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Daily Bread for 3.3.20

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-four.  Sunrise is 6:24 AM and sunset 5:48 PM, for 11h 23m 34s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 57% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand two hundred eleventh day.

  The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

  On this day in 1945, American and Filipino troops recapture Manila.

Recommended for reading in full —

Becky Dernbach reports How Caucus Chaos Led Minnesota to Embrace the Primary:

Minnesotans, at least compared to other Americans, love voting. The North Star State regularly leads the country in voter turnout; in fact, the state even clinched an all-time record, when 78 percent of its registered citizens came out to vote in the 2004 election.

But in 2016, it became clear the volunteer party-run caucuses the state had been using for decades weren’t designed for record turnout. As enthusiastic Minnesotans flocked to their precinct caucuses at the appointed time to cast their vote for their party’s presidential nominee, they found the system overwhelmed by sheer numbers. “So many people participated that the system collapsed and it didn’t work,” says state Rep. Pat Garofalo (R-Farmington). “It was a complete shit-show.”

In the Minneapolis elementary school gym where I showed up to caucus that year, so many people came that we ran out of chairs. Some people had to cast votes on Post-It notes because conveners ran out of official supplies. Others never made it into their caucus location at all after searching for parking, navigating the crowds, and waiting in long lines. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, says he heard a lot of complaints from voters “about inaccessibility, about chaos, about fairness.”

So this year, Minnesota ditched the caucus in favor of a presidential primary. Instead of crowding everyone at the polls at once, the primary will allow people to vote throughout the day. The primary will also provide early and absentee voting options, opening up the contest to people who can’t attend at a set time on a Tuesday evening.

Mary Kate McCoy reports Wild Rice Struggles To Survive In A Changing Climate:

While exact numbers are unknown, researchers estimate close to half of the manoomin that was once in Wisconsin has been lost. The waterways it’s found a home on for thousands of years have been turned upside down by habitat loss, water quality and human activity.

Climate change is yet another challenge to manoomin’s future. Tribal members and researchers are fighting to preserve the plant through restoration and educational efforts, but say the sacred plant faces an uphill battle to survive in a changing environment.

To McGeshick, restoring manoomin is about more than just the one plant — it’s restoring an entire ecosystem that people, animals and plants rely on.

“We all gotta live here,” he said. “The benefit of all of it … we get wild rice to eat. To me, what more could you ask for?”

Tonight’s Sky for March 2020:

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