Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 74. Sunrise is 5:29 AM and sunset 8:13 PM for 14h 44m 29s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 9 AM and Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1973, the televised Watergate hearings begin in the United States Senate.
Yesterday the UW System Board of Regents unanimously selected Dr. Jennifer Mnookin as the next chancellor for UW-Madison. She’s eminently qualified:
Mnookin has been dean of the UCLA School of Law since 2015 and began work at UCLA as a professor in 2005. She was a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law prior to that, and was a visiting professor at the Harvard University Law School for a year.
She has a doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earned her law degree from Yale Law School and got her bachelor’s degree from Harvard College.
Republican leaders were, predictably and on cue, upset:
Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, who is running for governor, said she was infuriated by the hire.
“Decisions like this from the Board of Regents make Wisconsin moms and dads consider sending their kids out of state where they can get an honest education,” said Kleefisch, whose daughter attends a private college in Texas. “This ridiculous mindset demonstrates why we need to drain the Madison swamp — to get away from this crazy groupthink.”
Kevin Nicholson, another GOP candidate for governor, called the board’s decision “insane.”
I’ve been a critic of more than one UW System decision, but the rending of garments over Mnookin’s selection is overwrought. For a faction that describes itself as defending common sense, these Republicans are dependably emotional, if not hysterical, about university life.
Kevin Nicholson’s simple (and simple-minded) criticism, that the regents’ decision is ‘insane,’ brings to mind nothing so much as an old 1970s television commercial:
Russia’s Attacks on Ukrainian Hospitals Show a ‘Murderous Pattern’:
And the attacks on the nation’s health care infrastructure kept coming, at a rate of at least two a day, by some counts — hospitals, clinics, maternity wards, a nursing home, an addiction treatment facility, a blood bank.
As of May 9, the Ukrainian Healthcare Center, a consultancy in Kyiv, had documented 165 cases of health care facilities damaged in the war, and the World Health Organization has identified some 200 such attacks.
In the video guest essay above, Pavlo Kovtoniuk, a co-founder of the consultancy and a former deputy health minister of Ukraine, explains that the attacks have sown psychological terror and devastated the nation’s health care system.
“It all seems cruel, inhumane and deliberate,” he says.
Whether the attacks against Ukraine’s hospitals and medical personnel amount to war crimes may eventually be a matter for the International Criminal Court in The Hague, as well as other courts and special war crimes tribunals, to decide.
But Mr. Kovtoniuk has already made up his mind.
“The evidence for potential war crimes will take years to gather,” he says. “But I don’t need to wait that long to know that what I’m seeing every day is a murderous pattern.”