Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 84. Sunrise is 5:51 and sunset is 8:08, for 14 hours, 17 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 91.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.
The Texas dispute over gerrymandering echoes a Wisconsin controversy over Act 10:
The same type of drama enveloped Wisconsin’s Legislature 14 years ago, when Republicans were fast-tracking collective bargaining legislation that had been introduced just days earlier by then-Gov. Scott Walker.
Former Wisconsin Sen. Mark Miller, who was the Senate’s minority leader at the time, said the union language was initially included in a budget repair bill introduced by Walker. Miller said one of his staff members noted that because the bill was fiscal in nature, two-thirds of the entire Senate, which worked out to 20 members, had to be at the Wisconsin Capitol in order for the vote to happen.
“I had contacted all the Democratic senators and asked them to pack clothes and toiletries for the next day,” Miller said. “And the next day, when we gathered off-site, I proposed to them that we go to Illinois and deny a quorum.”
Miller and 13 other Democratic senators did just that, staying in Illinois for weeks. Ironically, Miller said the idea was partially inspired by yet another redistricting-related walkout by Texas Democrats in 2003.
See Rich Kremer, Texas Democrats left their Capitol to block a key vote. In 2011, Wisconsin Democrats tried the same tactic, Wisconsin Public Radio, August 4, 2025.
Echoes of Wisconsin’s past, but faint ones in Walker, Miller, et al.: only 14 years ago, but so much has changed in our politics that Kremer might as well have been describing an event from 140 years ago. Changes that began with the Great Recession (2007-2009) led to a political transformation across America in the rise of populism, leaving those not wholly of or wholly against that movement as mere etchings of what they once were.
(That’s why the Journal Sentinel‘s recent reporting about whether Walker might run for governor again was silly: Walker’s unsuited to these times, the political equivalent of faded, yellowed newsprint. See We Weren’t Teasing, Scott Walker Was Teasing!)
There’s an evident consequence of this distance-of-many-years-in-the-space-of-a-few: the non-aligned, the eternally bipartisan, and the middle grounders are irrelevant. Yesterday’s type of Republican or Democrat isn’t today’s Republican or Democrat. There were then types of Republicans and types of Democrats. No longer. There is only one effectual type of each, the extremism of the former compelling an assertiveness of the latter.
The Carpenters were successful as musicians but sensibly ventured no political prognostications: it is not, and will not again be, Yesterday Once More.
Seattle Kraken mascot has a close encounter with a grizzly bear in Alaska: