Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-eight.  Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, for 9h 24m 37s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 1.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1863, Gen. Grant is victorious at the Battle of Missionary Ridge.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets at 6:30 PM in closed session with an open session beginning at 7 PM.

Recommended for reading in full:

Jennifer Rubin writes Time to call out and remove Putin’s propagandists:

Republicans are not “merely” violating their oaths of office for failing to support impeachment of a president who arguably has committed more serious “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” and acts of bribery than all his predecessors combined. None of them [of those predecessors] sacrificed national security to obtain a political advantage. President Trump has been disloyal to the United States, not only in giving Russia a leg up in its war against Ukraine, but also in broadcasting his propaganda. And for that, Republicans are just as guilty

….

If congressional Republicans have evidence our intelligence community is wrong, they need to present it. Otherwise, they need to be called out for deliberately assisting a hostile foreign power. It is up to mainstream media interviewers and every Democrat on the ballot in 2020 to directly challenge Republicans who, yes, engage in un-American activity.

In the case of Trump, he not only picks up the propaganda from domestic sources carrying Russian President Vladimir Putin’s water, which “worked its way into American information ecosystems, sloshing around until parts of it reached Mr. Trump”; he was duped right from the source speaking “with Mr. Putin about allegations of Ukrainian interference.” Whether the president is being blackmailed is unknown; what we do know is that he is a malleable puppet whose strings are pulled in the Kremlin.

Jacob Knutson reports Sen. John Kennedy repeats Ukraine conspiracy theory about DNC server:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-six.  Sunrise is 6:58 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, for 9h 26m 20s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 5.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1959, Interstate 90 opens to traffic between Janesville and Beloit.

Recommended for reading in full:

Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti writes The unholy alliance of the religious right and Trumpism is deeply anti-Christian:

The US attorney general William Barr’s speech at the University of Notre Dame last week has been widely decried by liberal commentators for violating the separation between church and state. In his speech, Barr portrayed “secularists” as enemies of American democracy. Yet few seem to have grasped the deeper political significance of Barr’s remarks.

On their face, none of Barr’s claims appear particularly new. The idea that “militant secularism” undermines the moral fabric of society, leading to all sorts of “social pathologies,” and the idea that “free government” requires the “moral discipline” afforded by religious belief, have been central tenets of official Catholic doctrine for at least a century and a half.

What is more original – and troubling – is the political use the US’s chief law-enforcement officer has made of these traditional religious themes. By subtly reworking some of the core tenets of Catholic social doctrine, he has constructed a new political theology in the service of Trumpism – one which aims to offer conservative Christians a set of principled, not just pragmatic, reasons for supporting the current US administration.

….

A more powerful retort to Barr’s speech would therefore be to point out that it is ultimately in contradiction with itself, since it runs counter to other key themes of Catholic and – more broadly – Christian theology. Most notably, the fact that Christianity was never intended to function as an exclusive identity, marking out the boundaries between those deemed fit for “free government” and those that aren’t. On the contrary, the core of the Christian message is one of universal inclusion.

This is precisely the meaning of the New Testament’s affirmation that: “There is neither Jew nor gentile, neither slave nor free, nor male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). The same point was also recently reiterated by Pope Francis when he reminded believers that “Catholicity” literally means “universality”, inferring from it that: “The church shows her catholicity by … liv[ing] in solidarity with all of humanity, and never closed in on ourselves.”

Bianca Vivion Brooks writes To Take on the Religious Right, We Need a Religious Left:

These values have been the foundation of many previous American progressive social movements. Though the civil rights movement had clear legislative aims, it was a deeply religious movement, sustained by the spiritual empowerment and social organization of Southern black churches. The church served not only as a place to worship, but also as a community support group, regular meeting space and bulletin board; a place to solve disputes and center political organizing.

The motto of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, over which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. presided, was, “To Save the Soul of America.” When their faith in the American government dwindled, black Americans relied on a unified faith in God to deliver them from the sin of racism. This hope was not a passive acceptance that their collective lot would be improved in the next life, but instead a critique of the status quo that moved them to political action in this one.

In the past, religious groups have also led the charge for immigration reform, a cause still championed by modern progressives today. During the 1980s, Presbyterian churches aiming to offer protection to undocumented refugees fleeing Central American wars formed the sanctuary movement. Sanctuary activists defended the movement on various religious grounds, including biblical precedent for providing refuge to those in need. By 1986, there were more than 300 sanctuary congregations in the United States, which also include Lutherans, United Church of Christ members, Roman Catholics and Jews. (As Susan Bibler Coutin notes in her book “The Culture of Protest: Religious Activism and the U.S. Sanctuary Movement,” the concept of “sanctuary cities” would come to supplant churches as municipal governments stepped in.)

The Mystery of the Kansas Gnome Homes:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-two.  Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, for 9h 28m 06s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 12.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1924, astronomer Edwin Hubble publishes in the New York Times his then-controversial, but now-confirmed, discovery that the Andromeda ‘nebula’ is actually another island galaxy far outside of our own Milky Way. Before his work, the accepted view was that the universe extended no farther than the Milky Way.

Recommended for reading in full:

Yesterday: Rob Mentzer reports Investigators Lock Down Rhinelander City Hall In Public Misconduct Case. Today: Natalie Brophy reports Rhinelander administrator Dan Guild subject of felony investigation:

RHINELANDER – City Administrator Daniel Guild was the primary subject of two search warrants executed Thursday at Rhinelander City Hall as part of an investigation into tampering with public records and misconduct in office.

The search is part of an investigation by the Oneida County Sheriff’s Office, assisted by the Price County Sheriff’s Office, into allegations that Guild “engaged in various acts including failure to release public records in response to requests by the media and law enforcement, as well as altering email content to present it as the original,” according to search warrants filed in Oneida County Court.

Authorities were looking for emails between Guild and staff from the Wisconsin League of Municipalities, as well as emails with city council members that mention altered emails, walking quorums or open meeting violations, documents state. Law enforcement was also looking for the disciplinary record for the city’s former director of public works, Tim Kingman.

….

This is not the first time Guild has come under public scrutiny. He was previously the city administrator in Weston, but resigned in July 2018 following a 30-day suspension for breaching his employment contract.

Margaret Sullivan writes The death knell for local newspapers? It’s perilously close:

Here’s some of what happened in the past few days.

Gannett and GateHouse, two major newspaper chains, finished their planned merger, and the combined company intends to cut the combined budget by at least $300 million. That will come on top of unending job losses over the past decade in the affected newsrooms of more than 500 papers.

The McClatchy newspaper group — parent of the Herald and Charlotte Observer — is so weighed down by debt and pension obligations that analysts think it is teetering on bankruptcy.

And the storied Chicago Tribune on Tuesday fell under the influence of Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that has strip-mined the other important papers it owns, including the Denver Post and the Mercury News in San Jose.

(Key point: when Sullivan writes about local journalism, she’s writing about serious papers, not the mediocre publications one finds near Whitewater.)

If you’re a UW-Madison student, the robots are coming for you. And they’re bringing food:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 29m 55s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 21.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1963 in Dallas, Pres. Kennedy is assassinated, Texas Governor John Connally is seriously wounded, and Dallas Police officer J. D. Tippit is also killed.

Recommended for reading in full:

Rob Mentzer reports Investigators Lock Down Rhinelander City Hall In Public Misconduct Case:

Officials from the Oneida County Sheriff’s Department are investigating alleged misconduct by a public official and tampering with public records, both of which are felony offenses. At 9:25 a.m., officials from Oneida, Vilas and Marathon countty sheriff’s offices started a search for evidence. They seized paper and digital documents in the search, and were also assisted by the state Department of Justice’s digital forensics support unit.

Michael Gerson writes Stephen Miller and Jim Jordan give us a taste of the Truly Trumpian Man:

Miller is best known as the prime mover behind the Muslim travel ban and the main opponent of any political compromise involving compassion for Dream Act “dreamers.” Now, with the release of a trove of emails sent to Breitbart writers and editors in 2015 and 2016 (soon before Miller became a Trump administration official), we get a glimpse of Miller’s inspirations and motivations. In response to the massacre of nine black churchgoers by a white nationalist in 2015, Miller was offended that Amazon removed merchandise featuring the Confederate flag and was concerned about the vandalization of Confederate monuments. Miller encouraged attention at Breitbart to a “white genocide”-themed novel, featuring sexualized violence by refugees. He focused on crime and terrorism by nonwhites as the basis for draconian immigration restrictions. He complained about the “ridiculous statue of liberty myth” and mocked the “national religion” of “diversity.” He recommended and forwarded stories from a range of alt-right sources.

All this is evidence of a man marinated in prejudice. In most presidential administrations, a person with such opinions would be shown the White House exit. But most of Miller’s views — tenderness for the Confederacy, the exaggerated fear of interracial crime, the targeting of refugees for calumny and contempt — have been embraced publicly by the president. Trump could not fire his alt-right alter ego without indicting himself. Miller is safe in the shelter of his boss’s bigotry.

….

The elevation of Trump to the presidency has given prominence to a certain kind of follower and permission for a certain set of social values. Bolsheviks once talked of creating the New Socialist Man. Miller and Jordan are giving us a taste of the Truly Trumpian Man — guided by bigotry, seized by conspiracy theories, dismissive of facts and truth, indifferent to ethics, contemptuous of institutional norms and ruthlessly dedicated to the success of a demagogue.

New 3D printer makes multi-material robots:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see scattered morning showers with a high of fifty-three.  Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 31m 46s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 31.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1953: “the Natural History Museum in London announces that the ‘Piltdown Man’ skull, initially believed to be one of the most important fossilized hominid skulls ever found, is a hoax.”

Recommended for reading in full:

Benjamin Wittes writes Gordon Sondland Accuses the President of Bribery:

Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution makes the president subject to impeachment and removal for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Normally, we debate impeachment in terms of the last phrase—the mysterious catch-all, “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” But today, Amb. Gordon Sondland, testifying before the House in the ongoing impeachment inquiry, offered a crystal clear account of how President Trump engaged in bribery.

The meaning of the term “bribery” in the impeachment clauses is not coextensive with the meaning of the same word in the criminal code. The impeachment clause predates the federal criminal code, and its contours are decided more by the common law of impeachment than by the terms of specific criminal laws. So I’m not invoking 18 U.S.C. § 201 to evaluate whether Trump committed a crime.

That said, the bribery statute offers a reasonable working definition of what it means to bribe a public official: “Whoever … directly or indirectly, corruptly gives, offers or promises anything of value to any public official … to influence any official act” has committed the offense.

What’s more, the statute also offers a reasonable working definition of what it means for a public official to demand a bribe: “Whoever … being a public official … directly or indirectly, corruptly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value personally … in return for … being influenced in the performance of any official act” also has committed the offense.

….

Remember the words of the statute: Whoever, being a public official, directly or indirectly, corruptly demands anything of value personally in return for being influenced in the performance of any official act has engaged in the crime of bribery.

This exchange [between Rep. Schiff and Amb. Sondland during testimony yesterday] seems to me unambiguously to describe a corrupt demand for something personally valuable (investigations of political opponents) in return for being influenced in the performance of two official acts (granting a White House meeting and releasing hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance).

See Ben Berwick & Justin Florence, The Bad Arguments That Trump Didn’t Commit Bribery (responding to Trump’s defenders’ efforts to rebut the powerful case that Trump committed impeachable bribery).

Amy Goldstein reports Top Trump health official spent $3 million on contractors who helped boost her visibility:

Marked “privileged, pre-decisional, deliberative,” the eight-page proposal, emailed to [Seema] Verma’s deputy chief of staff, was part of an unusual campaign carried out by high-paid contractors Verma brought on at a cost to taxpayers of more than $3 million.

This work over 19 months that provided “strategic communication” services by a network of politically connected contractors and subcontractors, first reported by Politico, came as Verma spoke about the importance of fostering individual responsibility and self-reliance among the nation’s needy.

House Republicans Are Choosing not Run for Reelection:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-four.  Sunrise is 6:53 AM and sunset 4:27 PM, for 9h 33m 41s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 42.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Parks & Rec Board meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1859, Milwaukee sees its first baseball game.

Recommended for reading in full:

Maria Perez reports Wisconsin’s dairy industry would collapse without the work of Latino immigrants — many of them undocumented:

Reliable numbers on immigrants working in the dairy industry are hard to come by. The best known Wisconsin survey, taken more than a decade ago, estimated the hired immigrant workforce at more than 40% of the total. The best known national survey, taken five years ago for the National Milk Producers Federation, estimated it at 51%.

Talk to workers in Wisconsin, and they express little doubt immigrants account for a larger portion of the dairy industry workforce today. And they don’t just work on the biggest farms, but also on operations that grew their herd beyond what a family can handle.

With unemployment low, many farmers fill openings by passing word to Mexican laborers already on-site, and then accepting the new workers who show up without asking too many questions.

Some farmers say they haven’t encountered a U.S.-born applicant in years.

Entry-level jobs may pay $11 to $13 an hour and can include free — albeit modest — housing. The immigrants may have to work nights, milk hundreds of cows every shift, toil in the wind and snow. The job can be dangerous; not everyone makes it back to their family.

Immigrants say the jobs are a ladder to a better life; farmers say the immigrants are the only means of affordable labor. So despite the rancor that surrounds national immigration policy, the workers keep coming and the farms keep hiring.

In dairy barns across Wisconsin, farmers and workers say there is a simple truth: Without the work of Latino immigrants — many, if not most, of them undocumented — the signature industry in America’s Dairyland would collapse.

Danielle Kaeding reports AG Josh Kaul Backs Michigan’s Stance In Lawsuit To Shut Down Enbridge’s Line 5:

Three state attorneys general are supporting Michigan’s stance in its case to shut down an energy firm’s pipeline running through the Straits of Mackinac, including Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul.

In June, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel sued Enbridge Energy and asked a Michigan court to rule the operation of Line 5 under its 1953 easement agreement with the state violates the public trust doctrine. Under the public trust doctrine, states hold land or natural resources in trust for public benefit or use.

In a recent filing, three Democratic attorneys general from Wisconsin, Minnesota and California said Enbridge has no right to interfere with Michigan’s right to preserve its lands for public benefit under the public trust doctrine. They urged a Michigan court to reject claims by Enbridge that the federal government’s authority through the Pipeline Safety Act and U.S. Coast Guard supersedes state authority.

South Dakota’s ‘Meth. We’re on it,’ campaign heavily criticized:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see morning rain or snow showers with a high of forty.  Sunrise is 6:52 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 35m 39s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 54% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1863, Pres. Lincoln delivers his Gettysburg Address.

Recommended for reading in full:

Patrick Marley and Craig Gilbert report In letter to House Republicans, Ron Johnson gives most detailed account yet of his Ukraine involvement:

Johnson wrote that he viewed the inquiry as a “continuation of a concerted, and possibly coordinated, effort to sabotage the Trump administration,” and he questioned the motives of government witnesses who have voiced concerns about Trump’s handling of Ukraine.

Johnson has given his version of events in numerous interviews in recent weeks but provided some new details Monday.

He talked to National Security Adviser John Bolton before calling Trump when he heard allegations that aid to Ukraine was being withheld until Ukraine launched an investigation. He tried, unsuccessfully, to talk to Vice President Mike Pence about it.

Johnson wrote that it “did not register” with him if Trump told his aides to talk to his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, about matters related to Ukraine. And according to Johnson, Trump told Johnson he barely knew Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador who oversaw dealings with Ukraine.

(Johnson’s letter is available online. Representing a state that has had a decade of extreme politics – gerrymandering, union-busting, sweetheart business subsidies, voter suppression, Foxconn — Johnson pushes ahead with a list of crackpot conspiracy theories. For Wisconsin, bad goes to worse.)

Catherine Rampell writes Trump and Republicans are on the hunt for Real Crimes:

For a party that prides itself on being the champion of law and order, the GOP has some peculiar ideas about crime.

Nothing President Trump does, it turns out, is a crime, let alone a “high” one. That’s not only because some crimes are not crimes, according to both Trump and his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. It is also not only because a sitting president is supposedly immune from criminal prosecution — including for shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, per another Trump lawyer.

According to Republicans’ airtight legal reasoning, nothing Trump does can be considered criminal because somebody else somewhere might be doing something worse. And just as O.J. Simpson pledged to search for the real killer, Trump and his fellow Republicans are on the hunt for the Real Crimes.

For instance: The Real Crime isn’t that Trump secretly withheld military aid to extort a desperate ally into announcing a sham investigation into a political rival. Heavens no. The Real Crime is that the public knows that this happened.

At least so says Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who recently railed against the whistleblower’s decision to “leak” information about Trump’s Ukrainian shakedown by reporting it to the intelligence community’s inspector general. That leak, Johnson complained, “exposed things that didn’t need to be exposed.”

Why Spam Calls Are At An All-Time High: