Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 73. Sunrise is 5:33 and sunset is 8:25 for 14 hours 49 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 60.8 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Lakes Advisory Committee meets at 4 PM.
On this day in 1933, aviator Wiley Post returns to Floyd Bennett Field in New York City, completing the first solo flight around the world in seven days, 18 hours and 49 minutes.
There was a moment during the Whitewater Common Council meeting last night when a resident mentioned that a police-funding referendum in 2025 passed with 54 percent of the vote. That’s correct, but it’s also telling. Fifty-four percent is hardly a resounding victory, especially for public safety. (It’s also true that some of the most critical views on policing, especially on funding, come from right-leaning voters.)
It’s simply the case that few departments, institutions, or organizations in the city (or other cities) are resoundingly popular. Resounding popularity is to be found elsewhere: puppies, Christmas, and properly roasted coffee beans.
It’s also true that public comments during council meetings often involve the same few people, many of them over fifty. They represent smaller factions in a city more fragmented than during the last generation. Within political ideologies of both the left and right, younger voters (under fifty) also hold views far different from those of older voters otherwise identified as holding the same ideology.
Some of those speaking present themselves as though they represent large coalitions in the city, but there are no large coalitions left in the city. That was thirty years ago, and thirty years ago isn’t coming back.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis and a New Ethics Ordinance.
Louvre Museum reopens gallery after jewelry heist: