Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty.  Sunrise is 6:41 AM and sunset 5:34 PM, for 10h 52m 51s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 95% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1972, Pres. Nixon arrives in China for a week-long visit.

Recommended for reading in full:

Rick Barrett reports Dairy farmers are in crisis — and it could change Wisconsin forever:

Wisconsin lost almost 700 dairy farms in 2018, an unprecedented rate of nearly two a day. Most were small operations unable to survive farm milk prices that, adjusted for inflation, were among the lowest in a half-century.

As of Feb. 1, Wisconsin had 8,046 dairy herds, down 40 percent from 10 years earlier, according to state Department of Agriculture data.

Remaining dairy farmers have burned through their farm equity and credit to remain in business. Often, at least one family member works an off-farm job to put groceries on the table or pay for health insurance. Some work double shifts, farming during the day then heading to a local factory for the night. It’s exhausting, but it keeps families in agriculture and preserves a cherished way of life.

Much of Wisconsin’s $88 billion farm economy hangs in the balance. Hundreds of towns across the state depend on the money that dairy farmers spend at equipment dealerships, feed mills, hardware stores, cafes and scores of other businesses.

Each dollar of net farm income results in an additional 60 cents of economic activity, according to University of Wisconsin research.

This spring, though, farmers face crucial decisions. Some are running out of feed for their cattle. Do they seek operating loans to plant crops for livestock rations? Or do they quit and cut their losses that can add up to thousands of dollars a month?

  Natasha Korecki reports ‘Sustained and ongoing’ disinformation assault targets Dem presidential candidates:

A POLITICO review of recent data extracted from Twitter and from other platforms, as well as interviews with data scientists and digital campaign strategists, suggests that the goal of the coordinated barrage appears to be undermining the nascent candidacies through the dissemination of memes, hashtags, misinformation and distortions of their positions. But the divisive nature of many of the posts also hints at a broader effort to sow discord and chaos within the Democratic presidential primary.

The cyber propaganda — which frequently picks at the rawest, most sensitive issues in public discourse — is being pushed across a variety of platforms and with a more insidious approach than in the 2016 presidential election, when online attacks designed to polarize and mislead voters first surfaced on a massive scale.

Recent posts that have received widespread dissemination include racially inflammatory memes and messaging involving Harris, O’Rourke and Warren. In Warren’s case, a false narrative surfaced alleging that a blackface doll appeared on a kitchen cabinet in the background of the senator’s New Year’s Eve Instagram livestream.

See also Microsoft says it has found another Russian operation targeting prominent think tanks.

  Inside the ant lab: Mutants and social genes:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be snowy with a high of thirty-five.  Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 5:33 PM, for 10h 50m 03s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

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

On this day in 1962, John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the Earth.

Recommended for reading in full:

 Corri Hess reports Gov. Tony Evers Says Business Incentives Should Be Discussed:

Evers said massive incentive packages are something the state is going to have to grapple with.

“I want Kimberly-Clark to be successful. I want Marinette Marine to be successful, but at the end of the day, can we continue to carry on this path?” Evers said. “I think it’s an important discussion to have as a state.”

In December, Walker reached a deal to keep a Kimberly-Clark plant open that’s worth up to $28 million over five years. Evers has said he will include $31 million in his state budget to help Fincantieri Marinette Marine expand its shipyard in northeastern Wisconsin.

Foxconn Technology Group has received the largest incentive from the state, more than $4 billion. Evers said he still believes it was too expensive. But he wants the company to be a success.

“Clearly, what they are planning to do has changed,” Evers said of Foxconn. “At the end of the day, several municipalities have provided financial support. The state has provided support. But the agreement is part of state law. We have to make sure their operation and their decision-making is more transparent than it is now.”

Mark Mazzetti, Maggie Haberman, Nicholas Fandos, and Michael S. Schmidt report Inside Trump’s Two-Year War on the Investigations Encircling Him:

An examination by The New York Times reveals the extent of an even more sustained, more secretive assault by Mr. Trump on the machinery of federal law enforcement. Interviews with dozens of current and former government officials and others close to Mr. Trump, as well as a review of confidential White House documents, reveal numerous unreported episodes in a two-year drama.

….

Julie O’Sullivan, a criminal law professor at Georgetown University, said she believed there was ample public evidence that Mr. Trump had the “corrupt intent” to try to derail the Mueller investigation, the legal standard for an obstruction of justice case.

But this is far from a routine criminal investigation, she said, and Mr. Mueller will have to make judgments about the effect on the country of making a criminal case against the president. Democrats in the House have said they will wait for Mr. Mueller to finish his work before making a decision about whether the president’s behavior warrants impeachment.

In addition to the Mueller investigation, there are at least two other federal inquiries that touch the president and his advisers — the Manhattan investigation focused on the hush money payments made by Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, and an inquiry examining the flow of foreign money to the Trump inaugural committee.

  To Survive, This Bug Builds a House of Bubbles:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of twenty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 5:32 PM, for 10h 47m 15s of daytime.  The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1868, photographer Edward S. Curtis is born:

Edward Sheriff Curtis was born near Whitewater. As a young boy, he taught himself photography. His family eventually moved to the Puget Sound area of Washington state. He settled in Seattle and opened a photography studio in 1897. A chance meeting on Mount Rainier resulted in Curtis being appointed official photographer on railroad magnate E.H. Harriman’s expedition to Alaska. Curtis also accompanied George Bird Grinnell, editor of Field and Stream magazine, to Montana in 1900 to observe the Blackfoot Sun Dance. After this, Curtis strove to comprehensively document American Indians through photography, a project that continued for over 30 years. Working primarily with 6 x 8-inch reflex camera, he created over 40,000 sepia-toned images. His work attracted national attention, most notably from Theodore Roosevelt and J. Pierpont Morgan, whose family contributed generously to his project. His monumental work, The North American Indian, was eventually printed in 20 volumes with associated portfolios. Curtis’ work included portraits, scenes of daily life, ceremonies, architecture and artifacts, and landscapes. His photographs have recently been put online by the Library of Congress.

(Morning Eagle – Piegan. 1910. Original caption: “At an age of more than ninety, Apinakuipita is still hale enough to ride his horse to the tribal gatherings.“)

Recommended for reading in full:

Charlie Savage and Robert Pear report 16 States Sue to Stop Trump’s Use of Emergency Powers to Build Border Wall:

The lawsuit is part of a constitutional confrontation that Mr. Trump set off on Friday when he declared that he would spend billions of dollars more on border barriers than Congress had granted him. The clash raises questions over congressional control of spending, the scope of emergency powers granted to the president, and how far the courts are willing to go to settle such a dispute.

The suit, filed in Federal District Court in San Francisco, argues that the president does not have the power to divert funds for constructing a wall along the Mexican border because it is Congress that controls spending.

[Read the full lawsuit here.]

Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California, said in an interview that the president himself had undercut his argument that there was an emergency on the border.

“Probably the best evidence is the president’s own words,” he said, referring to Mr. Trump’s speech on Feb. 15 announcing his plan: “I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster.”

The lawsuit, California et al. v. Trump et al., says that the plaintiff states are going to court to protect their residents, natural resources and economic interests.

  Inside Corning’s Gorilla Glass Factory:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of twenty-five.  Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 5:30 PM, for 10h 44m 29s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Unified School Board meets at 6 PM and Whitewater’s Library Board at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1885, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published in the United States.

Recommended for reading in full:

 Conor Friedersdorf writes of The Snowflake in Chief:

To support President Trump is to be complicit in the rule of a thin-skinned authoritarian who denigrates the free-speech rights of people who criticize him.

The latest illustration: his weekend outburst against Saturday Night Live, a sketch-comedy show that has regularly poked fun at every American president for 40 years. The most powerful snowflake in America was triggered by Alec Baldwin. “Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC!” Trump tweeted. “Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!”

….

Trump’s SNL tweets are of a piece with a larger, disturbing pattern of behavior in which he violates his oath to protect and defend the Constitution by calling for First Amendment freedoms to be abridged by bureaucrats and legislators; and by calling the press a public enemy and a target of his “drain the swamp” agenda.

 Stephanie Mencimer reports Trump Judicial Nominees Are Refusing to Endorse Brown v. Board of Education (“In normal times, it would be unthinkable. Under Trump, it’s become a trend”)”

There’s no Supreme Court decision more widely celebrated than Brown v. Board of Education, the unanimous 1954 ruling that abolished school segregation. But this month, when Neomi Rao appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a hearing on her nomination to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, she refused to say whether she thought the case had been correctly decided.

Asked by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) whether the court had made the right decision in Brown, Rao replied, “As a judicial nominee, I think it’s not appropriate for me to comment on the correctness of particular precedents.” Blumenthal asked her for a yes or no, but Rao would say only that Brown is “an incredibly important decision of the Supreme Court”—a dodge she twice repeated when pressed further.

….

Rao is one of at least 10 Trump nominees to the federal courts in the past year who have refused to offer an opinion on Brown. Several of those nominees have been confirmed or approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee and set for a full Senate vote.

….

Both of former President George W. Bush’s Supreme Court appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and archconservative Justice Samuel Alito, had no trouble answering the question in the affirmative during their confirmation hearings, nor did Justice Elena Kagan when she was nominated to the court by former President Barack Obama.

  Inside the ant lab – Mutants and social genes:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be snowy with a high of twenty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 5:29 PM, for 10h 41m 43s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 93.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1801 (following a tie electoral college vote between Jefferson and Burr), the House of Representatives on the 36th ballot elects Thomas Jefferson as the third president of the United States.

Recommended for reading in full:

 Shamane Mills reports Wisconsin Trails Nation In Offering School Breakfasts:

The number of Wisconsin students who received breakfast at school through a federally subsidized nutrition program decreased slightly in the 2017-18 school year. And while about 83 percent of schools in the state participated in the School Breakfast Program, that actually puts Wisconsin near the bottom nationally.

“If a school is not offering the school breakfast program, then children cannot access it,” said Crystal FitzSimons of the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC), which released its School Breakfast Scorecard on Wednesday.

Schools in Wisconsin that don’t offer breakfast for low-income students tell the state Department of Public Instruction they can’t afford to.

“The biggest barrier to providing breakfast is funding,” said DPI spokesman Thomas McCarthy.

On top of federal money, Wisconsin has a school reimbursement rate for free and reduced breakfast of 15 cents a meal. But the state hasn’t paid schools that statutorily set rate since 2006. Because of a shortfall in the account that pays schools for providing breakfast, the reimbursement has fallen to about 7 cents, said McCarthy.

(One would prefer conditions in which no student needed subsidized meals, but we’ve not those conditions, and in any event expenditures of this kind are slight – and far more valuable – as against any number of needless business subsidies or capital projects.)

See also Food Research & Action Center, School Breakfast Scorecard, School Year 2017–2018:

 Corri Hess reports DNR Considering We Energies Proposal To Increase Mercury Limits Released Into Lake Michigan:

Utility company We Energies wants to increase the amount of mercury it can release into Lake Michigan from its coal-burning power plant in Oak Creek.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources held a public hearing earlier this week to discuss the proposal, drawing more than 100 people opposing the plan.

We Energies spokesman Brendan Conway said the new limits wouldn’t cause a health risk to humans or wildlife.

“We are not asking to be asked to be treated differently than anyone else along the lake,” Conway said. “Other permitees along Lake Michigan have received similar or higher mercury variances. People should also understand this variance we are talking about is allowed by the EPA and the DNR so this is not an imminent public health risk.”

(That’s some spokesman We Energies has – he contends it’s not an imminent health risk. This begs the question of whether it might be an intermediate or long-term risk. The question of dumping mercury isn’t answered sensibly because others dump it, but by an assessment of cumulative effects.  Conway offers a mush-for-brains level of reassurance.)

 Tour These 6 Capitals of European Craftsmanship:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of twenty-eight.  Sunrise is 6:49 AM and sunset 5:28 PM, for 10h 38m 58s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 86.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1923, Egyptologist Howard Carter opens the burial chamber of Tutankhamun.

Recommended for reading in full:

 Glenn Kessler and Meg Kelly write Fact-checking Trump’s announcement of a national emergency:

Where to begin with President Trump’s rambling news conference to announce he was invoking a national emergency to build a border wall? It was chock-full of false and misleading claims, many of which we’ve previously highlighted, either in our database of Trump claims or our list of Bottomless Pinocchios. Here’s a summary of 14 of the most noteworthy claims, starting with immigration ones first. [The full article addresses each claim.]

 The Committee to Investigate Russia writes Stone Case Definitely Tied to Russian Hacker Case:

In arguing against a change of judge for Roger Stone, special counsel prosecutors reveal search warrants on accounts related to the 12 indicted Russian hackers turned up Stone communications with WikiLeaks. Not only does this explain the relevance of Stone appearing before the same judge assigned to the Russian hacker case, but it also presents the possibility Stone’s outreach was more than just the one exchange we already know for certain.

Although Zachary Basu of Axios reports Mueller says Paul Manafort should serve 19-24 years in prison, that’s a misreading of the government’s sentencing memorandum.  In fact, the Special Counsel’s Office doesn’t expressly make any recommendation of its own:

As an initial matter, the government agrees with the guidelines analysis in the Presentence Investigation Report (PSR) and its calculation of the defendant’s Total Offense Level as 38 with a corresponding range of imprisonment of 235 to 293 months, a fine range of $50,000 to $24,371,497.74, a term of supervised release of up to five years, restitution in the amount of $24,815,108.74, and forfeiture in the amount of $4,412,500.

Second, while the government does not take a position as to the specific sentence to be imposed here, the government sets forth below its assessment of the nature of the offenses and the characteristics of the defendant under Title 18, United States Code, Section 3553(a).

(Emphasis added.  This is very clever – agreeing with the PSR is less than taking a position on a specific sentence.  The court may decide not to impose so lengthy a sentence in any event.)

Hope Kirwan reports Wisconsin Counties Hopeful New Money For Groundwater Will Help Address Causes:

Gov. Tony Evers announced he was directing the state Department of Natural Resources to allocate $75,000 to the Southwest Wisconsin Groundwater and Geology (SWIGG) study in a statement released Wednesday.

The SWIGG study focuses on private wells in Grant, Lafayette and Iowa countries. An initial round of testing found 42 percent of tested wells were at unsafe levels of bacteria or nitrates, a compound linked to a variety of health problems.

Helping Kids With Cerebral Palsy Walk with Wearable Robots: