Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 68. Sunrise is 5:19 and sunset 8:25 for 15h 05m 25s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 63 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Lakes Advisory Committee meets at 4 PM.
On this day in 1848, Wisconsin becomes the 30th state to enter the Union with an area of 56,154 square miles, comprising 1/56 of the United States at the time.
On this day in 1953, Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay become the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, on Tenzing Norgay’s (adopted) 39th birthday.
Ah, persistence. Henry Redman reports Right-wing activists try for second time to recall Assembly Speaker Vos:
A group of right-wing activists enraged by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’ failure to appease their calls for a more aggressive response to claims of election fraud and their demand that he fire the chief state election official, has for the second time filed signatures to force a recall election against Vos.The group tried to recall Vos earlier this year, submitting more than 10,000 signatures in support of the effort in March. However the effort failed because those 10,000 signatures did not all come from the proper district.
Which district the signatures should come from has caused some confusion among the recall petitioners and officials at the Wisconsin Elections Commission because the map under which Vos was elected have been declared unconstitutional, while the new map won’t go into effect until this fall’s elections. The recall group gathered signatures from the district Vos currently represents and the new district created under the new maps.
The group also gathered signatures from various other parts of the state, which were immediately declared invalid.
On Tuesday, the group announced it had gathered about 9,000 signatures. There must be 6,850 valid signatures submitted to force a recall election in the district.
“We are highly confident we have the sufficient number,” former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman said outside the WEC offices Tuesday afternoon.
Vos is the longest serving Assembly Speaker in state history. He’s served in the Legislature, representing a district outside of Racine, since 2005 and as the Speaker since 2013, presiding over the state Republican party’s decade-long stranglehold on legislative power.
However right-wing activists have turned against Vos in recent years, claiming that he has not sufficiently responded to their allegations that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Vos brought this on himself. He schemed with schemers who were as persistent but twice as nutty, only to have them turn on him. Dante could not have devised a poetic punishment more haunting than Vos’s fate: to be stalked forever by Michael Gableman.
See also What Vos Wrought and If At First You Don’t Succeed…
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