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Acculturation, America, Daily Bread, Immigration, Refugees

Daily Bread for 11.27.21: New Americans in Wisconsin

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with scattered rain or snow showers and a high of 42.  Sunrise is 7:02 AM and sunset 4:23 PM for 9h 20m 32s of daytime.  The moon is in its third quarter with 49.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1903, Green Bay Packer Johnny Blood is born:

On this date Johnny Blood (aka John McNally) was born in New Richmond. Blood was an early NFL halfback playing for Green Bay from 1929 to 1933 and 1935 to 1936. He also played for the Milwaukee Badgers, Duluth Eskimos, Pottsville Maroons, and the Pittsburgh Pirates. An elusive runner and gifted pass receiver, he played a major role in the Packers’ drive to the first three championships in 1929, 1930 and 1931. Johnny Blood died on November 28, 1985, at the age of 82. Titletown Brewing Co. in Green Bay named their brew Johnny “Blood” Red Ale after the famed halfback.

 Hope Kirwan reports Experts on refugee experiences in Wisconsin encourage communities to see arriving Afghans as new Americans:

Vincent Her is a cultural anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse who teaches a class on refugees and transnational communities. He was a refugee himself 40 years ago, when his family fled their home in southeast Asia in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and came to America.

During a panel hosted by UW-La Crosse earlier this month, Her said he sees similarities between his family’s experience and that of the nearly 65,000 people who were evacuated during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Nearly 13,000 of those Afghans were brought to Fort McCoy, about 38 miles northwest of La Crosse, while they waited to be resettled, and thousands are still currently living on base.

….

Her said one of the best ways to support new arrivals is by immediately accepting them as fellow Americans instead of outsiders.

“We should not see them as refugees, we should not continue to refer to them as refugees. In the case of Hmong Americans, we have been here for 46 years and many continue to refer to us as Hmong refugees or Hmong,” Her said. “I prefer the term Hmong Americans because I basically grew up here. I raised my whole family here and we are as American as any other family. We eat turkey for Thanksgiving and pumpkin pie. Those are a part of our new food culture.”

But Her said accepting new Americans into a community doesn’t mean expecting them to discard their culture for the food and practices of white Americans.

He said when Hmong people from Southeast Asia started arriving in the U.S. after the Vietnam War, the federal government thought the best way to get people to assimilate quickly was by settling Hmong families in different communities.

“The hope is that if you keep them far apart, then they will quickly adapt, they will quickly become immersed in the community and you will never hear from them again,” Her said. “Rather than opening up to the community, they isolate themselves and they keep to themselves. Neighbors will say, ‘How come these people are so quiet? They’re not like Americans.’ Or if the family does things differently, then they say, ‘Well, these people don’t behave like Americans.'”

He said it wasn’t until these families reunited in communities around Wisconsin that they could regain their identities as Hmong and start to form a new identity as Hmong Americans.

How 20 Years of Halo Changed the Gaming Industry:

HALO – Theme Song Live:

Daily Bread, Food, Recipe

Daily Bread for 11.26.21: A Japanese Recipe for Pancakes

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 32.  Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 4:23 PM for 9h 22m 07s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 59.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1838, the Wisconsin Legislature assembles in Madison for the first time:

On this date, after moving from the temporary capital in Burlington, Iowa, the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature assembled in Madison for the first time. Two years earlier, when the territorial legislature had met for the first time in Belmont, many cities were mentioned as possibilities for the permanent capital — Cassville, Fond du Lac, Milwaukee, Platteville, Mineral Point, Racine, Belmont, Koshkonong, Wisconsinapolis, Peru, and Wisconsin City. Madison won the vote, and funds were authorized to erect a suitable building in which lawmakers would conduct the people’s business. Progress went so slowly, however, that some lawmakers wanted to relocate the seat of government to Milwaukee, where they also thought they would find better accommodations than in the wilds of Dane Co. When the legislature finally met in Madison in November 1838 there was only an outside shell to the new Capitol. The interior was not completed until 1845, more than six years after it was supposed to be finished. On November 26, 1838, Governor Henry Dodge delivered his first speech in the new seat of government.

 Few breakfast dishes seem more American than pancakes, but there should always be room for ideas to make our own favorites even better.  Valerio Farris writes of Extra Fluffy Pancakes, Thanks to This Japanese Secret Ingredient:

Recently, it came to my attention that there was a pancake trick making the rounds on Japanese Twitter. The secret to airier, fluffier, cakier pancakes? Mayo.

Weird, I know. But who am I to scoff? Rather, who are you to scoff? Who are any of us to scoff? So once I finished scoffing, I set out to give this recipe a try, following a translation of the original tweet.

According to SoraNews24, an online Japanese content aggregate, the recipe reads:

  • First mix one egg, 150 milliliters (2/3 cup) of carbonated water, and two tablespoons of mayonnaise together in a pot.
  • Add 150 grams of pancake mix, stir lightly, and heat over a low flame (option to add blueberries at this point).
  • Cook for about three minutes, flip, cook for about two more minutes on the other side, and you’re done.
  • Add butter, syrup, jam, or whatever toppings you’d like, and enjoy! The mayonnaise makes the pancakes fluffier, thicker, and juicier.

Sounds easy, right? Sure enough, it was.

Farris describes the result as a little tart, but not too dense.

Interesting.

Pentagon Creates UFO Task Force:

City, Film

Film: Tuesday, November 30, 1 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Dream Horse

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Tuesday, November 30th at 1 PM, there will be a showing of Dream Horse  @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:

Biography/Comedy/Drama/Sports

1 hour, 53 minutes

Rated PG (2020)

The inspiring true story of Dream Alliance, an unlikely race horse bred by a small town Welsh bartender (Toni Collette) with no equestrian experience. She convinces her patrons and neighbors to chip in their meager earnings to help raise and train the horse in the hope he can compete with the racing elite. Their investment begins to pay off, as Dream Alliance begins to rise through the ranks, and approaches the Welsh Grand National.

One can find more information about Dream Horse at the Internet Movie Database.

Enjoy.

Cats

Friday Catblogging: Calicos

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Mary Johnson lists 5 fun facts about calico cats you should know:

Cats come in a variety of colors and coat patterns, ranging from solid white to jet black and everything in between. For a cat to be considered a calico, three different colors must be present in her coat: black, red, and white. Tortoiseshell cats, which are sometimes confused with calicos, don’t have white in their coats. Instead, they’re usually black and red, sometimes seen with a hint of peaches and cream mixed in. On occasion, you’ll see a lighter tortie in shades of lilac and cream, known as dilute calicos. While no official calico cat breeds exist, you’ll often find these colorful fur babies in numerous cat breeds, including Persians, Maine coons, Manx cats, American shorthairs, and British shorthairs. 

….

1. Most calico cats are female

Did you know that only one out of every 3,000 calico cats is male? Male calicos are so rare that even your local veterinarian will most likely go their entire career without seeing one in person. Here’s why: The gene responsible for your cat’s coloration is located on the X chromosome. Female cats (XX) have a much greater chance of inheriting the unique calico pattern than male cats (XY). But what about those rare males? Sadly, they have an extra chromosome (XXY), and they’re usually sterile. 

Johnson lists the other four calico facts in her post at Pawtracks.

Animals, Birds, Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.25.21: Turkeys Take Over American Campuses

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Good morning.

Thanksgiving in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 37.  Sunrise is 7:00 AM and sunset 4:24 PM for 9h 23m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 69.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1783, The last British troops leave New York City three months after the signing of the Treaty of Paris.

 Mitch Smith reports As Turkeys Take Over Campus, Some Colleges Are More Thankful Than Others (‘From California to Minnesota to Massachusetts, turkeys have taken a liking to university life, leading to social media stardom and crosswalk confrontations’):

MINNEAPOLIS — They are lounging next to bike racks and outside dorms. They are strutting across Harvard Yard. And, yes, they are occasionally fanning their feathers and charging at innocent students.

Across the nation, from the riverbanks of the University of Minnesota to the forests of the University of California, Santa Cruz, wild turkeys have gone to college. And they seem to like it. Maybe too much.

Once rare in most of the United States, turkeys became one of the great conservation success stories of the last half-century. But as efforts to expand the bird’s range flourished across the countryside, the turkeys also trotted into cities, laying down roosts in alleys, parks, backyards and, increasingly, at institutions of higher learning.

“College campuses are just ideal habitat,” said David Drake, a professor and extension wildlife specialist at the University of Wisconsin, where a sizable flock likes to hang out near apartments for graduate students. “You’ve got that intermixing of forested patches with open grassy areas and things like that. Nobody’s hunting.”

….

There is little formal study of college turkeys, but on campus after campus, there is widespread agreement that their numbers have exploded in the last decade or so.

Alex Jones, who manages the Campus Natural Reserve at California, Santa Cruz, said he never saw a turkey as a student there in the 1990s. Now they are everywhere, sometimes in groups of dozens: outside dining halls, on the branches of redwood trees and, quite often, in streets blocking traffic.

“The funniest thing to me is that they’ll take the crosswalk sometimes,” Mr. Jones said.

Giant balloons take shape for Thanksgiving Day Parade:

Daily Bread, Newspapers, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 11.24.21: Alden Global Capital Comes for Lee Newspapers

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 50.  Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 4:24 PM for 9h 25m 26s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 78.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1863, at the Battle of Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga, Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant capture Lookout Mountain and begin to break the Confederate siege of the city.

 Erik Gunn reports ‘Slash and burn’ hedge fund bids for owner of multiple Wisconsin newspapers:

A hedge fund that has cut staff and resources drastically while becoming the second largest owner of newspapers in the country is now bidding to buy Lee Enterprises, which owns several daily newspapers in Wisconsin.

Alden Global Capital is offering $24 a share for Lee, the investment firm stated in a letter to Lee’s board of directors Monday, which would value the company at about $141 million. The offer is a 30% premium over Lee’s share price as of the close of trading on Friday, Nov. 19.

Word of the proposal quickly sent Lee’s stock price to near the offering amount by noon on Monday. The publishing company did not have an immediate comment.

Lee papers in Wisconsin include its state flagship, the Wisconsin State Journal, as well as dailies in La Crosse, Racine and Kenosha. Lee owns 90 newspapers nationwide, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Buffalo News and the Omaha World-Herald.

Over the last decade, Alden Global Capital has been buying newspapers around the country, including the chains Media General and the Tribune Co. It now owns about 200 papers, according to published reports.

“Alden comes in and it slashes and it burns,” said Lewis Friedland, a University of Wisconsin journalism professor. “They’re basically strip-mining newspapers.”

In this October’s Atlantic, McKay Coppins exhaustively described Alden’s approach in A Secretive Hedge Fund is Gutting Newsrooms:

What threatens local newspapers now is not just digital disruption or abstract market forces. They’re being targeted by investors who have figured out how to get rich by strip-mining local-news outfits. The model is simple: Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self.

The men who devised this model are Randall Smith and Heath Freeman, the co-founders of Alden Global Capital. Since they bought their first newspapers a decade ago, no one has been more mercenary or less interested in pretending to care about their publications’ long-term health. Researchers at the University of North Carolina found that Alden-owned newspapers have cut their staff at twice the rate of their competitors; not coincidentally, circulation has fallen faster too, according to Ken Doctor, a news-industry analyst who reviewed data from some of the papers. That might sound like a losing formula, but these papers don’t have to become sustainable businesses for Smith and Freeman to make money.

With aggressive cost-cutting, Alden can operate its newspapers at a profit for years while turning out a steadily worse product, indifferent to the subscribers it’s alienating.

….

This investment strategy does not come without social consequences. When a local newspaper vanishes, research shows, it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout, increased polarization, and a general erosion of civic engagement. Misinformation proliferates. City budgets balloon, along with corruption and dysfunction. The consequences can influence national politics as well; an analysis by Politico found that Donald Trump performed best during the 2016 election in places with limited access to local news.

With its acquisition of Tribune Publishing earlier this year, Alden now controls more than 200 newspapers, including some of the country’s most famous and influential: the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, the New York Daily News. It is the nation’s second-largest newspaper owner by circulation. Some in the industry say they wouldn’t be surprised if Smith and Freeman end up becoming the biggest newspaper moguls in U.S. history.

More than a few Wisconsin communities are effectively news deserts already, and others have local papers little better than an Alden paper. (The Janesville Gazette and Daily Jefferson County Union, now owned by APG, look like nothing so much as third-tier ad sales networks masquerading as proper newspapers.)

I’ve long been a critical of local newspapers because local newspapers long ago abandoned inquisitive and insightful reporting for boosterism and glad-handing. Alden and APG are bad for the communities in which they operate, but homegrown publishers were bad for these communities long before Alden and APG scooped desiccated local papers off the remainders table.

Alden, if successful in this acquisition, will take Wisconsin and other states yet lower.

One Hedge Fund Guts Local Newsrooms:

Daily Bread, UW System

Daily Bread for 11.23.21: Myopic Leading the Myopic in UW System Search

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 44.  Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 4:25 PM for 9h 27m 12s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 85.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 4:30 PM.

 On this day in 1924, Edwin Hubble‘s discovery, that the Andromeda “nebula” is actually another island galaxy far outside our own Milky Way, is first published in the New York Times.

 Kelly Meyerhofer reports UW System hires presidential search firm involved in 2 problematic hires elsewhere:

After a search for the next University of Wisconsin System president collapsed last year because of complaints over how it was conducted, a UW official said the firm involved in the failed search would not be hired to assist in the System’s second attempt to hire a new leader.

The System is instead working with a different executive search firm that has been involved in at least two problematic searches of its own.

Recently released records show the System hired WittKieffer this summer at an estimated cost of about $225,000 plus expenses to help identify and recruit candidates in its presidential search, which is expected to ramp up over the next two months.

In one search, WittKieffer provided “inaccurate salary information” from a candidate’s previous jobs that led East Carolina University to hire a candidate for a higher salary than the individual might have been paid otherwise, according to a report in Business North Carolina. The candidate was hired in 2016 at an annual $450,000 salary even though he had earned less than $300,000 in his previous job.

….

More recently, the president of Oregon State University resigned earlier this year after only nine months on the job in the wake of his previous employer, Louisiana State University, releasing a report detailing the “mishandling of sexual misconduct allegations and Title IX procedures” while he served as LSU’s president. WittKieffer led the Oregon State search.

The firm did not respond to two voicemail messages left over the past week.

Regent Karen Walsh, who is leading the System’s presidential search committee, said WittKieffer was the Regents’ “number one choice” among companies considered for the job. Neither she nor Regents President Ed Manydeeds were aware of the firm’s involvement in the two problematic searches at the time they hired the company, she said.

It’s possible to start a search poorly and end well, of course, but it seems less likely than starting well.

Whitewater has its own experience with starting poorly (and ending disastrously), in the search that led to UW-Whitewater’s hiring of Beverly Kopper.  See The Dark, Futile Dream and Revisiting Kozloff’s ‘Dark, Futile Dream.’

Uphilling: Ski Resorts Embrace Big New Trend: 

Daily Bread, Waukesha

Daily Bread for 11.22.21: Speeding Driver Kills or Injures Dozens at Waukesha Christmas Parade

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 35.  Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 4:25 PM for 9h 28m 59s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 91.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater School Board meets at 7 PM.

 On this day in 1963, President John F. Kennedy is assassinated and Texas Governor John Connally is seriously wounded by Lee Harvey Oswald, who also kills Dallas Police officer J. D. Tippit after fleeing the scene. U.S Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as the 36th President of the United States afterwards.

 News that several are reported dead and dozens injured after an SUV sped through yesterday’s Waukesha Christmas parade is understandably a statewide, national, and international story today —

Bill Glauber, Mary Spicuzza, and Molly Beck of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report A person plowed their SUV through the Waukesha Christmas Parade, leaving five dead and more than 40 injured authorities say:

WAUKESHA – A treasured rite of the holiday season turned into a scene of bloody, deadly mayhem late Sunday afternoon as a vehicle plowed into the Waukesha Christmas Parade, killing five people and injuring more than 40 others, authorities said.

Shortly before midnight, the City of Waukesha posted to its Twitter and Facebook accounts revised casualty totals.

“At this time, we can confirm that 5 people are deceased and over 40 are injured,” the statement said. “However, these numbers may change as we collect additional information.”

Earlier, authorities said 11 adults and 12 children were ferried to local hospitals. Others were taken by friends and family. Children’s Wisconsin hospital said it had 15 patients and no fatalities.

Waukesha Mayor Shawn Reilly called the incident a “horrible and senseless act.”

Waukesha Police Chief Dan Thompson said that around 4:39 p.m. a red SUV broke through the parade barriers and headed west on Main Street.

“The vehicle struck more than 20 individuals. Some of the individuals were children and there were some fatalities as a result of this incident,” he said.

A suspect vehicle was recovered and a “person of interest” was in custody, the police chief said. People were transported to hospitals via ambulances and police vehicles, he added.

Dan Simmons, Mitch Smith, Robert Chiarito, Jesus Jiménez, and Livia Albeck-Ripka of the New York Times report Five Dead in Wisconsin After Driver Plows S.U.V. Into Holiday Parade:

This was the 58th Christmas parade for Waukesha, an annual event that was canceled last year because of the pandemic. The theme of this year’s event was simply “Comfort and Joy.”

Mikey Randa, 14, said he was marching in the parade with his high school football team when he saw a young girl hit by the car. “The car just flew past us, there was a lot of panic,” he said, adding that he initially didn’t grasp what had happened. Mr. Randa said he then saw five or six bodies lying on the ground. “I’m still in a bit of a shock,” he said.

All Waukesha public schools will be closed Monday, the police department said in a statement Sunday night.

Jason Kellner, 49, said that he had just watched his son, a drummer in the Waukesha South High School marching band, pass by, when he first saw a red Ford Escape heading toward the crowd. After passing through an intersection, Mr. Kellner said, the car “started mowing people down.”

“I’ve never felt a worse feeling; wondering what I’m going to find when I get to my kid,” Mr. Kellner said of the moment he ran toward his son, whom he found standing unharmed by the side of the road.

International publications quickly reported on the events. See Reuters in The Guardian, Social media footage shows SUV speeding through Wisconsin Christmas parade – video and Britain’s The Telegraph, Wisconsin tragedy: Five people killed and more than 40 injured after car ploughs through parade. 

Wisconsin communities that have endured repeated suffering experience yet more. 

Birds, Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.21.21: Roadrunner Makes Trip from Nevada to Maine

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 50.  Sunrise is 6:55 AM and sunset 4:26 PM for 9h 30m 49s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 95.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1877,  Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record and play sound.

Claudia Chiappa and Dustin Wlodkowski  report Wily Roadrunner Visits Maine By Hitching Ride in Moving Van From Las Vegas:

Even the fastest birds need to hitch a ride sometimes, it seems.

A curious roadrunner was found in a moving van that had traveled from Las Vegas to Westbrook, Maine, this weekend, police said.

A surprised father and his son spotted the bird — the one made famous by the coyote-evading Looney Tunes cartoon — in the back of their van on Saturday while unloading it at a storage facility after a four-day, cross-country trip in Nevada, according to Avian Haven, a nonprofit wild bird rehabilitation center in Maine.

After finding the surprise passenger, the men contacted the Westbrook Maine Police Department and, eventually, reached wildlife experts at Avian Haven. A volunteer from the area was able to catch the elusive roadrunner with help from the family that had inadvertently transported it, and it was moved to the center.

The roadrunner is now safe and waiting to be returned to its original home. The bird was in “remarkably good shape for having been confined in the van for four days,” officials from the center said in a Facebook post.

The Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and the Arizona Game and Fish Department have been communicating about possible transfer plans, The Portland Press Herald reported on Monday.

As of Thursday, arrangements were still being made for what will likely be a direct air trip from Logan airport in Boston to Las Vegas.

“The shorter amount of time a bird is on an airline, the better,” said Doug Nielsen, a conservation education supervisor with the Nevada Department of Wildlife explaining that there will be coordination between his agency, the State of Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife as well as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Sometimes a roadrunner story is only a roadrunner story…

The Best Pumpkin Pie Recipe | Melissa Clark:

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City, Film

Film: Tuesday, November 23, 1 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Home for the Holidays

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>

Tuesday, November 23rd at 1 PM, there will be a showing of Home for the Holidays @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:

Comedy/Drama/Romance

1 hour, 43 minutes

Rated PG-13 (1995)

A requested film for the Thanksgiving season. A forty-year-old single woman flies home to spend Thanksgiving with her wild, wacky, dysfunctional family. Starring Holly Hunter, Anne Bancroft, Robert Downey, Jr., Charles Durning, Dylan McDermott, and Geraldine Chaplin. Directed by Jodie Foster.

One can find more information about Home for the Holidays at the Internet Movie Database.

Daily Bread, Local Government, Politics

Daily Bread for 11.20.21: ‘Polarization’ Is Evasion

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 47.  Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 4:27 PM for 9h 32m 42s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1859, Milwaukee sees its first baseball game:

An impromptu game of base ball , as it was spelled in the early years, was played by two teams of seven at the Milwaukee Fair Ground. The game was organized by Rufus King, publisher of the Milwaukee Sentinel, and is believed to have been the first baseball game played in Milwaukee. In spite of cold weather, two more games were played in December, and by April 1860 the Milwaukee Base Ball Club was organized. View early baseball photographs at Wisconsin Historical Images, and read about baseball’s first decades in Wisconsin at Turning Points in Wisconsin.

 Jennifer Rubin writes It’s not ‘polarization.’ We suffer from Republican radicalization:

You know the argument: America is divided into warring camps. The center has collapsed. Compromise is impossible. We have become uncivil and angry.

While it’s true that the country is more deeply divided along partisan lines than it has been in the past, it is wrong to suggest a symmetrical devolution into irrational hatred. The polarization argument too often treats both sides as equally worthy of blame, characterizing the problem as a sort of free-floating affliction (e.g., “lack of trust”). This blurs the distinction between a Democratic Party that is marginally more progressive in policy positions than it was a decade ago, and a Republican Party that routinely lies, courts violence and seeks to define America as a White Christian nation.

The Republican Party’s tolerance of violence is not matched by Democrats. Nor is the Republican Party’s refusal to recognize the sanctity of elections. Democrats did not call the elections they lost in 2020 and 2021 “rigged,” nor are they seeking to replace nonpartisan election officials with partisan lawmakers. Republicans’ determination to change voting laws based on their insistence that Donald Trump won the 2020 election is without historical precedent.

….

Only one party conducts fake election audits, habitually relies on conspiracy theories and wants to limit access to the ballot. A recent study from the libertarian think tank R Street found: “In Republican states, legislation tended to scale back the availability of mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes and to provide more uniform, if not shorter, early voting windows. Meanwhile, in Democratic states, legislators sought to increase the availability of early voting not only by expanded voting windows but also by instating universal vote-by-mail.”

Only one party overwhelmingly refused to participate in a bipartisan investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Only one party tolerates and defends House members who resort to violent imagery and harass fellow lawmakers. Talk of “secession” comes from only one party. Only one party is turning a vigilante who killed two people and seriously injured another into a folk hero. Only one party rises in defense of parents publicly threatening school boards. Only one party has taken to defending book-banning and book-burning. Governors of only one party are suing private companies and localities that follow coronavirus guidelines.

Yes.

It’s sometimes journalists, but not merely journalists, who advance these sanitizing claims of polarization. At the local level, officials either launder away populists’ false claims and malevolent ambitions as mere ‘differences of opinion’ or pretend there’s ‘nothing to see here.’

Our forefathers (among those of us whose families were on the right side of these issues) did not think that the British, Know Nothings, Confederates, Klan, and Bund were merely polarizing.  They rightly saw that those movements were blameworthy.

See Not Only in Washington, and Not Only Journalists (‘on local boards, councils, and commissions, how many elected and appointed officials speak confidently in defense of liberal democracy? In Whitewater, Wisconsin and so many nearby towns, too many of those who took office democratically, and too many of those who were appointed to prominent positions under the law, are silent in the face of challenges to democracy and the rule of law’).

Here in Whitewater, council members who take an oath to uphold the constitutional order find it easier to pass an ordinance banning residents from feeding, in their own yards, even a single peanut to a single squirrel than to consider a confident resolution in defense of our liberal democratic tradition.

Local such as this is merely vacuous.

The Best Pecan Pie Recipe | Melissa Clark:

Daily Bread, Elections, Law, Republicans, WISGOP

Daily Bread for 11.19.21: The WISGOP Push to Take Over the State’s Elections

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 39.  Sunrise is 6:53 AM and sunset 4:27 PM for 9h 34m 38s of daytime.  The moon is full with all of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1863, Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg Address at the dedication ceremony for the military cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

 Writing in the New York Times, Reid Epstein reports Wisconsin Republicans Push to Take Over the State’s Elections:

The Republican effort — broader and more forceful than that in any other state where allies of former President Donald J. Trump are trying to overhaul elections — takes direct aim at the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, an agency Republicans created half a decade ago that has been under attack since the chaotic aftermath of last year’s election.

The firestorm picked up late last month after a long-awaited reporton the 2020 results that was ordered by Republican state legislators found no evidence of fraud but made dozens of suggestions for the election commission and the G.O.P.-led Legislature, turbocharging Republican demands for more control of elections.

Then the Trump-aligned sheriff of Racine County, the state’s fifth most populous county, recommended felony charges against five of the six members of the election commission for guidance they had given to municipal clerks early in the pandemic. The Republican majority leader of the State Senate later seemed to give a green light to that proposal, saying that “prosecutors around the state”should determine whether to bring charges.

And last week, Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, said that G.O.P. state lawmakers should unilaterally assert control of federal elections, claiming that they had the authority to do so even if Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, stood in their way — an extraordinary legal argument debunked by a 1932 Supreme Court decision and a 1964 ruling from the Wisconsin Supreme Court. His suggestion was nonetheless echoed by Michael Gableman, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice who is conducting the Legislature’s election inquiry.

Epstein goes on to report why an effort like this matters to the GOP nationwide:

“In Wisconsin we’re heading toward a showdown over the meaning of the clause that says state legislatures should set the time, manner and place of elections,” said Kevin J. Kennedy, who spent 34 years as Wisconsin’s chief election officer before Republicans eliminated his agency and replaced it with the elections commission in 2016. “If not in Wisconsin, in some other state they’re going to push this and try to get a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on this.”

The WISGOP efforts in Wisconsin may not advance, but GOP efforts somewhere will advance, in hope of a U.S. Supreme Court decision placing federal elections wholly in the hands of GOP-controlled state legislatures eager to establish time, place, and manner of elections to their liking.

See also Ron Johnson Wants It All.

The Best Apple Pie Recipe | Melissa Clark:

Daily Bread, Sports, University

Daily Bread for 11.18.21: UW-Whitewater resumes annual wheelchair basketball tournament

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 35.  Sunrise is 6:51 AM and sunset 4:28 PM for 9h 36m 37s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s CDA meets at 5:30 PM.

 On this day in 1928, Walt Disney Studio releases the animated short Steamboat Willie, the first fully synchronized sound cartoon, directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, featuring the third appearances of cartoon characters Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse.

 Megan Hart reports Dominant wheelchair basketball teams back in action at UW-Whitewater: ‘They turn out Paralympic athletes like crazy’:

When the United States won gold in men’s wheelchair basketball at the Tokyo Paralympics this year, Wisconsin native Christina Schwab was on the sidelines as a coach.

For the three-time Paralympic gold medalist, it was her first time coaching internationally.

“It opened my eyes to so many things that happen behind the scenes that you don’t see when you’re an athlete, and it also gave me the opportunity to learn from some really successful coaches and some really successful athletes,” she said.

She brought those lessons back to the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where she coaches the women’s wheelchair basketball squad. Schwab isn’t an alum, but she credits UW-Whitewater for much of her own success as an athlete and coach. When she was younger, Schwab attended camps at UW-Whitewater and later used its facilities for training. And she’s not the only successful Paralympian with ties to the school.

There were five former UW-Whitewater players on the Team USA squad Schwab coached in Tokyo. Between men and women, the school has won 16 intercollegiate titles in the sport since 1982. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign may be the only other program that boasts a longer history of dominance in the sport.

A few teams might stand out when you think about the most successful programs in sports: the New York Yankees, the Green Bay Packers, the U.S. women’s national soccer team. UW-Whitewater wheelchair basketball could easily be added to the list.

And the teams are back in action after almost two years off due to COVID-19.

So very well done.

Cows rescued by jet ski after flooding in Canada:

Around 50 cows stranded on a farm in British Colombia have been rescued by farmers and volunteers using jet skis and boats. It comes after a huge storm hit the Pacific Northwest, destroying highways and leaving tens of thousands of people in Canada and the US without power. At least one person has been killed and several more are feared dead.