Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-one.  Sunrise is 7:13 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 07m 43s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 55.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy carries out a surprise attack on the United States Pacific Fleet and its defending Army and Marine air forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Jaclyn Peiser reports Arizona legislature closes after Giuliani spent two days with maskless GOP lawmakers:

For more than 10 hours last Monday, President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, convened in a Phoenix hotel ballroom with more than a dozen current and future Arizona Republican lawmakers to hear testimony from people who supposedly witnessed election fraud.

Giuliani and other attendees were shown maskless and not social distancing, and the Arizona Republican Party tweeted an image of Giuliani and lawmakers flouting coronavirus guidelines.

That defiance of public health advice came to a head on Sunday when Trump announced on Twitter that Giuliani had contracted the coronavirus. Hours later, legislative staff in Arizona’s Capitol abruptly announced a week-long closure of the state Senate and House starting on Monday.

An email announcement to members of the Arizona House said the move was “out of an abundance of caution for recent cases and concerns relating to covid-19″ and noted that “no one will have permission to work or meet in the building.”

Anita Kumar and Andrew Desiderio report Trump mulls preemptive pardons for up to 20 allies, even as Republicans balk:

President Donald Trump is considering preemptively pardoning as many as 20 aides and associates before leaving office, frustrating Republicans who believe offering legal reprieves to his friends and family members could backfire.

Trump’s strategy, like much of his presidency, is nontraditional. He is eschewing the typical protocol of processing cases through the Justice Department. And he may argue that such preemptive pardons for his friends and family members are necessary to spare them from paying millions in legal fees to fight what he describes as witch hunts. Those up for clemency include everyone from Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to several members of his family — all people who haven’t been charged with a crime. Weighing on Trump’s mind is whether these pardons would look like an admission of guilt.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya writes The people of Belarus are still marching against dictatorship. The U.S. can help:

Alexander Lukashenko refuses to step down or hold a new round of elections. His armed thugs are brutalizing ordinary people who hold up flowers and signs as they call for a different life. Thousands have been rounded up and housed like cattle in tiny, overcrowded jail cells without access to water, sanitation or horizontal sleeping positions. Torture is now commonplace. Belarusian Nobel Prize-winning writer Svetlana Alexievich has remarked, “I only know such stories from the Stalin era.” Such crimes have only strengthened the conviction of the Belarusian people that Lukashenko has to go.

….

We need more help from the United States, even in this complex transitional period. I appeal to the U.S. Congress to swiftly pass the Belarus Democracy, Human Rights, and Sovereignty Act of 2020.

This bill will expand the scope of those who can be sanctioned under U.S. law for their complicity in the repressions. At the same time it will provide support to independent media and technology for circumventing state censorship. Access to information is the strongest weapon in our possession. Lukashenko’s efforts to stifle the free flow of information and hide his violent crackdown cannot go unanswered.

‘Hug bubble’ safely connects care home residents to their families in France:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-one.  Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 08m 41s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 65.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1821, the first Wisconsin post office is established in Green Bay.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Christopher Rowland, Lena H. Sun, Isaac Stanley-Becker and Carolyn Y. Johnson report Trump’s Operation Warp Speed promised a flood of covid vaccines. Instead, states are expecting a trickle:

Federal officials have slashed the amount of coronavirus vaccine they plan to ship to states in December because of constraints on supply, sending local officials into a scramble to adjust vaccination plans and highlighting how early promises of a vast stockpile before the end of 2020 have fallen short.

Instead of the delivery of 300 million or so doses of vaccine immediately after emergency-use approval and before the end of 2020 as the Trump administration had originally promised, current plans call for availability of around a tenth of that, or 35 to 40 million doses.

Two vaccines, from manufacturers Pfizer and Moderna, which both use a novel form of mRNA to help trigger immune response, are on the verge of winning Food and Drug Administration clearance this month. Approval would cap an unprecedented sprint by government and drug companies to develop, test and manufacture a defense against the worst pandemic in a century — part of the Operation Warp Speed initiative that promised six companies advance purchase orders totaling $9.3 billion.

As planning accelerated for distributing supplies, the government began to further lower expectations.

 Tim Miller writes This Is Your Brain on Newsmax:

I wanted to find out what these folks were being told, so I committed myself to hours upon hours of viewing. You may think you have a sense for what is happening on The Max, but I promise you it is much weirder, more alarming, and more debased than you can imagine. Here’s some of what I saw:

The president’s campaign lawyer saying that a former Trump official should be executed.

A host saying that Biden’s election would bring a war between the races and that Barack Hussein Obama is a “reprobate” who is “pimping” a book.

Hosts and guests suggesting several times an hour that Republican state legislatures should overturn the will of the people to keep Trump in power.

Fantastical stories of millions of votes being dropped off by tow trucks in the dead of night after nationwide blackouts.

The term “ballot harvesting” bandied about indiscriminately.

An endless stream of Lionel Hutz-level legal analysis.

 The ‘World’s Loneliest Elephant’ is Finally Getting a New Home:

Taing Rinith reports in the Khmer Times that A new journey begins for Kaavan in Cambodia:

In an exclusive interview, Khmer Times talks to Ministry of Environment spokesman Neth Pheaktra about the future of the ‘world’s loneliest elephant’ after arriving in his new home.

….

KT: Do you think it will be difficult for Kaavan to live in Cambodia, as he has been living alone for a very long time? What challenges have you faced so far?

Pheaktra: Known as the ‘world’s loneliest elephant’, we initially thought that it would take a long time for Kaavan to adapt to his new life in Cambodia. However, surprisingly, he seems to be adapting very well and quickly. In fact, it is going much better than we expected. First of all, he has started trusting and feeling close to his caregivers. Secondly, Kaavan is already enjoying walking and playing freely in his new home in the protected area.

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of thirty-eight.  Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 09m 43s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 75.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1879, Humane Society of Wisconsin is organized in Milwaukee. 

Recommended for reading in full — 

 David Folkenflik writes ‘Substantial Likelihood Of Wrongdoing’ By VOA Parent Agency, Government Watchdog Says:

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel, a federal watchdog, disclosed Wednesday that it had found “a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing” at the parent agency of the Voice of America under the leadership of the CEO appointed by President Trump.

Since taking over the U.S. Agency for Global Media, CEO Michael Pack has turned it upside down, sidelining top executives, firing network chiefs, and deep-sixing requests for visa extensions for foreign staffers. Most notably, Pack had two senior political aides with records of strongly pro-Trump ideological statements investigate journalists for perceived anti-Trump bias and push for sympathetic news coverage of the president during the campaign.

The finding is yet another formal and stinging rebuke to Pack’s actions, though it is not a final determination. In late November, U.S. Judge Beryl Howell ruled that Pack had acted unconstitutionally in investigating his own journalists on political grounds. She ordered him to stop intervening inside VOA’s newsrooms. Suspended executives have separately filed a complaint with the inspector general of the U.S. State Department, which has jurisdiction over the agency.

 Catherine Rampell writes The November jobs report has no silver lining:

After a few strong months of job gains earlier this year, hiring has slowed dramatically. In June, for instance, employers added 4.8 million jobs; but last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report published Friday, that number had slowed to a trickle of only 245,000.

Yes, it’s good that U.S. employers are still hiring. In a normal, healthy economy, adding 245,000 jobs would be nothing to sneeze at. But it’s not nearly enough for the economy today. We remain in a deep, deep hole, dug when employers eliminated 22 million jobs on net earlier this year. As a result, the U.S. economy still has a greater jobs deficit today than was the case at the very worst point of every previous postwar recession, including the Great Recession. Which no longer seems so terribly “great” anymore, as this chart illustrates:

As you can see, we’ve recovered only about half the positions lost when the pandemic initially broke out in the United States and shuttered much of the economy. If hiring continues at November’s pace, it will take more than three additional years before the United States regains all the jobs lost in early spring. And that estimate does not account for expected population growth, which would call for more jobs than we had pre-pandemic.

The report contains other bad news, too.

The headline unemployment rate fell because people dropped out of the labor force entirely — that is, they stopped actively looking for work — and therefore are no longer counted as unemployed.

(Emphasis added. Rampell is right that, by job loss, this Pandemic Recession is far worse than the Great Recession. The Great Recession, however, was great – in darkness and danger – for its aftermath as much unemployment: stagnation in parts of America, addictions, malaise, and nativism. It was an illness half-treated, and so led to infections and worse maladies in many of its victims.)

Astronomers produce most detailed 3D map yet of the Milky Way:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-one.  Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 10m 48s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 84.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1783, at Fraunces Tavern in New York City, General Washington bids farewell to his officers.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Susan Glasser writes The President Is Acting Crazy, So Why Are We Shrugging It Off?:

Donald Trump in defeat, it turns out, is even more whiny, dishonest, and self-absorbed than he was before his decisive loss to Biden a month ago. In the speech, delivered to an empty room and released straight to Facebook, for reasons that remain unclear, Trump repeated many of the election conspiracy theories, lies, and laments which he has been sending forth for weeks on Twitter and via emissaries like Rudy Giuliani. The news was that these baseless claims—the only impact of which will be to further undermine public confidence in the U.S. government—were coming directly from the President, as he stood at a lectern bearing the Presidential seal. And what words they were. The pollsters were liars. “Detroit is corrupt.” “Millions of votes were cast illegally in the swing states alone.”

….

There are only two possible conclusions from listening to this folly: either the President actually believes what he is saying, in which case he is crazy, or he does not, in which case he is engaged in the most cynical attack on American democracy ever to come from the White House. Is Trump “increasingly detached from reality,” as even the dispassionate, strictly nonpartisan Associated Press put it, in recounting the speech? Or is that conclusion, harsh as it is, giving Trump the benefit of the doubt by implying that he is just misguided or uninformed? There is another explanation, after all, for this reckless speech: What if, in fact, the President is not delusional but is the purposeful, malevolent creator of an alternate reality, knowingly spewing disinformation, discord, and division? Either variant, of course, is terrible.

 Silvia Amaro reports EU proposes a plan to revive U.S. ties and work with Biden:

The European Union announced a new plan on Wednesday to improve relations with the U.S. ahead of the inauguration of Joe Biden.

It’s been a tense four years of trans-Atlantic ties, with President Donald Trump and the EU clashing over trade, defense, technology and foreign relations — to name a few points of contention.

As the Biden administration is due to arrive at the White House on Jan. 20, the EU has not wasted any time and has prepared a new plan to reset that relationship.

“We are taking the initiative to design a new transatlantic agenda fit for today’s global landscape,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement Wednesday.

“It is time to reconnect,” she added. Meanwhile, the commission’s executive vice president, Valdis Dombrovskis, told CNBC the EU was sending a “signal that we are ready and willing to engage with the U.S.”

In a document entitled “A new EU-U.S. agenda for global change,” the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, defined four major policy areas to focus on: health response, climate change, trade and tech, and security.

How Autonomous Robots Are Changing Construction:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty.  Sunrise is 7:09 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 11m 57s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 90.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 3:30 PM, and the Fire Department via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1775, the USS Alfred becomes the first vessel to fly the Grand Union Flag (the precursor to the Stars and Stripes); the flag is hoisted by John Paul Jones.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Philip Rucker reports Trump escalates baseless attacks on election with 46-minute video rant:

Escalating his attack on democracy from within the White House, President Trump on Wednesday distributed an astonishing 46-minute video rant filled with baseless allegations of voter fraud and outright falsehoods in which he declared the nation’s election system “under coordinated assault and siege” and argued that it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost to President-elect Joe Biden.

Standing behind the presidential lectern in the Diplomatic Reception Room and flanked by the flags of his office and of the country whose Constitution he swore an oath to uphold, Trump tried to leverage the power of the presidency to subvert the vote and overturn the election results.

The rambling and bellicose monologue — which Trump said “may be the most important speech I’ve ever made” and was delivered direct-to-camera with no audience — underscored his desperation to reverse the outcome of his election loss after a month of failed legal challenges and as some key states already have certified Biden’s victory.

A guide to Trump’s false election claims:

 Stephanie Saul, Kate Kelly, and Michael LaForgia report 2,596 Trades in One Term: Inside Senator Perdue’s Stock Portfolio (‘The Georgia Republican’s stock trades have included a range of companies within his Senate committees’ oversight, an analysis shows’):

An examination of Mr. Perdue’s stock trading during his six years in office reveals that he has been the Senate’s most prolific stock trader by far, sometimes reporting 20 or more transactions in a single day.

The Times analyzed data compiled by Senate Stock Watcher, a nonpartisan website that aggregates publicly available information on lawmakers’ trading, and found that Mr. Perdue’s transactions accounted for nearly a third of all senators’ trades reported in the past six years. His 2,596 trades, mostly in stocks but also in bonds and funds, roughly equal the combined trading volume of the next five most active traders in the Senate.

The data also shows the breadth of trades Mr. Perdue made in companies that stood to benefit from policy and spending matters that came not just before the Senate as a whole, but before the committees and subcommittees on which he served.

Nearly half of Mr. Perdue’s FireEye trades, for example, occurred while he sat on the cybersecurity panel, a role that potentially could have provided him with nonpublic information about companies like FireEye. During that period, FireEye landed a subcontract worth more than $30 million with the Army Cyber Command, which had operations at Fort Gordon, in Mr. Perdue’s home state. In 2018, Mr. Perdue reported capital gains of up to $15,000 from FireEye trades.

 Family in South Australia finds live koala in their Christmas tree:

An Adelaide family came home to find their Christmas tree topped with a new, furry decoration after a juvenile koala wandered inside their home, climbed up the plastic tree and sampled the leaves. The family immediately called the Adelaide and Hills Koala Rescue, but co-founder Dee Hearne-Hellon said the group didn’t believe the story at first. After being removed from the tree, the koala was released into bushland nearby.