It’s Oscars Month and the Seniors in the Park Bijou Theatre will be showing three of the Nominated Films. The Academy Awards ceremony is Sunday evening, March 27th.
Tuesday, March 22nd at 1 PM, there will be a showing of King Richard @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Biography/Drama/Sports
Rated PG-13
2 hours, 24 minutes (2021)
The story of tennis Super Stars Venus and Serena Williams and their coach & father, Richard Williams (Will Smith; Best Actor nomination). Also nominations for Best Supporting Actress (Aunjanue Ellis), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Picture.
Friday in Whitewater will see rain, and perhaps some snow, with a high of 38. Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 7:05 PM for 12h 05m 49s of daytime. The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos left a state Capitol meeting with Republicans seeking to decertify the 2020 election and declared, again, that what they wanted from him wasn’t possible.
But the group said they left Madison with hope for their efforts because of what he said next to reporters: “I think there was widespread fraud.”
Vos’ words emboldened proponents of the unsupported narrative that systemic fraud affected Wisconsin’s election outcome and played into a Republican Party talking point nationally.
Audio of his comments were played over booming speakers in a blacktop parking lot off I-39 in Portage County as a couple hundred people cheered while Vos was across the street meeting with county party leaders to manage their views on the same idea.
“I think he is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met and this is one of the dumbest things he has ever said,” Democratic Gov. Tony Evers said Thursday.
“That’s not leadership. We want people to vote. We want eligible people to vote. We want to make it as easy as possible. But when we continue to ratchet up the narrative that there was widespread fraud … that’s wrong. And that’s a leader saying that.”
Vos did not respond to requests for an interview on Thursday.
Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and director of the university’s Elections Research Center, said Vos’ statement will make it even more difficult to assuage concerns within his party over the 2020 election.
(It’s hard to believe that Evers truly thinks that Vos is one of the smartest people he’s met, as Evers has met well more than six or seven people in his life.)
What’s easy to believe, because it’s obvious, is that Vos is a small, scared man. In the presence of the mob, Vos squeals in agreement and scurries away soaked in his own sweat and urine.
Behold, Wisconsin: there goes your Speaker of the Assembly.
St. Patrick’s Day in Whitewater will see an early evening shower with a high of 56. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 7:04 PM for 12h 02m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 99.2% its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Unified School District’s Citizens Financial Advisory Committee meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1776, the British Army evacuates Boston, ending the Siege of Boston, after George Washington and Henry Knox place artillery in positions overlooking the city.
On March 17, the world celebrates the feast day of St. Patrick, a zealous British bishop of the fifth century who became famous for spreading Christianity in Ireland. Patrick is Ireland’s main patron saint.
But as a medieval historian, I suggest that we also pause to remember another of Ireland’s patron saints, the nurturing, compassionate St. Brigid.
This year, following a three-year campaign by a feminist organization, herstory.ie, the Irish government finally acknowledged Brigid’s importance by declaring a new national holiday on her feast day of Feb. 1. Until now, Ireland counted her among their official three patrons, along with St. Patrick and St. Columcille, or Columba, but gave workers a day off only on St. Patrick’s Day.
Unlike Patrick, who came from Britain, Brigid was born in Ireland, sometime around A.D. 450, the child of a slave and a king in the province of Leinster.
Unfortunately, Brigid left no historical record of her missionary work. Patrick wrote two letters that still exist: one a defense of his missionary career and the other a rebuke to a slave-raiding British king. All information about Brigid comes from biographies of saints written long after she lived. A churchman named Cogitosus was the first to write about Brigid, in about A.D. 650, or approximately 200 years after her birth.
Cogitosus recounted Brigid’s many purported miracles: As a girl, she gave away the household’s butter and bacon to hungry beggars and dogs, then miraculously replaced the food for her family. Later in life, she turned a wooden column into a living tree with one touch and hung her cloak on a sunbeam. After she founded her monastic community at Kildare and became its abbess, she also traveled, preached and was said to have cured Christians of serious debilities such as blindness and muteness, all in imitation of Christ. While many early female saints have miracles attributed to them, few of them actively proselytized.
….
Today, some people keep St. Brigid’s Day by weaving a special reed cross or visiting a holy well whose waters, blessed by Brigid, are believed to heal illness. The Brigidine Sisters of Kildare attend their ever-burning flame for Brigid, as nuns did in the Middle Ages. These seem like modest observances compared with the massive parades that flood the main streets of towns around the globe in annual celebration of Patrick.
This year on March 17, when you’re wearing the green and singing “Dirty Ol’ Town,” take a moment to whisper thanks to St. Brigid, the compassionate, sensible, native-born patron saint of Ireland, and ask if Ireland’s premier patron saint should be a woman.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 68. Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 7:03 PM for 11h 59m 57s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.3% its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks and Rec Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1935, Adolf Hitler orders Germany to rearm herself in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Conscription is reintroduced to form the Wehrmacht.
What would happen if Whitewater’s rightwing populists got everything they wanted?
As always, a reminder: the politics of the city government and school district matter less than genuinely charitable efforts to uplift this community. I’ve held these views for years. SeeAn Oasis Strategy (2016) and Waiting for Whitewater’s Dorothy Day(2020).
To the extent that government has any money left after providing for the basic services of the community, that money should be directed as though it were a charitable effort. SeeLocal Public Policy as if Charitable Assistance (2020).
And yet, here Whitewater is, after the Great Recession, opioid epidemic, economic stagnation, repeated incidents of sexual harassment, a pandemic, and another recession. Neither longstanding boosterism, nor the recent advocacy of (toxic) positivity from the school district offers any effective remedy for the community. If Whitewater’s public officials want to be taken seriously, they’ll need to begin thinking, speaking, and acting seriously.SeeWhitewater’s Local Government: Always Literally, Not as Often Seriously
For it all, one finds that bad goes to worse: a faction of rightwing populists now ludicrously presumes that it has a concoction that will have Whitewater up and at ’em.
The obvious one is that populists are going to claim 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.
Then, second, and less obviously, populists will also suggest that anybody who doesn’t agree with their conception of the real people, and therefore also tends not to support them politically—that with all these citizens you can basically call into question whether they truly belong to the people in the first place. We’ve seen this with plenty of other politicians who are going to suggest that already vulnerable minorities, for instance, don’t truly belong to the people.
Rightwing populism has only a series of ill-considered grievances, and scores to settle. They’ve no sound economics, and even less of anything beyond that.
Now, as one can guess, any temporary alliance between the development men and the rightwing populists has the transactional types telling the populist types to tone it down a bit, to speak in vacuous business jargon to sound more reasonable. A creature’s fundamental nature doesn’t change simply because it’s quieter for a bit.
It speaks loudly to the arrogance and indifference of the development men to Whitewater’s ordinary residents that they’d hold open the door to those who not long ago supported every excess of Trumpism. Pride and greed are not good policy, but are instead bad traits. It’s an old saying, still useful, that hubris invites Nemesis.
Not long ago, these special-interest business types talked about bringing newcomers to the city. No one will move to a Whitewater dominated by Trumpists; there are already plenty of Trumpist dystopias nearer to any possible newcomer than Whitewater is. Whitewater’s comparative advantage lies in being different from these degraded places, not in becoming another one.
Many communities face a challenge from rightwing populism, but not all towns are equally hardy and resilient. An affluent and academically successful community would weather Trumpism far better than Whitewater. That kind of successful community might quickly throw off the Trumpists the way an otherwise healthy person recovers from an infection.
A community that’s already ill would find itself battling disease after disease at the same time.
After all that’s happened, and because of the failure of community leaders bolster the private rather than the political, Whitewater now faces a political challenge that would set her back still farther from prosperity and good order. Struggling communities that fall into rightwing populism (viz., Trumpism) stay down. We’ve had cold conditions these many years, but rightwing populism will bring only an ice age.
Doubt not: there is a serious critique of the status quo to be made. Know well: the rightwing populists are among the last people anywhere to offer that serious critique.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 56. Sunrise is 7:04 AM and sunset 7:01 PM for 11h 57m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 91.3% its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater once had three kinds of conservatives (traditional, transactional, and populist), but she effectively has only two types (transactional and populist) now. Whitewater’s traditional conservatives have faded into political irrelevance. They were once the backbone of Old Whitewater, but by the mid-teens another conservatism, a populist one, rose quickly and replaced the tired and fading traditional types.
Fundamentally, the populist conservatives aren’t conservative at all. They’re energetic, motivated opponents of a traditional outlook. They don’t want to conserve – they want to overturn. Emotional, thin-skinned, and contemptuous of established institutions, they’re not working to repair. They’re working to tear down and, afterward, replace with something, anything so long as it advances them over others.
They are not, however, the only rightwing faction in town. Transactional conservatives, a smaller but well-positioned group of rightwing developers and business types, have outlasted the traditional conservatives and now find themselves in an alliance with the rising rightwing populists. The transactionalists fancy themselves financial savants, but the backbone of the group rests on second-generation landlords. (Plainly and accurately stated: the rental sector isn’t a modern development, tenancy having been around as long as history itself, and it’s not part of a modern knowledge economy.) In any event, they’ve worked these years to dominate town politics, but for it all Whitewater remains a low-wage economy. SeeA Candid Admission from the Whitewater CDA, Whitewater’s Still Waiting for That Boom, and Reported Family Poverty in Whitewater Increased Over the Last Decade (note well: that’s family and child poverty).
These men have done well for themselves, but they’ve done nothing for individual and household incomes.
Credit where credit is due: they have successfully managed every previous political alliance to their advantage. They’ve effectively co-opted those with whom they’ve made deals (including some on the center-left). Such an alliance is something like the old commercial about a roach motel: you can check in, but you won’t be checking out.
The alliance between the populists and the transactionalists won’t last. Either the populists will give up their ambitions to overturn existing arrangements, or they will discard the transactionalists if they achieve those ambitions. Rightwing populism as a movement only sustains intensity through ever-greater extremism; the transactionalists can only manipulate local politics through a stability that allows them to satisfy their own business ambitions. The populists are crudely appetitive, and the transactionalists are transparently acquisitive, and these are different impulses.
It’s a partnership of convenience now, but in the end only one of these factions will endure.
Monday is Pi Day, and in Whitewater it will be mostly cloudy with a high of 56. Sunrise is 7:06 AM and sunset 7:00 PM for 11h 54m 06s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 85.2% its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Plan and Architectural Review Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1942, Anne Miller becomes the first American patient to be treated with penicillin, under the care of Orvan Hess and John Bumstead.
In three weeks, Wisconsin communities will elect candidates for municipal, county, school board, and judicial posts. While the date of the election is the same for all, the composition and character of the electorate varies by community.
Although candidates and their ardent backers in communities may be excited equally, their constituents are not. Some communities, like Mequon-Thiensville, have seen (Fall 2021) and still see (Spring 2022) energized electorates (posts on this topic: 1, 2, 3). (In M-T, the tensions has been between kinds of Republicans, but in other places red or blue majorities are motivated simply as their predominant factions.)
To look at Whitewater, having come through a long series of afflictions, and see (or expect) widespread political enthusiasm is simply mistaken. Whitewater has passed the point at which local government can remedy what ails the city. It is certainly true that local politics can make conditions in the city worse, but there is little chance whatever that Whitewater’s city council or school board can make conditions much better.
(Preventing even worse candidates from taking office is, however singular a motivation, still important.)
Some years ago, a libertarian critique of local politics, as at FREE WHITEWATER, would have held open, implicitly, the prospect that local officials might alter their course and become part of meaningful improvement for the community. And so, and so, a critique of local politics a decade ago understandably sought to counsel a better course through restrained and responsible government.
That’s simply not possible now: there are some, but too few, sensible local officials; some challengers are, candidly, both ignorant and comically spiteful.
Under the circumstances, one shouldn’t wonder that many residents have greater concerns than politics. They’ve been disappointed, and too many of those now entering politics are disappointing.
A serious critique reminds that a political course will not be the source of the city’s betterment.
It is valuable to write of our present politics and politicians (including also the proposals and conduct of full-time city and district leaders) as a first-impression history of these leaders’ actions. I’ve neither interest nor confidence that anything written here will be seen as advice for government. This libertarian never has, and never will, represent government and its officials.
So many who’ve come along over the years since 2007 (when posting at FREE WHITEWATER first began) have desperately wanted a place in government, a seat at a political table, to be in the center of political affairs. Nad yet, and yet… government has never been the highest place, and to sit at government’s rickety table is to be poorly seated.
Residency – mere residency – is the highest status, all else being subordinate and instrumental. What a shame it is that so many striving men and women in this town haven’t grasped this simple truth. They’ve misspent years on a lesser pursuit. A shame and sadness, truly.
The energy of a few (notably reactionary) candidates reflects neither the energy nor priorities of many residents.
There’s more to write about Whitewater’s political condition this spring, but always with the understanding that politics hasn’t, and won’t, meaningfully improve conditions. For the city, it’s enough (and necessary) simply to avoid a worse politics that slithers through the community.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 41. Sunrise is 6:23 AM and sunset 5:48 PM for 11h 25m 04s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 4.1% its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1917, Jeannette Rankin of Montana becomes the first female member of the United States House of Representatives.
Under Wisconsin redistricting from a decade ago, large changes favoring the WISGOP ignored any principle of least change, but this year a conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court decided that least change would be the standard to which redistricting would be held. Least change now favors drastic WISGOP changes a decade ago.
For it all, the state’s court decided for the Evers Administration’s version of least change. Shawn Johnson and Bridgit Bowden report Wisconsin Supreme Court chooses Evers’ ‘least changes’ redistricting plan(‘The plan from Evers’ would still maintain Republican leans in Wisconsin’s political maps’):
The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Thursday it would use the “least changes” redistricting plans submitted by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers as Wisconsin’s political maps for the next decade.
In the 4-3 decision, conservative swing Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote that of all the plans submitted, Evers’ plan best complied with criteria laid out by the court and met all the requirements of the Wisconsin and United States constitutions.
The court ruled in November that any new redistricting plan should make as few changes as possible to the maps the Republican Legislature passed, and former Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed, in 2011. That meant any new map approved by the court would lean Republican.
According to an analysis by Marquette University research fellow John Johnson, Republicans would still keep strong majorities in the Legislature under Evers’ map. Even in a statewide tie election, Democrats would only be likely to win 38 out of 99 seats in the Assembly and 11 out of 33 seats in the Senate.
But choosing Evers’ maps over competing plans submitted by Republican members of Congress and the Legislature was, under the circumstances, a win for Democrats. In the Legislature, it could mean the difference between simple Republican majorities and supermajorities that could override any governor’s vetoes.
The opinion of the court appears immediately below:
It’s Oscars Month and the Seniors in the Park Bijou Theatre will be showing three of the Nominated Films. The Academy Awards ceremony is Sunday evening, March 27th.
Tuesday, March 8th at 1 PM, there will be a showing of Belfast @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Biography/Drama/History
Rated PG-13
1 hour, 38 minutes (2021)
A young boy and his working-class Belfast family experience the tumultuous “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. Nominated for Best Picture, Sound, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress (Judi Dench), and Best Supporting Actor (Ciaran Hinds).
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 33. Sunrise is 6:25 AM and sunset 5:47 PM for 11h 22m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.9% its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM, and Whitewater Fire Department, Inc. holds a business meeting at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1776, the first amphibious landing of the United States Marine Corps begins the Battle of Nassau.
Here in Whitewater, and in larger communities across America, some had fits during the pandemic over ordinary political speech, to mere words and books and ideas, insisting laughably through it all that they were men of strength and common sense while whining and tantruming like children. They have been, and are, as ridiculous as they are ignorant.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 45. Sunrise is 6:27 AM and sunset 5:46 PM for 11h 19m 16s of daytime. The moon is new with none its visible disk illuminated.
Having waited these many months, Wisconsin now sees the results of Michael Gableman’s awkwardly titled Second Interim Investigative Report On the Apparatus & Procedures of the Wisconsin Elections System:
Having read it all, one can only marvel at Gableman’s masterpiece of mediocrity and mendacity. It’s not bad lawyering; it’s no lawyering at all.
And so, and so, it will persuade no one. Those who would accept anything will accept this report. Those who expect something will find it falls below their expectations.
It’s been a long time since Wisconsin has been a normal place. Gableman’s work assures that it will be longer still until our politics is again normal.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 43. Sunrise is 6:28 AM and sunset 5:45 PM for 11h 16m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 1.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Alcohol Licensing Committee meets at 6:15 PM, and the Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1953, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin suffers a stroke and collapses; he dies four days later.
As Foxconn continues to flounder in the Village of Mount Pleasant, village board members have voted to lengthen their terms in office.
The board voted on Jan. 24 to extend their terms from two to three years, beginning in 2023.
According to the ordinance, this is being done “in the best interest of the Village’s health, safety, welfare, and morals.”
But residents aren’t happy. Within two weeks of the decision, more than 1,200 people signed a petition that will force a referendum, superseding the Jan. 24 vote.
Only 981 signatures were needed; that’s 7 percent of the number of Mt. Pleasant residents who voted in the last gubernatorial election.
Kelly Gallaher, who heads watchdog group A Better Mount Pleasant, led the signature drive.
“I’ve knocked on a lot of doors in my life — this was by far the easiest door I’ve ever knocked in the last decade,” Gallaher said. “I think the most remarkable thing is we are in a time of enormous political divisiveness. Mt. Pleasant residents are in complete agreement that the village board overreached and acted arrogantly.”
Mt. Pleasant board members and staff did not return requests for comment Monday.
In a free society, government is meant to be limited (to specified tasks) and responsible (to the people in whom sovereignty rests and is conferred). Meant to be and is aren’t always and forever the same. And so, and so, the Village of Mount Pleasant trustees place themselves further from the accountability of their residents.
