Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 81. Sunrise is 6:36 AM and sunset 7:01 PM for 12h 24m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 77.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater Fire Department, Inc. meets at 6 PM.
This day in 1959, the first successful photocopier, the Xerox 914, is introduced in a demonstration on live television from New York City.
Patrick Marley reports Gableman talking to conspiracy theorist Shiva Ayyadurai as he reviews Wisconsin’s election:
MADISON — The attorney heading a partisan review of Wisconsin’s presidential election has been consulting with a losing U.S. Senate candidate who appeared in a conspiracy theory-fueled film, falsely claimed a million ballots were destroyed in Massachusetts and recently linked his election doubts to a science-fiction novel.
Shiva Ayyadurai since he lost a 2020 primary for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts has been spreading untrue claims about elections — suggesting last month without credible evidence that more than 4% of Donald Trump’s votes were shaved off his totals. Now, he’s talking to former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman for Gableman’s review of the presidential election.
Ayyadurai’s exact role is not clear.
“They’re indicating they’re going to bring in Dr. Shiva as well to help on the forensic audit,” Reince Priebus, Trump’s first chief of staff, said last month on former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s podcast.
Ayyadurai and Gableman “have had a lot of conversations,” according to Harry Wait, president of the conservative watchdog group Honest Open Transparent Government. Wait said he speaks to Gableman frequently, including last week.
Biden beat Trump in Wisconsin by about 21,000 votes, or 0.6 percentage points. Recounts in Milwaukee and Dane counties confirmed his victory, as did a string of court decisions.
Assembly Republicans have said they need more review of the election and have tasked Gableman with digging into the issue at taxpayer expense. Gableman, who claimed without evidence last year that Wisconsin bureaucrats stole votes, is supposed to wrap up his review as soon as next month.
There is an insatiability to populist desires: they want what they want, and they will ignore or break tradition, reason, or law to get it. Their first and fundamental position is that
all other contenders for power are fundamentally illegitimate. This is never just a disagreement about policies or even about values, which after all in a democracy is completely normal, ideally maybe even somewhat productive. No, populists always immediately make it personal and they make it entirely moral. This tendency to simply dismiss everybody else from the get-go as corrupt, as not working for the people, that’s always the pattern.
The ineluctable consequence of their belief that all others are legitimate is the populists’ insistence that If You Didn’t Vote for Trump, Your Vote Is Fraudulent. Conspiracy theories about the election stem from this insistence.
They are for conservative populism over liberal democracy, and would rather destroy the constitutional order than live within it.
There are countless officials, including local ones in Whitewater, who will not acknowledge these truths about the populists and their intentions. They’ll say nothing, or prattle about smaller matters, in the hope that the populist threat will pass, or that through silence now they’ll find a comfortable place in a new order should the populists prevail.
There is not even one such official who isn’t a disappointment.
On Wednesday, September 15 at 8:02 p.m. EDT, 00:02 UTC on September 16, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 successfully launched the Inspiration4 mission – the world’s first all-civilian human spaceflight to orbit – from historic Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Approximately three days after liftoff, Dragon and the crew of Inspiration4 will splash down at one of several possible landing sites off the Florida coast.