Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-four.  Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, for 9h 01m 51s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 8.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1783, Gen. Washington resigns as commander-in-chief, marking the end of his military service during the Revolution.

Recommended for reading in full —

Rory Linnae reports Wisconsin once had a ‘model’ voting rights program for people with disabilities. Officials have let it decline:

Despite the clamor to turn out Wisconsin voters in 2020, some voters might be stopped at the doors of their polling places.

Auditors have flagged hundreds of violations at Wisconsin polls that make it harder or impossible for voters with disabilities to vote in person. A Journal Sentinel review of audits found officials are missing required action plans to fix most of these issues from the last two years.

Though Wisconsin once had a robust program for monitoring accessibility problems at polls — one that was lauded as a best practice by a presidential commission in 2014 — state officials have let it wane. Since the recognition, officials have missed audits, been slow to follow up on accessibility violations and provided fewer supplies to help polling places become more accessible.

“This dramatic decrease in the audit program is troubling as these audits provide critical information on the accessibility of polling places around the state,” said Denise Jess, executive director of the Wisconsin Council of the Blind and Visually Impaired.

Margaret Sullivan writes The two big flaws of the media’s impeachment coverage — and what went right:

Their test was to cover the impeachment proceedings without getting mired in the usual traps: false equivalence; distraction by presidential stunt; rampant speculation; the use of squishy language; and what I called Barr-Letter Syndrome, a reference to the way the mainstream press allowed Attorney General William P. Barr last spring to mischaracterize the findings of the Mueller report.

….

Equating the unequal: In an unceasing effort to be seen as neutral, journalists time after time fell into the trap of presenting facts and lies as roughly equivalent and then blaming political tribalism for not seeming to know the difference.

“Too much coverage seems to have got stuck in a feedback loop,” wrote Jon Allsop in Columbia Journalism Review. “We’re telling the public that politicians aren’t budging from their partisan siloes, and vice versa, with the facts of what Trump actually did getting lost somewhere in the cycle. The cult of ‘both sides’ is integral to this dynamic, and it’s serving the impeachment story poorly.”

Other critics, including the Atlantic’s James Fallows, NYU’s Jay Rosen and Dan Froomkin of Press Watch, among others, pointed particularly at the New York Times.

The “pizazz” and “polarization” problems: The first hearings, featuring State Department officials William B. Taylor Jr. and George Kent, failed to provide adequate thrills for some, despite their helpfulness in establishing that Trump had strong-armed Ukraine for political favors.

Some news organizations seemed to join with President Trump in dubbing them dull — a “#snoozefest” as his son Eric saw it.

Author Jennifer Weiner warned in a Times opinion piece: “If we keep insisting that impeachment has to entertain us, we’re going to channel-surf our way right out of our democracy.”

Who Pre-Ordered Tesla’s Cybertruck?:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-seven.  Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, for 9h 01m 43s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 15.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1944, Anthony McAuliffe, acting commander of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division troops defending Bastogne, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge, refuses a German surrender demand.

Recommended for reading in full —

R. Jeffrey Smith reports Trump Administration  Officials Worried Ukraine Aid Halt Violated Spending Law:

When President Donald Trump ordered a halt to aid to Ukraine last summer, defense officials and diplomats worried first that it would undermine U.S. national security. Ukraine is, as some of them later testified before Congress, on the front lines of Russian aggression, and only robust American support would fend off aggressive Moscow meddling in the West. This worry eventually helped galvanize congressional support for one of the two impeachment articles approved by the House of Representatives on Dec. 18.

But there was also a separate, less-noticed facet of the internal administration uproar set off by Trump’s July 12 order stopping the flow of $391 million in weapons and security assistance to Ukraine. Some senior administration officials worried that by defying a law ordering that the funds be spent within a defined period, Trump was asking the officials involved to take an action that was not merely unwise but flatly illegal.

The administration so far has declined to release copies of its internal communications about this vital issue – the legality of what Trump had ordered. On Friday, in 146 pages of new documents provided to the Center for Public Integrity under a court order, the Justice Department blacked out – for the second time – many of the substantive passages reflecting what key officials at the Pentagon and the Office of Management and Budget said to one another.

But considerable evidence is still available that those at key institutions responsible for distributing the Ukraine aid worried the halt potentially violated a 45-year-old law written to keep presidents from ignoring the will of Congress, according to public statements and congressional testimony

That law, known as the Impoundment Control Act, says that once Congress appropriates funds – like the Ukraine assistance – and the president signs the relevant spending bill, the executive branch must spend those funds. A president cannot simply ignore Congress’s direction, no matter how inconvenient or unappealing that instruction might be. If funds are withheld or shifted elsewhere, this cannot be done in secret, and Congress must approve.

(Emphasis added.)

See also updates to the Center for Public Integrity’s reporting at the DIGGING INTO THE #UKRAINEDOCS live blog.

Dan Friedman reports Trump Touts Support from Putin Over Impeachment (‘Trump’s tweet follows a report that Putin planted the idea of Ukrainian inference with Trump’):

You can’t make it up. President Donald Trump on Friday night touted a statement from Russian President Vladimir Putin criticizing Trump’s impeachment. Trump did this amid continuing revelations that Putin helped sell him on the discredited theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

Get In the Christmas Spirit With These Stories:

Good morning.

The first day of winter in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of forty-one.  Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, for 9h 01m 40s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 23.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Catherine Rampell writes Two years later, every promise made about the GOP tax cuts has been broken:

In the fiscal year that recently ended, the deficit once again widened, to nearly $1 trillion. That is 26 percent higher than the deficit in fiscal 2018 and an astounding 48 percent higher relative to 2017, the last full year before the tax cuts were in place.

Yes, the deficit went up partly because spending did. But it has also increased because tax revenue isn’t coming in nearly as strongly as you’d expect during an economic expansion. In fact, thanks to Trump’s tax overhaul, corporate tax revenue is down more than a fifth since fiscal 2017. The Congressional Budget Office has predicted that the legislation overall will end up adding nearly $2 trillion in red ink over a decade.

As you may recall, the tax law’s boosters promised it would pay for itself by supercharging the economy. Just two weeks before signing the bill, Trump foresaw “6 percent growth.” If true, that would have been quite an achievement — roughly triple what independent forecasters predicted for the upcoming decade.

Lisa Kaplan writes The Biggest Social Media Operation You’ve Never Heard of Is Run Out of Cyprus by Russians:

Here’s what I do know: Measured in terms of views and subscribers, it had the third-largest reach of any group of entertainment channels on YouTube in November—outranked only by Disney and WarnerMedia. It is run by Russian nationals and based in and managed from Cyprus, with U.S. operations housed in a shared work space in New York. It funds itself with ad revenues from YouTube and Google worth tens of millions of dollars. And in 2018, it purchased a small suite of Facebook advertisements targeting U.S. citizens on political issues—and it made those purchases in rubles.

….

If you’ve never heard of TheSoul, you’re not alone. The company has built its online empire in relative obscurity. Public coverage of the company in English has been sporadic. In September 2019, Time magazine raved over the company’s traffic and described the “bizarre” content posted by 5-Minute Crafts. Vox likewise posted an article in November 2018 characterizing the channel’s content as “cringey” and “peculiar.” Forbes has noted the lightning-fast rise of TheSoul Publishing and its remarkable traffic, contrasting the apparently anodyne videos with dire-sounding concerns over Russian election interference: “So just what are those Trump loving, Hillary hating Russians promoting ad nauseam on Facebook to fool Americans into voting the way Vladimir Putin wants?” the Forbes article asks, before showing a lengthy video compilation of TheSoul’s crafting suggestions.

….

But here’s the thing: TheSoul Publishing also posts history videos with a strong political tinge. Many of these videos are overtly pro-Russian. One video posted on Feb. 17, 2019, on the channel Smart Banana, which typically posts listicles and history videos, claims that Ukraine is part of Russia.

“Best Illusion of the Year” by the Neural Correlate Society:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-nine.  Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 01m 40s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 35.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Ashley Luthern and Gina Barton report A powerful Milwaukee real estate developer accused of sexual assault was questioned at a shelter instead of the police station:

A woman who told police a real estate developer drugged and raped her took five years to come forward largely because she feared for her safety and was afraid he would retaliate against her, according to a police report obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The woman told police Kalan Haywood Sr. “is a man of importance in Milwaukee and is known to associate with high-level political officials including senators and the mayor,” according to the report.

Haywood, 45, denied the allegations, telling a Milwaukee police detective any sexual activity he had with the woman was consensual and he did not remember the November 2014 encounter she described, according to a video obtained by the Journal Sentinel.

“Me drugging a lady to have sex with her? Totally insane,” Haywood told the Journal Sentinel in a lengthy interview. “Totally, totally, totally, totally, totally insane.”

When a detective questioned Haywood, he did so at the Sojourner Family Peace Center, without the knowledge of the center’s executive director.

In the video of Haywood’s interview with police, the detective appeared to assuage Haywood’s fears that he’d be recognized by telling him the domestic violence shelter was a place where suspects are never questioned.

Haywood has not been arrested or charged in the case. The investigation remains open. The Journal Sentinel is using his name because he is a high-profile developer, sits on numerous civic boards, has received city funding for real estate projects and has been publicly identified by the Milwaukee Police Association as a suspect in a sexual assault case.

Nathalie Baptiste writes Trump’s Food Stamp Cuts Will Be Devastating to Trump Country:

Earlier this month, the US Department of Agriculture finalized new restrictions on eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, which provided food assistance to 40 million people in 2018. Millions of low-income families, seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities access this vital benefit. Under the new rule, which goes into effect in April 2020, work requirements for the 700,000 SNAP users who are labeled as “able-bodied” adults without any dependents (ABAWD) will be tightened, potentially leaving them without access to the program and pushed deeper into poverty.

But an unintended consequence of this measure is the damage that it will do to rural communities and the grocery stores they rely on.

….

“SNAP users help grocery stores’ bottom line,” says David Procter, director of Kansas State University’s Rural Grocery Initiative. According to a report from Civil Eats, a news organization that reports on America’s food system, SNAP cuts will mean that places as different as Detroit and rural Alaska could suffer. In Detroit, two different grocers told researchers that SNAP makes up 80 percent of their business. In rural Alaska, according to Eater, a food news site, for some village grocers, SNAP benefits make up 40 percent of their profits. Oregon Food Bank CEO Susannah Morgan estimated that the state stands to lose $18 million in revenue at grocery stores and agricultural production.

  The Best Tech Of The Decade:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-three.  Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 01m 46s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 46.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

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

Recommended for reading in full — 

Betsy Swan reports Trump Administration Battles New Sanctions on Russia:

The bill, called the “Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act of 2019” (DASKA) would level new sanctions against Russian oligarchs, against its banking sector, and against its sovereign debt (which the powerful California Public Employees Retirement System has hundreds of millions of dollars invested). It would also open the door to sanctioning Russia’s ship-building industry in response to the Kremlin’s capture of Ukrainian sailors and ships as they sailed through the Kerch Strait late last year. And it would sanction some crude oil development projects in Russia, as well as energy projects outside the country backed by Russian state-owned entities.

Julia Davis writes Russia’s State TV Calls Trump Their ‘Agent’:

They’ve also added a cynical new a narrative filled with half-joking ironies as they look at the American president’s bleak prospects when he does leave office.

Appearing on Sunday Evening With Vladimir Soloviev, Mikhail Gusman, first deputy director general of ITAR-TASS, Russia’s oldest and largest news agency, predicted: “Sooner or later, the Democrats will come back into power. The next term or the term after that, it doesn’t matter… I have an even more unpleasant forecast for Trump. After the White House, he will face a very unhappy period.”

The host, Vladimir Soloviev, smugly asked: “Should we get another apartment in Rostov ready?” Soloviev’s allusion was to the situation of Viktor Yanukovych, former president of Ukraine, who was forced to flee to Russia in 2014 and settled in the city of Rostov-on-Don.

Such parallels between Yanukovych and Trump are being drawn not only because of their common association with Paul Manafort, adviser to the first, campaign chairman for the second, but also because Russian experts and politicians consider both of them to be openly pro-Kremlin.

Isaac Stanley-Becker reports Russian disinformation network is said to have helped spread smear of U.S. ambassador to Ukraine:

The story that appeared on the Hill website on March 20 was startling.

Marie Yovanovitch, the American ambassador to Ukraine, had given a “list of people whom we should not prosecute” to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuri Lutsenko, according to a write-up of an interview Lutsenko gave to the conservative columnist John Solomon.

Five days later, an image of that purported list appeared in a post on the website Medium and on some other self-publishing platforms in locations as disparate as Germany, South Africa and San Francisco. In less than a week, the Medium essay had been translated into Spanish and German and posted to other websites.

Now, a social media analysis firm, Graphika, has traced those posts to a Russian disinformation campaign — in the first evidence that a network of accounts involved in spreading disinformation before the 2016 presidential election also participated in circulating the false claims about Yovanovitch that earlier this year led to her recall from the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv.

  Why SpaceX And Amazon Are Launching 42,000+ Satellites:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighteen.  Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 01m 55s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 58.0% of its visible disk illuminated.

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

Recommended for reading in full — 

Bruce Vielmetti and Molly Beck report ‘Effort to stop removal of 234K voter registrations heads to federal court, while attorney general tries to stall purge in state court:

An effort to stop the state from removing the voter registrations of 234,000 Wisconsin voters who may have moved heads to federal court as the Democratic attorney general seeks to stall the purge in state court.

Attorney General Josh Kaul on behalf of the state’s Elections Commission on Tuesday filed notice that it would appeal and is seeking to stay an Ozaukee County judge’s order that it immediately remove more than 200,000 names from the roll of registered voters in Wisconsin.

As Kaul filed his notice, the liberal-leaning League of Women Voters of Wisconsin sued in federal court to try to halt the purge of voter names.

….

It is possible the Court of Appeals, noting the statewide impact and time pressure of the case, could refer the state case directly to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, where conservatives hold a 5-2 majority.

The state filed its appeal in District IV, located in Madison.

The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin had sought to intervene in Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty’s lawsuit against the Elections Commission, but Malloy denied its petition.

Elaine Kamarck writes Why Trump’s tax returns are so important:

In 2014, Eric Trump told the golf writer James Dodson “Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.” He has subsequently denied the statement but there are other suspicious connections. For instance, a large number of apartments in Trump Tower in New York and other locations are owned by Russian nationals or by companies thought to be fronts for Russian criminal organizations. The Yale historian Timothy Snyder describes the following: “In Trump World Tower, constructed between 1999 and 2001 on the east side of Manhattan near the United Nations, a third of the luxury units were bought by people or entities from the former Soviet Union.”[1]

The many layers of smoke around Trump and Russia are perhaps best summarized by the following real estate transaction. In 2004, when he was going through bankruptcy, Trump bought a mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, for $41 million. In 2008 Trump sold the mansion to a Russian billionaire named Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million. Rybolovlev never lived in the mansion, and held onto it for more than a decade, paying the taxes and upkeep on it.

….

If Donald Trump’s tax returns and other financial statements reveal that he is not a brilliant businessman but rather a wholly-owned subsidiary of Russians, his presidency will collapse one way or another. Trump’s financial story will provide a motive for what has been an irrational presidency, prone to destructive and “self-impeaching” behavior. It could be the final shoe to drop and it now sits at the Supreme Court.

Watch Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Rocket Go To Space And Land Back On Earth: