Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 67. Sunrise is 6:31 AM and sunset 7:11 PM for 12h 40m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 10.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
There will be a Whitewater Common Council and Whitewater Unified School District joint meeting at 7 PM.
On this day in 2001, the September 11 attacks kill 2,996 people using four aircraft hijacked by 19 members of al-Qaeda. Two aircraft crash into the World Trade Center in New York City, a third crashes into The Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, and a fourth into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
In the Journal Sentinel, Jessie Opoien writes Can the Wisconsin Supreme Court overcome its fractured relations? Observers fear a point of no return:
“So many harsh, terrible things have been said. It’s going to be very hard, I think, for them to sit at a table and to be able to find common ground and to be able to compromise on whatever they need to compromise on,” former Justice Janine Geske said. “There are a lot of layers to this, somebody’s going to have to work through, and I think it’s going to be hard for them to be able to do it. … I don’t know that it can be done.”
Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, recently likened the dynamic of the court to a “food fight.” Marquette University Law School professor Chad Oldfather calls it “a mess.”
“My guess is that (the conflict) just furthers the sense that has been growing for a while … that they’re just political actors — that there’s no difference between what they do and what members of the Legislature do. And that’s a problem because they’re not supposed to do the same job,” Oldfather said.
Opoien knows that dysfunction is not new:
The disagreements among justices continued over the next decade [the 2010s], including a physical altercation between Ann Walsh Bradley and Prosser, and an exchange during which Prosser called Abrahamson a “bitch” and said she would be “destroyed.”
(Emphasis added.)
See Prosser admits touching Bradley’s neck; she says she suffered no harm.
This court isn’t ill because it has a new justice; it suffers from pre-existing conditions.
See Hurricane Lee in this amazing time-lapsed view from space: