Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 53. Sunrise is 6:04 and sunset 7:42 for 13h 38m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 83.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1775, the Revolutionary War begins with an American victory in Concord during the battles of Lexington and Concord.
One reads that Democrat Peter Barca announces bid for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District (‘Barca stepped down as secretary of Wisconsin’s Department of Revenue earlier this month’):
Democrat Peter Barca, a former state representative who served in Congress 30 years ago, announced a new congressional run Thursday.
Barca will attempt to unseat incumbent U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil of Janesville, a Republican, to serve Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District. Barca most recently served as the secretary of Wisconsin’s Department of Revenue, but he stepped down from that role earlier this month.
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Barca previously served as a U.S. representative for the 1st District from 1993 to 1995.
The Kenosha resident spent a total of nine terms as a representative in the Wisconsin State Assembly. That included a stint as Democratic minority leader before he stepped down from that role in 2017.
The GOP offered a typically calm & understated reply:
In response to Barca’s announcement, Mike Marinella, spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said Barca would be “too extreme for Southeast Wisconsin.”
“Peter Barca has consistently put his out of touch policies ahead of Wisconsinites, and Bryan Steil will have a resounding victory this November,” Marinella said in the statement.
Barca as extreme would only make sense to people who haven’t seen or heard of Barca. Marinella’s reply is tailored to low-information diehards who think every last person who’s not bright red is, definitionally, an Extremist-Radical-Leftist-Marxist-Socialist-Rastafarian-Syndicalist-Epidemologist.
If anything, Barca is too mild in manner and too tepid in rhetoric for these times. Steil, by contrast, will say whatever he needs to get his base to the polls. If Barca gets the nomination and makes it a close race, then the 1st Congressional District (and Whitewater, especially) can expect Steil to say anything whatever to motivate the conservative populists of the district. If that means falsely describing Whitewater as a dystopia, then Steil (like Trump in Green Bay on 4.2.24) won’t hesitate.
See also The Local Press Conference that Was Neither Local Nor a Press Conference.
Mount Ruang eruption in Indonesia sparks tsunami fear as hundreds evacuate:
Mount Ruang has repeatedly erupted since Tuesday and officials fear it could collapse into the sea and cause a tsunami, as happened in 1871. The alert level for the volcano, which has a peak of 725 meters above sea level, was raised from three to four, the highest level in the four-tiered system