Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy and windy with scattered showers and a high of 73. Sunrise is 5:35 and sunset is 8:07 for 14 hours 32 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 24 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 5:15 PM and the Police and Fire Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1551, the National University of San Marcos, the oldest university in the Americas, is founded in Lima, Peru.
This libertarian blogger has argued that ‘bipartisan’ and ‘bipartisanship’ are empty terms in Wisconsin. Clinging to these terms now is like insisting horse-drawn wagons are still a primary means of transportation. See That ‘Bipartisanship’ Didn’t Last Long — Because It Was Never There, The WisDems’ Bipartisan Delusion, and Seeing Once Again That Wisconsin’s Not a Bipartisan Environment. (While there are times when bipartisan still has meaning for a single vote of a single commission, it’s mostly a term without an accurate application.)
Headlines today at the Journal Sentinel show how confused use of the term bipartisan has become:
See Kala Huynh, Wisconsin schools would get $617M boost under bipartisan funding deal, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 12, 2026.
See Jessie Opoien and Molly Beck, Democrats slam Evers’ deal with GOP on school funding, tax relief, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 11, 2026.
Both headlines are reconcilable only if one thinks of this budget deal — involving leaders from two branches of state government — as though it were merely a single vote of a state commission. This is not merely a single vote of a state commission.
If many WisDems legislators — along with some in the WISGOP — oppose this deal, it’s not a bipartisan deal in the ordinary connotation of bipartisan: a deal supported broadly by both parties. (If every Democrat voted for a proposal, and one Republican joined in support, that would be a definition of bipartisan stretched so thin as to be transparent.)
That’s how much the terms bipartisan and bipartisanship have shriveled in our time — from terms that were meant to define consensus between major parties to meaning little more than one member from each party.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): Claims of Legacy, a Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and Outcome-Driven Argumentation.
South Florida wildfires burn thousands of acres in the Everglades: