Daily Bread for 1.20.17

Good morning.

Whitewater will see morning showers with a daytime high of forty. Sunrise is 7:18 AM and sunset is 4:53 PM, for 9h 34m 42s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 44.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}seventy-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1942, fifteen high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” On this day in 1865, the 25th Wisconsin Infantry reconnoiters the Salkehatchie River in South Carolina prior to battles in the first week of February.

Recommended for reading in full —

Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth describes Words as Weapons of Authoritarian Control on Primary Concerns:

David Corn suggests that investigators on the Trump-Russia Beat Should Talk to This Man: “Last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee announced it was commencing an investigation of Russian hacking during the 2016 campaign that would include an examination of connections between Russia and the Trump camp. And a veiled but public exchange between Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the committee, and FBI Director James Comey during a hearing on January 10 suggested the FBI has collected information on possible ties between Trump associates and Russians and may still be probing this matter. So with subpoena-wielding investigators on this beat, here’s a suggestion: The gumshoes ought to talk to an American from Belarus named Sergei Millian, who has boasted of close ties to Trump and who has worked with an outfit the FBI suspected of being a Russian intelligence front. If they haven’t already. Millian, who is in his late 30s and won’t say when he came to the United States or how he obtained US citizenship, is an intriguing and mysterious figure with a curious connection to Trump.”

Ryan Koronowski writes that Trump made a lot of promises about what he will do as president. We’ve documented 663 of them: “ThinkProgress examined 583 days of Trump’s public statements, from his campaign announcement speech on June 16, 2015 all the way up to the day before his inauguration. This included thousands of radio and television interviews, speeches, tweets, and campaign policy documents?—?well over 4 million words and counting. Our basic criteria were: 1) a statement made by Trump or by a policy document or questionnaire issued in his name, 2) about what would or would not happen during or as a result of his presidency, 3) about which a reasonable person could be disappointed should the promise be broken. Every time Trump made a new statement or claim about what he would or would not do as president, or guarantees about what he’d ensure would or would not happen, it went on the list. This includes instances when Trump straightforwardly said “I promise” or “I guarantee,” but also instances when he said that “we will” do something or that something “will never” happen if he became president.”

Patrick Marley and Jason Stein report that Vos calls for $300 million more for roads: “Madison — Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and other Republicans in his house called Thursday for sending $300 million to state highways over the next two years and cutting taxes by the same amount or more. Catching hold of more than $700 million in new state money now expected through the summer of 2019, Vos essentially called for raising either the gas tax or vehicle registration fees to pay for roads while cutting income taxes or property taxes.”

In So Fly: The Impossibly Acrobatic Martial Art of Tricking, Great Big Story shows what happens “when you combine the ferocious kicks of taekwondo, the grace of wushu, the improvised movements of capoeira, and gymnastics [into] the head-spinning martial art of tricking:

So Fly: The Impossibly Acrobatic Martial Art of Tricking from Great Big Story on Vimeo.