Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be much warmer than yesterday, with a high of thirty under mostly sunny skies. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 01m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 55.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1860, South Carolina becomes the first state to secede from the Union. On this day in 1803, the Louisiana Purchase was formally completed with a transfer ceremony in New Orleans. In December 1941, large numbers of Wisconsinites begin enlisting for military duty during the Second World War, with about 320,000 serving during the course of the war.
Worth reading in full —
Patrick Marley reports that Wisconsin Attorney General Schimel considers reopening Lincoln Hills probe: “Madison — After saying last week he was “in the dark” on an investigation into Wisconsin’s juvenile prison, Attorney General Brad Schimel changed course Monday and said his office now may issue charges over alleged inmate abuses. Schimel’s sharply different tone came a day after a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation reported that state officials missed a series of warning signs coming from Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls, which share a campus 30 miles north of Wausau. The Republican attorney general headed a criminal investigation into the facility for a year, but turned it over to the FBI in early 2016. He told the Journal Sentinel on Thursday he had not been seeking updates on the investigation and didn’t know its status….When told FBI hadn’t visited Lincoln Hills for nearly a year, Schimel said he was surprised to hear that, but wasn’t bothered. He struck a much different tone Monday, after the Journal Sentinel’s story appeared. In an interview with The Associated Press, Schimel said his agency may “step back in” and re-launch its own investigation.”
Eli Lake proposes that Obama Should Out Putin’s Wealth as Payback for Election Hacking: “U.S. officials have hinted before that they know more than they are saying about Putin’s money. Adam Szubin, the acting undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, told the BBC in January that Putin “supposedly draws a state salary of something like $110,000 a year. That is not an accurate statement of the man’s wealth, and he has long time training and practices in terms of how to mask his actual wealth.” In October, retired Admiral James Stavridis told NBC News: “It’s well known that there’s a great deal of offshore money moved outside of Russia from oligarchs. … It would be very embarrassing if that was revealed, and that would be a proportional response to what we’ve seen”….The effect of a disclosure by the Obama administration though would be apparent in the West. Putin may not care whether his citizens know how corrupt he is. But I bet his Western bankers and business partners do. Fiona Hill, a senior fellow and Russia expert at the Brookings Institution, told me Monday: “The one thing about revealing this information is that it would stigmatize his wealth. This is shining a spotlight on him and his allies.”
Jennifer Rubin writes that Trump revels in fake news and phony claims: “here is what is different about Trump: He doesn’t try to get it right. He doesn’t assume that people care about the truth or that the truth is important. He will repeat blatant untruths (e.g. Arab Americans celebrated after 9/11, President Obama wasn’t born in the United States, he won by a landslide, we don’t know whether Russia hacked us), and then try to bully those who dispute him. Rather than engage on the facts, Trump insults, demeans and bullies the messenger. Critical voices — even “Saturday Night Live” — are, in his view, “losing” business (even when they are not), because for Trump, financial success makes one good and truthful while financial distress means one is bad and a liar.”
Rich McCormick writes that the Rogue One director says its original ending was very different [spoilers in linked story]: “Rogue One could have been a very different film. Reports of extensive reshoots persisted during its production, and the fact it underwent severe story surgery is backed up by shots seen in the trailers that didn’t make it into the final film. We may never know what the first version of the first Star Wars spinoff looked like, but director Gareth Edwards — who spoketo movie magazine Empire this month — has confirmed that Rogue One’s original ending was one such cutting-room casualty.”
One sees that some Britons decided to send a meat pie to the edge of space, about 100,000 feet above the Earth —