Luke Mogelson [of The New Yorker] followed Trump supporters as they forced their way into the U.S. Capitol, using his phone’s camera as a reporter’s notebook.
Read Luke Mogelson’s original report, Among the Insurrectionists.
See also Transcript of Rioters’ Remarks.
At 2:12 p.m. on Jan. 6, supporters of President Trump began climbing through a window they had smashed on the northwest side of the U.S. Capitol. “Go! Go! Go!” someone shouted as the rioters, some in military gear, streamed in. It was the start of the most serious attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812. The mob coursed through the building, enraged that Congress was preparing to make Trump’s electoral defeat official. “Drag them out! … Hang them out!” rioters yelled at one point, as they gathered near the House chamber.
Officials in the House and Senate secured the doors of their respective chambers, but lawmakers were soon forced to retreat to undisclosed locations. Five people died on the grounds that day, including a Capitol police officer. In all, more than 50 officers were injured.
To reconstruct the pandemonium inside the Capitol, The Washington Post examined text messages, photos and hundreds of videos, some of which were exclusively obtained. By synchronizing the footage and locating some of the camera angles within a digital 3-D model of the building, The Post was able to map the rioters’ movements and assess how close they came to lawmakers — in some cases feet apart or separated only by a handful of vastly outnumbered police officers.
Good morning. 
Sunday in Whitewater will be overcast with a high of thirty-one. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:49 PM, for 9h 29m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 19.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1917, the United States pays Denmark $25 million for the Virgin Islands.
Recommended for reading in full —
Michael S. Schmidt and Kenneth P. Vogel report Prospect of Pardons in Final Days Fuels Market to Buy Access to Trump:
As President Trump prepares to leave office in days, a lucrative market for pardons is coming to a head, with some of his allies collecting fees from wealthy felons or their associates to push the White House for clemency, according to documents and interviews with more than three dozen lobbyists and lawyers.
The brisk market for pardons reflects the access peddling that has defined Mr. Trump’s presidency as well as his unorthodox approach to exercising unchecked presidential clemency powers. Pardons and commutations are intended to show mercy to deserving recipients, but Mr. Trump has used many of them to reward personal or political allies.
The pardon lobbying heated up as it became clear that Mr. Trump had no recourse for challenging his election defeat, lobbyists and lawyers say. One lobbyist, Brett Tolman, a former federal prosecutor who has been advising the White House on pardons and commutations, has monetized his clemency work, collecting tens of thousands of dollars, and possibly more, in recent weeks to lobby the White House for clemency for the son of a former Arkansas senator; the founder of the notorious online drug marketplace Silk Road; and a Manhattan socialite who pleaded guilty in a fraud scheme.
Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer John M. Dowd has marketed himself to convicted felons as someone who could secure pardons because of his close relationship with the president, accepting tens of thousands of dollars from a wealthy felon and advising him and other potential clients to leverage Mr. Trump’s grievances about the justice system.
Ed Pilkington reports Major NRA donor to challenge gun group’s bankruptcy over alleged fraud:
A major donor to the National Rifle Association is poised to challenge key aspects of the gun group’s bankruptcy filing, in an attempt to hold executives accountable for allegedly having defrauded their members of millions of dollars to support their own lavish lifestyles.
Dave Dell’Aquila, a former tech company boss who has donated more than $100,000 to the NRA, told the Guardian on Saturday he was preparing to lodge a complaint in US bankruptcy court in Dallas, Texas. If successful, it could stop top NRA executives discharging a substantial portion of the organisation’s debts.
It could also stop Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s controversial longtime chief executive, avoiding ongoing lawsuits that allege he defrauded the pro-gun group’s members to pay for luxury travel to the Bahamas and Europe and high-end Zegna suits.
Isabelle Khurshudyan and Loveday Morris report Russian opposition leader Navalny again tests Kremlin: Supporters await return while officials threaten arrest:
But jailing Navalny could create another conundrum for Putin’s government, analysts said. A throng of supporters are expected to greet Navalny at Vnukovo International Airport — more than 2,000 people responded “going” to one Facebook group.
Arresting him would certainly elevate his image as a political martyr among his backers. A response from Western governments, perhaps in the form of more sanctions, is also possible.
Tatiana Stanovaya, head of political analysis firm R. Politik, wrote on the Telegram messaging app that Navanly’s possible arrest would trigger protests that would test “how far [Russian security services] and the most repressive apparatus of the state can go.”
Paris Receives First Snowfall of the Season:
more >>Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with occasional light snow and a high of thirty-four. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:48 PM, for 9h 27m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 12.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1945, Adolf Hitler moves into his underground bunker, the so-called Führerbunker.
Recommended for reading in full —
Gwynn Guilford and Hannah Lang report U.S. Unemployment Claims Rise as Coronavirus Weighs on Economy (‘Initial claims for benefits jump to highest level since pandemic began; Fed chairman says job market has a long way to go’):
The number of workers filing for jobless benefits posted its biggest weekly gain since the pandemic hit last March and the head of the Federal Reserve warned the job market had a long way to go before it is strong again.
Applications for unemployment claims, a proxy for layoffs, rose by 181,000 to 965,000 last week, the Labor Department said Thursday, reflecting rising layoffs amid a winter surge in coronavirus cases.
The total for the week ended Jan. 9 also was the highest in nearly five months and put claims well above the roughly 800,000 a week they had averaged in recent months.
“We are a long way from maximum employment,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said in a webcast hosted by Princeton University, his undergraduate alma mater, an indication that the central bank’s easy-money policies will remain in place for the foreseeable future.
The U.S. labor-market recovery stalled last month with the December jobs report showing the U.S. lost 140,000 payroll positions. The economic recovery’s slowdown has included
Holly Bailey and Tim Craig report Nation’s governors prepare for worst, warn of long-term dangers to their capitols:
“It’s going to take quite a while to turn back what’s been started here,” said Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), who has participated in joint calls in recent days with other Midwestern governors about the possibility of fresh violence in the aftermath of last week’s riot at the U.S. Capitol and an FBI warning about armed far-right extremists gathering across the country this weekend.
The weekly calls began last spring between the governors — mostly Democrats, but some Republicans — as a way to informally coordinate and trade ideas about how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic amid a perceived leadership vacuum by the Trump administration.
But in recent days, the calls — which have included the governors of Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin — have taken on a new urgency as state officials have shared information and advice about how to confront what many believe could be a dark and dangerous period of extended insurgency against state and even local governments.
Neil MacFarquhar, Jack Healy, Mike Baker, and Capitol Attack Could Fuel Extremist Recruitment For Years, Experts Warn:
Overthrowing the government. Igniting a second Civil War. Banishing racial minorities, immigrants and Jews. Or simply sowing chaos in the streets.
The ragged camps of far-right groups and white nationalists emboldened under President Trump have long nursed an overlapping list of hatreds and goals. But now they have been galvanized by the outgoing president’s false claims that the election was stolen from him — and by the violent attack on the nation’s Capitol that hundreds of them led in his name.
“The politicians who have lied, betrayed and sold out the American people for decades were forced to cower in fear and scatter like rats,” one group, known for pushing the worst anti-Semitic tropes, commented on Twitter the day after the attack.
(Trump is finished, but Trumpism will slither along. See Man and Movement.)
Weekly Space Highlights — Starship test-fired, lunar transit, and more:
more >>See Pet cat feared dead in 2018 California mudslide is found alive (‘Twenty-three people were killed in the mudslide, including the cat’s owner, Josie Gower’).
Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-four. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:47 PM, for 9h 25m 30s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 6.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1967, the Packers win the first Super Bowl, defeating the Chiefs, 35-10.
Recommended for reading in full —
Reuters reports Capitol rioters planned to capture and kill politicians, say prosecutors:
Prosecutors offered that view in a filing asking a judge to detain Jacob Chansley, the Arizona man and QAnon conspiracy theorist who was photographed wearing horns as he stood at the desk of the vice-president, Mike Pence, in the chamber of the US Senate.
The detention memo, written by justice department lawyers in Arizona, goes into greater detail about the FBI’s investigation into Chansley, revealing that he left a note for Pence warning that “it’s only a matter of time, justice is coming”.
“Strong evidence, including Chansley’s own words and actions at the Capitol, supports that the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and assassinate elected officials in the United States government,” prosecutors wrote.
A public defender representing Chansley could not be immediately reached for comment. Chansley is due to appear in federal court on Friday.
Prosecutors and federal agents have begun bringing more serious charges tied to violence at the Capitol, including against a retired firefighter, Robert Sanford, that he hurled a fire extinguisher at the head of one police officer and another, Peter Stager, accused of beating a different officer with a pole bearing an American flag.
In Chansley’s case, prosecutors said the charges “involve active participation in an insurrection attempting to violently overthrow the United States government”, and warned that “the insurrection is still in progress” as law enforcement prepares for more demonstrations in Washington and state capitals.
Paul Farhi report Voice of America journalists demand resignation of news agency’s top leadership:
Simmering tensions between journalists and managers at Voice of America grew into open rebellion Thursday, with more than two dozen newsroom employees signing a petition demanding the immediate resignation of their new director and his top deputy.
VOA staff said Robert Reilly and Elizabeth Robbins had abdicated their responsibility to remain independent of government influence by ordering the global broadcaster to air a speech that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered at its Washington headquarters Monday — a “propaganda event,” the staffers called it.
The letter also criticized Reilly and Robbins for disciplining a reporter for seeking to question Pompeo afterward. The reporter, Patsy Widakuswara, who was removed from the White House beat after the incident, was one of the letter’s signatories. A top editor was reassigned in the wake of the event as well.
Yellowstone National Park — Wolverine Trail Camera Footage:
more >>Last month, park biologists were excited to find one of Yellowstone’s rarest mammals triggered a remote trail camera outside the Mammoth Hot Springs area!
Wolverines (Gulo gulo), mid-sized carnivores in the weasel family that typically occupy high-elevation alpine and forest habitats, exist in low densities in the park and are rarely detected. Park biologists have used remote cameras to monitor the cougar population since 2014, but this technology has since become increasingly valuable for detecting and monitoring a variety of species and aspects of Yellowstone’s ecology. This is the first video footage of a wolverine since remote cameras have been deployed in the park.
The fight against gerrymandering will be a key political issue statewide (and in Whitewater) over 2021-2022. See Probable Wisconsin Political Issues for 2021.
Both of the counties of which Whitewater is a part have supported resolutions in favor of fair maps. For more information, visit the Wisconsin Fair Maps Coalition to help end gerrymandering in the state.
Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with afternoon showers and evening snowfall, and a high of thirty-five. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:46 PM, for 9h 23m 47s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.11% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1952, NBC’s long-running morning news program Today debuts, with host Dave Garroway.
Recommended for reading in full —
Drew Harwell, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Razzan Nakhlawi, and Craig Timberg report QAnon reshaped Trump’s party and radicalized believers. The Capitol siege may just be the start:
The siege on the U.S. Capitol played out as a QAnon fantasy made real: The faithful rose up in their thousands, summoned to Washington by their leader, President Trump. They seized the people’s house as politicians cowered under desks. Hordes wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the “Q” symbol and toting Trump flags closed in to deliver justice, armed with zip-tie handcuffs and rope and guns.
The “#Storm” envisioned on far-right message boards had arrived. And two women who had died in the rampage — both QAnon devotees — had become what some were calling the first martyrs of the cause.
The siege ended with police retaking the Capitol and Trump being rebuked and losing his Twitter account. But the failed insurrection illustrated how the paranoid conspiracy theory QAnon has radicalized Americans, reshaped the Republican Party and gained a forceful grip on right-wing belief.
The baseless conspiracy theory, which imagines Trump in a battle with a cabal of deep-state saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex, helped drive the day’s events and facilitate organized attacks. A pro-Trump mob overwhelmed Capitol Police officers, injuring dozens, and one officer later died as a result. One woman was fatally shot by police inside the Capitol. Three others in the crowd died of medical emergencies.
QAnon devotees joined with extremist group members and white supremacists at the Capitol assault after finding one another on Internet sanctuaries: the conservative forums of TheDonald.win and Parler; the anonymous extremist channels of 8kun and Telegram; and the social media giants of Facebook and Twitter, which have scrambled in recent months to prevent devotees from organizing on their sites.
Alan Feuer and Luke Broadwater report More Arrests Made Amid New Calls for Investigation of Capitol Attack:
Led by Representative Mikie Sherrill, a New Jersey Democrat and former Navy pilot, more than 30 lawmakers called on Wednesday for an investigation into visitors’ access to the Capitol on the day before the riot. In a letter to the acting House and Senate sergeants-at-arms and the U.S. Capitol Police, the lawmakers, many of whom served in the military and said they were trained to “recognize suspicious activity,” demanded answers about what they described as an “extremely high number of outside groups” let into the Capitol on Jan. 5 at a time when most tours were restricted because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Separately, the inspector general’s office of the Capitol Police said it was opening a potentially wide-ranging inquiry into security breaches connected to the siege. The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan federal watchdog agency, signaled that it would look into what role, if any, members of Congress may have played in inciting the mob of Trump supporters who breached metal barricades and shattered windows on Jan. 6, seeking to overturn the results of the election.
more >>Ghost kitchens are kitchens designed for delivery-only businesses, without dine-in areas or customer-facing storefronts. The pandemic has ravaged dine-in eateries, and companies that have focused on delivery could come out on top if the current trends continue.
A WISGOP legislator, Rep. Gary Tauchen, has drafted a bill to award Wisconsin’s electoral votes by congressional district, thereby maximizing the importance of gerrymandering.
Melanie Conklin writes that GOP has bill to reallocate Wisconsin’s electoral votes by congressional district:
And that is what a new bill authored by Rep. Gary Tauchen (R-Bonduel) would do. It would make Wisconsin a state where the winner of the popular vote does not get all — or even necessarily the most — Electoral College votes. Tauchen’s bill (LRB 0513/1) would distribute the presidential electors by assigning one vote for each of Wisconsin’s eight congressional districts, then giving the remaining two electors to the statewide winner of the popular vote.
That would exacerbate partisanship and give added incentive to gerrymander the map of Wisconsin’s congressional districts to favor one party over the other, says UW-Madison Prof. Barry Burden, founder and director of the Elections Research Center.
“Doing it by congressional district is actually a terrible idea, because what it will do is amp up the partisan efforts to draw those districts to favor one side or the other,” says Burden. “It’s already an ugly process, but it will be on steroids if those districts affect not only control of Congress but also control the presidency.”
As the WISGOP successfully gerrymandered (after the last census) legislative districts against the popular vote statewide, and as they’ll do what they can to gerrymander districts for another decade, re-apportioning most electoral votes is consistent with earlier schemes by boosting a losing GOP presidential candidate against a more popular opponent.
As these WISGOP men have gerrymandered with impunity, they’ve come to see gerrymandering not as a manipulation of democracy, but rather as an expression of how politics should, and must always, favor them.
After a bit, it may have begun to seem natural, yet lamentably transitory.
A corruption of legislative boundaries for a mere decade is perhaps all-too-brief: why take for ten years when one could take for twenty, thirty, or fifty?
Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be overcast with a high of thirty-six. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:45 PM, for 9h 22m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 10:00 AM, the city’s Parks and Recreation Board via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM, and the Police and Fire Commission via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1922, the call letters of experimental station 9XM in Madison were replaced by WHA. This station dates back to 1917, making it “the oldest station in the nation.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Peter Stone reports Lawyers face fallout from fueling Trump’s false claims of election fraud:
Prominent lawyers who helped fuel Donald Trump’s baseless charges of election fraud to try and thwart Joe Biden’s win, are now facing potentially serious legal and financial problems of their own tied to their aggressive echoing of Trump’s false election claims, say former Department of Justice lawyers and legal experts.
They include a federal investigation into the Capitol attack by a pro-Trump mob, possible disbarment and a defamation lawsuit.
Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who led Trump’s conspiratorial drive to overturn the election and gave an incendiary talk to the Trump rally right before the march on the Capitol began, could be ensnared in a federal probe of the attack and is facing a disbarment complaint in New York.
Pro-Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Cleta Mitchell have, respectively, been hit with a defamation lawsuit for making false claims, and losing her law firm post after coming under scrutiny for her work promoting Trump’s false claims.
Tia Sewell writes Trump’s War on the U.S. Agency for Global Media:
When the Biden administration takes office on Jan. 20, one place that will likely see quick and decisive change is the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM)—a little-known agency that has seen a tumultuous few months.
The agency’s mandate is to promote unbiased news in support of freedom and democracy abroad. But this year, Michael Pack—the Trump-appointed CEO of the USAGM—attempted to purge the organization of career officials, censor criticisms of President Trump and withhold congressionally appropriated funding from a subsidiary of the media organization. Pack’s moves have continued to stoke fear over the White House’s mismanagement and attempted politicization of the federal agency intended to promote independent and credible journalism.
Or so say, anyway, a series of judicial rulings and administrative findings. Last week alone, Pack was confronted with three separate allegations of fraud and misuse of office. Prior to that, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel—an independent federal investigative body with no connection to former Special Counsel Robert Mueller—disclosed that it has found “a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing” under Pack’s leadership at the USAGM. And on Nov. 20, 2020, in the most recent ruling in a series of legal blows dealt to Pack, Chief Judge Beryl Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia prohibited Pack and his USAGM board of executives from continuing activities that violate the First Amendment rights of journalists and editorial employees at Voice of America, which is overseen by the USAGM.
The USAGM is an independent federal agency composed of five news organizations: Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks. Its stated mission is to align U.S. national interests with global media, “to inform, engage and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.”
Can astronauts drink alcohol on the space station?:
more >>David Frum, writing of Trump & Trumpism in The Conservative Cult of Victimhood, observes that
There is no redemption without repentance. There is no repentance without accountability. There is no accountability without consequences.
He rightly concludes that for the Trumpists, the absence of a moral order of accountability and repentance has meant that
Even as Trump commits one constitutional, legal, and ethical abuse after another, his followers depict themselves as somehow the people truly suffering unfairness. Trump was a perpetrator who thought himself a victim, and American society has indulged that same illusion among Trump supporters.
Long before Trump, even the smallest cities – like Whitewater – indulged grandiose claims, sham statistics, and dodgy data from a few key officials and a few like-minded residents. These were small-minded men and women who reacted as though a critique of public policy were an attack on the Sistine Chapel.
Every political booster’s flimsy claim only lessened respect for quality and truth. One looks back on the time immediately before the Great Recession in 2007, and sees that key public figures in Whitewater pushed flimsy policy claims unworthy of a second-rate high-school debate team. Their inadequacies paved the way for worse: they inured the community to lesser standards and degraded conditions, while praising their own roles in doing so.
Officials from that time – from towns across rural America, truly – may wail that they would never have wanted Trumpism. Perhaps. It is enough to know that their own departures from quality and truth – though their self-promotion of mediocre work – smoothed the path for a far worse movement of lies and fantasies.
One reads that Whitewater now has an option, for most of the city, of grocery delivery from nearby cities. As it is, Whitewater has a Walmart, but no stand-alone, full-service grocery. Private delivery service is a benefit to the community. It’s better to have more grocery options than fewer.
These are private enterprises providing private delivery services. Government, including Whitewater’s Community Development Authority, has spent years and millions on large public projects (an ‘Innovation Center,’ profitless tech startups, etc.), and for it Whitewater has only grown poorer as a low-income community. A decade of letting the leaders of the local business league (the self-described ‘Greater Whitewater’ Committee) run the CDA like a low-rent club hasn’t improved the best measure of economic development: gains in individual and household incomes.
Market manipulation means fewer markets.
Whitewater’s slipped far, and she needs something wholly different to address her condition: Waiting for Whitewater’s Dorothy Day.
See also A Candid Admission from the Whitewater CDA, Whitewater & Walworth County’s Working Poor, 2020 ALICE® Report, Reported Family Poverty in Whitewater Increased Over the Last Decade.
Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be overcast with a high of thirty. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:43 PM, for 9h 20m 33s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6 PM.
On this day in 1932, Hattie Caraway becomes the first woman elected to the United States Senate.
Recommended for reading in full —
Tim Craig, Holly Bailey, and Matt Zapotosky report State capitals face threat of armed protests, FBI warns:
On Saturday, heavily armed demonstrators surrounded the Kentucky Capitol. The protesters, dressed in camouflage and carrying assault weapons and zip-tie handcuffs, vowed to continue to support Trump while railing against Gov. Andy Beshear (D) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
At a news conference Monday, Beshear vowed he would not be “intimidated,” and he called on Americans to reject those who threaten the symbols and buildings that represent the country’s democratic principles.
“These are not the actions of people who believe in this country. These are people who believe they can bully and intimidate other individuals,” Beshear, visibly angry, said. “To anybody who believes that domestic terror is the way to go, we will be ready for you. We will not back down.”
In Wisconsin, state workers on Monday began boarding up ground-level windows of the Capitol in Madison in anticipation of the protesters. In Arizona, officials had erected a double-layer chain-link fence around the Capitol complex in Phoenix. In Michigan, a state that has been on edge since the FBI disrupted a plot in October to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), a state legislative committee voted Thursday to ban residents from openly carrying guns inside the Capitol in Lansing.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) called up 750 National Guard troops to help protect the Capitol, where the legislature kicked off its annual session Monday.
Jennifer Schuessler reports Hundreds of Historians Join Call for Trump’s Impeachment:
More than 300 historians and constitutional scholars have signed an open letter calling for the impeachment and removal of President Trump. They say his continuation in office after encouraging supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol posed “a clear and present danger to American democracy and the national security of the United States.”
Those who signed the letter, released on Medium on Monday, include best-selling authors like Ron Chernow, Taylor Branch, Garry Wills and Stacy Schiff, as well as many leading academic historians. A number of the signatories had joined a previous letterin December 2019, calling for the president’s impeachment because of “numerous and flagrant abuses of power” including failure to protect the integrity of the impending 2020 election.
“Since November 2020,” the new letter says, “Trump has refused to accept the results of a free and fair election, something no president before him has ever done.”
Politically, the condemnation by historians may carry less weight than the president’s loss of support in recent days from business groups that once supported him or his policies. But David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers who drafted the new letter, said that historical expertise mattered.
“Trump has defied the Constitution and broken laws, norms, practices and precedents, for which he must be held accountable now and after he leaves office,” the letter says of his presidency. “No future president should be tempted by the example of his defiance going unpunished.”
Japan’s Hokuriku region blanketed by record snowfall:
more >>
