Good morning. 
Monday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of 58. Sunrise is 6:15 AM and sunset 7:34 PM, for 13h 18m 39s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:00 PM.
On this day in 1776, with the Halifax Resolves, the North Carolina Provincial Congress authorizes its Congressional delegation to vote for independence from Britain.
Recommended for reading in full —
Rich Kremer reports Thompson Continues Push for Systemwide Online Education Program:
University of Wisconsin System interim President Tommy Thompson is continuing his push for a system-wide approach to online education. Thompson says a unified front on behalf of all UW System campuses is the best way to compete with out-of-state colleges spending heavily in Wisconsin to attract working adults to take courses.
During a UW Board of Regents meeting on Thursday, Thompson sounded the alarm about increasing competition for working adults with some college credit but no degree.
“The barbarians are at the door,” said Thompson. “Arizona State, Western Governors, University of Southern New Hampshire is a big one, coming in and advertising. And they’re taking approximately, I would say, 35 to 40 percent of our students.”
According to a UW System review of 25 online programs with the most Wisconsinites enrolled during the 2018-2019 school year, UW System campuses had 37 percent of the total. Wisconsin technical colleges enrolled 32 percent while out-of-state universities enrolled 37 percent.
Anne Applebaum writes What America’s Vaccination Campaign Proves to the World:
The best answer to Russian and Chinese strongmen who offer thousands of vaccines to countries that say nice things about them is to flood the market with millions of American doses, helping everyone regardless of what they say about the U.S. or anyone else. After Trump, the American political system won’t win much admiration again anytime soon. But if American democracy is no longer a trusted product, American efficiency could be once again. Within a matter of weeks, a majority of American adults will have had their first dose of a vaccine. What if the U.S. then begins to pivot from mass-vaccinating its own citizens to mass-vaccinating the rest of the world? Americans can’t do social trust, but we can do vaccines, plus the military logistics needed to distribute them: planes, trucks, cold-storage chains. The best cure for propaganda and disinformation is real-life experience: If people see that the vaccines work, they will eventually get one. We can end the global pandemic, improve the economy for everybody, protect ourselves and everyone else, and create the relationships that can help us deal with crises to come.
Catherine Rampell writes Republicans are learning that there’s more to capitalism than tax cuts:
Democrats, having achieved unified control of government, are threatening to reverse the major corporate tax cut Republicans passed in 2017. Yet corporate America is criticizing Republicans, and for something unrelated: legislation in Georgia, Texas and other states that threatens to strip Americans of their voting rights
…..
these corporations aren’t criticizing anti-voter bills out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re doing so because speaking up is good for the bottom line. They’ve crunched the numbers and determined that promoting voting rights is more financially valuable than whatever they stand to gain from slightly lower tax rates.
Among those at risk of disenfranchisement, after all, are these companies’ customers and employees. And it’s not such a great business move to endorse attempts to take away your customers’ and employees’ civil rights; even staying neutral on the issue — as some companies tried to do before the Georgia law passed — can alienate consumers who are either direct victims of the law or allies of those victims.