This Tuesday, March 9th at 1 PM, there will be a showing of Let Him Go @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
(Crime/Drama/Thriller)
Rated R (Violence)
1 hour, 53 minutes (2020)
A retired sheriff (Kevin Costner) and his wife (Diane Lane) learn, after the death of their son, that their grandson has been adopted by a family living in a compound in the Dakotas, away from law enforcement and modern amenities.
With no other recourse, they embark on a mission to get the boy back, no matter what the cost.
Masks are required and you must register for a seat either by calling, emailing, or going online at https://schedulesplus.com/wwtr/kiosk. There will be a limit of 10 people for the time slot. No walk-ins.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 41. Sunrise is 6:19 AM and sunset 5:51 PM, for 11h 31m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 44.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1899, Bayer registers “Aspirin” as a trademark.
After spending years traversing the country to lead health studies for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Jimenez was ready to give up the traveling life and return full time to her Mount Horeb home. She’d gotten interested in hemp while growing up in Seattle — home to hemp stores and the largest hemp festival in the country — and she was eager to turn her own fields to the crop.
Wisconsin once led the nation in industrial hemp production, with the plant’s fibers in high demand to make rope in World War II. But the federal Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which classified both hemp and its intoxicating cousin marijuana as Schedule I drugs, had effectively banned the industry for half a century.
The United States and European Union agreed to temporarily suspend tariffs levied on billions of dollars of each others’ aircraft, wine, food and other products as both sides try to find a negotiated settlement to a long-running dispute over the two leading airplane manufacturers.
President Biden and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, agreed in a phone call on Friday to suspend all tariffs imposed in the dispute over subsidies given to Boeing and Airbus for “an initial period of four months,” Ms. von der Leyen said in a statement.
“This is excellent news for businesses and industries on both sides of the Atlantic and a very positive signal for our economic cooperation in the years to come,” she said.
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“Finally, we are emerging from the trade war between the United States and Europe, which created only losers,” Bruno Le Maire, the French finance minister, said on Twitter. He added that a burden would be lifted for French winegrowers, whose sales have been pummeled by steep retaliatory tariffs that the Trump administration imposed on imports to the United States.
Pope Francis, 84, the head of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, 90, the spiritual leader of most of the world’s Shia Muslims, talked for almost an hour during the first ever papal visit to Iraq, the pontiff’s first trip abroad since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Sistani, dressed in black, “affirmed his concern that Christian citizens should live like all Iraqis in peace and security, and with their full constitutional rights”, according to a statement.
Francis, dressed in white, thanked Sistani for having “raised his voice in defence of the weakest and most persecuted” during some of the most violent times in Iraq’s recent history, the Vatican said.
Neither man wore a face mask during the intimate encounter at Sistani’s modest rented home in the holy city of Najaf, despite a recent rise in Covid infections in Iraq. Francis has been vaccinated against the virus, but Sistani has not.
The pope removed his shoes before entering Sistani’s room. The Muslim cleric, who normally remains seated for visitors, stood to greet Francis at the door of his room – a rare honour.
The tabby was seen on an Avanti West Coast train at London Euston, about half an hour before it was due to leave for Manchester at 21:00 GMT on Tuesday.
Passengers were transferred to a replacement train as station staff coaxed the cat from the Pendolino, which travels at speeds up to 125mph.
The stand-off came to an end after a bin was pulled up beside the carriage, giving the moggy its own special disembarkation platform.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 43. Sunrise is 6:21 AM and sunset 5:50 PM, for 11h 25m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 56.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1946, Churchill uses the phrase iron curtain in his speech (The Sinews of Peace) at Westminster College, Missouri.
Republican legislators in dozens of states are trying to make voting more difficult, mostly because they believe that lower voter turnout helps their party win elections. (They say it’s to stop voter fraud, but widespread fraud doesn’t exist.) The Supreme Court, with six Republican appointees among the nine justices, has generally allowed those restrictions to stand.
“I don’t say this lightly,” Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida, recently wrote. “We are witnessing the greatest roll back of voting rights in this country since the Jim Crow era.”
The only meaningful way for Democrats to respond is through federal legislation, like the voting-rights bill that the House passed on Wednesday. Among other things, it would require states to register many eligible voters automatically; allow others to register on Election Day; hold at least 15 days of early voting; expand voting by mail; and allow people with completed criminal sentences to vote. The bill also requires more disclosure of campaign donations and restricts partisan gerrymandering.
But the bill seems to have no chance of winning the 60 votes in the Senate needed to overcome a filibuster. The Senate is divided 50-50 between the two parties (including two independents, who usually vote with Democrats). The bill will pass only if all 50 Senate Democrats agree to scrap or alter the filibuster, as they have the power to do.
The Biden administration is preparing to convert its immigrant family detention centers in South Texas into Ellis Island-style rapid-processing hubs that will screen migrant parents and children with a goal of releasing them into the United States within 72 hours, according to Department of Homeland Security draft plans obtained by The Washington Post.
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“We welcome the change, because the detention of families — we never thought that was a good system or a good policy at all,” said Edna Yang, co-executive director of American Gateways, an immigration legal aid organization in Texas. “They shouldn’t be detained, and they should be given the opportunity to go before the immigration judge and be released in the community and not held like prisoners.”
(Yes, a thousand times over: free movement of people, capital, or goods.)
The Milwaukee Brewers expect to have between 11,000 and 12,000 fans in the stands at American Family Field when they open their 2021 season April 1 against the Minnesota Twins.
The Brewers announced Thursday morning they had reached agreement with the City of Milwaukee Health Department to begin the season at 25% capacity. They had requested 35% capacity in a 500-page health and safety report submitted to health officials last month.
The shortened 60-game season in 2020 was played with no fans in the stands because of the spreading coronavirus pandemic. MLB teams have put strict protocols in place and have agreed to seat fans in small groups, or pods, if allowed to have a certain percentage at games this season.
Wisconsin’s senior senator, Ron Johnson, has become a topic of national interest. As here at FREE WHITEWATER, Americans from fawaway parts of the continent have noticed his extreme positions.
The Oshkosh Republican on Wednesday afternoon promised to force a full reading of the bill while speaking on The Vicki McKenna Show. He said that reading the entirety of the document would likely take up to 10 hours.
“I will make them read their 600- to 700-page bill,” he said on the radio program. “So that every member of the Senate would have time to read it … before we start the debate on it.”
As a matter of sheer obstinacy, this tactic makes sense. As generaladvocacy (toward all Wisconsin) it doesn’t make sense: merely reading the entire bill won’t highlight bloated parts as effectively as using time in the Senate and in the media to repeat over and again the specific parts of the bill that Johnson thinks are bloated. Johnson isn’t taking ten hours – he’s wasting ten hours on a stunt. He’d do better to take ten minutes, repeated again and again in the media, to highlight parts of the bill to which he objects.
He could, easily, be ambitious, compromised, and a crackpot at the same time.
If this should be (at least in part) the performance of an ambitious man, to whom is Johnson’s performance directed? WISGOP primary voters, the donor class, or Trump?
Johnson is ostentatiously extreme. He’s become a United-States-senator-as-troll. A would-be troll king, truly, competing with Cruz, Graham, Paul.
And so, and so, one wonders: For whom is Johnson performing?
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 38. Sunrise is 6:23 AM and sunset 5:49 PM, for 11h 25m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 67.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 3:30 PM, and the Whitewater Fire Department holds a business meeting via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes the 32nd President of the United States. He was the last president to be inaugurated on March 4.
We are nearly a year into this pandemic, and this is what we are seeing in the state capitol today: no masks, no social distancing, and no safety precautions for the staff who have no choice but to be in the building. This is reckless and dangerous. pic.twitter.com/Q7ic76xP2y
— Senator Melissa Agard (@senator_melissa) March 3, 2021
MADISON – Assembly leaders packed dozens of maskless adults and children into a small hearing room in the Wisconsin State Capitol on Wednesday in the latest sign that Republicans who control the legislative process do not plan to adopt COVID-19 mitigation rules.
The crowd of people gathering together without face masks is again ringing alarm bells for Democratic lawmakers who say the behavior puts Capitol workers’ health at risk and discourages people from participating in the democratic process.
“This is not allowing the public who wants to be able to engage with government to be able to engage with government in a safe way,” Sen. Melissa Agard, D-Madison, said Wednesday.
The lack of face masks pushed at least one Democratic member of the committee who is not fully vaccinated to avoid the meeting and watch the proceedings by livestream.
“The question is not when do we eliminate the virus in the country,” said Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center and an expert in virology and immunology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Rather, it’s when do we have the virus sufficiently under control? “We’ll have a much, much lower case count, hospitalization count, death count,” Offit said. “What is that number that people are comfortable with?” In his view, “the doors will open” when the country gets to fewer than 5,000 new cases a day, and fewer than 100 deaths.
That latter threshold, of 100 COVID-19 deaths a day, was repeated by other experts, following the logic that it approximates the nation’s average death toll from influenza. In most recent years, the flu has killed 20,000 to 50,000 Americans annually, which averages out to 55 to 140 deaths a day, said Joseph Eisenberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. “This risk was largely considered acceptable by the public,” Eisenberg said. Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist at UC San Francisco, made a similar calculation. “The end to the emergency portion of the pandemic in the United States should be heralded completely by the curtailing of severe illness, hospitalizations, and deaths from COVID-19,” she said. “Fewer than 100 deaths a day—to mirror the typical mortality of influenza in the U.S. over a typical year—is an appropriate goal.”
Filmmaker Barry Avrich (David Foster: Off the Record, Prosecuting Evil) explores how one of the most respected art galleries in New York City became the center of the largest art fraud in American history and was ultimately forced to close after 165 years. Knoedler & Company, under its president, Ann Freedman, made millions selling previously unseen works by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and others that had supposedly come from a secret collection.
But when her prestigious clients discovered they had purchased fakes, the scandal rocked the art world. Avrich secured unprecedented access to Freedman, her clients and other key players for the documentary.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 45. Sunrise is 6:25 AM and sunset 5:47 PM, for 11h 22m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 77.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 2005, Steve Fossett becomes the first person to fly an airplane non-stop around the world solo without refueling.
If you had to choose between having running water at home or risking your home being raided by the authorities, which would you choose? The correct answer is: this shouldn’t even be a question.
But it’s become one. The startling truth is that signing up for even basic utilities in this country has turned into a gamble for many people, particularly undocumented immigrants. Last week, the Washington Post revealed that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] has paid tens of millions of dollars since 2017 for access to a private database that contains more than “400m names, addresses and service records from more than 80 utility companies covering all the staples of modern life, including water, gas and electricity, and phone, internet and cable TV”. The information has been mined by Ice, the Post reported, for immigration surveillance and enforcement operations.
Neither [ICE] nor any other federal agency should have unfettered access to this data. In fact, there are strict protocols and regulations that determine how the federal government can gather your information and when it can infringe on your privacy, much of this is codified in the Privacy Act of 1974, as the Post notes. So how are federal agencies like Ice getting around these legal safeguards, which would otherwise prevent them from scooping up such data on their own and without a court order? Simple. They just buy it. With taxpayer money.
In Cleveland County, Okla., the chairman of the local Republican Party openly wondered “why violence is unacceptable,” just hours before a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol last week. “What the crap do you think the American revolution was?” he posted on Facebook. “A game of friggin pattycake?”
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Interviews with more than 40 Republican state and local leaders conducted after the siege at the Capitol show that a vocal wing of the party maintains an almost-religious devotion to the president, and that these supporters don’t hold him responsible for the mob violence last week. The opposition to him emerging among some Republicans has only bolstered their support of him.
And while some Republican leaders and strategists are eager to dismiss these loyalists as a fringe element of their party, many of them hold influential roles at the state and local level. These local officials are not only the conduits between voters and federal Republicans, but they also serve as the party’s next generation of higher-level elected officials, and would bring a devotion to Trumpism should they ascend to Washington.
The Whitewater Common Council met on Thursday, 2.18.21. It will meet again tonight, 3.2.21.
The recording of the meeting is embedded above. The amended agenda for the meeting is available.
A few remarks, on selected items of the agenda —
1.Amended Agendas. A good rule of thumb for amendments within 72 hours of a meeting is time sensitivity, not mere importance. Many could reasonably contend that a given item was, of itself, important. The question for amendments should be urgency (Video, 1:24.)
2. The Library. The meeting saw a discussion about possibilities (can a library board lawfully decide on salaries or holidays?) and practicalities (what’s good policy in these cases?). The twists and turns of the discussion – from what’s lawful, to what’s practical, to what’s budget neutral, to what will be done in the future – obscure this question: how uncomfortable are policy discussions in Whitewater? People are familiar with each other, and yet they seem uncomfortable all the same. (Video, 9:26.)
(On city policy, a unified approach is sensible. On the adoption of holidays, the city should align itself with the nation of which it is a part: the United States recognizes the King holiday, and so should the City of Whitewater.)
3. The Lakes in Town. The waters of Cravath and Tripp Lakes have deteriorated over the years, and to improve their condition, the lakes are being dredged. (The lake is Tripp, the park is called Trippe Lake Park.) This process is lengthy, but that length cannot be avoided. A faster process would only undermine the ecological and aesthetic goal behind the reclamation effort. (Video, 22:40.)
It’s worth noting that few people in the city, this last decade, advocated consistently for improving the condition of the lakes before that condition became intolerable. Many of the development men who pushed for a greater downtown presence long ignored the adjacent lakes’ condition, and those in opposition to those development men (as here at FREE WHITEWATER) ignored the lakes, too.
The project is overdue, yet not too late.
4. Water Towers. Whitewater plans a new water tower, with the old one in Starin Park likely to remain undisturbed as a local attraction.
5. Tax Incremental Financing. The city council heard a presentation on possibilities for extending a tax incremental district for a year, closing others, and thereafter opening new ones. (Video, 38:10.)
6. Asides.
Policy as personality is bad policy.
Watching a pitcher isn’t pitching.
What a shame that it’s too troublesome to invite the public to speak at each point on the agenda. Whitewater has few public comments because government tries too little. Perhaps the officials of the city have exhausted themselves on their own remarks, lacking afterward the energy even to ask for others’ opinions more than once.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 40. Sunrise is 6:26 AM and sunset 5:46 PM, for 11h 19m 58s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 86.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1972, the Pioneer 10 space probe is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida with a mission to explore the outer planets.
Firing or overruling the ref won’t help you if your own team can’t decide where the goal posts are.
This has been obvious for a while. Yet Democratic leaders chose to ignore the discord rather than adopt a compromise policy that might be acceptable to moderates — and still achieve, say, 90 percent of the left’s objectives. Which are, presumably, to raise living standards for as many of the working poor as possible.
Raising the federal hourly minimum wage from $7.25 — where it has remained since 2009 — is broadly popular among both voters and Democratic lawmakers. There’s disagreement, though, about what level it should be raised to.
The “Fight for 15” movement, launched in 2012 by fast-food workers with backing from organized labor, cultivated political support for this round-numbered, alliterative goal. The movement has had successes in places such as New York and Seattle, and the left wing of the Democratic Party has worked to expand the minimum to $15?nationwide.
But this policy’s economic and political effects might look different in areas where wages and costs of living are lower. In Mississippi, for instance, the most recent data available show that the median wage is $15 per hour. So if implemented immediately, a federal minimum at that level would apply to half of the state’s wage-earning workforce.
It’s unclear how employers might react to a large mandated increase. Maybe they’d lay off lots of employees or reduce hours, as opponents of minimum wages generally argue. This would undercut the policy’s goal of helping low-wage workers. Or maybe employers would raise prices. Or demand higher productivity. Or accept lower profits. Or some combination of all these things.
As the country has witnessed episode after episode of police abuse, holding police officers accountable for misconduct has become an urgent issue. But despite increased attention, it’s still rare for police officers to face criminal prosecution. That leaves civil lawsuits as victims’ primary route for seeking legal redress and financial compensation when a police encounter goes wrong. The resulting settlements can be expensive for the city, which is generally on the hook for the payouts (meaning ultimately, most are subsidized by taxpayers), and those costs can encourage cities to make broader changes.
Successful settlements are also a helpful source of information for places that are serious about police reform. If cities and police departments want to cut down on misconduct and spend less taxpayer money, they need to know how much they’re paying for police abuse, and what kinds of incidents are most frequent and most expensive.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 29. Sunrise is 6:28 AM and sunset 5:45 PM, for 11h 17m 05s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 93.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Involvement & Cable TV Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4 PM.
Nearly half of Wisconsin manufacturers say their business remains down, according to new survey results released Thursday by Wisconsin Manufacturing Extension Partnership (WMEP) Manufacturing Solutions, a not-for-profit manufacturing consulting firm that caters to small and midsize manufacturers across the state.
The survey found 22 percent of manufacturers reported their business down “significantly” compared to a normal year, and 17 percent said business was still “down somewhat.”
Only 8 percent of respondents said business was “down greatly,” a marked improvement from October when 18 percent of manufacturers were still reporting large declines in revenue.
Alternatively, nearly 40 percent of manufacturers said their business was up to some degree.
George Bureau, vice president of consulting services for WMEP, said that split shows an “uneven” recovery.
“We have some manufacturers that are actually too busy that are having challenge(s) getting product out the door, and some that are OK, and … a few that aren’t doing so well,” Bureau said.
Employees at a private Wisconsin company owned by two top Republican donors in the US have faced significantly higher rates of Covid-19 infection and have filed numerous complaints about workplace safety to federal authorities, according to a Guardian investigation into Uline.
Dick and Liz Uihlein, the billionaire founders of the Uline packaging and office supply company who were once dubbed the “most powerful conservatives you never heard of”, have been critics of Wisconsin stay-at-home orders and, some employees fear, used their considerable political clout to try to challenge safety rules in the state.
An internal document seen by the Guardian shows that at least 14% of Uline’s corporate workforce has tested positive for Covid-19 since last April, compared to 8.7% of the population in Kenosha county, where the company’s corporate office is located.
The agency’s delivery times have sunk to historic lows since [Louis] DeJoy took over in June. In most states, it took at least five days for a piece of first-class mail — such as a bill or paycheck — to arrive last month, according to data provided by mail-tracking vendor GrayHair Software. Going back 90 days, into the heart of holiday shipping season, it took more than six days on average for first-class delivery nationwide. The Postal Service aims to deliver local mail in two days and nonlocal mail in three to five days.
At the end of December, the agency had an on-time rate of 38 percent for nonlocal mail, according to data it reported to a federal court. Traditionally, that number is around 90 percent. The Postal Service has not disclosed 2021 metrics.
