Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 68. Sunrise is 5:33 and sunset is 8:10 for 14 hours 37 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 7.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Commission meets at 4 PM, and there will be a Common Council Visioning Session at 5:30 PM.
The Whitewater School Board will hold a governance workshop at 5:30 PM. Among the topics on the board’s agenda is Topic B, “Review spreadsheet with all documents in one place.” That’s quite sensible — one wouldn’t want to review all the documents in different places. Imagine if one had to go from Whitewater to Richmond to Lima Center simply to look at a spreadsheet.
Of these governance topics, absent from discussion is why, by its own policies, the Whitewater School Board offers the district’s residents recordings of its regular meetings only at a leisurely pace: “Recordings of the School Board Meetings will be posted in BoardDocs within a week or two after the meeting is held.” “A week or two” — honest to goodness that’s how it’s written — colloquially translates into “we’ll get to it when we get to it.”
The Artemis II astronauts traveled to the moon and back in less than two weeks.
On this day in 1804, William Clark and 42 men depart from Camp Dubois to join Meriwether Lewis at St. Charles, Missouri, marking the beginning of the Lewis and Clark Expedition‘s historic journey up the Missouri River.
If a ‘bipartisan’ bill gets no WisDems Senate votes, was it ever bipartisan?
The Wisconsin legislature has rejected the compromise tax and spending bill negotiated among Gov. Evers, Speaker Vos, and Senate Majority Leader LeMahieu:
The property tax and school funding package negotiated between Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg) passed the Assembly Wednesday night in a bipartisan vote, but died in the Senate after three Republicans joined all the Democrats in voting against the measure.
[…]The late Wednesday night votes followed more than nine hours of deliberation. Although Democrats in both chambers had panned the bill, 10 Assembly Democrats voted yes when the roll call arrived, after an amendment by Republicans that included disaster relief funds for parts of the state damaged during last year’s August floods and expanded a property tax cut for disabled veterans. The final Assembly tally was 61-32.
Despite the amendment, however, the Senate, meeting more than six hours after it was initially scheduled to convene, voted 18-15 against the bill. Republican Sens. Rob Hutton, Steve Nass and Chris Kapenga joined the entire Senate Democratic caucus in opposition.
See Henry Redman, Evers property tax, school funding deal with GOP dies in Senate, Wisconsin Examiner, May 13, 2026.
See also ‘Bipartisan’ Has Lost Meaning as a Useful Term, 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.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): Claims of Legacy, a Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and Outcome-Driven Argumentation.
Japan unleashes ‘Monster Wolf’ robots to repel record bear attacks:
Japan is an advanced society with world-class technology. It’s understandable that they’d build a wolf-like robot. And yet, and yet, after lethal bear attacks, one might suggest a different, older approach. Bears, as it turns out, although formidable, are not bulletproof…