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:

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.”