Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 89. Sunrise is 5:36 AM and sunset 8:26 PM for 14h 50m 06s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 41.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater, Wisconsin will see a meeting at 3 PM of the Joint Review Board to present on Tax Incremental Finance Districts 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. Years of tax incremental financing through local government planning and reams of press releases about government-directed development programs, yet for it all Whitewater is still a low-income community. What’s changed in the last twenty years is the size of the group that still believes local government is a meaningful engine of residents’ economic well-being. That tiny remnant of diehards could fit on a park bench next to the bum talking about the time machine he invented.
On this day in 1949, the United States Senate ratifies the North Atlantic Treaty, the treaty that establishes the legal basis for NATO.
Forward. By Wikipedia Saves Public Art – Flickr: Forward by Jean Miner-Coburn, 1893-1895, IAS 75008873, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15248293
A national story in the Washington Post assesses Trump’s focus on Wisconsin. Philip Bump writes Trump’s deluded effort to flip the 2020 results in Wisconsin, explained:
Vos’s summary makes clear that he has now joined former vice president Mike Pence and a battery of other officials across the country: Trump wanted them to do something they had no power to do — and so Trump disparaged them publicly.
The situation in Wisconsin, however, is a bit more complicated than Trump’s other ongoing efforts to somehow reverse the results of an election that’s seen President Biden serve as president for 18 months. It derives from a recent decision from the state’s elected Supreme Court that Trump allies are now presenting as having invalidated the presidential election results in that state.
It does not and it could not, and, as Vos notes, this should be obvious to even the most Trump-sympathetic observers.
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It’s worth considering the logic here. If the Supreme Court were tomorrow to declare that voting in polling places was for some reason unconstitutional, would Trump (or anyone!) argue that votes cast by that method in 2020 should not count? Would the natural response be to recalculate election results to exclude those votes? Or would there be a recognition that most or all of those voters would simply have cast ballots some other way? That’s setting aside the assertion that it’s odd to decry illegal behavior when illegality was asserted only after the fact. If buying alcohol was made illegal tomorrow, the 21st Amendment repealed, would that mean that everyone who’s had a drink since 1933 engaged in criminal activity?
Trump has become Forward’s obsessive stalker, returning to her again and again with unwanted advances.
Ius and Tithonium Chasmata seen in “true colour” (4K UHD):
Observations made by ESA’s Mars Express with the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) were combined into a “true colour” image, reflecting what would be seen by the human eye if looking at Ius and Tithonium Chasmata (trenches), part of Mars’ Valles Marineris canyon structure.