Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 77. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:30 PM for 15h 13m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 92.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1944, Operation Overlord begins the Allied invasion of Normandy, with the execution of Operation Neptune—commonly referred to as D-Day—the largest seaborne invasion in history. Nearly 160,000 Allied troops cross the English Channel with about 5,000 landing and assault craft, 289 escort vessels, and 277 minesweepers participating. By the end of the day, the Allies have landed on five invasion beaches and are pushing inland.
Over at Politico, David Siders writes ‘Numbers Nobody Has Ever Seen’: How the GOP Lost Wisconsin:
For more than a decade, Republicans have used aggressive redistricting and other heavy-handed tactics in the state Legislature to press a narrow advantage into a seemingly permanent upper hand over Democrats. It began with the election of Republican Gov. Scott Walker in the tea party wave of 2010 and continued through a bold but unsuccessful effort by hard-line Republicans to decertify the state’s 2020 presidential election results. ButJoe Biden won the state in 2020. And in the April election, liberal Milwaukee County judge Janet Protasiewicz beat conservative former state Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly by a whopping 11 percentage points, flipping the ideological majority of the court.
In the aftermath, even Republicans here are acknowledging that the state has now shifted leftward, and abortion has a lot to do with that. The end of Roe v. Wade last year effectively reinstated Wisconsin’s 19th-century abortion ban, which is already being challenged — and those challenges will likely be decided by the state Supreme Court. That’s why Protasiewicz campaigned heavily on protecting abortion rights, and the election turned almost entirely on the issue. Turnout was staggering. In 2015, in a similar spring election, a liberal state Supreme Court justice won reelection in a contest in which about 813,000 people voted. This year, the total number of voters who cast ballots in the Supreme Court race more than doubled to top 1.8 million.
That Protasiewicz’s win was important is undeniable. The court’s new majority is going to overturn Wisconsin’s abortion ban.
Afterward, however, Wisconsin will yet remain a gerrymandered state. Important for one significant issue is different from ongoing influence. It’s what happens legally and politically after an abortion ruling, notably on the allocation of state legislative power, that will determine whether Wisconsin’s move to the left in 2023 is enduring.
IRS Pilot Program Aims to Simplify Filing Taxes:
Filing taxes in the U.S. can be complicated, stressful and time-intensive. The IRS is aiming to fix this by piloting its own free online tax filing system at the beginning of 2024. Soledad O’Brien speaks with Nina Olson, the executive director at the Center for Taxpayer Rights and a former national taxpayer advocate at the IRS.