Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 80. Sunrise is 6:32 and sunset is 7:07, for 12 hours, 35 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 59.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Second Annual Food Truck Festival runs today from Noon to 6 PM.
On this day in 1956, IBM introduces the 305 RAMAC, the first commercial computer to use disk storage.
The gerrymandering of Wisconsin after the 2010 election gave rise to WISGOP legislators who, while positioning themselves as lawgivers, are, in fact, the sorts who struggle to run their side businesses safely:
One month before a worker severed part of his finger at a food packaging plant owned by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, federal regulators ordered the company to make sure equipment couldn’t turn on unexpectedly and injure employees, records show.
The worker, Sean Wiley, was injured in March while cleaning a large machine known as a ribbon blender at the plant on Black Hawk Drive in Burlington.
Robin J. Vos Enterprises was given two citations and initially fined about $33,000 in late July by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration after the March incident, online records show. The penalty was dropped to $19,000 as part of a settlement between the company and the agency.
The company was fined and told it had to abate the violation by March 10.
That’s the same day Wiley was injured.
Wiley previously told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he didn’t know his coworker, who he said was supposed to be working with him and guarding the machine, had been reassigned to another piece of equipment.
….
Vos, one of the most prominent and powerful Republicans in Wisconsin, is the longest-serving speaker in state history. He owns several businesses, including his food packaging company, which started as a popcorn factory. He also owns a car wash in Union Grove and numerous rental properties in Whitewater. He previously owned Knights Popcorn in Milwaukee.
See Mary Spicuzza, Inspectors warned Robin Vos’ company about equipment safety shortly before worker severed finger, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, September 11, 2025.
Vos’s business replied only through a spokesman about the OSHA violations.
The spokesman needn’t have bothered. It would have been faster to send a photo of Vos from the pandemic, with the assurance he offered at the time — “incredibly safe”:
Tesla’s Door Design Can Trap People Inside: