Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with afternoon showers and a high of 60. Sunrise is 5:25 AM and sunset 8:17 PM for 14h 51m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 64.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1673, Marquette and Joliet Reach the Menominee:
On or about May 21, 1673, Fr. Jacques Marquette, fur-trader Louis Joliet, and five French voyageurs pulled into a Menominee community near modern Marinette, Mich.
Marquette wrote that when the Menominee learned that he and Joliet intended to try to descend the Mississippi River all the way to the sea
“They were greatly surprised to hear it, and did their best to dissuade me. They represented to me that I should meet nations who never show mercy to strangers, but break their heads without any cause; and that war was kindled between various peoples who dwelt upon our route, which exposed us to the further manifest danger of being killed by the bands of warriors who are ever in the field. They also said that the great river was very dangerous, when one does not know the difficult places; that it was full of horrible monsters, which devoured men and canoes together; that there was even a demon, who was heard from a great distance, who barred the way, and swallowed up all who ventured to approach him; finally that the heat was so excessive in those countries that it would inevitably cause our death.”
The Menominee weren’t the only ones who thought that there were giant beasts on this continent. Jefferson thought that there might have been, even in his day, large mammals roaming North America (‘Some makers of saltpetre, in digging up the floor of one of those caves beyond the blue ridge, with which you know the limestone country abounds, found some of the bones of an animal of the family of the lion, tyger, panther &c. but as preeminent over the lion in size as the Mammoth [mastodon] is over the elephant’).
Shawn Johnson reports Judge threatens to fine Vos in open records case involving Gableman election investigation:
A Dane County judge warned a lawyer for Assembly Speaker Robin Vos that she would start fining the speaker for contempt of court if he didn’t get answers from the head of a Republican election investigation.
….
“I still don’t have anything from Mr. Gableman as to what the heck he did,” Bailey-Rihn said during a hearing Thursday. “And no one has given me any evidence that, yes, we have complied with the open records request.”
Earlier this month, Bailey-Rihn ordered Vos to tell Gableman not to destroy records after a lawyer for Gableman revealed that he was deleting records he deemed irrelevant to the investigation. She was the second judge to issue such an order in an open records case involving Gableman’s investigation.
On Thursday, Bailey-Rihn expressed frustration that she still did not have a signed affidavit from Gableman pledging that he had complied with the open records request.
“It’s not like this is Batman that you have to send out the bat signal to get somebody to respond. This is a contractor that is in Waukesha (County),” Bailey-Rihn said. “You don’t need a bat phone for that. I mean, it’s not like you don’t know where the Office of Special Counsel is.”
Vos attorney Ronald Stadler told Bailey-Rihn that he could not enforce the order, playing off of her repeated Batman references.
“It isn’t as simple as Commissioner Gordon turning on the bat light and summoning Batman,” Stadler said. “Somebody has to see it, and somebody has to respond to it. I don’t have control over Mr. Gableman.”
The deeper, inexcusable problem is that Mr. Gableman doesn’t seem to have control over Mr. Gableman, so to speak.
It’s not Batman, it’s batshit crazy.
Finland Brewery Launches NATO Beer with ‘Taste of Security’:
Olaf Brewing’s OTAN lager features a blue label with a cartoon version of a beer-drinking medieval knight in metal armor emblazoned with NATO’s compass symbol.
The beer’s name is a play on the Finnish expression “Otan olutta,” which means “I’ll have a beer,” and the French abbreviation for NATO, which is “OTAN.” The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has two official languages, English and French.
Robin Vos has to be thinking “Why did I do this to myself??”. A valid question. Being scrotum-clenched by Gableman can’t be much fun. Gableman has to have the geo-location of some sort of significant body to be able to not only repeatedy humiliate Vos, but get Vos to pay him, and risk court contempt, to do so. Gableman is running a transparent scam, and there appears to be nothing Vos can do about it, presuming he wanted to.
The concept that Vos has no authority over Gableman responding to court orders gives new boundaries to strained credulity. Clearly external forces are at work. Vos keeps re-upping Gableman despite the whole process being a national-level embarrassment to Vos and the local R-Team. Who/what is making him do so? I have no use for Vos, but he is certainly a canny enuf politician to understand this isn’t working, yet he persists. Is he running scared from Kleefish/Ramthun? Is he getting leaned on by Bradley/Hendricks or the Uihleins? Even they have to know that Gableman going rogue makes them look like schmucks.
All that said…Vos getting booed at the republican convention both warms my heart and demonstrates how completely over the edge the WiGOP has gone.
BTW: If you are not aware…FW has gone from being mostly dysfunctional to totally hosed under FireFox. All that loads now is the initial frame.
Three problems:
1. Vos’s indulgence of Gableman — odd, nearly inexplicable (the possibilities you raise are the most probable, if for Vos counterproductive, reasons he’s behaving this way).
2. Vos getting booed — well, that’s on him. Sowing, reaping…
3. Firefox: That’s on me. I generally like this theme, but even when I first adopted it, it was an older one. I’m looking for a replacement but will look into how Firefox resolves in the meantime. Thanks very much for letting me know.
RE: Firefox. When you went to the new theme, it worked fine. Then, after a while, it would not load content, but did load the links on the left side to content. Clicking on the link got to the content. Now…Just the initial frame loads, with no content links. I’m suspecting that the deterioration is version-itus, due to FireFox upgrades. FW works fine in Chrome-based browsers.
The current theme is quite nice, and I can see why you went with it.
Thanks much 🙂