Good morning.
The last day of 2016 in Whitewater will be cloudy in the morning, but a bit sunnier in the afternoon, with a high of thirty-five. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:31 PM, for 9h 06m 08s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 5.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}fifty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1879, at Menlo Park, Thomas Edison holds the first public demonstration of an incandescent light bulb; “[i]t was during this time that he said: ‘We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.’[61]” On this day in 1967, the Packers defeat the Cowboys, 21-17, in what amounted to an Ice Bowl (the game had a temperature of 13 below zero and a wind chill of 46 below zero).
Recommended for reading in full —
Mark Sommerhauser writes that As Donald Trump eyes infrastructure spending, state leaders assess impact for Wisconsin. Waiting for Trump to pour money into Wisconsin may prove a long wait: “Most recently, some D.C. lobbyists have begun to question Trump’s basic commitment to an infrastructure plan. Trump, in a post-election interview with The New York Times, seemed to back away from the issue, saying infrastructure won’t be a “core” part of the first few years of his administration. Trump acknowledged that he didn’t realize during the campaign that New Deal-style proposals to put people to work building infrastructure might conflict with his party’s small-government philosophy. “That’s not a very Republican thing — I didn’t even know that, frankly,” Trump said.”
The Washington Post‘s editorial board states the obvious, in Trump refuses to face reality about Russia: “Mr. Trump has been frank about his desire to improve relations with Russia, but he seems blissfully untroubled by the reasons for the deterioration in relations, including Russia’s instigation of an armed uprising in Ukraine, its seizure of Crimea, its efforts to divide Europe and the crushing of democracy and human rights at home. Why is Mr. Trump so dismissive of Russia’s dangerous behavior? Some say it is his lack of experience in foreign policy, or an oft-stated admiration for strongmen, or naivete about Russian intentions. But darker suspicions persist. Mr. Trump has steadfastly refused to be transparent about his multibillion-dollar business empire. Are there loans or deals with Russian businesses or the state that were concealed during the campaign? Are there hidden communications with Mr. Putin or his representatives? We would be thrilled to see all the doubts dispelled, but Mr. Trump’s odd behavior in the face of a clear threat from Russia, matched by Mr. Putin’s evident enthusiasm for the president-elect, cannot be easily explained.”
Jim Henry writes persuasively of The Curious World of Donald Trump’s Private Russian Connections: “Even before the November 8 election, many leading Democrats were vociferously demanding that the FBI disclose the fruits of its investigations into Putin-backed Russian hackers. Instead FBI Director Comey decided to temporarily revive his zombie-like investigation of Hillary’s emails. That decision may well have had an important impact on the election, but it did nothing to resolve the allegations about Putin. Even now, after the CIA has disclosed an abstract of its own still-secret investigation, it is fair to say that we still lack the cyberspace equivalent of a smoking gun.Fortunately, however, for those of us who are curious about Trump’s Russian connections, there is another readily accessible body of material that has so far received surprisingly little attention. This suggests that whatever the nature of President-elect Donald Trump’s relationship with President Putin, he has certainly managed to accumulate direct and indirect connections with a far-flung private Russian/FSU [former Soviet Union] network of outright mobsters, oligarchs, fraudsters, and kleptocrats.”
Conservative David Frum describes How Trump Made Russia’s Hacking More Effective: “Without Trump’s own willingness to make false claims and misuse Russian-provided information, the Wikileaks material would have deflated of its own boringness. The Russian-hacked material did damage because, and only because, Russia found a willing accomplice in the person of Donald J. Trump. Many questions remain about how the Russian spy services did what they did. That includes Putin’s motives for ordering the operation. But on issues from Crimea to Syria to NATO to the breakup of the European Union, Trump’s publicly expressed views align with Putin’s wishes. Over Trump’s motives for collaborating so full-throatedly with Russian espionage, there hangs a greater and more disturbing mystery—a mystery that Trump seems in no hurry to dispel. And maybe he is wise to leave the mystery in place: as delegitimizing as it is, it’s very possible the truth would be even worse.”
Admittedly, I’m not an admirer of champagne, but this recipe for a champagne cocktail is intriguing, indeed, agreeably bewitching: