Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of nineteen.  Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 4:34 PM, for 9h 50m 29s of daytime.  The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.

 On this day in 1836, Territorial Governor Dodge signs Wisconsin’s first law, prescribing how legislators were to behave, and how others were to behave toward them.

Recommended for reading in full:

Molly Beck reports Tony Evers rehires former agriculture secretary ousted by Senate Republicans:

Gov. Tony Evers has rehired his former agriculture secretary less than a week after Senate Republicans voted to fire him.

Brad Pfaff has been hired as the state Department of Administration’s director of business and rural development after being ousted last week by Republican lawmakers following a series of clashes over state funding for farmers’ mental health services.

….

A spokeswoman for Evers did not immediately say whether the position was created for Pfaff.

The Republicans’ vote to remove Pfaff marked the first time the Senate ousted a cabinet secretary in decades, and possibly ever. Evers’ called the move “absolute bullshit.”

Republicans defended their vote to reject Pfaff by arguing manure storage rules Pfaff has been developing would hurt struggling farmers amid one of the worst downturns for the dairy industry.

But Evers said the lawmakers were punishing Pfaff for sticking up for farmers and publicly criticizing Republicans who control the Legislature for holding back suicide prevention funds.

 Mitch Smith reports New Normal in Key State for 2020 Race: Political Deadlock:

MADISON, Wis. — The governor of Wisconsin called a special session last week to debate gun legislation. It resulted in exactly zero new laws, and it lasted less than a minute.

Such is life these days in Wisconsin, a state that for much of the last decade was a laboratory for some of the nation’s most conservative policymaking and a hotbed of partisan fervor, but where pretty much everything has now slowed to a crawl.

Acrimonious deadlocks have become the new normal in Wisconsin, one of three Midwestern states where Democrats ended full Republican control last year by flipping governorships. Gov. Tony Evers’s defeat of Scott Walker, whose success at pushing Wisconsin sharply to the right prompted a brief presidential bid, has given Democrats a new foothold this year in a region where they had been mostly sidelined. Yet with attention turning to the presidential election, in which Wisconsin voters are seen as playing a decisive role, divided power has given way to frustrated impasse, with little chance for either party to hold up state policymaking as the showcase it once was here.

Yesterday, Mercury transited in front of the Sun, and NASA recorded the event:

Good morning.

Veterans Day in Whitewater will be snowy with a high of twenty-five.  Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 4:35 PM, for 9h 52m 45s of daytime.  The moon is full with 99.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6 PM.

It’s Veterans Day: “A Congressional Act (52 Stat. 351; 5 U.S. Code, Sec. 87a) approved May 13, 1938, made November 11 in each year a legal holiday: “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as ‘Armistice Day’.”

Recommended for reading in full:

Shane Croucher writes Trump promised to eliminate the deficit in eight years. So far, he has increased it by 68%:

During the 2016 campaign, President Donald Trump made an aggressive promise on federal finances: He would eliminate the budget deficit within eight years. Now, three years into his presidency, the deficit is 68 percent higher than when he started.

Trump inherited a deficit of $585 billion when he took office in January 2017. That was 58 percent lower than the $1.4 trillion former President Barack Obama inherited in 2009 following the financial crisis, a number his administration slashed over two terms.

According to the latest Congressional Budget Office data released on Monday, the full-year deficit for 2019 is estimated to come in at $984 billion, just shy of the $1 trillion that many analysts were expecting. In 2018 the figure was $779 billion and in 2017 it was $665 billion.

“Relative to the size of the economy, the deficit—at an estimated 4.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—was the highest since 2012, and 2019 was the fourth consecutive year in which the deficit increased as a percentage of GDP,” the CBO said in its report.

“He’s got no hope of eliminating the deficit,” Danny Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College and a former monetary policymaker at the Bank of England, told Newsweek.

 Salvatore Rizzo debunks Rand Paul’s claim that Trump has a constitutional right to confront whistleblowers:

Paul said Trump’s confrontation rights under the Sixth Amendment supersede any laws Congress has passed to protect whistleblowers. But the two things aren’t really in conflict, and the Sixth Amendment doesn’t apply to impeachment in any case.

The Sixth Amendment includes bedrock constitutional protections: the rights to counsel, to call witnesses, to confront accusers and to a speedy public trial with an impartial jury. The text of the amendment starts by limiting those rights to defendants facing “criminal prosecutions.”

Impeachment is a different process that turns on congressional votes. The maximum penalty is removal from office. Under the Constitution, the House has the sole power of impeachment and the Senate the sole power to try impeachment charges, with a two-thirds majority required for conviction.

(The Pauls – Rand and father Ron – are often described as libertarians, but libertarianism is incompatible with Trumpism, and in the father’s case incompatible with pre-Trump racism. See Libertarians and Ron Paul. In the Pauls, one hoped for more but received less.)

 Using The 10-Year-Old Original Motorola Droid For A Week:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-eight.  Sunrise is 6:41 AM and sunset 4:36 PM, for 9h 55m 03s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1969, Sesame Street premieres.

Recommended for reading in full:

Rob Mentzer reports Anti-Gerrymandering Group To Train Activists In ‘Fair Maps’ Fight:

The legislative maps Republicans drew after they took power in Wisconsin in 2011 gave them as much as a 13-point electoral advantage, according to expert analysis. They’ve also been the subject of multiple lawsuits. Most recently, in June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal courts don’t have the power to decide cases related to partisan gerrymandering. That decision effectively ended legal challenges to the 2011 maps.

[Activist Carlene] Bechen said that makes local activism even more important.

“The biggest thing people at the grassroots level can do is turn up the pressure,” Bechen said. “And the more the pressure gets turned up, people of conscience will pay attention.”

Because new maps are drawn every 10 years, the results of the 2020 elections will determine which politicians will be in power for 2021 redistricting, which could reshape maps again.

But activists like Bechen say politicians shouldn’t be drawing the maps in the first place. She points to Michigan’s Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission as a model. Another neighboring state, Iowa, also has nonpartisan redistricting that keeps legislators from control of how the maps are drawn.

….

A Marquette University Law School poll in January found 72 percent of respondents said they would prefer Wisconsin’s redistricting to be done by a nonpartisan commission. County boards in 47 counties have passed resolutions calling on state lawmakers to create a nonpartisan panel to draw the districts. Voters in eight counties have approved similar referendums.

AJ Vicens writes How Russian Hackers Conquered the World:

Before the 2016 US presidential election, most Americans had very little sense of Russia’s hacking capabilities and the extent to which its operatives were causing havoc. But the country’s hackers had been quite active and well known in some communities well before, staging a series of increasingly brazen and destructive attacks against regional rivals, including Estonia, Georgia, and Ukraine.  Even after 2016, most Americans are probably not aware of the extent to which such Russian operations remain a threat. A devastating cyber attack launched on Ukraine in 2017 ended up infecting business networks around the world and costing billions in damages, crippling hospitals—including in the US.

In his just-released book “Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers,” Andy Greenberg of Wired walks readers through the discovery of Sandworm, the name given to the small group of Russian military hackers thought to be behind the high-profile attacks, explaining that they sometimes launched them for the pettiest of reasons.

This Amateur Physicist Built a Fusion Reactor in His Backyard:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-three.  Sunrise is 6:40 AM and sunset 4:37 PM, for 9h 57m 23s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 91.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1989, the Berlin Wall falls.

Recommended for reading in full:

 Katrin Bennhold writes The Fall of the Berlin Wall in Photos: An Accident of History That Changed The World (‘The Communist regime was prepared for everything “except candles and prayers.” East Germany’s peaceful 1989 revolution showed that societies that don’t reform, die’):

It [party official’s Schabowski’s remarks on free movement between East and West Berlin] was a mistake. The Politburo had planned nothing of the sort. The idea had been to appease the growing resistance movement with minor adjustments to visa rules — and also to retain the power to deny travel.

But many took Mr. Schabowski by his word. After West Germany’s main evening news, popular with East Germans who had long stopped trusting their own state-controlled media, effectively declared the wall open, crowds started heading for checkpoints at the Berlin Wall, demanding to cross.

At one of those checkpoints, a Stasi officer who had always been loyal to the regime, was working the night shift. His name was Lt. Col. Harald Jäger. And his order was to turn people away.

As the crowd grew, the colonel repeatedly called his superiors with updates. But no new orders were forthcoming. At some point he listened in to a call with the ministry, where he overheard one senior official questioning his judgment.

“Someone in the ministry asked whether Comrade Jäger was in a position to assess the situation properly or whether he was acting out of fear,” Mr. Jäger recalled years later in an interview with Der Spiegel. “When I heard that, I’d had enough.”

Shortly after, Mr. Jäger defied his superiors and opened the crossing, starting a domino effect that eventually hit all checkpoints in Berlin. By midnight, triumphant easterners had climbed on top of the wall in the heart of the city, popping champagne corks and setting off fireworks in celebration.

Not a single shot was fired. And no Soviet tanks appeared.

That, said Axel Klausmeier, director of the Berlin Wall Foundation, was perhaps the greatest miracle of that night. “It was a peaceful revolution, the first of its kind,” he said. “They were prepared for everything, except candles and prayers.”

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of thirty.  Sunrise is 6:38 AM and sunset 4:38 PM, for 9h 59m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 85.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1870, Increase Lapham publishes the first national weather forecast.

Recommended for reading in full:

Greg Sargent lists Four big facts that blow up the GOP’s latest defense of Trump:

Republicans are road-testing yet another deeply absurd defense of President Trump: They are conceding that, yes, there may have been a quid pro quo, but there’s no proof Trump himself was behind it.

….

Trump himself suspended the military aid.

Trump personally ordered acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to inform budget officials that the aid that had already been appropriated by Congress was being frozen, officials told The Post.

Trump did this one week before his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump demanded the investigations he wanted, explicitly mentioning Biden and the conspiracy theorythat Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the Democratic emails to set up Russia and Trump.
….

Giuliani publicly confirmed the whole plot, and that he was acting at Trump’s direction.

Trump froze the aid to Ukraine at a time when Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani had already said publicly for months that he was pressuring Ukraine to carry out these investigations. As far back as early May, Giuliani explicitly said he wanted those investigations to target both the conspiracy theory and Biden specifically.
….

Those texts demonstrate the meaning of [Ambassador to the E.U] Sondland’s confession.

Those texts between Sondland and other ambassadors and Ukrainian officials show him negotiating, at the direction of Giuliani and the White House, for Ukraine’s “anti-corruption statement” to mention both the 2016 Ukraine-hack conspiracy theory and Burisma, the company where Biden’s son worked that’s central to a fabricated tale of Biden corruption.
….

Pence directly delivered the message about suspended aid to Ukraine.

On Sept. 1, the same day Sondland informed a top Zelensky aide that the military aid was conditional, Vice President Pence met with Zelensky.

Zelensky raised the withheld aid with Pence. And as The Post reports, Pence informed Zelensky that the administration was “still looking at” the aid, i.e., it was on hold. Pence also told Zelensky he needed to do more to fight “corruption.”

(Emphasis in original.)

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports Foxconn wants to omit firefighting sprinklers in part of its factory, and a consultant says that’s safe:

Foxconn Technology Group wants permission to omit sprinkler protection in part of its factory — the second fire-related code variance the company has sought.

A consultant’s report, prepared for Foxconn’s construction management team and included in a group of planning documents released last week by a state agency, says sprinklers can safely be omitted in the factory’s “stocker” areas if certain recommendations are followed.

Mary Cain explains She Was the Fastest Girl in America, Until She Joined Nike:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of twenty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:37 AM and sunset 4:39 PM, for 10h 02m 08s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 77.33% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM.

On this day in 1929, New York’s Museum of Modern Art opens to the public.

Recommended for reading in full:

Ari Berman contends The Right to Vote Won Big on Tuesday:

Voters in three states chose candidates and policies that could result in expanded access to the ballot, an undoing of Republican gerrymandering efforts, and a fairer voting system.

Democrat Andy Beshear, who was elected governor of Kentucky, pledged during the campaign to issue an executive order restoring voting rights to 140,000 people convicted of nonviolent felonies in the state. Kentucky is one of only three states where people with past felony convictions cannot vote unless the governor restores their rights. As a result, 300,000 Kentucky residents—nine percent of the electorate—have been disenfranchised, including more than one in four African-Americans, the highest black felon disenfranchisement rate in the country.

….

In Virginia, Democrats won the state legislature, giving them one-party control of the state for the first time in a quarter of a century. Democrats could now pass major voting reforms like early voting, automatic and Election Day registration, and the automatic restoration of voting rights for ex-offenders, along with repealing the state’s restrictive voter ID law. All of these bills have already been introduced by Democrats in the legislature but blocked by Republicans.

Virginia Democrats will also control the drawing of the state’s redistricting mapsin 2021. It remains to be seen whether they will support efforts to create a bipartisan redistricting commission to redraw legislative and US House maps, which passed the legislature this year but must be approved by the legislature again in 2020 and then by the voters in a ballot referendum.

Mike McIntire, Karen Yourish, and Larry Buchanan report In Trump’s Twitter Feed: Conspiracy-Mongers, Racists and Spies:

In September, an obscure Twitter account promoting a fringe belief about an anti-Trump cabal within the government tweeted out a hashtag: #FakeWhistleblower.

It was typical for the anonymous account, which traffics in far-right content and a conspiracy theory known as QAnon, some of whose adherents think that satanic pedophiles control the “deep state.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently labeled QAnon a potential domestic terror threat.

Still, that did not stop others, including a Republican congressional candidate, from quickly picking up the hashtag and tweeting it. Within a week, hundreds of QAnon believers and “MAGA” activists had joined in, posting memes and bogus reports to undermine the complaint by a government whistle-blower that President Trump had pressed Ukraine’s leader for dirt on former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son.

Then Mr. Trump tweeted the hashtag himself.

Giant Squid Captured On Video:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be snowy with a high of thirty-eight.  Sunrise is 6:36 AM and sunset 4:40 PM, for 10h 04m 34s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 70.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Library Board’s personnel committee meets in closed session at 5:45 PM.

On this day in 1947, Meet the Press first premieres as a television program.

Recommended for reading in full:

Jonathan Bernstein reports Tuesday’s Elections Went Badly for Donald Trump:

Democrats had a good night Tuesday in the off-year elections, picking up both chambers of the Virginia state legislature and apparently the governor seat in Kentucky, although Republican Governor Matt Bevin hasn’t yet conceded. In Mississippi, Republicans held on in the gubernatorial race, but by a relatively slim margin.

….

Oh yes, the suburbs. Bevin was hurt in suburban Cincinnati (although see a dissenting thread). Democrats also picked up a state legislative seat in suburban St. Louis; won their first three city council seats in Carmel, an Indianapolis suburb; and did better than usual in some Memphis suburbs. That continues a trend from 2018 that should scare Republicans. That said, it’s impossible to know if it will continue or if it’s a Trump-era reaction that will dissipate or reverse once he’s gone.

National effects? The Washington Post’s Robert Costa reports that Senate Republicans were watching Kentucky closely: “not just watching the returns, but President Trump’s political capital as they make decisions about how to handle impeachment and their own future.” How politicians interpret elections is only sometimes scientific, but it always matters, often far more than the objective facts about those elections. Whether they think Trump is an electoral asset or poison at the ballot box will be at least as important to the outcome of impeachment and a Senate trial as actual evidence of malfeasance. I can say one thing: These political professionals are unlikely to be convinced by Trump’s habitual false claims that his intervention in a race moved the polls by massive amounts.

(Emphasis in original.)

Philip Bump writes Republicans have heard less about the impeachment probe — and are more likely to reject established details:

It’s worth noting here one possible reason for that difference. Fox News is the most trusted network among Republicans, according to Suffolk University polling — and Fox News has also been much less likely to cover key witnesses in the impeachment inquiry.

Republicans’ lack of familiarity with the core issues — or professed lack of familiarity — is a theme in Monmouth’s poll.

Most Republicans — a group that, again, opposes the impeachment inquiry — think that what’s been revealed so far shows that Trump either did nothing wrong or did nothing that rises to the level of impeachment.

How Trump’s Ally Roger Stone Is Tied To The Russia Probe: