Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of fifty-four. Sunrise is 7:08 AM and sunset 6:59 PM, for 11h 50m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 39.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred fifty-fourth day.
On this day in 1781, astronomer William Herschel’s observations of Uranus establish that celestial object as a planet:
Sir William Herschel observed Uranus on 13 March 1781 from the garden of his house at 19 New King Street in Bath, Somerset, England (now the Herschel Museum of Astronomy),[24] and initially reported it (on 26 April 1781) as a comet.[25] Herschel “engaged in a series of observations on the parallax of the fixed stars”,[26] using a telescope of his own design.
Recommended for reading in full:
Charlie Sykes writes Why the Democrats Chose Milwaukee:
“No city in America has stronger ties to socialism than Milwaukee,” declared the executive director of Wisconsin’s GOP. “And with the rise of Bernie Sanders and the embrace of socialism by its newest leaders, the American left has come full circle. It’s only fitting the Democrats would come to Milwaukee.”
Well, yes. And no. Milwaukee has had three Socialist mayors: Emil Seidel (1910–12), Daniel W. Hoan (1916–40), and Frank Zeidler (1948–60). But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez they were not. Unglamorous municipal officials, they were stolid, competent, somewhat dour practitioners of what became known around here as “sewer socialism.” By modern standards, their policies were not particularly controversial or divisive. Among Hoan’s most radical innovations were public housing, harbor improvements, and a city bus system.
….
One Republican insider told me that a better gauge of the current state of play in Wisconsin was the Senate election in which Baldwin decisively defeated her Republican challenger, who ran on an unabashedly pro-Trump platform. Baldwin won Milwaukee County with 71.5 percent of the vote and Dane County with 77.7 percent. She won statewide by more than 10 points and a margin of more than 288,000 votes. If that race really does reflect the political landscape in Wisconsin (and Democrats seem to think that it does), Trump’s reelection is in deep trouble.
….
But perhaps the best point of comparison is, simply, 2016. Hillary Clinton famously neglected to visit Wisconsin, and ended up losing it by just 23,000 votes. Trump won rural, blue-collar counties, some of which had voted twice for Barack Obama, and won the Green Bay area by double digits. The key to that race, however, was Milwaukee County. Clinton got about 39,000 fewer votes there than Obama did four years earlier. She didn’t show up to ask for those votes, and she didn’t get them.
So the DNC’s decision to come to Milwaukee was less about “socialism” than it was about those votes, and a commitment to voters that they will show up this time.