Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-one.  Sunrise is 7:06 AM and sunset 5:10 PM, for 10h 04m 22s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 64.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM. 

On this day in 1959, musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, “The Big Bopper” J. P. Richardson, and pilot Roger Peterson are killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa.

Recommended for reading in full —

Mitchell Schmidt writes The Iowa caucuses are Monday, but in 2020 the center of the political universe is Wisconsin:

All eyes might be on Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses Monday, but political experts say the road to the White House this year will likely once again run through Wisconsin, where the battleground state’s sliver-thin margin could tip either way and potentially decide the 2020 election.

Wisconsin is the only state listed as a toss-up by all three of the major national political prognosticators, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Cook Political Report and Inside Elections.

“Wisconsin could be the decider,” said Larry Sabato, founder and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and Sabato’s Crystal Ball. “There are only a handful of states that are truly competitive and that switch sides with any regularity, and Wisconsin is one of them.”

Wisconsin’s significance in the presidential election, where close to a dozen Democratic candidates are vying for the nomination and their shot at derailing President Donald Trump’s re-election plans, comes down to the Midwestern state’s nearly even partisan split.

Desmond Lachman writes This Too Shall Crash:

During the 2008 global financial market meltdown, we were painfully reminded of the teachings of the late economist Hyman Minsky, the renowned expert on financial and credit market cycles. Minsky never tired of warning that credit bubbles and prolonged bull markets generally end in epic economic and financial market collapses.

Evidently President Trump and his economic team have either never been warned about “Minsky moments” – sudden, drastic collapses of asset values following prolonged growth — or else they are making the classic mistake of thinking that this time will be different. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain why, 10 months before the election, President Trump is placing a booming stock market and a strong economy at the front and center of his re-election campaign.

There can be no doubt that we have been experiencing a global credit market bubble that would have made Minsky shudder – one that an unprecedented and prolonged period of ultra-easy monetary policy by the world’s major central banks helped to inflate. Indications of this monetary largesse can be found in the world’s four largest central banks’ balance sheets, which together have increased by a staggering $10 trillion.

….

Minsky taught that markets and politicians have short memories and that they repeatedly delude themselves into believing that this time will be different. Sadly, once again he is being proved correct. President Trump is giving too much prominence to the stock market in his re-election campaign. Today’s market exuberance – and the political exuberance it begets – are foolish in the face of mounting economic and political risks.

Toyota’s 2020 Super Bowl Commercial:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-five.  Sunrise is 7:07 AM and sunset 5:09 PM, for 10h 01m 55s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 55% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1925, the Serum Run to Nome (Alaska) arrives with a diphtheria antitoxin by dog sled relay across Alaska with 20 mushers and about 150 sled dogs traveling 674 miles in five and a half days, and so saves the small town of Nome and surrounding communities from an incipient epidemic.

Recommended for reading in full —

Steven Waldman lists The Four Lies Trump Tells Evangelical Christians:

Lie #4: Trump is personally a devout Christian. This is an odd one. Very few conservative Christians seem to believe that Trump is personally religious or even moral. But these factors are not important ingredients in their support. Rather, they argue that Trump’s policies and actions advance a religious agenda despite his personal failings. Trump really doesn’t have to pretend to be religious.

But he does anyway. He has spoken passionately about his love for the Bible in ways that almost always reveal that he’s barely read it. My favorite example of Trump’s fake religiosity was when he was asked why his businesses had been audited by the Internal Revenue Service. He said, “Maybe because of the fact that I’m a strong Christian.”

After all, he reminded us, he has “a great relationship with God.”

Trump and other religious conservatives often talk about how liberal cultural elites hold evangelicals in contempt. This is sometimes true. But it’s hard to think of a greater sign of disrespect than lying to someone’s face and assuming the person won’t have the intelligence to figure it out.

Peter Wehner writes There Is No Christian Case for Trump:

What most stands out to me about [Wayne] Grudem’s case on behalf of Trump is that he is a near-perfect embodiment of an individual fully in the grip of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. And in that sense, he is a near-perfect embodiment of some of the president’s most committed evangelical supporters.

In Grudem and those who think like him, you see astonishing intellectual, theological, and ethical contortions, all in the service of making Trump appear far better than he is. I have a hunch as to why: His supporters don’t want to struggle with the cognitive dissonance created by supporting a man who, if he were a liberal Democrat, they would savage on moral and ethical grounds.

But it isn’t enough to simply remove the tension; they need to justify their decision.

It isn’t enough for many of Trump’s evangelical supporters to say that, by their lights, he is advancing policies that promote the common good even as he is acting in unethical ways that deeply trouble them. In that difficult trade-off, they could admit, they have decided that the former should take priority over the latter. Instead, they have created a cartoonish image of the president, pretending that his character flaws are trivial and inconsequential, while his policy achievements put him near the top rank of American presidents.

The Mysterious Origins of Maiden’s Castle:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-six.  Sunrise is 7:08 AM and sunset 5:08 PM, for 9h 59m 30s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 45.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1950, Curly Lambeau resigns as packers head coach.

Recommended for reading in full —

Patrick Marley, Andrew Mollica, and Eric Litke report Who received the voter purge letter? State lawmakers, a cabinet secretary and a former UW chancellor:

Among the thousands of voters flagged to be possibly removed from Wisconsin’s voter rolls are two state lawmakers, a cabinet secretary, a Milwaukee County supervisor and a former University of Wisconsin chancellor.

Election officials in October asked more than 230,000 people to update their voter registrations because they believed they had moved. The letters triggered an ongoing legal battle over whether the recipients should be quickly taken off the rolls.

State officials for months declined to make public the list of those who had been sent the letters but relented this week and released the list under the state’s open records law.

The list reveals that a smattering of public officials were among the thousands of voters who were sent the letters last year. Most of the officials confirmed to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that they had recently moved and said they had updated their voter registrations or planned to do so soon.

Among those who were targeted were Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam; Rep. David Crowley, D-Milwaukee; Workforce Development Secretary Caleb Frostman; Milwaukee County Supervisor Sequanna Taylor and former UW Extension Chancellor Cathy Sandeen.

Jim Polzin reports Kobe King says frustration was building with coach Greg Gard since early in Badgers career:

King said he began having doubts about playing for UW coach Greg Gard as early as his true freshman season in 2017-18. King thought about leaving after that injury-plagued campaign and again after his redshirt freshman season, but decided to try to stick it out.

The situation got worse this season, according to King. He had three meetings with the coaching staff during the season — two with Gard, one with assistant Joe Krabbenhoft — to express his concerns. The timing of the first meeting with Gard — after a loss at Rutgers — was somewhat odd only because King had scored 18 points against the Scarlet Knights and 24 the previous game vs. Indiana.

King’s issues weren’t about anything on the court.

“I just talked to him about the way we were talked to as a team,” King said, declining to go into specifics. “It’s not about the negativity always, because I’ve seen that.”

King said he played under tough coaches at La Crosse Central (Todd Fergot) and on the AAU circuit with the Wisconsin Playground Warriors (Chris Neubauer). “But for me,” King said, “I always felt like their care was deeper than just basketball.”

….

King said Thursday that other players in the program are frustrated with how they’re handled by Gard, which raises red flags that this isn’t an isolated situation. When asked if he believes this problem involves other players beyond King, Gard said, “Everybody is entitled to their own opinions. I continue to help everybody individually, but at the same time understand that I have to help this team keep moving forward.”

Archeologists Discover 16 Ancient Egyptian Tombs:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-four.  Sunrise is 7:09 AM and sunset 5:06 PM, for 9h 57m 07s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 35.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1865, Congress passes, and sends to the states, the Thirteenth Amendment (it was ratified by the required number of states on 12.6.1865). 

Recommended for reading in full —

Mike Gousha and John D. Johnson report Thousands of Milwaukee homes are no longer owned by city residents in a massive transfer of wealth since the Great Recession:

The Great Recession more than a decade ago hit Milwaukee hard. When the housing market collapsed, the city suffered through a tidal wave of foreclosures. Residential property values plummeted; they didn’t bottom out until 2016.

Since then, housing values in most parts of the city have begun to rebound,  although they generally remain well below their pre-recession peaks.

But Milwaukee’s housing market has changed in other fundamental ways:

There has been a dramatic decline in residential properties occupied by their owners.

The city has seen a transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars in housing wealth.

Simply put: Thousands of residential properties in Milwaukee are no longer owned by city residents. They’re owned, instead, by individuals and companies with mailing addresses in the suburbs, other parts of Wisconsin, or out-of-state altogether.

These trends raise questions about the long-term health of city neighborhoods, particularly those that are home predominantly to people of color.

Dan Vergano reports US Life Expectancy Has Finally Stopped Declining:

Life expectancy in the US increased by about a month to 78.7 years in 2018, federal health officials reported on Thursday. The increase reverses an alarming — and unprecedented — drop for the past three years in the vital measure of national health.

Around 2.8 million people died in the US in 2018. US life expectancy in that year was still below its 2014 peak of 78.9 years, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Falling heart disease and cancer death rates, the two leading causes of death, as well as a 4% decrease in drug overdose deaths, the first such drop in 28 years, appear to have arrested the decline in life expectancy seen since 2014.

Touchdown – SpaceX rocket lands after latest Starlink launch:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-two.  Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 5:05 PM, for 9h 54m 46s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 26.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1703, the Forty-Seven Ronin, under the command of Oishi Kuranosuke, avenge the death of their master, by killing Kira Yoshinaka.

Recommended for reading in full —

Peter Cary reports Republicans passed tax cuts — then profited (‘The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is a case study of how lawmakers can make themselves richer with the bills they pass’):

When the price of Apple stock hit a then-record high in October 2018, among the shareholders counting their gains were 43 Republicans in Congress, who collectively owned as much as $1.5 million worth of the tech giant’s shares. Apple’s stock jumped 37 percent in its run-up to that record. Several variables were behind the climb, including higher-than-expected earnings.

But congressional Republicans themselves had a hand in the spike, stock analysts say. Legislation they championed — the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — doled out nearly $150 billion in corporate tax savings in 2018 alone. One effect: a big boost in stock prices.

Cutting tax rates for companies like Apple and hundreds of other stocks they own was one of many ways Republican lawmakers enriched themselves after they passed the tax law, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of the 186-page law and members’ financial disclosure forms. Democrats also stood to gain from the tax bill, though not one voted for it; all but 12 Republicans voted for the tax bill.

As part of the bill, Republicans approved tax breaks in 2017 for seven classes of assets many of the wealthier members of Congress held at the time, including partnerships, small corporations, real estate, and several esoteric investment vehicles. While they sold the bill as a package of business and middle-class tax cuts that would not help the wealthy, the cuts likely saved members of Congress hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes collectively, while the corporate tax cut hiked the value of their holdings.

….

Contrary to Republican claims, the law is not paying for itself and is likely to burden the nation with an additional $1.9 trillion in debt over 11 years beginning in 2018, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Steven Pearlstein writes Our current economic boom is a mirage, and our politics are going to break it:

In reality, our current economic boom is a Keynesian mirage. The only reason our economy is growing at all is that because of extravagant tax cuts and undisciplined spending, the federal government last year spent $1 trillion more than it brought in in revenue, even as the Federal Reserve injects an additional $60 billion a month into the financial system. As the International Monetary Fund warned in its annual economic outlook last fall, such a level of fiscal and monetary stimulus is not sustainable, creating risks of inflation, a spike in interest rates or a sharp decline in the value of the dollar, any of which in turn could lead to a recession or financial crisis. In the longer run, this addiction to living beyond our means will also have the effect of making us ever more beholden to the foreign lenders and investors who make it possible.

Closed Caption Glasses: A New Way to Watch Theater: