Good morning.

February in Whitewater ends with cloudy skies and a high of twenty-two.  Sunrise is 6:30 AM and sunset 5:43 PM, for 11h 12m 44s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 30.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

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

On this day in 1862, Battle of Island No. Ten, Missouri, begins (the 8th and 15th Wisconsin Infantry regiments and the 5th, 6th and 7th Wisconsin Light Artillery batteries fought in the battle):

The Union victory marked the first time the Confederate Army lost a position on the Mississippi River in battle. The river was now open to the Union Navy as far as Fort Pillow, a short distance above Memphis. Only three weeks later, New Orleans fell to a Union fleet led by David G. Farragut, and the Confederacy was in danger of being cut in two along the line of the river.

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The Committee to Investigate Russia writes Cohen Hearing: The Aftermath:

Here are some of the day’s big takeaways related to the Russia probe:

The Associated Press:

TRUMP SPOKE IN CODE

At least when it came to covering up a business deal in Russia.

Cohen testified that Trump “in his way” communicated that he wanted his former lawyer to lie to Congress about a Trump Tower Moscow deal he was negotiating during the 2016 presidential campaign.

But Cohen said the president was careful not to directly tell him to do so.

(…)

NO ‘DIRECT’ EVIDENCE OF COLLUSION

Cohen says he isn’t aware of direct evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. But he does have “suspicions” about it.

Cohen testified that Trump was told in advance that WikiLeaks planned to release emails damaging to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 White House campaign. Cohen recounted a phone call in Trump’s office days before the Democratic National Convention when Trump adviser Roger Stone told Trump that WikiLeaks would be releasing a “massive dump” of emails harmful to the Clinton campaign in the coming days.

(…)

THERE’S MORE TO COME

Cohen says prosecutors in New York are investigating conversations that Trump or his advisers had with Cohen after the FBI raided his hotel room and office in April 2018.

About two months later, Cohen says he had contact with Trump or one of his representatives. But Cohen declined to say more because he says the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York is investigating the matter.

(…)

ENTANGLING THE TRUMP CHILDREN

Trump’s children emerged as key figures in a plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow and as their father’s top defenders.

Cohen said he had briefed Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. approximately 10 times about the business deal. Cohen’s testimony may pose a problem for Trump Jr., who told Congress in 2017 that was only “peripherally aware” of the proposal.

How Amazon Makes Money:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of twenty-four.  Sunrise is 6:32 AM and sunset 5:42 PM, for 11h 09m 52s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 38.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s  Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM.

On this day in 1904, Wisconsin’s second state capitol burns down:

On the evening of the 26th, the generator was turned off for the night. The only lights visible were two gas jets serving the night watchman. At approximately 2 a.m., night watchman Nat Crampton smelled smoke and followed the odor to a recently varnished ceiling, already in flames. A second watchman arrived to assist, but there was no water pressure with which to operate a hose. The fire department encountered a similar situation upon arrival. Governor Robert M. La Follette telegraphed fire departments in Janesville and Milwaukee for assistance. La Follette was at the capitol, directing efforts to douse the fire and entering the burning building to retrieve valuable papers. The fire was completly extinguished by 10 p.m. the next day. Losses were estimated to be close to $1 million.

Recommended for reading in full:

Livestream: Cohen Testimony Before House Oversight Committee:

See also full prepared testimony:

Molly Beck reports Tony Evers seeks to end gerrymandering with state budget provision to create nonpartisan commission:

Gov. Tony Evers will propose in his state budget a process aimed at drawing legislative boundaries in a way that favors neither political party.

The move would put election maps in the hands of a nonpartisan state agency instead of with Republicans who control the Legislature and drew the state’s current legislative boundaries that are being challenged in federal court.

“The people should get to choose their elected officials, not the other way around,” Evers said in a statement. “By creating a nonpartisan redistricting commission in Wisconsin, we’re making sure that when we’re redrawing district maps in 2021, we’re putting people before politics.”

But Republican lawmakers are sure to block the proposal that is the latest in a series of measures to be included in Evers’ first state budget set for release Thursday.

  Laura Meckler reports Report finds $23 billion racial funding gap for schools:

Overwhelmingly white school districts received $23 billion more than predominantly nonwhite school districts in state and local funding in 2016, despite serving roughly the same number of children, a new report finds.

The funding gap is largely the result of the reliance on property taxes as a primary source of funding for schools. Communities in overwhelmingly white areas tend to be wealthier, and school districts’ ability to raise money depends on the value of local property and the ability of residents to pay higher taxes.

And while state budgets gave heavily nonwhite districts slightly more money per student than they gave overwhelmingly white districts, in many states it was not enough to erase the local gaps.

See EdBuild report.

Inside The SpaceX Moon Launch That Just Made History:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of twenty.  Sunrise is 6:34 AM and sunset 5:41 PM, for 11h 07m 00s of daytime.  The moon is in its third quarter with 49.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Seed Capital Screening Committee meets at 4:30 PM.

On this day in 1815, French dictator Napoleon escapes exile on Elba.

Recommended for reading in full:

Molly Beck reports Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers pulls back Wisconsin troops from the U.S. border:

Evers said he is withdrawing the 112 Wisconsin National Guard soldiers and airmen from Arizona because “there is simply not ample evidence to support the president’s contention that there exists a national security crisis at our southwestern border.”

“Therefore, there is no justification for the ongoing presence of Wisconsin National Guard personnel at the border,” Evers said. “I cannot support keeping our brave service men and women away from their families without a clear need or purpose that would actively benefit the people of Wisconsin or our nation.”

Evers said border security is “the responsibility of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.

Steve Coll reports The Jail Health-Care Crisis (“The opioid epidemic and other public-health emergencies are being aggravated by failings in the criminal justice system”):

There are more than three thousand jails in the United States, usually run by sheriffs and county offices, which house some seven hundred thousand people. They are typically waiting to make bail—or, if they can’t, to go to trial or enter a plea—or are serving short sentences. Barr is right about the crisis of chronic health conditions among them. According to a study released in 2017 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, nearly half the people held in jails suffer from some kind of mental illness, and more than a quarter have a severe condition, such as bipolar disorder. The same year, the bureau reported that about two-thirds of sentenced jail inmates suffer from drug addiction or dependency; that number was based on data from 2007-09, so it does not take into account the recent catastrophic rise of opioid addiction. That epidemic and other public-health emergencies, in jails across the country, are being aggravated by failings in the criminal-justice system.

  James Rowen describes The Farewell Tour of Scott Walker:

Walker insists to the State Journal that Foxconn can revive manufacturing in the Midwest, adding “It’s something, I tell the president all the time.” He seems embarrassingly oblivious to his tacit admission that he indeed failed to meet his promise of creating 250,000 new jobs in four or five or six or eight years in office, even though he had full control of the government, budgets, and free media on talk radio and advocacy sites to control the outcome.

If Walker had been an effective governor and manufacturing leader for eight years, why would he be talking now about reviving manufacturing, not extending and burnishing it, let alone bringing up Foxconn – – the very manufacturing ‘deal’ whose death is burying the last molecules of Walker’s legacy?

Who Invented Cottage Cheese?

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty.  Sunrise is 6:35 AM and sunset 5:39 PM, for 11h 04m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 60.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School Board meets in open session beginning at 7 PM.

On this day in 1862, James Loom demonstrates a new canon at Camp Randall. (“James Loom exhibited a new breech-loading cannon at Camp Randall in Madison, Wisconsin The cannon was said to be effectively discharged 50 times in four minutes.”)

Recommended for reading in full:

Ellen Nakashima reports Former senior national security officials to issue declaration on national emergency:

A bipartisan group of 58 former senior national security officials will issue a statement Monday saying that “there is no factual basis” for President Trump’s proclamation of a national emergency to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The joint statement, whose signatories include former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former defense secretary Chuck Hagel, will come a day before the House is expected to vote on a resolution to block Trump’s Feb. 15 declaration.

….

“Under no plausible assessment of the evidence is there a national emergency today that entitles the president to tap into funds appropriated for other purposes to build a wall at the southern border,” the group said.

Albright served under President Bill Clinton, and Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, served under President Barack Obama.

Also signing were Eliot A. Cohen, State Department counselor under President George W. Bush; Thomas R. Pickering, President George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations; John F. Kerry, Obama’s second secretary of state; Susan E. Rice, Obama’s national security adviser; Leon E. Panetta, Obama’s CIA director and defense secretary; as well as former intelligence and security officials who served under Republican and Democratic administrations.

Juliet Eilperin reports EPA regulator skirts the line between former clients and current job:

Less than a month into his tenure as the top air policy official at the Environmental Protection Agency, Bill Wehrum hopped into the EPA’s electric Chevy Volt and rode to the Pennsylvania Avenue offices of his former law firm.

There, he met with representatives of the nation’s largest power companies — including two groups that, shortly, had been his paying clients — to brief them on the Trump administration’s plans to weaken federal environmental regulations.

The Dec. 7, 2017, meeting is just one example of interactions between Wehrum, a skilled lawyer and regulator, and former clients that ethics experts say comes dangerously close to violating federal ethics rules. Since joining the EPA in November 2017, Wehrum acknowledges that he has met with two former clients at his old firm — without consulting in advance with ethics officials, even though they had cautioned him about such interactions. He also weighed in on a policy shift that could have influenced litigation involving DTE Energy, a Detroit-based utility represented by his former firm.

Top 15 Best Global Brands Ranking (2000-2018):

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be windy, with snow flurries, and a high of thirty.  Sunrise is 6:37 AM and sunset 5:38 PM, for 11h 01m 19s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 69.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1863, the 28th and 29th Wisconsin Infantry regiments and 12th Wisconsin Light Artillery take part in an expedition to Yazoo Pass by Moon Lake in Mississippi.

Recommended for reading in full:

Andrew Prokop reports Mueller issues new sentencing memo for Paul Manafort:

Special counsel Robert Mueller has filed a second sentencing memo taking former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort to task for what he says is years of illegal activity.

“For over a decade, Manafort repeatedly and brazenly violated the law,” Mueller’s team writes. “His crimes continued up through the time he was first indicted in October 2017 and remarkably went unabated even after indictment.”

The special counsel did not recommend a specific sentence for Manafort, but said his sentence “must take into account the gravity of this conduct.”

Manafort was convicted of financial crimes after a trial in Virginia, and then struck a plea deal to avert a second trial in Washington, DC. So he will be sentenced by two different judges — T.S. Ellis III in Virginia, and Amy Berman Jackson in the District of Columbia.

Mueller’s first sentencing memo for Manafort was filed last week, in Virginia, and focused on Manafort’s financial crimes. This second sentencing memo is focused on illegal lobbying and obstruction of justice.

See Sentencing Memorandum:

Reviewing the latest sentencing memorandum, Franklin Foer considers The Loud Silence of Mueller’s Manafort Memo (“A court filing by the special counsel is filled with elegant omissions—but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there”):

The Mueller team’s sentencing recommendation is, however, an important document of Manafortology. It is the legal equivalent of a magazine profile—that is, a psychologically-driven character study with historical sweep. The prosecutors have gone back to the 1980s and toured his career.

When I first started reporting on Paul Manafort three years ago, I kept looking for a redeeming flicker of humanity. Editors would push me: “Surely, he started off as an idealist, before taking his moral tumble?” They were aching for what we call in the trade the “to-be-sure graf,” where a journalist displays all of the pieces of contrary evidence in plain view. Reader, let me tell you, I searched hard to find that sliver of goodness, and it eluded me.

It seems that the prosecutors ended up with the pretty much the same conclusion: There’s simply nothing redeeming in Paul Manafort’s career—or as they put it, “no warranted mitigating factors.” He engaged in his elaborate schemes for “no other reason than greed,” the court filing says. The prosecutors are constantly lifting their jaw from the floor, because they simply can’t believe their subject’s “hardened adherence to committing crimes.” Even when Manafort had been initially indicted, he kept right on tampering with witnesses without apparent conscience or self-consciousness.

  Find New Ways of Living on These Five Islands:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of thirty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:38 AM and sunset 5:37 PM, for 10h 58m 29s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 78.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1945, U.S. Marines raise the flag on Mt. Suribachi during the Battle of Iowa Jima:

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima is an iconic photograph taken by Joe Rosenthal on February 23, 1945, which depicts six United States Marines raising a U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi, during the Battle of Iwo Jima, in World War II.^[1]

….

Later, it became the only photograph to win the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in the same year as its publication, and came to be regarded in the United States as one of the most significant and recognizable images of the war.

Three Marines in the photograph, Sergeant Michael Strank, Corporal Harlon Block (misidentified as Sergeant Hank Hansen until January 1947), and Private First Class Franklin Sousley were killed in action over the next few days. The other three surviving flag-raisers in the photograph were Corporals (then Private First Class) Rene Gagnon, Ira Hayes, and Harold Schultz (misidentified as PhM2c. John Bradley until June 2016).^[2] Both men originally misidentified as flag raisers had helped raise a smaller flag about 90 minutes earlier, and were both still on the mountaintop and witnessed – but were not part of – the specific moment of raising the larger flag that was captured in the Pulitzer Prize–winning photo.

Recommended for reading in full:

David Fahrenthold and Jonathan O’Connell report Residents of another Manhattan building vote to remove ‘Trump Place’ name:

Since Election Day in 2016, the owners of five buildings have decided to remove it — a stark demonstration of Trump’s unpopularity in the city that gave him his start, and which he still calls home.

Equity Residential, an apartment company that owns three nearby buildings, took down Trump’s name just after the election. Then the condo owners at 200 Riverside — facing legal warnings from the Trump Organization — went to court and persuaded a state judge to rule that the Trump Organization could not stop them from removing their sign.

The loss of the Trump name at 120 Riverside will not cost Trump’s company any revenue. The company does not manage the building or derive any ongoing licensing revenue from its use of the Trump name.

….

In Manhattan, Trump’s name now adorns 11 condo buildings. The research firm CityRealty found that the price of condos in those buildings — measured in dollars per square foot — began to decrease in 2016 and continued to drop in 2018. Using that metric, Trump buildings once commanded a premium above other Manhattan buildings, but now the price per square foot that units in Trump buildings sell for is below average.

“Trump buildings have not performed as well as the rest of the market over the past 18 months,” said Daniel Levy, CityRealty’s president.

  Cat Contract: