Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 73. Sunrise is 6:28 and sunset is 7:14, for 12 hours, 46 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 93 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1972, in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave National Park, a Cave Research Foundation exploration and mapping team discovers a link between the Mammoth and Flint Ridge cave systems, making it the longest known cave passageway in the world.
Rich Kremer reports that Bryan Steil and Derrick Van Orden are Wisconsin’s top Democratic targets but haven’t strayed from Trump:
Trump has pursued much of his agenda without Congress, but his signature budget law is the exception. Nearly every Republican voted for it, including Steil and Van Orden.
Neither lawmaker has shied away from the votes, especially Van Orden. While he’s avoided in-person town halls, he’s been among the president’s most outspoken supporters, especially on social media.
“We will be passing @realDonaldTrump Big Beautiful Bill and anyone that is (in) the way needs to find another Party,” Van Orden wrote on X in late May.
“I am very proud to stand with @realDonaldTrump and the One Big Beautiful Bill,” he wrote in another post in June. “We are delivering on the mandate given by the American people. Cope.”
See Rich Kremer, Bryan Steil and Derrick Van Orden are Wisconsin’s top Democratic targets. They haven’t strayed from Trump, Wisconsin Public Radio, September 9, 2025.
Steil and Van Orden cannot stray from Trump: WISGOP primary voters in their gerrymandered districts would not allow it.
There’s another reason they’ll not stray, however, a reason more immediate and psychological. They’ve espoused a far-right populist agenda, and populism is an insatiable extremism from which few adherents ever recant. Those who develop a craving for populism (the nativism, the magical economics, the thirst to impose their will on others by force) want more, not less. Go that far, and you’ve gone too far to walk back. Drink a little, and they quickly fill another glass.
The gap between a reasoned politics and populism is canyon-wide. Van Orden and Steil will stay where they are, come what may.
Blood moon and lunar eclipse shine around the world: