Good morning.

Whitewater’s Tuesday will be increasingly sunny with a high of fifty-four. Sunrise is 6:41 AM and sunset 7:17 PM, for 12h 35m 38s of daytime. The moon is new, with .2% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the {tooltip}one hundred fortieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1979, the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania has a partial nuclear meltdown in reactor number 2: “It was the most significant accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant history.^[2] The incident was rated a five on the seven-point International Nuclear Event Scale: Accident With Wider Consequences.^[3][4]” On this day in 1954, a “Joe Must Go” a bipartisan grassroots campaign to recall Sen. Joe McCarthy from the Senate, begins in earnest with an organizational meeting in Sauk City. The campaign failed, but not before garnering 335,000 signatures.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Max Ehrenfreund sees The looming split between Trump and Ryan: “President Trump and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan both want to rewrite the tax code, but their proposals differ on how much tax relief to give the middle class. Trump wants a tax cut across the board, according to the plan he published during the campaign. He has proposed relief for the wealthy especially, but also for less affluent households. The plan that Ryan (R-Wis.) and his colleagues in the House have put forward would not substantially reduce taxes for the middle class, and many households would pay more. Trump’s plan arguably reflects his unique style of conservative populism. The proposal would be extremely costly for the government, and the president’s past comments suggest he would be willing to put the federal government deeper into debt to fund breaks for the middle class. Ryan’s plan would instead simplify and streamline the tax code in accordance with conservative orthodoxy, eliminating the goodies for households with modest incomes that Trump would preserve or expand. In all, taxpayers with roughly average incomes could expect a tax cut of around $1,100 a year under Trump’s plan, compared to just $60 under Ryan’s plan once the proposals were fully implemented. Now, after even a united Trump-Ryan effort on health care failed to win over enough Republicans to get through the House, their hopes of passing a tax plan depend on getting on the same page quickly.”

Jeet Heer writes about The Death of Paul Ryan, Policy Genius: “Ryan’s sparkly reputation rested partly, of course, on the soft bigotry of low expectations (better than you would expect a Republican to be!), but also on appearance. Ryan looks like a thoughtful man. He can furrow his brow in simulation of abstract reasoning. Not everyone was fooled. Paul Krugman called him a “flimflam man,” pointing out that the numbers Ryan touted in his imaginary budget didn’t add up, with the proposed tax cuts creating much bigger deficits than Ryan acknowledges. The AHCA fiasco vindicates Krugman’s harsh judgment. The “reform” was hated not just by Democrats but by actual Republican policy wonks—people who were critical of Obamacare, but saw the AHCA as doing nothing to make it better. In a devastating critique in Forbes, Avik Roy, one of the foremost conservative experts in the field, got to the heart of Ryan’s plan. “Expanding subsidies for high earners, and cutting health coverage off from the working poor: It sounds like a left-wing caricature of mustache-twirling, top-hatted Republican fat cats.” Roy, the president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, is a genuine conservative wonk with a real concern for the impact of policy. Paul Ryan is a pretend wonk who throws around numbers to impress the likes of Mitt Romney and Donald Trump. Unfortunately, the Republican Party only uses real wonks like Roy when they want to criticize Democrats. When policy gets made, it falls to Ryan. Perhaps the only positive outcome of the current turmoil is that it might, at long last, destroy Ryan’s reputation for policy expertise.”

Julia Ioffe considers What Russia’s Latest Protests Mean for Putin: “First and foremost, it was a tremendous show of power by Navalny, who has declared that he is running for president of Russia in 2018. He is a long shot at best, and the Kremlin may not even allow him on the ballot. Yet he showed he has real political power and that tens of thousands of people across the country see him as a legitimate leader, despite the Kremlin’s assiduous work to marginalize him by keeping him off government-controlled television—still Russians’ main source of news—and inventing a half-dozen criminal cases against him. Second, it indicated that despite the government’s total control of television and creeping control of the web, technology and social media are still powerful tools. By Sunday, the Medvedev expose had been viewed nearly 12 million times. By comparison, 52 million people voted in September’s parliamentary elections. It doesn’t mean that all those viewers believed it or agreed with its anti-Kremlin message, but it means they at least saw it, even though it wasn’t shown on state TV. It also means that Navalny, with his YouTube channel, which was doing a live broadcast during the protests, can reach past Kremlin TV and influence people even in the heart of Putin country.”

Laura Schulte reports that the Hodag [has been] added to ‘Fantastic Beasts’ roster: “RHINELANDER – Those on the hunt for magic creatures in central Wisconsin won’t have to travel far to spot one. The legendary Hodag has officially been deemed a “fantastic beast” by J.K. Rowling, the author of the “Harry Potter” series. Rowling added the beast to her book “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” on March 14. The book was originally released in 2001, as one of Harry Potter’s textbooks, written by fictional author Newt Scamander, according to Rowling’s site, www.pottermore.com. The small book was also the basis for the movie of the same name, released in 2016. In the book, Rowling describes the Hodag as “horned, with red, glowing eyes and long fangs, and the size of a large dog. The Hodag’s magic resides largely in its horns which, when powdered, make a man immune to the effects of alcohol and able to go without sleep for seven days and seven nights.” The passage also notes the Hodag is found in a “protected area around Wisconsin.”

Robert Lustig reveals foods with loads of hidden sugar:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of fifty-one. Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 7:16 PM, for 12h 32m 44s of daytime. The moon is new, with .4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred thirty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority is scheduled to meet this afternon at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1513, Juan Ponce de León spots what he believes is an island, but was likely his first sighting of Florida. On this day in 1865, the 8th, 11th, 14th, 20th, 23rd, 27th, 28th, 29th, 33rd and 35th Wisconsin Infantry regiments join in the Battle of Spanish Fort began on the Gulf Coast of Alabama.

Recommended for reading in full —

John Schmid and Kevin Crowe report on An intractable problem (for the last half-century, Milwaukee has been caught in a relentless social and economic spiral): “At the start of the 1970s, Milwaukee’s industrial heyday, just 17% of the city’s population lived in census tracts in which 20% to 40% of the residents lived below the federal poverty line. That’s a level labeled “concentrated poverty,” and social scientists consider it the combustion point for social toxins like crime, teen pregnancies, dropping out of school. (A Milwaukee census tract averages about 3,000 people.) Milwaukee’s rate was far healthier than other industrial cities like Detroit (25%), Philadelphia (21%) or Chicago (20%). By the end of that watershed decade, amid the first wave of industrial shutdowns, 22% of the city lived in 20%-40% poverty tracts, and there was a proliferation of “extreme poverty” tracts, where 40% or more lived below the line. Then came the booming ’80s and the greatest bull market on Wall Street since the 1920s. The aphorism is that a rising economic tide lifts all boats, but Milwaukee missed out. By the end of the decade, the percentage of people living in tracts with 20%-plus poverty rose to 43.5% — including both concentrated and extreme poverty. During the tech-driven ’90s, as the internet minted new fortunes and Google was born, the number of 20%-40% tracts increased from 48 to 74. By the end of the decade, the percentage of city residents in 20%-plus tracts was 47.2%, almost half the city’s population. By 2014, 145 of the city’s 209 census tracts — home to almost three-quarters of the city’s population — had at least 20% of the population living in poverty, and more than one out of four Milwaukeeans lived in neighborhoods of extreme poverty.”

Margaret Sullivan notes that Scott Pelley is pulling no punches on the nightly news — and people are taking notice: “Pelley, of CBS Evening News, has set himself apart — especially in recent weeks — with a spate of such assessments, night after night. Perhaps the most notable one, on Feb. 7, went like this: “It has been a busy day for presidential statements divorced from reality. Mr. Trump said this morning that any polls that show disapproval of his immigration ban are fake. He singled out a federal judge for ridicule after the judge suspended his ban, and Mr. Trump said that the ruling now means that anyone can enter the country. The president’s fictitious claims, whether imaginary or fabricated, are now worrying even his backers, particularly after he insisted that millions of people voted illegally, giving Hillary Clinton her popular-vote victory.” And then Pelley added a reality-check kicker: “There is not one state election official, Democrat or Republican, who supports that claim.” There are plenty of other examples: One evening last month, he described Trump aide Kellyanne Conway as “a fearless fabulist.” Another night, he referred to the president as having had “another Twitter tantrum.” Far more than his competitors — Lester Holt on NBC and David Muir on ABC — Pelley is using words and approaches that pull no punches. It’s not that the others don’t provide fact-checks or report on criticism; they do. But Pelley, 59, despite his calm delivery, is dogged, night after night — and far blunter.”

Colbert King contends It’s time for the feds to follow the Russian money: “There’s plenty of ground for federal agencies to plow. The Financial Times reported in October that an investigation that it conducted had turned up evidence of ties between one Trump venture and an alleged international money-laundering network. Title deeds, bank records and correspondence showed that a Kazakh family accused of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars bought apartments in a Manhattan building part-owned by Trump and pursued business ventures with one of his partners. This week, ABC News reported that from 2011 to 2013, the FBI had a warrant to eavesdrop on a Russian money-laundering network that operated out of Trump Tower in New York. “The FBI investigation led to a federal grand jury indictment of more than 30 people, including one of the world’s most notorious Russian mafia bosses, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov,” ABC’s Brian Ross and Matthew Mosk reported. “He was the only target to slip away, and he remains a fugitive from American justice.” Bloomberg Businessweek reported this month: “Two months before Trump broke ground in New York in October 1998, Russia defaulted on $40 billion in domestic debt, and some of the biggest banks started to collapse. Millionaires scrambled to get their money out and into New York. Real estate provides a safe haven for overseas investors. It has few reporting requirements and is a preferred way to move cash of questionable provenance. Amid the turmoil, buyers found a dearth of available projects. Trump World Tower, opened in 2001, became a prominent depository of Russian money.”

Conor Dougherty reports that the Push for Internet Privacy Rules Moves to Statehouses: “California and Connecticut, for instance, recently updated laws that restrict government access to online communications like email, and New Mexico could follow soon. Last year, Nebraska and West Virginia passed laws that limit how companies can monitor employees’ social media accounts, while legislators in Hawaii, Missouri and elsewhere are pushing similar bills for employees, as well as for students and tenants. “More and more, states have taken the position that, if Congress is not willing or able to enact strong privacy laws, their legislatures will no longer sit on their hands,” said Chad Marlow, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union. Online privacy is the rare issue that draws together legislators from the left and the far right. At the state level, anyway, some of the progress has come from a marriage between progressive Democrats and libertarian-minded Republicans, who see privacy as a bedrock principle, Mr. Marlow said.”

Good morning.

Whitewater will have a rainy Sunday, with a high of fifty-seven. Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset is 7:15 PM, for 12h 29m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 3.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred thirty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1881, famous Civil War mascot Old Abe dies from injuries he sustained during a fire at the State Capitol. He was the mascot for Company C, an Eau Claire infantry unit that was part of the Wisconsin 8th Regiment. His fame continued after the war:

After Wisconsin took possession of Old Abe, state officials classified him as a “War Relic” and created an “Eagle Department” in the Capitol building, which included a two-room “apartment,” a custom bathtub for the eagle, and a caretaker. Later John Hill served in this capacity.[23] Old Abe became a nationally known celebrity, whose presence at events was requested by individuals and organizations from the state and the country. Old Abe appeared at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the 1880 Grand Army of the Republic National Convention. Other events were fundraisers for charities, which included: the 1865 Northwest Sanitary Fair in Illinois, Soldiers’ Home Fair, Soldier’s Orphan’s Home, Harvey Hospital, and Ladies Aid Society of Chippewa Falls.[3] In February 1881, a small fire broke out in the basement of the Capitol. After Old Abe raised an alarm, the fire was quickly put out. However, the eagle inhaled a large amount of thick black smoke, and about a month later, lost strength and began to decline. On March 26, 1881, in spite of the efforts of numerous doctors, Old Abe died in the arms of caretaker George Gilles.[23]

On September 17, 1881, Old Abe’s stuffed remains were placed in a glass display case located in the rotunda of the Capitol. Four years later, Old Abe was moved, within the Capitol, from the rotunda to the G.A.R. Memorial Hall. In 1900, his remains were transferred to the new building of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. However, pressure from veterans convinced Governor Robert M. Lafollette to return Old Abe to the Capitol building in 1903. That year, President Theodore Roosevelt viewed the remains and expressed his pleasure at being able to see the eagle he had studied in school as a child. In 1904, Old Abe’s remains and the glass case were destroyed in a fire that razed the Capitol building.[23]

Since 1915, a replica of Old Abe has presided over the

Wisconsin State Assembly Chamber in the Capitol, and another is on display at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum in Madison.[24] A stone sculpture of the eagle is at the top of the Camp Randall Arch.[11]

Recommended for reading in full — 

Tim Alberta describes events from Inside the GOP’s Health Care Debacle: “Donald Trump had heard enough about policy and process. It was Thursday afternoon and members of the House Freedom Caucus were peppering the president with wonkish concerns about the American Health Care Act—the language that would leave Obamacare’s “essential health benefits” in place, the community rating provision that limited what insurers could charge certain patients, and whether the next two steps of Speaker Paul Ryan’s master plan were even feasible—when Trump decided to cut them off. “Forget about the little shit,” Trump said, according to multiple sources in the room. “Let’s focus on the big picture here.” The group of roughly 30 House conservatives, gathered around a mammoth, oval-shaped conference table in the Cabinet Room of the White House, exchanged disapproving looks. Trump wanted to emphasize the political ramifications of the bill’s defeat; specifically, he said, it would derail his first-term agenda and imperil his prospects for reelection in 2020. The lawmakers nodded and said they understood. And yet they were disturbed by his dismissiveness. For many of the members, the “little shit” meant the policy details that could make or break their support for the bill—and have far-reaching implications for their constituents and the country.”

Matt Flegenheimer and  Thomas Kaplan contend that Paul Ryan Emerges From Health Care Defeat Badly Damaged: “Less than 18 months after being elected speaker, Mr. Ryan has emerged from the defeat of the health care bill badly damaged, retaining a grip on the job but left to confront the realities of his failure — imperiling the odd-couple partnership that was supposed to sustain a new era of conservative government under unified Republican rule.”

Graydon Carter contends that the Trump Presidency is Already a Joke (But It’s No laughing Matter): “Trump’s one brief moment of acting presidential—when he read off a teleprompter for 60 minutes and 10 seconds during his address to Congress—served only to show just how low the bar for presidential behavior has plummeted since January. Watching TV commentators applaud him for containing himself for a little over an hour was like hearing a parent praise a difficult child for not pooping in his pants during a pre-school interview. Besides, vintage Trump is not going anywhere anytime soon. A couple of weeks earlier, during a visit by the Japanese prime minister, Shinz? Abe, the president told an acquaintance that he was obsessed with the translator’s breasts—although he expressed this in his own, fragrant fashion.”

Hannah Levintova outlines The Long, Twisted, and Bizarre History of the Trump-Russia Scandal: “The Trump-Russia scandal—with all its bizarre and troubling twists and turns—has become a controversy that is defining the Trump presidency. The FBI recently disclosed that since July it has been conducting a counterintelligence investigation into possible coordination between Trump associates and Russia, as part of its probe of Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 election. Citing “US officials,” CNN reported that the bureau has gathered information suggesting coordination between Trump campaign officials and suspected Russian operatives. Each day seems to bring a new revelation—and a new Trump administration denial or deflection. It’s tough to keep track of all the relevant events, pertinent ties, key statements, and unraveling claims. So we’ve compiled what we know so far into the timeline below, which covers Trump’s 30-year history with Russia.  We will continue to update the timeline regularly as events unfold. (Click here to go directly to the most recent entry.) Please email us at scoop@motherjones.com if you have a tip or we’ve left anything out.”

People on Twitter are mocking Trump for pretending to drive a big rig truck (instead of reading and comprehending the details of health care legislation that he dismissively described as “the little shit“):

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with a high of forty-none, and periods of rain. Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset is 7:13 PM, for 12h 26m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 8.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred thirty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire claims the lives of one hundred forty-six workers, most of whom were Jewish and Italian immigrant women aged 16 to 23. On this day in 1865, the 36th and 38th Wisconsin Infantry regiments participate in the Battle of Fort Stedman, Virginia, during the Siege of Petersburg.

Recommended for reading in full —

David Graham observes that for Trump, It’s Never Trump’s Fault: “Trump was very clear about who was not to blame: himself. “I worked as a team player,” the president of the United States said, demoting himself to bit-player status. He wanted to do tax reform first, after all, and it was still early. “I’ve been in office, what, 64 days? I’ve never said repeal and replace Obamacare within 64 days. I have a long time. I want to have a great health-care bill and plan and we will.” Strictly speaking, it is true that Trump didn’t promise to repeal Obamacare on day 64 of his administration. What he told voters, over and over during the campaign, was that he’d do it immediately. On some occasions he or top allies even promised to do it on day 1. Now he and his allies are planning to drop the bill for the foreseeable future….Trump’s quick disavowal of any role in the collapse fits with an emerging pattern: The president never takes the blame for anything that goes wrong….Assuming the public accepts it, this choice has both upsides and downsides. On the one hand, it means that Trump is never to blame for anything. On the other, if he’s so irrelevant, why should anyone pay attention to him or take his proposals and ideas seriously?”

Robert Costa, Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker report on ‘The closer’? The inside story of how Trump tried — and failed — to make a deal on health care: “For Trump, it was never supposed to be this hard. As a real estate mogul on the rise, he wrote “The Art of the Deal,” and as a political candidate, he boasted that nobody could make deals as beautifully as he could. Replacing Obamacare, a Republican bogeyman since the day it was enacted seven years ago, was Trump’s first chance to prove that he had the magic touch that he claimed eluded Washington. But Trump’s effort was plagued from the beginning. The bill itself would have violated a number of Trump’s campaign promises, driving up premiums for millions of citizens and throwing millions more off health insurance — including many of the working-class voters who gravitated to his call to “make America great again.” Trump was unsure about the American Health Care Act, though he ultimately dug in for the win, as he put it. There were other problems, too. Trump never made a real effort to reach out to Democrats, and he was unable to pressure enough of his fellow Republicans. He did not speak fluently about the bill’s details and focused his pitch in purely transactional terms. And he failed to appreciate the importance of replacing Obamacare to the Republican base; for the president, it was an obstacle to move past to get to taxes, trade and the rest of his agenda.”

Tim Mak reports that Devin Nunes Vanished the Night Before He Made Trump Surveillance Claims: “Hours before the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee announced his shocking claims about surveillance of the Trump transition team on Wednesday morning, he practically disappeared. Rep. Devin Nunes was traveling with a senior committee staffer in an Uber on Tuesday evening when he received a communication on his phone, three committee officials and a former national security official with ties to the committee told The Daily Beast. After the message, Nunes left the car abruptly, leaving his own staffer in the dark about his whereabouts. By the next morning, Nunes hastily announced a press conference. His own aides, up to the most senior level, did not know what their boss planned to say next. Nunes’ choice to keep senior staff out of the loop was highly unusual.”

Travis Dorman reports that Tennessee bills teen to replace guardrail that killed her: “LENOIR CITY, Tenn. — The state of Tennessee erroneously has billed a dead teen nearly $3,000 to replace the guardrail that killed her in a car crash in November. Her flabbergasted father said that he not only would not pay but also contends that the model of guardrail that struck his daughter was poorly designed and dangerous. Around 5:44 a.m. ET Nov. 1, Hannah Eimers, 17, was driving her father’s 2000 Volvo S80 on Interstate 75 northbound near Niota, Tenn., when the car left the road, traveled into the median and hit the end of a guardrail with the driver’s side door, according to a Tennessee Highway Patrol crash report. Instead of deflecting the car or buckling to absorb the impact, the guardrail end impaled the vehicle, striking the teen in the head and chest and pushing her into the back seat, according to the report. She died instantly.”

Opera? No, something even better: subway opera —

Elevating the Underground: Subway Opera from Great Big Story on Vimeo.

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be warm, with a high of seventy, and an even chance of afternoon thunder showers. Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 7:12 PM, for 12h 23m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 15.7% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the {tooltip}one hundred thirty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1989, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez strikes Prince William Sound’s Bligh Reef at and spills 10.8 million US gallons of crude oil over the next few days. On this day in 1874, legendary magician Harry Houdini (who claimed to be born in Appleton and actually lived there for a bit) is born in Budapest.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Andrew Roth and Natalie Gryvnyak report that Days before his death, Putin critic said in interview he knew he was in danger: “KIEV — In the plush, crimson-decked lobby bar of Kiev’s five-star Premier Palace Hotel, Denis Voronenkov, a Russian lawmaker who had defected to Ukraine, knew he was in danger. “For our personal safety, we can’t let them know where we are,” he said Monday evening as he sat with his wife for an interview with The Washington Post. Less than 72 hours later, he was dead, shot twice in the head in broad daylight outside the same lobby bar. It was a particularly brazen assassination that recalled the post-Soviet gangland violence of the 1990s. His wife, dressed in black, sobbed as she stooped down to identify Voronenkov’s body, which lay beneath a black tarp in a pool of blood. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, just hours later, called the attack an “act of state terrorism by Russia.” As of Thursday evening, police had not identified the assailant, who died in police custody after being shot by Voronenkov’s bodyguard. Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, called the accusation a “fabrication.” In the weeks before his death, Voronenkov, a former member of Russia’s pliant Communist Party, had told friends he was being targeted. Hackers had been trying to pry into his Twitter account and his wife’s email. He had received threatening text messages, and the police had recently assigned him a bodyguard. There were rumors he was under surveillance.”

James B. Stewart observes that Pages From Trump’s Tax Returns Raise a Decade’s Worth of Questions: “But scratch the surface, and a far more complicated and troubling picture emerges. On the line for “other income,” the Trumps reported negative $103 million. Tax experts told me that is almost certainly what was left of the $916 million loss reported on the 1995 returns reported by The Times, an amount that could be carried over and used to offset income in future years.  “That’s my assumption,” said Leonard C. Green, a certified public accountant who is president of the Green Group, a tax and accounting advisory firm, and author of “The Entrepreneur’s Playbook.” That means that in the years between 1996 and 2005, Mr. Trump was able to use the enormous loss to offset $813 million in income. It’s possible, though unlikely, that some of those tax-loss carry-forwards, as they’re known, expired unused. In 1995 they could be used for up to 18 years, which means any of the losses incurred before 1987 would have expired by 2005. But there’s no evidence Mr. Trump had losses of anywhere near that magnitude that early in his career. Most of the losses are presumed to date from the problems his casino operations ran into in the early 1990s.”

Mark Sommerhauser reports concerning Wisconsin’s Fiscal bureau: Scott Walker’s budget leaves $1.1 billion hole starting in 2019: “Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal for the state’s next budget creates a larger structural deficit than previously thought, nearly $1.1 billion, in the ensuing budget cycle beginning in 2019, the state’s nonpartisan fiscal office said Thursday. The Legislative Fiscal Bureau released the findings in a memo made public late Thursday. It shows Walker’s plan for the 2017-19 budget, which back-loads spending and tax cuts into its second fiscal year, leaves a structural deficit of $1.1 billion that lawmakers would have to erase in crafting the 2019-21 budget. A previous estimate from Walker’s office pegged the number at about $740 million. The structural deficit figure compares projected revenue to expenditures if Walker’s plan were enacted this year as-is, and if no changes were made to its revenue or spending levels in the following budget in 2019. Both are unlikely to happen, but the figure gives policymakers “an indication of the beginning point for the budget of the succeeding biennium” under Walker’s plan, according to the memo.”

Michael D. Shear explains What Trump’s Time [Magazine] Interview Shows About His Thinking: “Just Quoting. ‘Why do you say that I have to apologize? I’m just quoting the newspaper, just like I quoted the judge the other day, Judge Napolitano. I quoted Judge Napolitano, just like I quoted Bret Baier. I mean Bret Baier mentioned the word wiretap. Now he can now deny it, or whatever he is doing, you know. But I watched Bret Baier, and he used that term. I have a lot of respect for Judge Napolitano, and he said that three sources have told him things that would make me right. I don’t know where he has gone with it since then. But I’m quoting highly respected people from highly respected television networks.’ — President Trump Among Mr. Trump’s more bizarre assertions in recent days — and repeated in the Time interview — is the idea that he should not be held accountable for merely quoting someone who makes a controversial, even unproven, claim or allegation.”

Sometimes there are alligators in the sewer: