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:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:51 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 37m 39s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 64% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School Board also meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1963, the Bell System in the United States officially launches a push-button telephone.

Recommended for reading in full:

Erik Gunn reports Another New Owner for Journal Sentinel:

The merger announcement produced widespread predictions that further staff cuts are ahead for the new company, which will own about 1 in 6 newspapers across the country. The two predecessor firms have already cut their workforces repeatedly in the last several years.

Besides the Journal Sentinel, Gannett owns daily newspapers in Appleton, Fond du Lac, Green Bay, Manitowoc, Marshfield, Oshkosh, Sheboygan, Stevens Point, Wausau and Wisconsin Rapids. GateHouse owns the Daily Reporter in Milwaukee, which covers construction and development, and the monthly Wisconsin Law Journal.

Under the merger agreement, New Media is buying Gannett for roughly $1.4 billion in cash and stock, financed with a five-year, 11.5% interest loan of $1.8 billion from Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm. The transaction is scheduled to close Tuesday, Nov. 19.

Naveena Sadsivam reports This Pipeline Cuts Across a Reservation. Wisconsin Might Make Tribal Members Felons for Protesting It:

For more than 60 years, one section of Enbridge’s elaborate network of pipelines carrying petroleum across Canada has taken a detour through the Bad River Reservation in northern Wisconsin.

Some of the easements that allowed Enbridge to keep its Line 5 pipeline on the tribe’s land expired in 2013, and negotiations between Enbridge and the tribe to renew the leases fell through. Yet Line 5 is still funneling Enbridge’s petroleum across the Bad River Reservation. The tribe says Enbridge is trespassing, and has sued the company to kick it off their property.

If a bill awaiting Wisconsin’s Democrat Governor Tony Evers’ signature becomes law, members of the tribe protesting Enbridge’s operations on their reservation could face fines of $10,000 and up to six years in jail.

“It provides these illegally operating companies with the right to basically charge someone with a felony for being on their land,” said Philomena Kebec, a citizen of Bad River and former tribal prosecutor. “And this could be an Indian person on Indian land where the company is illegally trespassing.”

….

The Bad River Reservation, an approximately 125,000-acre tract on the south shore of Lake Superior, was established in 1854 by a treaty with the federal government. Although the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians is sovereign, state criminal laws apply within the reservation as a result of a federal law called “Public Law 280,” which grants several states—including Wisconsin—law enforcement authority within tribal nations. As a result, if Governor Evers signs the new bill, it would apply to Native Americans on tribal land.

These Search and Rescue Robots Could Save Your Life:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will bring rain and snow showers with a high of thirty-six.  Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 4:29 PM, for 9h 39m 41s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 74.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 2013, a late-season tornado outbreak plagues the Midwest, with 73 confirmed tornadoes across several states.

Recommended for reading in full:

Amber Phillips writes More testimony raises the question: What did Ron Johnson know about Trump’s intentions with Ukraine?:

What did Sen. Ron Johnson know about President Trump’s intentions with Ukraine? That’s been a question from the start of this impeachment inquiry, ever since the senator himself acknowledged he heard from people there was a quid pro quo.

The Wisconsin Republican’s name keeps popping up in testimony in critical conversations, including with Trump and Ukraine’s president. They are conversations that could help assess whether Ukrainians knew there were conditions on getting their military aid and whether Trump was behind ordering those conditions.

New closed-door testimony Friday folds Johnson in again, this time detailing a September meeting in Ukraine with Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Here’s U.S. diplomat in Ukraine David Holmes saying this in his opening statement, obtained by CNN, about Johnson:

President Zelensky asked about the security assistance. Although both senators stressed bipartisan congressional support for Ukraine, Senator Johnson cautioned President Zelensky that President Trump has a negative view of Ukraine and that President Zelensky would have a difficult time overcoming it. Senator Johnson further explained that he was “shocked” by President Trump’s negative reaction during an Oval Office meeting on May 23, when he and the Three Amigos proposed that President Trump meet President Zelensky and show support for Ukraine.

Why that’s notable: We know that Johnson wanted the security aid, which was mysteriously frozen after Congress approved it this summer, given to Ukraine. He’s the vice chair of the Senate Ukraine Caucus and a key member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who helped shepherd it through Congress.

But Johnson has been publicly very supportive of Trump, giving the president the benefit of the doubt that he was interested in ensuring the money wouldn’t be used corruptly. Yet here’s Johnson in a closed-door setting appearing to say he doesn’t understand why Trump isn’t more supportive of Ukraine.

(Emphasis in original. Phillips’s full article lists other references in public statements showing Johnson’s ongoing role in the Ukraine matter.)

On Wisconsin Public Radio, Kate Archer Kent hosts a discussion on Immigration: Now, And Then:

As the Supreme Court takes up a case challenging efforts to end a program protecting from deportation young immigrants who came to the country illegally, we discuss conditions at the border with a Wisconsinite who saw them firsthand. Then, we take a closer look at the state’s immigration history.
Host(s):
Kate Archer Kent
Guest(s):
Primitivo Torres
Rachel Ida Buff

(Link to audio file.)

Coffee Around the World:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 4:30 PM, for 9h 41m 47s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 83.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1861, the 4th Wisconsin Infantry reconnoiters Virginia’s eastern shore.

Recommended for reading in full:

 Devi Shastri reports Team searching for UW System’s next president has no faculty, no staff, little diversity:

On Nov. 1, a week to the day after Ray Cross, University of Wisconsin System president of five years, announced his intent to retire, faculty representatives from each of the 13 UW campuses sat in a meeting in Madison to discuss the upcoming search for his replacement.

“And literally while we were in the discussion, the email came in to faculty reps announcing the composition of the committee and announcing that they were going to meet in December to take their charge and get working,” said Kathleen Dolan, a distinguished professor at UWM and chair of the faculty senate’s university committee, said at a faculty senate meeting last week.

The search committee had no faculty. No staff. The committee’s sole student, Torrey Tiedeman, already sits on the Board of Regents.

Further, the committee appears to have only one person of color: Edmund Manydeeds III, a regent who is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

That composition has raised skepticism, particularly since it’s tasked with a big job: finding the best candidate to lead the state’s largest producer of college graduates into the ever-uncertain, ever-changing higher education landscape of tomorrow.

 Pema Levy writes Donald Trump Has Had a Lot of Terrible Lawyers. Rudy Giuliani Might Be the Worst:

Giuliani also took on a side portfolio: pushing for the ouster of the US ambassador in Ukraine and trying to get Ukraine to launch investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, as well as into a conspiracy theory about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 elections.

That project has proven a disaster for his client: A lawyer who sets out to defend a president and instead helps create the basis for his impeachment has not been an effective counsel. If that weren’t enough, here are three other ways Giuliani is not helping.

….

Giuliani is failing his most basic task of publicly defending his client. With little evidence that Giuliani is carrying out actual legal work for the president, that public role would seem to be his one job. This week he attempted to do so in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, describing the July 25th phone call during which Trump asked Ukraine’s president to do him “a favor”:

Allegations of Burisma-Biden corruption weren’t even a major part of the conversation. The focus was on Ukrainian corruption broadly speaking and out of a five-page transcript Mr. Trump spent only six lines on Joe Biden.

The line quickly drew derision on Twitter. There is no word-count threshold for crimes or abuses of power.

 Proof Russian Pilots Bombed a Hospital. Then They Did It Again:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of thirty-eight.  Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 4:31 PM, for 9h 43m 54s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 90.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1942, the United States is victorious at the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal:

In the resulting battle, both sides lost numerous warships in two extremely destructive surface engagements at night. Nevertheless, the U.S. succeeded in turning back attempts by the Japanese to bombard Henderson Field with battleships. Allied aircraft also sank most of the Japanese troop transports and prevented the majority of the Japanese troops and equipment from reaching Guadalcanal. Thus, the battle turned back Japan’s last major attempt to dislodge Allied forces from Guadalcanal and nearby Tulagi, resulting in a strategic victory for the U.S. and its allies and deciding the ultimate outcome of the Guadalcanal campaign in their favor.

Recommended for reading in full:

Bruce Vielmetti reports Operator of former Cedarburg fondue restaurant may have drugged more than 20 young women, prosecutor says:

A former Cedarburg restaurant operator charged with spiking a customer’s drink in 2014 may have drugged more than 20 young women’s drinks over a 10-year period, both in Cedarburg and in Florida, according to a prosecutor.

Jacob Banas, 39, owned the August Weber Haus, a fondue restaurant and bar on Cedarburg’s historic Washington Avenue. Allegations about him tampering with customers’ drinks first arose in 2014, in a search warrant affidavit.

Several women had complained that after accepting drinks from Banas, they had no recollection of the rest of their evening, felt sick and disoriented unlike being drunk, threw up, were told by others they engaged in strange behaviors, or woke up in Banas’ apartment, some having had sex with him, some unsure if they had or not.

But it wasn’t until last year that Banas was charged with “administering a dangerous or stupefying drug,” a felony related to one woman’s encounter with him in April 2014.

….

Banas’ trial is set for February. The case is being heard by the Washington County judge after all three judges in Ozaukee County Circuit Court either recused themselves or were substituted by the defense.

 Jacob Schultz reports FBI Releases Report on Lone Offender Terrorism:

The FBI has released a report on lone offender terrorism, which is commonly referred to as lone wolf terrorism. The report examines lone offender attacks in the United States from 1972-2015. In the report, the authors analyze a collection of data about lone offenders including demographic information, ideological inclinations and radicalization timelines. The report can be read here and below.

[embeddoc url=”https://freewhitewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FBI-Lone-Offender-Terrorism-Report.pdf” width=”66%” height=”66%” download=”all” viewer=”google”]

Cosmic Concepts: Galaxy Shapes and Sizes:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-one.  Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 4:32 PM, for 9h 46m 03s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 96% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1861, historian Frederick Jackson Turner is born in Portage.

Recommended for reading in full:

Patrick Marley reports Lawsuit seeks to force Wisconsin election officials to remove people who may have moved from the voter rolls:

The lawsuit argues that state law requires the commission to remove people from the voter rolls within 30 days if it does not get responses after notifying them it has reliable information they have moved.

….

Commissioners have been reluctant to suspend people from the voter rolls quickly because thousands of voters contended in 2017 they were improperly removed from the rolls when similar mailings were sent that year.

In 2017, the commission contacted about 340,000 voters who it believed might have moved. It removed many of them from the voter rolls because they did not respond.

But election officials in the months afterward determined many of the people were contacted because of faulty data.

In September 2018, the commission told local election clerks they could reinstate voter registrations if they believed people had been wrongly removed from the rolls. That cleared the way for Milwaukee to restore the registrations of about 21,000 voters — nearly half of the 44,000 Milwaukee voters who had been taken off the rolls in 2017.

To avoid similar problems, the commission in June voted unanimously to give people more than a year to respond to the latest mailings before they would have their voter registrations suspended.

The commission consists of three Republicans and three Democrats.

Scott R. Anderson and Quinta Jurecic write What to Make of the First Day of Impeachment Hearings:

One aspect of the Republican strategy that appears constant is an effort to undermine the legitimacy of the process leading to impeachment proceedings. Nunes opened and closed by identifying three questions—what interactions the whistleblower who initially brought attention to the July 25 Trump-Zelensky call has had with Democrats, to what extent Ukraine meddled in the 2016 elections, and why Burisma placed Hunter Biden on its board—that he maintains should be answered before any further steps are taken, even as he accused Schiff of conducting a “star chamber” and orchestrating a show trial. Jordan and other Republicans returned to these themes, with several reiterating demands for more information about the whistleblower and implying that they were not fully aware of what had happened in the prior closed-door sessions. None of these critiques, however, have much bearing on the question of impeachment: Trump himself disclosed and has corroborated the July 25 call memorandum and none of these points contest the facts to which Taylor, Kent and others have testified. Instead, these Republican efforts are aimed to distract and obfuscate by creating so much outrage at the Democrats’ conduct that Trump’s own actions—the subject of the impeachment inquiry—cease to be the focus of the public debate.

Voyager 2 Leaves the Solar System:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of twenty-five.  Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 4:33 PM, for 9h 48m 15s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Police and Fire Commission meets at 6:30 PM.

 On this day in 1858, John Gund and Gottlieb Heileman establish the Heileman Brewery.

Recommended for reading in full:

Margaret Taylor and Benjamin Wittes describe The Story the Impeachment Depositions Tell:

First, the transcripts show how Rudy Giuliani pursued objectives in Ukraine for the benefit of his business partners, as well as the political interests of his client, President Trump. These activities lead to the president being fed bad information over a long period of time and they ultimately result in the meritless dismissal of Yovanovitch, as well as to a concerted attack on Deputy Secretary of State George Kent.

Second, against the backdrop of the election of a new president in Ukraine, the transcripts show the development of an irregular channel for achieving Trump’s objectives in that country—a channel that was not always playing by the usual rules of diplomacy or bureaucratic lines of communication. The transcripts show the members of both the regular and irregular channel trying to figure out what was really going on and how to navigate the unprecedented situation of Giuliani’s influence on Trump, in order to help the new Ukrainian president solidify a relationship with the United States—a relationship that is crucial for Ukraine’s continued existence as a fully independent sovereign country.

Third, in this broader context, the transcripts tell a specific story of the development of conditionality regarding a White House meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. What began as a mere hostility on the part of Trump toward Ukraine and an unsubstantiated conviction that the Ukrainians had interfered in the 2016 election, came to involve demands to investigate that theory. And it came as well to involve demands that the Ukrainians investigate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and his connection to the Ukrainian national gas company, Burisma, on whose board the younger Biden sat. Those demands, over the course of the summer, came to be linked to the desire of the new Ukrainian government for a White House meeting between Zelensky and Trump.

Finally, the transcripts tell a related story of how the provision of military assistance to Ukraine similarly came to be conditioned on U.S. demands—because what Ukraine ultimately needs is U.S. support in an ongoing military conflict with a more powerful neighbor that is occupying its territory. The narrative is ultimately one of how an irregular actor’s behavior—circumventing the normal policy process and feeding bad information and conspiracy theories to a president—led to that president demanding political smears of an embattled, struggling democracy as a condition of U.S. support.

 The New Tech Of Door-To-Door Campaigning: