Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will see scattered thundershowers with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 19m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 59.4% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the nine hundred fifty-eighth day.
The Whitewater Unified School Board meets at 6:30 PM in closed session, with open session scheduled to begin at 7 PM.
On this day in 1946, Mellen, Wisconsin receives 11.72 inches of rain in a single day.
Recommended for reading in full:
Olivia Herken reports In Wisconsin, users of cannabis and CBD are as close as Main Street (‘Users of marijuana and its derivatives are everywhere — from children with serious illness to dogs, and in cities and a small town hair salon’):
Recently, the state of Wisconsin legalized the sale and use of CBD, or cannabidiol, an active ingredient in cannabis. CBD contains just trace amounts or no THC, the psychoactive chemical found in the plant.
Marijuana remains illegal in Wisconsin, although Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has proposed legalizing its use for medical conditions and decriminalizing possession of small amounts. He has signaled he is open to legalization for recreational uses. However, top Republicans in the GOP-run Legislature have vowed to block Evers’ proposals.
Kickapoo Kind [a CBD and hemp shop in Viroqua, Wis.] owner Tim Murphy said he has seen the popularity of cannabis blossom, including among some unlikely people. Customers come from many miles away to check out Murphy’s products. The shop recently moved to larger space on Main Street in Viroqua to handle the demand.
“I’ve had people come from Richland Center, Prairie du Chien, Elroy, all over,” Murphy said. “All walks of life. I’ve had 90-year-old grandmas in here, and I’ve had little babies (with epilepsy) in here. Every single walk of life that you can think of has walked through that door.”
(I don’t use these products, but others should be free to do so. This consumer trend is, so to speak, home grown. For years, prohibitionists and drug warriors have insisted – pretended, truly – that demand for these products came from outsiders, non-residents, urban dwellers, non-whites, etc. Oh, no: there is broad, local support.)
Eillie Anzilotti reports Madison is the first city to go 100% electric for its bike share:
As of June 18, BCycle, the local bike share, became the first citywide system in the U.S. to transition its fleet entirely to electric-assist bicycles. “We have seen the e-bike trend in the larger bike business exploding in the past few years, and we’re so excited for it to come into bike share,” says Morgan Ramaker, exeutive director at BCycle.
BCycle is a nationwide bike-share provider owned by Trek Bikes, which is based near Madison in Wisconsin. With 47 dock-based systems across the U.S., including Indego in Philadelphia and B-Cycle in Houston, BCycle is one of the largest providers in the country. Though it’s privately owned, it works closely with local governments in each city where it has a presence to understand local needs.
I’ve thought for some time that weed legalization has some serious legs as a populist issue with the potential to substantially alter state politics. The D-Team has figured this out. The R-Team, still dealing with a half-century legacy of making political hay by hippie-bashing, is way behind the curve.
When the city of Waukesha, no hotbed of progressive ideas, voted 77% for a weed-legalization referendum, It should have occurred to Fitz and Vos that the ground was shifting radically under them and the old drug-warrior war-horses that they have been riding for 50 years were pulling up lame. Vos has sort-of figured it out, but Fitz remains unreconstructed.
This has the potential to make the WI Republican caucus resemble the horse-barn at Santa Anita, with lots of black wreaths hanging on the stable doors. Will Republicans evolve, or perish?? This is as non-partisan, and as cross-cultural, a political issue as I have ever seen, and could well have the legs to defeat Gerrymandering.
Unreconstructed is the word – many Walworth County officials, for example, will fight the drug war until the last dog dies. It’s funny about some of these men – on cannabis, business welfare, immigration: they will hold to backwards policies even at the expense of their fellow residents’ economic well-being and individual health choices.
So be it: better to draw these distinctions between the parties plainly, and put the matter to the electorate. Many of these unreconstructed men will live long enough to see the ruin of their life’s work. The collapse of their way should have come sooner; there is at least a measure of recompense that it’s coming (however slowly) now.