else sneak in.
So…It is likely that Vos is going to be defending a recall in his old district at the same time he will be running in a new district that isn’t fine-tuned to elect him. That is a lot to handle, along with selling popcorn and UW-W student slum-lording. Sux to be Robin..
Even if he beats back the recall, and the R-Team maintains hegemony in the lege, it ain’t gonna be the same after November. Vos knows that, as his half-assed, poison-pill infused, medical weed bill showed. He’s reaching the desperation phase of trying to round up support from the same folks he has been purple-nurpling since 2010. It’s unlikely to work. He has reached the political nirvana of pissing off everyone.
Remember when Vos was goose-stepping around the statehouse predicting how the Republicans were going to get a veto-proof majority in both houses and have their way with Evers? I do..and Vos probably wishes he didn’t.
Perhaps Vos assumed that he could manage the forces in the present-day WISGOP as easily as he managed the events in Walker’s early gubernatorial years. He couldn’t, of course. Tiger by the tail and all that. As it turns out, he’s now caught between the WISGOP and a Wisconsin moving away from gerrymandering (as you note).
MAGA was likely to swallow Vos eventually, but now he’s trapped between a voracious MAGA faction and a state that will have a more balanced distribution across all Assembly districts. (Put more bluntly: caught between MAGA and a more reasonable Assembly.)
Somewhere, the world’s smallest violin plays a melancholy tune.