Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 91. Sunrise is 5:42 and sunset is 8:19, for 14 hours, 37 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 15.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Unified School District’s board goes into closed session shortly after 6 PM, and returns to open session at 7 PM.
On this day in 1868, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution is certified.
Declining circulation and declining profits leave Wisconsin’s professional press (what’s left of it) rattled. The Journal Sentinel is the last major daily in Wisconsin (as the State Journal is roundly paywalled, and roundly paywalled in today’s environment is scarcely read). We live in Fog-Shrouded Wisconsin, a place of enfeebled journalism. In that environment, professional journalists will feel pressure to get attention, and the poorly-sourced will masquerade as seriously-reported. See How Many Journal Sentinel Reporters Does It Take to Flack Unnamed WISGOP Sources? At Least Four.
There’s another example from the Journal Sentinel from last week: Scott Walker offers a feeble tease on X about a possible run for governor, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel then spends days touting Walker’s run as a genuine possibility, until reality compelled them to tell readers that, honest to goodness, a Walker candidacy was never going to happen.
Here’s the timeline:
7.24.25 @ 12:01 PM: Gov. Evers announces that he’ll retire after two full terms.
7.24.25 @ 12:52 PM: Scott Walker posts on X a photo of a red MAGA hat with the numbers 45 – 47 on the side. These are the numerical designations for Trump’s terms of office, but would also be the designations for Walker’s, too, if he were somehow returned to office after Evers. (Walker then posts another version of the photo that same day @ 7:16 PM.)
7.25.25 @ 11:32 AM: The Journal Sentinel reports Walker’s post on X as a serious possibility. See Molly Beck, Scott Walker teases interest in another run for Wisconsin governor, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 25, 2025. Beck adds, again from X, Walker’s 7.25.25 post on “28 policy priorities” the next governor of Wisconsin should support. (Anyone with 28 priorities doesn’t know how to prioritize.) It’s a paywalled story relying on Walker’s freely available posts on X.
7.27.25 @ 5:25 PM: Scott Walker, on X, admits that he is not, in fact, running for governor in 2026.
7.27.25 @ 9:18 PM: The Journal Sentinel reports Walker’s not running. See Maya Bell, Scott Walker says he’s not running for Wisconsin governor in 2026, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 27, 2025.
A few remarks:
1. Walker was never going to run. Never. Anyone, even Walker, knows that he’s unsuited to a right-wing populist environment. Years of insisting that he lunched on brown-bag ham sandwiches isn’t what today’s WISGOP wants to hear. Right-wing populism wants to inflict misery on its perceived cultural and ethnic enemies. (Foxconn, for example, would never have been their ambition.) It’s ethnic cleansing, closet-confining, and book banning that they’ve in mind.
2. The Journal Sentinel put Beck’s story about nothing save Walker’s tweets behind a paywall, as though someone should subscribe to read Walker’s free-to-anyone social media. This works to reduce professional reporting to nutty notions and rumors at subscribers’ expense.
Three days of nonsense is, at bottom, three days of nonsense. Professional reporting is having a rough go of it; click-bait reporting will only make their situation worse.
ISS astronaut gets kimchi fried rice ingredients on recent cargo delivery, demonstrates microgravity: