Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 81. Sunrise is 5:18 and sunset is 8:28 for 15 hours 10 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning gibbous with 91 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Comprehensive Plan Advisory Work Group meets at 4 PM, and the Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1965, NASA launches Gemini 4, the first multi-day space mission by an American crew. Ed White, a crew member, performs the first American spacewalk.
Retiring Wisconsin politicians Gov. Evers, Speaker Vos, and Senate Majority Leader LeMahieu proposed a plan to spend the state’s budget surplus but failed after opposition from WisDems in the Senate and WISGOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany. See If a ‘Bipartisan’ Bill Gets No WisDems Senate Votes, Was It Ever Bipartisan? The Democrats and Republicans who opposed the proposal, it turns out, were out of step with the popular mood — large majorities of poll respondents favored the deal. See Wisconsin Surpluses, Deficits, and Popular Opinion:
What to make of support for a proposal that a reliable projection estimated would lead to a multi-billion dollar budget deficit? Crucially, even when respondents were told that the proposal could produce a future budget deficit, the spend-down still received wide support….That retiring leaders Evers, Vos, and LeMahieu were closer to the popular will than Republican Tiffany and many Democrats in the Legislature should give Tiffany and those Democrats [in opposition] pause.
Perhaps they don’t understand Wisconsinites’ views so well as they thought — something for all of us to consider when assessing the popular mood.
Pollster Franklin seems accurate in his assessment that the deal “gives something that everybody wants, at least a piece of.” Yes, indeed (some refunds to individuals & couples, some special education funding, satisfying different constituencies in part if not fully).
While the distinction between wants and needs is often nebulous, and much debated without resolution, it seems accurate to say that for many voters, their wants are, at bottom, their needs.
Concern about affordability has not gone away. Not at all — it’s present among many of our fellow residents.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and Outcome-Driven Argumentation.
Honest to goodness, what the heck is wrong with people? ‘Sewer people’ emerge from New York manhole, change clothes and disappear: