Friday in Whitewater will see a morning shower with a high of 58. Sunrise is 6:20 AM and sunset 7:31 PM, for 13h 10m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 6.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
The City of Whitewater will hold a Board of Canvass this afternoon at 2:00 PM.
Those involved are, by and large, older and more professional than right-wing protesters we have surveyed in the past. They typically have no ties to existing right-wing groups. But like earlier protesters, they are 95 percent White and 85 percent male, and many live near and among Biden supporters in blue and purple counties.
The charges have, so far, been generally in proportion to state and county populations as a whole. Only Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and Montana appear to have sent more protesters to D.C. suspected of crimes than their populations would suggest.
Nor were these insurrectionists typically from deep-red counties. Some 52 percent are from blue counties that Biden comfortably won. But by far the most interesting characteristic common to the insurrectionists’ backgrounds has to do with changes in their local demographics: Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges.
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When compared with almost 2,900 other counties in the United States, our analysis of the 250 counties where those charged or arrested live reveals that the counties that had the greatest decline in White population had an 18 percent chance of sending an insurrectionist to D.C., while the counties that saw the least decline in the White population had only a 3 percent chance. This finding holds even when controlling for population size, distance to D.C., unemployment rate and urban/rural location. It also would occur by chance less than once in 1,000 times.
Put another way, the people alleged by authorities to have taken the law into their hands on Jan. 6 typically hail from places where non-White populations are growing fastest.
The political arm of House Republicans is deploying a prechecked box to enroll donors into repeating monthly donations — and using ominous language to warn them of the consequences if they opt out: “If you UNCHECK this box, we will have to tell Trump you’re a DEFECTOR.”
The language appears to be an effort by the National Republican Congressional Committee to increase its volume of recurring donations, which are highly lucrative, while invoking former President Donald J. Trump’s popularity with the conservative base. Those donors who do not proactively uncheck the box will have their credit cards billed or bank accounts deducted for donations every month.
The prechecked recurring box on the N.R.C.C.’s WinRed donation page
The prechecked box is the same tactic and tool that resulted in a surge of refunds and credit card complaints when used by Mr. Trump’s campaign last year, according to an investigation published by The New York Times over the weekend. The Trump operation made the language inside its prechecked boxes increasingly opaque as the election neared. Consumer advocates and user-interface designers said the prechecked boxes were a “dark pattern” intended to deceive Mr. Trump’s supporters.
This is the second in a series on Whitewater’s local politics of 2021. There are three principal kinds of conservatives in Whitewater. There are more kinds than this, of course, as there are many kinds of cats within the family Felidae; it’s enough for now to focus on the most common species within that family.
Whitewater’s three main conservative types: traditional, transactional, and populist. A description of each follows.
Traditionalists. Mostly local born, conservative socially before ‘cultural conservatism’ was a distinguishing term, short-term in outlook, plain in manners, speech, dress, and spending, with expectations of a social hierarchy in which a few town notables decided for the whole community. It is this group – or at least some of its prominent members – who have advanced boosterism in Whitewater as though it were a secular religion. However defending of orthodoxy they may consider themselves, they’re truly heterodox: their theology mixes with their social outlook so that its hard to tell which matters more to them.
Theirs was – and still is for their remaining numbers – a creed in which one accentuated the positive, ignored unpleasant observations or questions, and made sure that there was a (metaphorically) narrow perimeter fence that kept outsiders and outside discussions to a minimum. Babbitt would read like an instruction manual to them. There’s a Japanese expression that reminds of this outlook (although it is sometimes mistakenly attributed as Scandinavian): ‘the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.’
They contend that this imposed order is necessary for the common good.
Along with boosterism, this type has another core belief: conflicts of interest principles do not apply to them. They are certain that, although it may be impossible for others, they can perform multiple, conflicting roles without bias or prejudice. It would never occur to them to doubt their own judgment.
This group wanes a bit more each year. They’re no longer the leading conservative force in Whitewater.
The most zealous of the boosters, however, were not locals at all, but new officials who became converts to the traditionalists’ boosterism so that they might have a place at the table. (Sometimes they weren’t even conservatives, but it was a conservative table setting.)
Newcomers were expected to learn how to conform, so that they might truly arrive in that small social circle. What a shame, truly, that these newcoming men and women did not see — or were not reminded by others – that they arrived from the moment they were born.
Transactionalists. A second kind of conservative – transactional ones – began their advance while the traditionalists were still dominant, took some of the traditionalists’ views, discarded others, and mixed the resulting concoction to promote their particular business interests.
There are few of them, but no group of conservatives in Whitewater has been so skillful. They are deal-and-business oriented, so long as the deals and businesses are theirs.
These are not pro-market men (where markets are voluntary private combinations of capital, labor, goods, and services). They are pro-business men, and while the language of markets may be useful for them, the underlying principles mean little.
Unlike the traditionalists, they’ll gladly form relationships, and adopt the styles, of others if doing so redounds to their advantage. When they no longer see an advantage for themselves, they’ll discard those relationships. They are hardy and adaptable.
They contend that the public money they direct into their preferred capital projects is necessary for the common good.
Like the traditionalists, they do not believe conflict of interest principles should apply to their dealings. Unlike the traditionalists, they are far better at manipulating rules and agency actions to their own advantage. They conceal the extent of their maneuverings by co-opting others, who become provisionally useful to the transactionalists’ ambitions.
Populists. While there have always been populists (of right or left), Whitewater has never been fond of outspoken men and women. Large-scale conservative populism has only flourished in the last ten years, in Whitewater and other places like it. Most of these conservative populists are Trumpists, but not all. In any event, whatever their movement comes to be called, Trumpism will outlast Trump.
They contend that they uphold conservative tradition more truly than the traditionalists and conservative economics more effectively than the transactionalists. They see themselves variously and contradictorily as either facing ruin or assured of success.
Some are new to politics, some have been around. Some are well-read and literate, others not. Unlike conservative traditionalists or transactionalists, who are mostly like other members of their respective groups, the conservative populists vary widely in ability and sophistication.
All the populists share a desire to speak – they’re highly motivated and outspoken – but their varying abilities leave some at risk of confusing or detracting from the messages of others. (When a group is uniform in members’ abilities, some won’t detract from others because they’re all of similar strength.)
The populists are often underestimated. I have been – and am – a critic of these rebranded Trumpists, but have never underestimated them.
These populist conservatives are not deal-makers: they want what they want, on their terms, as soon as they can get it. As the traditionalists fade away, the question among conservatives in Whitewater (and other places) will be whether the deal-makers or the populists dominate right-of-center politics.
Thursday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of 64. Sunrise is 6:22 AM and sunset 7:30 PM, for 13h 07m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 12.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1820, the Venus de Milo is discovered on the Aegean island of Milos.
The opposition is rooted in a mix of religious faith and a longstanding wariness of mainstream science, and it is fueled by broader cultural distrust of institutions and gravitation to online conspiracy theories. The sheer size of the community poses a major problem for the country’s ability to recover from a pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of half a million Americans. And evangelical ideas and instincts have a way of spreading, even internationally.
There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated against Covid-19, making them among the least likely demographic groups to do so, according to the Pew Research Center.
“If we can’t get a significant number of white evangelicals to come around on this, the pandemic is going to last much longer than it needs to,” said Jamie Aten, founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois.
As vaccines become more widely available, and as worrisome virus variants develop, the problem takes on new urgency.
Wayne LaPierre, who positioned the National Rifle Association as an uncompromising lobbying powerhouse over the past three decades, admitted Wednesday that he did not disclose free trips he took on a luxury yacht and acknowledged that some top NRA officials were not informed in advance of his plan to seek bankruptcy protection for the group.
Under questioning on the third day of a federal bankruptcy hearing, LaPierre defended his leadership of the gun rights group and the benefits he and his family received from NRA contractors.
But his testimony undercut arguments by NRA lawyers this week that LaPierre has effectively cleaned up ethical and governance problems since 2018, when the organization was first alerted by New York state officials of possible fiscal mismanagement.
Last year, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) sued the NRA, alleging that LaPierre and three other top officials used the group’s resources for their own personal benefit. She has sought to dissolve the organization.
(No group has done more harm to legitimate Second Amendment rights than LaPierre’s NRA.)
Vance E. Perry, 57, was released from the William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital on Dec. 30, 2017, following treatment for ongoing health problems, including a mental illness known to cause confusion and disorientation. Perry had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was at the hospital for a medication check, according to the family’s attorney.
The Army veteran never made it home. Perry was found dead a day later in a parking garage.
“He couldn’t care for himself. He couldn’t remember anything you told him from one minute to the next. If you told him, ‘Wait here for the cab,’ he wouldn’t remember that you told him that two minutes later,” said attorney Terrence Polich who represented Perry’s family in a lawsuit against the Veterans Affairs Hospital.
Today’s post will summarize the local election results and offer a few observations; subsequent posts in the series will expand on particular, and notable, local political conditions.
For the Whitewater Unified School District, the district saw three active candidates on the ballot for two seats on the board. Unofficial results from Rock, Jefferson, and Walworth counties: Maryann Zimmerman 1354, Larry Kachel 1322, Tom Ganzer (I) 1075.
In the City of Whitewater, for an at-large council seat, unofficial results show Lisa Dawsey-Smith with 708, Dan Machalik with 328. In the fifth aldermanic district, Greg Majkrzak (I) received 62 votes, with Neil Hicks receiving 60. In the first aldermanic district, Carol McCormick (I) ran unopposed, as did Brienne Brown (I) in the third aldermanic district.
The center-left candidate in the statewide race for schools superintendent, Jill Underly, carried Whitewater over the center-right candidate, Deb Kerr, by 842-379.
A few remarks:
Voters won’t help an incumbent who won’t help himself. One expects an incumbent to advance his record confidently and defend himself thoroughly against criticism. People aren’t inclined to do for a politician what he won’t do for himself. Advancing and defending are not assurances of re-election, but their absence makes defeat likely. It has been a tumultuous year; passivity is not a winning response to tumult.
Underly’s Performance. Jill Underly performed meaningfully better in Whitewater than Tom Ganser, the incumbent school board candidate. They were ideologically similar candidates with different local receptions. It’s not broad ideology, but particular local circumstances, that account for their different levels of support.
The election invites consideration (among other topics) of the kinds of conservatives in Whitewater, the city’s center-left, the city’s few progressives, managing Whitewater’s common council, the intermixing of city & district politics, demographics, marketing, and majoritarianism in the school district, and the limits of political change in the city or school district.
Tomorrow: The Kinds of Conservatives in Whitewater.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see afternoon thunderstorms with a high of 78. Sunrise is 6:24 AM and sunset 7:28 PM, for 13h 04m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 19.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1827, John Walker, an English chemist, sells the first friction match that he had invented the previous year.
Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, was one of President Donald J. Trump’s most vocal allies during his term, publicly pledging loyalty and even signing a letter nominating the president for the Nobel Peace Prize.
In the final weeks of Mr. Trump’s term, Mr. Gaetz sought something in return. He privately asked the White House for blanket pre-emptive pardons for himself and unidentified congressional allies for any crimes they may have committed, according to two people told of the discussions.
Around that time, Mr. Gaetz was also publicly calling for broad pardons from Mr. Trump to thwart what he termed the “bloodlust” of their political opponents. But Justice Department investigators had begun questioning Mr. Gaetz’s associates about his conduct, including whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old that violated sex trafficking laws, in an inquiry that grew out of the case of an indicted associate in Florida.
There are several details of the Matt Gaetz story that keep sticking in my head, but the one that sticks in it most is the report that the Florida Republican used to wander around and show his colleagues nude photos of people he had slept with. There’s a kind of grim weirdness to the idea of these interactions (which Gaetz denies) — a very “I Read On eHow.com That Men Bond Over Conquests” bewilderment. The callousness and the violation involved are enough of a sock to the gut. But the fact that this was allegedly known about him is what keeps getting to me. The fact that this, or something in this neighborhood of bad, occasioned senior staff from then-House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s (R-Wis.) office to have a talk with Gaetz about professional behavior.
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To me, this is something you do, ideally, zero times. You never experience the impulse to do it, and you lead a pleasant life. You travel. You eat lunchmeat sandwiches. Maybe you do a marathon, or climb something. You lead a blithe existence for many decades, you die in your bed in your mid-nineties surrounded by your cherished relatives, and in all that time, you never walk up to a colleague on the floor of the House of Representatives and out of nowhere present him with a nude photograph of someone you claim tohave had sex with.
But if you can’t do it zero times, then ideally it happens only once. It happens only once, because the moment you do it, the person you show it to responds the way a person should respond. You produce your photograph to your colleague, and your colleague looks at you and says, “Never show that to anyone, ever again. Go home and rethink your life. I do not feel closer to you. If anything, I want to have you removed forcibly from my presence by strong gentlemen whose biceps are tattooed with ‘MOM.’The fact that you thought this would make us closer makes me question every decision in my life that has led me to this point. Leave now and never come back.”
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 78. Sunrise is 6:26 AM and sunset 7:27 PM, for 13h 01m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 28.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1831, many of the Sauk leave Wisconsin and Illinois: “On this date, in the spring of 1831, the Sauk Indians led by Chief Keokuk left their ancestral home near the mouth of the Rock River and moved across the Mississippi River to Iowa to fulfill the terms of a treaty signed in 1804. Many of the tribe, however, believed the treaty to be invalid and the following spring, when the U.S. government failed to provide them with promised supplies, this dissatisfied faction led by Black Hawk returned to their homeland on the Rock River, precipitating the Black Hawk War.”
Shortly after President Biden took office, I began asking his aides why their publicly announced goal for Covid-19 vaccine distribution — an average of one million shots a day — was so unambitious. The pace wasn’t much faster than what the Trump administration had achieved in its final days, and it was far short of the rate at which vaccine makers would be delivering doses to the government. Based on that delivery schedule, a reasonable goal seemed to be three million shots a day.
White House officials responded by talking about the logistical challenges in giving so many shots. But they never explicitly denied that three million daily shots was realistic. The response left me suspecting that their true goal was closer to three million than one million, but that they wanted to set a public goal they could comfortably clear.
Whatever you think of the P.R. strategy (and I tend to prefer transparency over artificially low expectations), the administration has now reached three million shots a day. And it deserves credit for getting there so quickly.
Doing so has required a campaign that resembles wartime mobilization in its speed and complexity. It has involved state and local governments as well as the private sector. It has combined existing infrastructure like pharmacies with brand-new mass-vaccination clinics at sports stadiums and amusement parks.
Mulling Q’s identity is in fact the easiest question to ask about the so-called QAnon movement. It’s also the wrong one.
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For the scores of families who have lost relatives to obsessions with QAnon’s paranoid worldviews, a Q revelation might give them someone to blame. But that doesn’t mean it would provide any real accountability. What are grieving people going to do? Sue someone for spinning a fantasy on an anonymous message board?
Unmasking Q might not even be a point of leverage in arguments with believers. After all, this is a movement that believes many powerful people have been replaced with body doubles, either because they actually died years ago or have been arrested as part of Trump’s crusade against the “deep state.”
In this context, [HBO documentary filmmaker] Hoback’s hope that QAnon followers will stop choosing “to devote their lives to a cause propagated by a cynic, who treats the whole world like it’s a game” seems sweetly naive.
(I’ve enjoyed the HBO documentary Q: Into the Storm, but share Rosenberg’s doubts that those beclouded by conspiracy theories will easily return to reason.)
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 74. Sunrise is 6:27 AM and sunset 7:26 PM, for 12h 58m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 38.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 7 PM.
On this day in 1792, President Washington exercises, for the first time in American history, the constitutional authority to veto a bill.
A Facebook page shows a child scampering down a school corridor, alerting Ohio families to a scholarship program.
Chatter fills the same page with news ranging from a state anti-corruption bill to the vibrant local real estate market. “It’s a great time to be selling a home in Columbus,” one post celebrates.
Titled Arise Ohio, the Facebook page is the creation of the American Culture Project — a nonprofit whose website says its mission is to “empower Americans with the tools and information necessary to make their voices heard in their local communities, statehouses and beyond.”
Undisclosed on the Facebook page is the nonprofit’s partisan goal. Arise Ohio and similar sites aimed at other politically pivotal states are part of a novel strategy by a little-known, Republican-aligned group to make today’s GOP more palatable to moderate voters ahead of the 2022 midterms by reshaping the “cultural narrative” on hot-button issues.
That goal, laid out in a private fundraising appeal sent last month to a Republican donor and reviewed by The Washington Post, relies on building new online communities that can be tapped at election time, with a focus on winning back Congress in 2022.
“We’ve created a persuasion machine that allows conservatives to reach, engage and move people to action like never before,” the solicitation states. “Now is the time to expand and capitalize on this machine, setting the political playing field in advance of the 2022 election.”
Vaccines could be available for children as early as this summer, but hesitancy among parents could be an obstacle to making schools COVID-free.
Pfizer announced this week that its COVID-19 vaccine is 100% effective in children ages 12 to 15, and the company plans to seek emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for that age group “in the coming weeks.”
The company launched a vaccine trial last week for children between 6 months and 11 years old.
But a survey this week by Indiana University researchers found that more than a quarter of U.S. parents don’t intend to get their kids vaccinated. Opposition is especially pronounced among Republican or Republican-leaning women, 54% of whom said they plan to have their kids skip the vaccine.
UW epidemiologist Ajay Sethi calls the potential eligibility of 12- to 15-year-olds “a very important step to increase immunity to the virus in our community.”
Easter in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 74. Sunrise is 6:29 AM and sunset 7:25 PM, for 12h 55m 57s of daytime. The moon is in its third quarter with 49.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1865, a day after Union forces capture Richmond, Virginia, President Lincoln visits the Confederate capital.
Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500.
It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help.
What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.
“It felt,” Russell said, “like it was a scam.”
But what the Blatts believed was duplicity was actually an intentional scheme to boost revenues by the Trump campaign and the for-profit company that processed its online donations, WinRed. Facing a cash crunch and getting badly outspent by the Democrats, the campaign had begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week until the election.
Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.
As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.
Before he has even confirmed that he will run for office, Vance has built a campaign slush fund worth at least $10m on the strength of donations from the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a formerly ardent Trump supporter, and the hedge fund heiress-slash-Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, Forbes magazine first reported.
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The conventional wisdom among political strategists has long been that the Republican party, whose supporters are disproportionately white, faces a demographic timebomb as the US electorate diversifies. Trump knocked down the theory a bit last year by making inroads among Latinos and, to a lesser extent, African American men.
The “working-class” pitch is partly an appeal to those new Republican-curious voters. But Trump also pointed to another, powerful way for the Republican party to extend its reach: by winning an ever-greater share of working-class white voters, the kind who might have once belonged to a union and voted Democratic, but who backed Trump in both 2016 and 2020 by a margin 40 points greater than the national spread.
Republican strategists are brainstorming about how to retain those voters. An internal Republican memo revealed this week by Axios, called Cementing GOP as the Working Class Party, advised that “House Republicans can broaden our electorate, increase voter turnout, and take back the House by enthusiastically rebranding and reorienting as the Party of the Working Class.”
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 68. Sunrise is 6:31 AM and sunset 7:24 PM, for 12h 53m 05s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 60.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1865, the Union Army liberates Richmond: “When Petersburg, Virginia, fell on the night of April 2, 1865, Confederate leaders hastily abandoned Richmond. The 5th, 6th, 7th, 19th, 36th, 37th and 38th Wisconsin Infantry participated in the occupation of Petersburg and Richmond. The brigade containing the 19th Wisconsin Infantry was the first to enter Richmond on the morning of April 3rd. Their regimental flag became the first to fly over the captured capital of the Confederacy when Colonel Samuel Vaughn planted it on Richmond City Hall.”
On the surface, Marty Tibbitts led a charmed life.
The CEO of a Michigan-based telecommunications company, he lived in a historic waterfront mansion with his high school sweetheart and co-founded the now-shuttered World Heritage Air Museum. Family and friends remembered his “big smile and fun demeanor” after he was killed in a plane crash in July 2018.
But behind the scenes, prosecutors allege, Tibbitts was quietly designing an underwater drone meant to shuttle large amounts of cocaine to Europe as part of a massive drug trafficking organization that they say he was financing.
A freshly unsealed federal indictment, first reported by the Detroit News, details a six-year investigation into the trafficking ring whose reach ensnared more than a dozen countries, including the United States, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico. The complaint brings criminal charges against an alleged drug baron arrested in North Carolina and portrays Tibbitts, 50, as a high-level co-conspirator.
The board of the Evjue Foundation, the charitable arm of The Capital Times, recently approved $375,000 in grants to support seven local food programs and seven other local causes.
The biggest single grant, for $85,000, went to the Second Harvest Foodbank of Southern Wisconsin.
“We are incredibly grateful for the ongoing generosity of the Evjue Foundation,” said Michelle Orge, Second Harvest president and CEO.
“This funding is a critical component in our ability to meet the food needs of so many in our community who will need support in the coming months as we recover from the pandemic.”
The Evjue board also approved grants to other programs that provide food assistance, including $15,000 for NewBridge, and $10,000 each for the Badger Prairie Needs Network, the River Food Pantry, the Middleton Outreach Ministry, St. Vincent DePaul and the Mellowhood Foundation.
Good Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 50. Sunrise is 6:32 AM and sunset 7:23 PM, for 12h 50m 13s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 70.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1865, defeat at the Third Battle of Petersburg forces the Army of Northern Virginia and the Confederate government to abandon Richmond, Virginia.
Poor old Joe Biden. He might have won the electoral college and the popular vote but he’ll never feel the love of his underlings like Donald Trump did.
The former president’s first full cabinet meeting in June 2017 remains an unparalleled opera of oleaginousness. Secretary after secretary all but flung themselves at his feet, sang songs of praise and paid homage to the divine emperor of the universe.
Has any parent ever known such undying adoration from their child? Only King Lear from Goneril and Regan, perhaps. And most telling was the fact that the world was allowed to see it. Trump made sure it was one more chapter in his reality TV presidency.
Not really Biden’s style. His first cabinet meeting on Thursday was relocated to the East Room because of coronavirus restrictions – the 16 permanent members wore face masks and sat in a giant square with empty chairs between them – but was otherwise a return to the staid old way of doing things.
The main item on the agenda was not the American president’s sculpted handsomeness, nor his towering intellect, nor his indubitable virility, nor his ability to hit holes in one, but merely his freshly announced $2tn infrastructure plan.
Flanked by the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and the defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, with the vice-president, Kamala Harris, opposite, Biden said he was asking five cabinet members to “take special responsibility to explain the plan to the American public.”
For 17 years, cicadas do very little. They hang out in the ground, sucking sugar out of tree roots. Then, following this absurdly long hibernation, they emerge from the ground, sprout wings, make a ton of noise, have sex, and die within a few weeks. Their orphan progeny will then return to the ground and live the next 17 years in silence.
Over the next several weeks, billions of mid-Atlantic cicadas will hear the call of spring and emerge from their cozy bunkers. This year’s group, born in 2004, is known as Brood X. They’ll start their journey to the surface when soil temperatures reach around 64 degrees Fahrenheit.
While they’ll emerge in biblical numbers, they’ll be blanketing only a small slice of the country.
