Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will see rain and snow with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 5:53 AM and sunset 7:51 PM, for 13h 57m 45s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 44.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the nine hundredth day.
On this day in 1963, Dave Brubeck performs at Beloit College. Here’s The Dave Brubeck Quartet – Take Five – at Carnegie Hall from that same year:
Recommended for reading in full:
Adam Serwer, from 2017, offers a reminder of The Myth of the Kindly General Lee (“The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed”):
The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.
….
The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.
There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.
But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”
Patrick Marley and Kevin Crowe report Overtime for state workers tops $80 million, with some Wisconsin employees more than doubling their pay:
MADISON – Overtime for state employees jumped 12% last year under a system that allowed dozens of employees to more than double their pay by routinely working long hours.
The state spent $80.9 million on overtime in 2018, or $8.7 million more than the $72.2 million it spent in 2017, according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis of payroll data released under the state’s open records law.
More than three-fourths of the overtime — $63.6 million — was rung up at the Department of Corrections and Department of Health Services, which have struggled to keep employees at facilities that must be staffed around the clock.
That meant big paydays for employees willing to work long hours week in and week out, including a nurse who made nearly $217,000 last year.
(Scott Walker was as a fiscal conservative in the same way he was a ballerina.)