Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-one. Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 5:03 PM, for 9h 51m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger explodes 73 seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, killing all seven crew members, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. (“Challenger was named after HMS Challenger, a British corvette that was the command ship for the Challenger Expedition, a pioneering global marine research expedition undertaken from 1872 through 1876.”) On this day in 1959, Lombardi becomes Packers coach: “He had been the offensive backfield coach of the New York Giants for the previous five seasons. Lombardi went on to coach the Packers for nine years, winning five NFL Championships and victories in Super Bowls I and II. ”
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Hope Kirwan reports Western Wisconsin Led Nation In Farm Bankruptcies In 2017:
New federal court data shows the Western District of Wisconsin had the highest number of farm bankruptcies in the country last year.
The Western District had 28 Chapter 12 bankruptcy cases filed in 2017, a chapter specifically for family farmers or fishermen. The district includes 44 counties and covers more than half of the geographic area of the state.
The Eastern District of Wisconsin had 17 cases and the Minnesota District had 19 cases. There are 94 federal court districts in the United States.
“The increase in Chapter 12 bankruptcies is certainly an anomaly when you compare it to the other types of bankruptcies,” said Christopher Seelen, an Eau Claire attorney who represents creditors in bankruptcy court. “People seem to have jobs, and the economy seems to be going well for most folks. Unfortunately for some of these farmers who are suffering through these low grain prices, the economy is not going as well for them.”
(All those Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation grants & loans, eight years of bold declarations of being ‘open for business,’ and yet rural Wisconsin remains a struggling afterthought.)
➤ The editorial board of his district newspaper, the Fresno Bee, blasts how Rep. Devin Nunes, Trump’s stooge, attacks FBI:
Instead of taking Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election seriously and leading an impartial and bipartisan inquiry, Nunes has colluded with the White House. Last March, Nunes said he’d seen secret intelligence reports backing Trump’s claims that President Barack Obama had “wiretapped” his offices, but it turned out the documents came from the administration.
The blowback forced Nunes to step away from the Russia investigation. But he never fully recused himself and after the Republican-controlled House Ethics Committee in December cleared him of disclosing classified information, he raised his profile again.
Now, he’s being celebrated in Trumpworld with the four-page memo that accuses the FBI of political bias and misdeeds. Drafted by Nunes staffers, it apparently summarizes classified material and alleges abuse of the surveillance process by the FBI and Justice Department to target the Trump campaign. Conservative media and some Republicans in Congress are calling for it to be released publicly and using it to call for Mueller’s investigation to be shut down.
There are reasons to be very skeptical of this memo. The FBI hasn’t been sent a copy or given a chance to respond. Democrats who have seen it, including Rep. Adam Schiff of Burbank, say it’s full of inaccuracies and innuendo. And the social media campaign #ReleaseTheMemo may be promoted by Russian-linked bots, just as during the 2016 campaign.
(Yes. Perhaps one might say increasingly clear, as Trump’s own words have brought about already the foundation of a case.)
➤ Dana Milbank contends Republicans redefine morality as whatever Trump does:
New evidence suggests that the damage he is doing to the culture is bigger than the man. A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday found that two-thirds of Americans say Trump is not a good role model for children. Every component of society feels that way — men and women, old and young, black and white, highly educated or not — except for one: Republicans. By 72 to 22 percent, they say Trump is a good role model.
In marked contrast to the rest of the country, Republicans also say that Trump shares their values (82 percent) and that — get this — he “provides the United States with moral leadership” (80 percent).
…
No doubt some of those Republicans now condoning Trump’s behavior will give the standard rebuttal: What about the Clintons? Well, Quinnipiac didn’t poll nationally during the Clinton presidency, but Gallup, during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in January 1999, asked a similar question. The number of Republicans back then saying Clinton did not provide good moral leadership, 91 percent, was similar to the 96 percent of Democrats who say Trump does not provide moral leadership today. The difference: Democrats disapproved of Clinton’s morality by 2 to 1 (65 to 33 percent), even as they overwhelmingly approved of his job performance. Only 16 percent of Republicans today say Trump does not provide moral leadership.
The triumph of partisanship over morality starts at the top. Franklin Graham excused Trump’s alleged sexual encounter, and Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, declared that Trump gets a “mulligan” — a do-over — for his behavior.
Such normalizing of Trump’s behavior makes the seediest elements feel safe to crawl out from under their rocks. The FBI reported in November that hate crimes were up again in 2016 after rising in 2015. And the Anti-Defamation League reported that anti-Semitic incidents were “significantly higher” through the first nine months of 2017 — a time in which Trump said there were “very fine people” among a march of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville. (This month, as Trump was whipping up loathing of the “fake news” media, a young man was arrested for threatening to gun down CNN journalists.)
➤ Jordan Bhatt reports Donald Trump tells Theresa May he won’t visit the UK unless she bans protests:
Donald Trump is refusing to visit the UK unless Theresa May can ensure that he is not met with protests.
Bloomberg revealed that Trump complained in a phone call to May about the “negative coverage” he has received in the British press.
May told the US president that that was how the UK media operated and she could do little to change it.
Trump went on to say that he would not visit the UK unless there were guarantees that he would not be met with protests.
[British] Advisers who had been listening to the phone call are reported to have been “astonished” at the demands.
(In effect, Trump insists that he will not visit Britain unless the British prime minister turns her country into a dictatorship on his behalf.)
➤ The Naked Mole Rat Is One of the Weirdest Creatures Out There:
Naked mole rats feel no pain. They’re exceptionally long-lived. They frequently enter reversible comas, and a single queen mole rat rules over her colony with totalitarian authority. They can also survive without oxygen for extended periods of time—a feat that almost no other animal can accomplish. In this episode of “Animalism,” Ed Yong, a science writer for The Atlantic, explains why the naked mole rat is one of the strangest animals in the kingdom..