Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 48. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:26 PM for 9h 02m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 75% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1814, representatives of the United Kingdom and the United States sign the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812.
The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents has approved increasing salary ranges for top university positions in order to match ranges at peer institutions. The vote Monday came after UW System interim President Tommy Thompson said he favors smaller, successive increases for top executive pay ranges.
Regents voted unanimously to raise the salary ranges for chancellors, provosts and UW System leaders. The range for the UW-Madison chancellor increased 21.67 percent, which sets a minimum of $600,126 and a maximum pay of $900,190. The range for the UW-Milwaukee chancellor position increased by 32 percent, setting a minimum pay of $451,440 and a maximum of $677,160.
Before the vote, Regent President Edmund Manydeeds said changing the salary ranges “doesn’t address or guarantee salary rates for any of the senior executives.” Instead, he said the intent was to align salary ranges with market data provided during a Dec. 9 board meeting.
….
At the start of Monday’s meeting, Manydeeds told members he received a phone call from Thompson reiterating his opposition to matching market rates for top executive positions all at once.
“He thinks that we should not go to the high end of these ranges, as you know,” Manydeeds said. “He had a recommendation. He thinks it’s prudent to do that in successive increases, not do it all at once.”
Thompson is right, in almost any circumstances, but notably in these times of stress for frontline workers inside and outside of the UW System. Weak leaders (in this case, the Regents) often favor the level close to their own (in this case, specific chancellors). They want to placate those with whom they deal, or with whom they more closely identify, while ignoring ordinary employees.
Indeed, this is an easy marker of a weak board (whether public or private): it foremost confers raises and benefits to those who are closest by hierarchy to the board.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 42. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:25 PM for 9h 01m 57s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 83.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Voting is the beating heart of democracy, the way we claim control of this government of the people. But in Wisconsin, an infection in the bloodstream of the body politic is threatening our ability to be self-governing.
Donald Trump’s repeated lies about the 2020 election over the past year have put our democracy at grave risk, but he has not done this alone. His enablers, from U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson to Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, have refused to stand up to a dangerous man.
If they won’t do their duty, then citizens must: Tell Johnson, Vos and the rest to stop undermining confidence in Wisconsin elections.
Here are the facts. Donald Trump lost the popular vote in Wisconsin by about 20,600 votes; he lost nationally by 7 million. Recounts in Milwaukee and Dane counties last year confirmed that he lost. Courts repeatedly threw out ludicrous challenges by Trump backers.
And an Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in six battleground states that the former president complained about found fewer than 475 votes in dispute. Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; the disputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his margin in those states.
In other words, there was no steal and nothing to investigate. Just lies.
But the Republican sycophants in Wisconsin insist on appeasing Trump.
After Trump hectored him last summer for not doing enough to investigate and spread the former president’s lies, Vos launched a partisan review with former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman at the helm. Gableman bungled it, choosing to talk to more conspiracy theorists than election experts. His work has been an embarrassment to the state, even to many Republicans.
In November, Johnson literally called for the takeover of federal elections by the partisans in the Wisconsin Legislature. In other words, his own party. Johnson said local officials should ignore the bipartisan Elections Commission that his own party set up six years ago.
The stench of racism permeates much of this, especially efforts by Republicans to clamp down on access to voting. People of color are likely to be most affected.
But the lying also corrodes trust in the most basic act of democracy.
The WISGOP can stop this, but it won’t. We are late in the day, and a faction that has become addicted to lies shows no sign of seeking detoxification.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 29. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:24 PM for 9h 01m 47s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 90% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1944, German troops at the Battle of the Bulge demand the surrender of United States troops at Bastogne, Belgium, prompting the famous one word reply by General Anthony McAuliffe: “Nuts!”
The project director hired to oversee the struggling Foxconn development in the Village of Mount Pleasant is consistently billing taxpayers for 40 hours per week, but records are unable to account for how all his time is being spent.
Claude Lois is a contracted consultant with engineering firm Kapur and Associates,and he works in Mount Pleasant’s Village Hall. His role as project director has no official job description, and records obtained by Wisconsin Public Radio of Lois’ time card and village-owned calendar do not match.
Lois does not provide public updates to the village on how his time is spent or have a direct boss overseeing his work. Village Administrator Maureen Murphy authorizes his $28,000 per month salary without further documentation. When pressed for further information, Murphy provided WPR with Lois’ 2017 contract.
Murphy said Lois is in the office early in the morning and “working all the time” on new investment projects for Mount Pleasant. She said despite what Lois’ calendars show, there are no discrepancies between what he is billing for and the time he is working on behalf of the village.
“Every month, Claude presents the progress of the Foxconn development to the public, village and state officials, special interest groups, and stakeholders,” according to Kapur’s website.
The site says Lois also represents all local and national press inquiries. But the Village of Mount Pleasant contracts with a Milwaukee-based public relations firm to handle its media requests.
Lois, who bills $175 per hour, is scheduled to get a raise to $200 an hour starting Aug. 21. Lois declined to comment.
As of Dec. 13, Kapur and Associates billed Mount Pleasant approximately $362,000 for 2021, which was largely for Lois’ salary. By comparison, Murphy is paid $108,000 annually, according to the village budget.
Since 2017, Kapur has billed the village about $1.23 million.
On Nov. 1, Lois’ calendar indicates one 90-minute meeting with Foxconn from 1:30 to 3 p.m. The calendar indicates the rest of his day was free, but his time card shows he billed for nine hours of work.
The next day, Lois had one director meeting on his calendar from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m., with the rest of the day free. His time card said he worked 10 hours that day.
Some days Lois’ calendar is filled with meetings, and he bills up to 13 hours. Other days, like Oct. 28, Lois has nothing on his calendar and bills for eight hours, according to the records obtained by WPR.
….
After serving as the mayor of Burlington in Racine County for four terms and managing the state’s shared revenue program during former Gov. Scott Walker’s administration, Lois began working for Kapur and Associates in 2017. He was named project manager for Foxconn without the village conducting a national search.
When Lois was hired by Mount Pleasant, the Foxconn project still had some promise for the village and the state. But since 2017, Foxconn has fallen short on its hiring and building goals.
Lois, a former politician, now finds himself at the trough of a project that offers nothing to the communities he once ‘served.’ Both Lois and Mount Pleasant Village Administrator Murphy should, of course, be ashamed. They won’t be — having come this far shamelessly, contrition will not move them to step away from that trough.
Winter in Whitewater begins on a mostly cloudy day with a high of 35. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:24 PM for 9h 01m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 95.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
When the state Supreme Court ruled last month that Wisconsin’s new legislative lines would have to look a lot like the old lines, it all but ensured Republican control of the Legislature for another decade.
The only partisan question that remains — and it’s an important one — is how big that GOP advantage will be.
The court now has before it a GOP plan passed by the Legislature under which 62 or 63 of 99 Assembly seats would lean Republican in their makeup.
And it has before it a handful of plans offered by Democrats, progressives and others under which 55 to 60 Assembly seats would lean Republican.
In other words, even the Democratic plans before the court are very, very favorable to Republican control of the Legislature over the next 10 years.
But those plans are not quite as tilted toward the GOP and feature a higher number of competitive districts, which are scarce under the Republican plan.
Here are some takeaways about where things stand in a very consequential redistricting fight in Wisconsin, presented here in a question-and-answer format:
Wisconsin is a 50-50 state politically. So why do even the Democrats’ plans give Republicans a large edge in the struggle for control of the Legislature?
There are two reason for this. The first involves geography. Democratic voters are more concentrated in urban areas, meaning their voting power is more concentrated in fewer districts. Republicans are more efficiently distributed across the state. This means that under any Wisconsin plan that follows traditional redistricting standards such as compactness, more than half the legislative districts are going to lean Republican in their makeup. The urban-rural partisan divide gives the GOP a “natural” edge in the state’s legislative and congressional maps.
The second reason is that the state Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled 4-3 last month that it would only accept a redistricting plan that minimized changes to the current districts (which do have to be changed to make sure that after 10 years of population shifts, they have equal numbers of people). The court’s liberal minority dissented from that view.
The political effect of the ruling was to make the current map the template and baseline for the new lines. And that map was adopted in 2011 by a Republican governor and Legislature to maximize the number of GOP seats. The current lines drawn 10 years ago go beyond the “natural” Republican advantage discussed above to achieve an even bigger partisan tilt, guaranteeing one-sided GOP control of both chambers under almost all election scenarios.
How big will the advantage in the WISGOP gerrymandered maps be? Real big.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 38. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:23 PM for 9h 01m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School Board meets in open session at 7 PM.
Wisconsin’s conspiratorial U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson has spouted plenty of garbage in recent months — that mouthwash has been proven to kill COVID-19, that unvaccinated people are being put “basically into internment camps,” that climate change is “bullsh-t.”
Republicans who control the Legislature have already gerrymandered voting districts in Wisconsin to give conservative candidates an unfair advantage in elections. Johnson isn’t satisfied with that because the rigged maps won’t help him. He has to run statewide for his U.S. Senate seat.
So Johnson wants his colleagues to go further. He called on Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, and other GOP leaders to all but count the votes following elections so Republican candidates are more assured of victory.
Republicans in other states are similarly trying to seize control of election administration. They hope to decide close races in their favor by manipulating voting rules before and after Election Day. If a Democrat narrowly wins, for example, just throw out some of the Democrat’s votes on a subjective technicality.
Wisconsin should reject and prevent such devious attempts to undermine our democracy.
It’s hard to rank Johnson’s ideas, as so many are destructive in different ways. Unlike Johnson’s other errors, conspiracy theories, and lies, his proposal on elections has an obvious practical advantage: WISGOP control of elections would help him capture a third term.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 33. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:23 PM for 9h 01m 43s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.8% of its visible disk illuminated (the moon’s peak visible illumination was at 11:35 PM last night).
On this day in 1776, Thomas Paine publishes one of a series of pamphlets in The Pennsylvania Journal entitled “The American Crisis.”
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 33. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:22 PM for 9h 01m 49s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1865, Secretary of State William Seward proclaims the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, prohibiting slavery throughout the United States.
One of the investigators reexamining the 2020 election results in Wisconsin on behalf of the GOP-led state legislature is the president of a group that unsuccessfully sued to overturn the vote.
Another worked as a deputy in the White House Presidential Personnel Office, which was known for weeding out people perceived as disloyal to President Donald Trump.
A third is an Arkansas lawyer who represented Trump’s campaign during last year’s Wisconsin recount, a process that confirmed President Biden won the key swing state by roughly 20,700 votes.
All are being paid with Wisconsin taxpayer money as part of a legislative-backed investigation into the 2020 results headed by a former state Supreme Court justice that has picked up steam in recent weeks. The inquiry, the latest gambit by Republicans to reexamine the 2020 election nationally, makes little pretense of neutrality and is being led by figures who have shown allegiance to Trump or embraced false claims of fraud.
The former president personally lobbied state lawmakers to pursue the Wisconsin investigation and spurred on other ballot reviews around the country, leaning on legislators to revisit the vote more than a year after Americans went to the polls.
In Wisconsin, a state that is likely to see some of the nation’s most competitive races in 2022 for governor and U.S. Senate, there are now multiple efforts underway to scrutinize how the last election was run, including a recommendation by a county sheriff to prosecute and jail state election officials.
“What we’re seeing in Wisconsin is a whole bunch of little brush fires, each one of which could be dismissed as minor, unconcerning or maybe even absurdly comical,” said Jeffrey Mandell, an expert in Wisconsin election law and attorney for the Democratic mayor of Green Bay, who is fighting a subpoena from the legislative inquiry. “My concern is there are enough brush fires that they could feed into each other and form a real conflagration.”
The danger, he said, is that the same players could challenge the outcome of a closely contested midterm election — potentially with control of the U.S. Senate in the balance — and that the institutions designed to certify the results will have been dismantled or disempowered.
“It would be a crisis,” Mandell said. “People haven’t been paying attention because there are bigger fires elsewhere. But there aren’t more fires anywhere.”
Wisconsin has had a contentious politics for years. We have years more ahead.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 33. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:22 PM for 9h 02m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1903, the Wright brothers make the first controlled powered, heavier-than-air flight in the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
On its flag, Missouri quotes Voltaire: Salus populi suprema lex esto, which, roughly translated, means let the welfare of the people be the highest law.
Those two tenets of what it means to be a Missourian are sort of in conflict these days, as the state competes with other red states to demonstrate how conservative they are, even if it kills people.
Incumbent Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a U.S. Senate hopeful, is using his office (as Josh Hawley did before him) to climb up the political ladder. But what Schmitt is doing will almost certainly result in people dying:
As part of compliance with Schmitt’s letter, the local public health agencies in the above counties will stop “case investigation, contact tracing, quarantine orders, and public announcements of current cases/deaths, etc.”
Which means that we may well see case numbers in Missouri dropping—not because fewer people are infected with COVID, but because Eric Schmitt’s political ambitions are causing local governments to stop counting COVID infections as a way of bowing to his MAGA bona fides.
This abject refusal to acknowledge reality would be pathetic, if it weren’t so dangerous.
(Emphasis added.)
Missouri: where data are unlawful. The corrupt concept: if there’s no record of a problem, then there’s no problem.
(Another avenue for deceit would be to impair the accurate collection of data, so that any information still presented would be a mere shadow of the truth.)
Lies of omission are still lies.
Once a politician, appointed official, or institution adopts a practice of concealment, there’s no way back. One self-serving lie begs for companions…
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny, with strong winds subsiding, and a high of 36. Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 4:22 PM for 9h 02m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 93.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1773, members of the Sons of Liberty disguised as Mohawk Indians dump hundreds of crates of tea into Boston harbor as a protest against the Tea Act.
Michael Gableman talked up his review of the 2020 election at a Republican event over the weekend, telling the crowd he wouldn’t back down from Democrats and tipping his hand about his preferences in GOP primaries.
The former state Supreme Court justice at times has tried to portray himself as impartial and at others sought to stir up the Republican base. He’s on deck to speak at another Republican event later this month.
During an appearance Sunday in Beloit, Gableman appeared alongside former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and touted her bid for governor. That could put him in an awkward position if Marine veteran Kevin Nicholson decides to run for governor because Gableman serves on the advisory board for Nicholson’s political organization, the No Better Friend Corp.
The report doesn’t say whether Gableman offered Kleefisch a box of chocolates, but there’s time until Valentine’s Day (1 month, 29 days, to be precise). Harry & David (‘your destination for a gourmet gift delivery that is sure to delight’) accepts all major credit cards.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 64. Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 4:21 PM for 9h 02m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 88.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
WASHINGTON — At her annual budget address this month, Gov. Kristi Noem, Republican of South Dakota, blamed President Biden’s economic policies for rising prices, derided the “giant handout” of federal stimulus funds and suggested that she had considered refusing the money over ideological objections.
But like many Republican officials, Ms. Noem has found it hard to say no to her state’s share of the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief aid that Democrats passed along party lines in March.
Ms. Noem explained to fellow legislators how critical those federal funds were to South Dakota and outlined how she would use some of the nearly $1 billion slated for her state to invest in local water projects, make housing more affordable and build new day care centers. For those questioning her choice to take the money, Ms. Noem, who has opposed Covid restrictions including shutdowns and mask mandates, said any pandemic-relief funds she rejected would have just gone to other states.
“It would be spent somewhere other than South Dakota,” Ms. Noem said. “The debt would still be incurred by the country, and our people would still suffer the consequences of that spending.” No state has declined the relief money, and if they had it would go back to the Treasury Department, not to other states.
Republican leaders across the country have been engaged in a similarly awkward dance over the past few months as they accept — and often champion — money from the $350 billion bucket of state and local aid included in the stimulus bill, which passed Congress without a single Republican vote. In some states, like Ohio and Arizona, Republican governors are spending the funds while attempting to undercut the law that allowed the money to flow. Other governors are faulting Congress for not giving their state enough money.
And, like their counterparts in Congress, many Republicans have blasted Mr. Biden’s stimulus bill for fueling inflation, even as they take the funds, and criticized Democrats for pushing for additional government spending plans.
Of course, they’ll criticize and then take the money — Trumpism has no firm economic position except the enrichment of the Trump family subsumed under the general principle that hypocrisy is a virtue.
Look around small towns where Trumpists talk about fiscal prudence, and you’ll see that they (and others) waste money on artificial turf, etc., at the first opportunity. They’re fiscally prudent until they want something for themselves, all the while they’ll accuse others of their own, repeated actions.
They don’t have a coherent economic position — they have a collection of aching emotional needs that have to be satisfied. Explain their position coherently from moment to the next? Nah, why bother? They believe that explanations are for weaklings, suckers, socialists, communists, anarchists, anthropologists, meteorologists… whomever.
There are many sound reasons to oppose Trumpism, recognizing that alternatives to it bring their own, (far) lesser risks. One can believe that the Democrats are spending too much, as I do, and yet support resolutely their broad-based coalition against Trumpism’s autocratic nativism. Never Trump, after all, means Never Trump; never Trumpism means never Trumpism.
The Trumpists’ thorough-going hypocrisy is, in fact, another reason to oppose them.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 46. Sunrise is 7:18 AM and sunset 4:21 PM for 9h 03m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 81.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 9 AM, and the Fire Department holds a business meeting at 6 PM.
On this day in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turnerdelivers the “Significance of the Frontier in American History” address at the forty-first annual meeting of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
Republicans and Democrats alike Monday ripped into Wisconsin’s partisan review of the 2020 election, saying it was a baseless exercise that would needlessly damage faith in democracy.
State Sen. Kathy Bernier, a Republican from Lake Hallie who leads the Senate Elections Committee, said the review by former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman is firing up people who don’t understand elections.
“Mr. Gableman is coming to my county and I will attend that meeting along with my concealed carry permit, to be perfectly honest, because (the election review) keeps jazzing up the people who think they know what they’re talking about, and they don’t,” Bernier said.
Bernier, who oversaw elections for 12 years as Chippewa County clerk, said Republicans are reacting to political pressure from former President Donald Trump. Their constant complaints about the election could ultimately hurt Republicans if they don’t believe results can be trusted, she said.
“And so I think my advice would be to have Mr. Gableman wrap up sooner rather than later, because the longer we keep this up, the more harm … we’re going to do for Republicans,” she said.
In response, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos of Rochester issued a statement saying it was Democrats who were preventing Gableman from completing his work sooner. He did not note that much of Monday’s criticism came from Republicans and offered no timeline for when Gableman would finish his review.
….
Bernier made her comments during a panel discussion in the state Capitol. She was joined by Ben Ginsberg, who spent nearly four decades representing Republicans in election disputes, and Bob Bauer, who served as White House counsel during Barack Obama’s presidency.
Ginsberg agreed with Bernier’s assessment, saying attacks on the election will hurt Republicans in the long run because their voters will be less likely to cast ballots if they think elections are rigged.
“We are here today because Wisconsin has found itself really in the middle of a harmful and disturbing national trend that involves the intimidation of election officials — the people who are supposed to call balls and strikes in our elections,” Ginsberg said.
Joe Biden beat Trump by nearly 21,000 votes in Wisconsin. Recounts and court rulings have confirmed his victory. A legislative audit and a study by a conservative group turned up no evidence that would question the results.
The low-impulse-control base of the WISGOP is sure respond with… low-impulse-control behavior. (They usually start off with heads shaking, arms raised, bleating ‘what, what, what’ and decline in composure from there on out. While public health depends on widespread vaccinations, the easiest way to improve public civility would be to offer not free vaccinations, but free tranquilizers, in Trump-supporting communities.)
