Sometime later today, Pres. Biden will sign a bill, having passed overwhelminmgly in both the House and Senate, to make Juneteenth a national holiday. The House saw only 14 members opposed (one being Tom Tiffany, R-WI 7) and the Senate voted after Sen. Ron Johnson withdrew his opposition to a vote.
Making Juneteenth a national holiday was the right decision.
Of the mere 14 representatives in all the House who opposed the bill, Wisconsin’s delegation had the misfortune of having one such opponent; of all the Senate, Wisconsin had the misfortune (until yesterday) of having the one senator who had blocked previously a vote in that chamber.
Small town governments, like the one in Whitewater, will have to decide (as with other federal holidays) whether and how they should observe the day.
There will be government objections of various kinds about the costs or supposed impracticalities of observing the holiday.
The holiday isn’t, however, worth commemorating because it’s federal – it should be federal because it’s worth commemorating. The same is true for state and local recognition.
Juneteenth is worthy of commemoration, and no one need wait for local politics to acknowledge American history.
One can – and should – celebrate even if no action comes from city hall.
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 93. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 20m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 42.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1673, Marquette & Joliet reach the Mississippi: “Here we are, then, on this so renowned river, all of whose peculiar features I have endeavored to note carefully.”
Was the FBI behind the violent siege of the Capitol on January 6?
This is the latest piece of unreality that the MAGA right is grasping onto to shed culpability for the domestic terror attack at the Capitol and exonerate the great patriots who watch their television programs.
Fingering the FBI in all this is a bizarre turn. After-all the agency was in the fourth year of being controlled by their swamp-draining, all-powerful god king. But whatever. Part of the appeal of Trumpism is the belief that you are simultaneously #winning but also being cheated by implacable, nefarious forces.
….
Their evidence is two-fold: (1) During a congressional hearing, Christopher Wray did not answer directly when asked whether the federal government had infiltrated any of the militia groups that were present at the siege. (2) There are “unindicted co-conspirators” in the charging documents for some of the insurrectionists which Beattie et al assume must be government agents.
And here, per [Darren] Beattie, are the implications of such a “revelation”:
A still more disturbing possibility arises from a careful study of the unindicted co-conspirators listed throughout the various charging documents of individuals facing the most serious charges related to 1/6 . . . In many cases the unindicted co-conspirators appear to be much more aggressive and egregious participants in the very so-called “conspiracy” serving as the basis for charging those indicted.
Stripped down to its barest parts, what we have here is the same debunked “the insurrectionists were really secret Antifa” conspiracy—only rejiggered so that now FBI agents are cast in role of instigators who victimized the peaceful, innocent patriots who love their country.
But as with secret Antifa, there are some holes in this theory. The most important is that there is no actual evidence that the unindicted co-conspirators are agents of the government. That’s just a wild supposition being made by MAGA apologists based entirely on an anodyne non-response of Director Wray when he was asked about the bureau’s infiltration of extremists groups. Is it possible that the unindicted co-conspirators were undercover agents? Maybe? Or they could have been Russian special forces. Or Martians. There is an equal amount of evidence for each of these possibilities. Which is to say: None.
Also, there’s some legal problems with it. Some criminal lawyers who are not professional trolls seem to think this is something that prosecutors literally cannot do. Here’s the Washington Post:
“There are many reasons why an indictment would reference unindicted co-conspirators, but their status as FBI agents is not one of them,” said Jens David Ohlin, a criminal law professor at Cornell Law School.
Added Lisa Kern Griffin of Duke University Law School: “Undercover officers and informants can’t be ‘co-conspirators’ for the purposes of establishing an agreement to violate the law, because they are only pretending to agree to do so. … An unindicted co-conspirator has committed the crime of conspiracy, and investigative agents doing their jobs undercover are not committing crimes.”
Alan M. Johnson was convicted in Walworth County of first-degree reckless homicide in the death of his brother-in-law. (Johnson’s late brother-in-law is identified in today’s high court opinion as ‘K.M.’ The events of the case took place in Whitewater, and the Walworth County trial was before Circuit Judge Kristine Drettwan.)
Johnson appealed his conviction, and the Court of Appeals granted him a new trial (State v. Johnson, 2020 WI App 50, ¶52, 393 Wis. 2d 688, 948 N.W.2d 377).
Today, the Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed in part, and in reversed part, the Court of Apeals decision, finding that
¶2 Three issues are presented for our review. First, did the circuit court err in failing to instruct the jury on perfect self-defense? Second, did the circuit court err in failing to instruct the jury on the lesser included offense of second-degree reckless homicide? And finally, did the circuit court err in precluding Johnson from offering evidence regarding what he found on K.M.’s computer the night of K.M.’s death? The court of appeals ruled in Johnson’s favor on all three questions.
¶3 We agree the circuit court erred in failing to instruct the jury on perfect self-defense and second-degree reckless homicide. When determining whether these instructions should be provided, the evidence is viewed in the light most favorable to the defendant, and the instruction must be provided if evidence is presented from which a reasonable jury could find in the defendant’s favor on the instructed elements. The evidence presented at trial was sufficient to satisfy this low evidentiary bar. We affirm the decision of the court of appeals on these grounds and remand for a new trial.
¶4 However, we conclude the circuit court properly exercised its discretion in precluding Johnson from testifying regarding what he found on K.M.’s computer that night. The circuit court concluded this other-acts evidence was not relevant, and even if it was, the probative value of the evidence would be substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice. While another court might see it differently, this was a permissible and reasonable conclusion, particularly since Johnson was permitted to testify regarding why he was at K.M.’s house and that he “found” what he was looking for. Accordingly, we reverse the decision of the court of appeals on this ground.
(State ofWisconsin v. Alan M. Johnson, 2021 WI 61. Citations omitted. ‘Perfect’ self-defense under Wisconsin law is a self-defense claim that serves as a full – and so complete, or perfect – defense to a homicide charge. Wis. Stat. § 939.48(1). If successful, a perfect self-defense claim would defeat, rather than merely reduce to a lower degree, the homicide charge.)
The full opinion of the court appears below, subject to revision before final publication. There is, one finds, no aspect of the case that tragedy hasn’t touched —
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 83. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 19m 56s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 32.39% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1858, Abraham Lincoln delivers his House Divided speech in Springfield, Illinois.
Donald Trump attempted to enlist top US law enforcement officials in his bid to overturn the results of the 2020 election – in an effort branded “pure insanity” – newly released emails reveal.
The documents, released by the House of Representatives’ oversight committee on Tuesday, show an increasingly desperate bid by the former president and his allies to hold on to power after he lost November’s election.
“These documents show that President Trump tried to corrupt our nation’s chief law enforcement agency in a brazen attempt to overturn an election that he lost,” Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House of Representatives’ oversight committee, said.
FormerWhite House chief of staff Mark Meadows told justice department officials to investigate false allegations of voter fraud at least five times, according to the documents, including the conspiracy theory “Italygate”. Richard Donoghue, then acting deputy attorney general, responded to an email about the theory as “pure insanity”.
What’s the significance of the emails? They show that Trump pressured the then acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, to make the justice department take up election fraud claims, writes our Washington DC bureau chief, David Smith.
Republicans are trying to block a Senate inquiry into the Trump justice department’s secret data seizure from Democrats to track down leaks of classified information.
And woes are mounting for the lawyers who pushed Trump’s election conspiracies. Lawyers including L. Lin Wood and Sidney Powell face federal inquiries and defamation suits threatening their careers, writes Peter Stone.
Part of the current challenge is the heavy reliance on foreign manufacturers. Few medications are made in the United States and that creates domestic risks. In a world with a considerable number of geopolitical uncertainties, it is challenging to rely on nations with which America has an adversarial relationship. Right now, there are many complicating issues in the relationship with China including trade, national security, and foreign policy. As the two countries move from a relationship that emphasized cooperation to one that is either competitive or conflictual, the risk of medical drugs being made in China increases. Depending on how relations ebb and flow, there could be times where China needs to redirect drug and PPE manufacturing to domestic needs as opposed to foreign ones. Or they could use its control of drug production to reward allies and punish adversaries. Either way, it is risky for the United States to rely heavily upon China during a time of considerable tension.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office appears to have entered the final stages of a criminal tax investigation into Donald J. Trump’s long-serving chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, setting up the possibility he could face charges this summer, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
In recent weeks, a grand jury has been hearing evidence about Mr. Weisselberg, who is facing intense scrutiny from prosecutors as they seek his cooperation with a broader investigation into Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization, the people with knowledge of the matter said. The prosecutors have obtained Mr. Weisselberg’s personal tax returns, the people said, providing the fullest picture yet of his finances.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 83. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 19m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 22.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
The dreams of conservatives are currently troubled by “wokeness” and critical race theory. As with most nightmares, there is a grain of truth within such terrors.
For most people, wokeness involves being mindful of the cruel and oppressive portions of American history, being alert to persistent structural racism, and being determined to right past and present wrongs. This is the theory that attracted many people to street protests last summer. By this standard, count me as woke.
But there is an academic version of critical race theory that goes a great deal further. In this variety of postmodernism, all power structures are rotted to the core by white supremacy. The ideals of democracy — pluralism, freedom, the rule of law, even reasoned debate itself — are myths or narratives serving the privileged. In this view, politics is no longer a contest of ideas. It is a fight for power, a zero-sum struggle between oppressor and oppressed. This type of wokeness involves seeing through the pretensions of a free society and favoring the oppressed in every instance.
The distinctions here are not minor. There is a difference between using critical race theory as a tool to understand unjust power structures and believing that every outworking of Western democratic theory is inherently unjust. There is a difference between examining the disturbing truths of American history and denying the existence of objective truth and the possibility of persuasion.
In contrast, the nightmares of progressives are currently dominated by the growth of right-wing authoritarianism and fascism. In these fears, there is more than a grain of truth.
Large elements of the American populist right mythologize the nation’s past rather than face its failures. They dismiss real news as fake and embrace obvious propaganda. They are anti-intellectual to the point of denying lifesaving scientific truths. They fear diversity and target racial, ethnic and religious minorities for resentment. They cultivate a sense of victimhood by warning of arrogant elites and vast conspiracies. These are not isolated ailments; they are the textbook symptoms of a fascist political infection.
….
But seriously now. Only one of these nightmares has taken over a major political party, which is in the process of purging all dissent. Only one of these delusions is the governing vision of a former president who just might be president again. Only one of these developments has turned the backbones of the minority leader of the House, the minority leader of the Senate and almost every other Republican leader into gelatinous goo. Only one of these ideologies produced a crowd that sacked the U.S. Capitol and threatened violence against political leaders. Only one of these movements is working in state legislatures across the country to make electoral systems more vulnerable to manipulation and mob rule.
MOSCOW — The ransomware hackers suspected of targeting Colonial Pipeline and other businesses around the world have a strict set of rules.
First and foremost: Don’t target Russia or friendly states. It’s even hard-wired into the malware, including coding to prevent hacks on Moscow’s ally Syria, according to cybersecurity experts who have analyzed the malware’s digital fingerprints.
Some years ago, an administrator (no longer with the school district) told others that a good practice for leaders was to ‘communicate, communicate, communicate’ with the community. The concept makes sense: craft a message and then make sure it’s heard by repeating it. In a small town, how hard could that be?
As it turns out, in a small town that’s divided along ideological and cultural lines, it is hard. SeeWhitewater’s Local Politics 2021.
An example is a recent question, from Whitewater’s police chief to a newspaper reporter, as recounted in Community Action’s leader responds to police chief’s concerns on voucher program. It’s an ordinary practice for appointed or elected officials to seed topics in the press (although often the story conceals the origin of the official’s question). In this case, the story’s very title makes clear that the inquiry about the voucher came from a city official.
Indeed, the story is by evident design a reply to the chief’s question, with statements about ongoing oversight from a manager and a beneficiary of the voucher program.
Still, there’s nothing untoward about officials calling or writing to reporters in the hope that those reporters will inquire along lines the officials suggest.
What’s different, in Whitewater, is that this small town likely will not have one ‘community’ view about a topic, and what an official might hope would lead to a majority opinion will instead spawn a few differing opinions, not one of which will amount to a majority viewpoint. These different, opposing views will make their way online, as they did in this case.
More significant, those differing opinions will vary in quality, with some being strident, exaggerated, or simply false. (Some of the flimsiest claims in the present matter imply that the claimants are in possession of information that could only have, if true, come from official sources that revealed details of ongoing investigations. As it’s unlikely that anyone learned anything that way, it’s more likely that claims of inside knowledge are false.)
A question about vouchers, for example, may begin its journey well-fed and suitably dressed, only to become malnourished and thread-bare once a few others get hold of it.
The school administrator who once advised to ‘communicate, communicate, communicate’ underestimated the difficultly of communication in a splintered community. (Indeed, she understood the local scene poorly in many ways.) At best, counting on others to carry a topic forward relies on an uncertain band of local messengers. Some will prove articulate, some inarticulate. At worst, it leaves a message in the hands of others who will amplify it into discordance and dissonance.
Government can – and will – decide for itself. This libertarian blogger is not in the business of advising public officials, and they’re not in the business of taking a libertarian blogger’s advice.
It’s simply true that in Whitewater the audition for a topic or message faces an uncertain reception, as the audience is of differing tastes.
The reception is even more fraught when others, of varying skill or motivation, pick up the tune.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 86. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 19m 19s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 14.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1777, the Second Continental Congress passes the Flag Act of 1777 adopting the Stars and Stripes as the flag of the United States.
A second CDC report from early June sheds light on the demographic and social factors linked to lower vaccination rates among all counties, whether rural or urban.
The CDC ranks over 3,000 counties nationwide using a social vulnerability index that measures 15 factors such as poverty, poor transit and crowded housing that weaken a community’s capacity to respond to disaster.
Researchers divided counties into four categories — large urban, suburban, small-to-medium urban, and rural — and looked for which demographic profiles were linked to lower vaccination rates. Across all these categories, households with children, people living with disabilities and single-parent households were more likely to see lower vaccination rates. And researchers say these gaps are particularly pronounced in suburban and rural counties.
Counties with higher numbers of mobile home residents, as well as those with higher poverty and lower education rates, also lagged significantly behind other counties within their rural-urban category, according to the CDC report.
“Rural communities often have a higher proportion of residents over 65 years of age, lacking health insurance, living with underlying medical conditions or disabilities, and with limited access to health care facilities with intensive care capabilities, which may make them more likely to get sick or die from COVID-19,” says Vaughn Barry, a CDC epidemiologist and one of the report’s lead authors.
Novavax, a small American company buoyed by lavish support from the U.S. government, announced on Monday the results of a clinical trial of its Covid-19 vaccine in the United States and Mexico, finding that its two-shot inoculation provides potent protection against the coronavirus.
In the 29,960-person trial, the vaccine demonstrated an overall efficacy of 90.4 percent, on par with the vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, and higher than the one-shot vaccine from Johnson & Johnson. The Novavax vaccine showed an efficacy of 100 percent at preventing moderate or severe disease.
Despite these impressive results, the vaccine’s future in the United States is uncertain and it might be needed more in other countries. Novavax says it may not seek emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration until the end of September. And with a plentiful supply of three other authorized vaccines, it’s possible that the agency may tell Novavax to apply instead for a full license — a process that could require several extra months.
The most threatening legal investigation, which involves potential for jail either for Trump or his associates if it proceeded and resulted in conviction, does not relate to his presidential duties.
The Washington Post reported on 25 May that Manhattan prosecutors had convened the grand jury that is “expected to decide whether to indict Donald Trump, other executives at his company or the business itself, should prosecutors present the panel with criminal charges”.
This development suggests that Manhattan prosecutors’ inquiry into Trump and his business concerns has hit an “advanced stage” after proceeding for more than two years. More, it indicates that Manhattan prosecutors believe they have discovered evidence of a crime. This potential evidence could be against Trump, an executive at his company, or his business.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 90. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:34 PM, for 15h 18m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 9.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Four Wisconsin lawmakers toured the site of a controversial audit of Arizona ballots on Saturday alongside Eric Greitens, the former Missouri governor who stepped down three years ago after admitting to an affair and facing a blackmail allegation.
What the four Wisconsin Republicans planned to do with the information they gleaned from Arizona’s ballot examination remained unclear.
(The impatient agitation of conservative populism requires constant feeding, with one demand leading only to another. Vos will likely never go far enough for them, and each measure to satisfy them confirms that, short of turning Wisconsin into a herrenvolk state, there’s nothing he can do to satiate them. See generallyConservative Populism Moves in One Direction Only.)
NEW RICHMOND, Wisconsin —At just over seven months since Donald Trump lost the presidential election, just how strong is the siren song of “stop the steal” conspiracy theories within the Republican base? An answer of sorts could be found in the thousands of people wearing Trump-themed “patriot” gear who streamed into a grass field on Saturday to attend a “free speech festival” organized by one of the leading lights of election fraud misinformation: MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
While Trump was scheduled to address the predominantly white crowd via Jumbotron, Lindell, who dubbed the event a “free speech Woodstock,” inexplicably threatened to end an interview with The Daily Beast when asked if the rally could be seen as a show of strength of the Trump movement generally.
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Intertwined election fraud and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories were common themes in speeches by conservative A listers like Charlie Kirk, Chris Cox, and Dinesh D’Souza. They addressed the crowd while standing on a stage featuring a large Jumbotron where Trump was set to appear— “We have the biggest Jumbotron I think I’ve ever seen,” Lindell exclaimed —with two smaller Jumbotrons on either side and a gigantic American flag hanging from a pair of construction cranes on stage right.
“We’re going to have the American flag, the biggest flag that I know of,” he said.
The lineup included three Black speakers—the duo Diamond and Silk, who used to appear regularly on Fox News until they began promoting anti-vax theories, and former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, the firebrand conservative known for his inflammatory rhetoric against Black Lives Matter and the mistreatment of inmates at the county jail until he resigned from office in 2017.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 87. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:34 PM, for 15h 18m 25s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1899, a tornado hits the town of New Richmond, Wisconsin: it “formed on the early evening of Monday, June 12, 1899 and tore a 45-mile long path of destruction through St. Croix, Polk and Barron counties in west-central Wisconsin, leaving 117 people dead, twice as many injured and hundreds homeless.”
The Oshkosh Republican’s removal stems from statements he made during a June 3 Milwaukee Press Club event, which were posted to YouTube. He criticized the Trump and Biden administrations for “not only ignoring but working against robust research (on) the use of cheap, generic drugs to be repurposed for early treatment of COVID,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
A YouTube spokesperson said: “We removed the video in accordance with our COVID-19 medical misinformation policies, which don’t allow content that encourages people to use Hydroxychloroquine or Ivermectin to treat or prevent the virus.”
The company’s policy says it doesn’t allow content that spreads medical misinformation contradicting local health authorities or the World Health Organization’s information about COVID-19.
Johnson blasted the website.
“YouTube’s ongoing COVID censorship proves they have accumulated too much unaccountable power,” he said in a statement. “Big Tech and mainstream media believe they are smarter than medical doctors who have devoted their lives to science and use their skills to save lives. They have decided there is only one medical viewpoint allowed and it is the viewpoint dictated by government agencies.”
Johnson replied: “Because he’s weak. And don’t ask me to get inside the mind of a liberal, progressive, socialist, Marxist like President Biden.”
….
Kennan Ferguson, at UW-Milwaukee political science professor, said: “I don’t think anybody can be all those things. Certainly the last three are like nesting dolls. Almost all Marxists are socialists and many socialists are progressives. But liberalism in the United States was developed as an anti-Marxist political theory.”
Ferguson said by his usage of the words, “Johnson means them all as epithets rather than ideological descriptors. You can see that in that he doesn’t know the differences between them.”
Richard Avramenko, a UW-Madison political scientist and director for the Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy, said Johnson would have been more accurate to describe Biden as a “left liberal.”
….
Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette University Law School Poll, said that “for folks on the right, at this point those labels have become more or less synonymous regardless of what their dictionary meanings are. From my point of view it represents the blending together of these terms without much care or concern for the actual substantial differences in meaning in those four words.
(Note well, Whitewater: Using these four terms indistinguishably is a measure of a disqualifying lack of knowledge or of sheer indifference. There is, however, a fitting term for someone who so misuses these distinct categories: ignoramus.)
“Attempts to get to the bottom of this phrase have left many speechless, to which we must ask: what’s the matter, cat got your tongue? Here’s the origin and meaning of this moggy musing…”
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 96. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 17m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1776, the Continental Congress appoints the Committee of Five to draft a declaration of independence.
In the last three years, Republicans have hired attorneys to challenge Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ COVID-19 response, intervene in cases to prevent changes to election laws and to defend laws limiting the powers of Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul that were enacted after the two were elected but before they took office.
Among the lawsuits they launched was one to halt Evers’ stay-at-home order during the pandemic last year. The state Supreme Court ruled in lawmakers’ favor, ending the stay-at-home order early.
A rally in western Wisconsin on Saturday featuring former President Donald Trump will include speakers who have called for martial law and promoted a bizarre conspiracy theory based on the false claim that Trump can be reinstated as president.
The “MAGA Frank” rally in New Richmond is expected to draw thousands of Trump supporters. It features a number of fringe conservative figures and commentators, including many who are still calling for the 2020 election to be overturned. At its center is Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, who in January was photographed carrying notes to a White House meeting that suggested Trump should declare martial law to prevent then President-elect Joe Biden from taking office.
That won’t stop the speakers at Saturday’s Wisconsin rally from making wild, false claims, said Right Wisconsin editor James Wigderson, as they did at a similar event last month in South Dakota. Wigderson, a conservative who has become alienated from the Republican Party due to his strident rejection of Trump, says he sees little chance Wisconsin’s Republicans will condemn false or inflammatory statements made this weekend.
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“When you’re telling the Republican base that the election got stolen, and oh by the way, the next election is going to get stolen, too, you’re driving people to do terrible things,” Wigderson said.
Surveys have shown Trump supporters are the least likely to say they have been vaccinated or plan to be. Remember, Trump got vaccinated before leaving the White House, but that was reported months later. Unlike other public officials who were trying to encourage people to get the shot, Trump did it in private.
The top 22 states (including D.C.) with the highest adult vaccination rates all went to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
Some of the least vaccinated states are the most pro-Trump. Trump won 17 of the 18 states with the lowest adult vaccination rates. Many of these states have high proportions of whites without college degrees.
Thursday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon thundershowers with a high of 91. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 17m 16s of daytime. The moon is new with none of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1999, NATO suspends its airstrikes after Slobodan Milosevic agrees to withdraw Serbian forces from Kosovo.
Wisconsin schools could lose $2.3 billion in federal funding under budget action by the Legislature’s Republican-controlled finance committee — nearly $1 billion more that could be lost in pandemic relief aid than previously believed.
Republican lawmakers writing the state’s next two-year state spending plan last month allocated an additional $128 million for K-12 schools, far below a state spending threshold required under federal relief laws that provide schools with funding to recover from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
Until Wednesday, lawmakers were under the impression $1.5 billion was at risk but a new memo shows the money in jeopardy surpasses $2 billion. The news comes at a time when state officials have learned the state has an additional $4.4 billion in revenue to use in spending decisions.
Rep. Mark Born and Sen. Howard Marklein, co-chairmen of the finance committee, have said the ultimate state budget plan they intend to send Gov. Tony Evers will address the issue and preserve the funding but have not yet said how they plan to tackle it.
Leaders at the G7 summit will call for a new, transparent investigation by the World Health Organization into the origins of the coronavirus, according to a leaked draft communique for the meeting.
The call was initiated by Joe Biden’s administration and follows the US president’s decision to expand the American investigation into the origins of the pandemic, with one intelligence agency leaning towards the theory that it escaped from a Wuhan laboratory.
The broad consensus among scientific experts remains that the most likely explanation is that Covid-19 jumped to humans from an animal host in a natural event. An on-the-ground investigation by WHO experts earlier this year concluded t it was “extremely unlikely” the pandemic began in a laboratory.
Last night [6.8], Lindsey Graham told Sean Hannity’s audience that the news media’s dismissal of the lab-leak hypothesis “changed the course of this election.” Graham’s argument is that, had the media acknowledged the theory, “the election would have been about holding China accountable,” and hence Trump would have won.
This analysis makes about as much sense as anything else said on Hannity’s show. First, the lab leak was and is a hypothesis, so the extent of China’s culpability, if any, would never have been proven in any case. Second, Trump himself repeatedly praised the Chinese government’s handling of the virus — “China has been working very hard to contain the coronavirus,” he tweeted on January 24. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency” — at a time Biden was raising questions about the lab leak. And third, Trump’s efforts to hold China’s government “accountable” would have simply failed, merely highlighting once again Trump’s total inability to handle the pandemic.
However the virus originated, Trump’s responsibility was to protect the country. Whether he failed to prepare, while repeatedly lying about it, after the virus came from a wet market or a lab seems unlikely to have made much of a difference.
Sometime later today, Pres. Biden will sign a bill, having passed overwhelminmgly in both the House and Senate, to make Juneteenth a national holiday. The House saw only 14 members opposed (one being Tom Tiffany, R-WI 7) and the Senate voted after Sen. Ron Johnson withdrew his opposition to a vote.