Good morning.

A new month in Whitewater begins with a partly sunny day and a high of thirty-one. Sunrise is 7:07 AM and sunset 5:09 PM, for 10h 01m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 21.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}eighty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia is lost when it disintegrates over Texas and Louisiana as it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven crew members. On this day in 1860, Charles Ingalls and Caroline Quiner, Ma and Pa Ingalls, are married in Concord, Wisconsin.

Recommended for reading in full —

Matt Levine considers Trump’s relationship to businesses in Immigration Orders and Odd Tenders: “Many people in the business and financial and technology communities listened to what Trump said, and cheerily assumed he’d do something completely different. Sure he talked about restricting trade and banning Muslim immigrants, but what they heard was that he’d enact “sensible immigration policy” and pro-growth trade agreements, reduce taxes, cut back regulation and generally improve conditions for business….And what has happened so far? Immigration bans (with more to come), abandoned trade agreements, “alternative facts,” unprompted promises to bring back torture. And what has not happened so far? Tax policy is a complete mystery, with an unclear and walked-back promise to impose a border tax. Health-care policy is even more mysterious. Trump has made vague promises to cut regulations by 75 percent, but his specific regulatory focus seems to be on increasing penalties on companies that move operations abroad. Everything Trump literally said is coming literally true; everything the serious people heard remains an unserious hope. Businesses may eventually get the tax and regulatory reform they wanted, but it’s not a priority. The technology industry, and some others, are beginning to figure this out:

Trump has “had this extraordinary honeymoon where Wall Street has kind of discounted all the negative aspects,” Richard Fenning, the CEO of consultancy Control Risks, told Bloomberg Television. As companies react to the migrant ban, “perhaps that honeymoon is starting to be over,” he said.”

Thomas R. Wood shows What Democracy Looks Like:

What Democracy Looks Like from Thomas R. Wood on Vimeo.

Derek Thompson asks Want to Talk to the President? Advertise Here: “Indeed, some politicians and journalists are realizing just how much Trump’s statements are recapitulations of ideas he has just seen on TV. CNN’s Brian Stelter observed that minutes after Fox News used the words “ungrateful traitor” to describe Chelsea Manning and “weak leader” to describe President Obama, Trump sent a tweet calling Manning an “Ungrateful TRAITOR” and Obama “a weak leader. Last week, Maryland Representative Elijah Cummings directly implored the president to call him in a segment on Morning Joe. “I know you’re watching,” he said. “Call me. I want to talk to you.” Hours later, Trump called the congressman’s Washington office.”

Jeffrey Gettleman reports that State Dept. Dissent Cable on Trump’s Ban Draws 1,000 Signatures: “Within hours, a State Department dissent cable [for employees of the department], asserting that President Trump’s executive order to temporarily bar citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries would not make the nation safer, traveled like a chain letter — or a viral video. The cable wended its way through dozens of American embassies around the world, quickly emerging as one of the broadest protests by American officials against their president’s policies. And it is not over yet. By 4 p.m. on Tuesday, the letter had attracted around 1,000 signatures, State Department officials said, far more than any dissent cable in recent years. It was being delivered to management, and department officials said more diplomats wanted to add their names to it.”

There’s at least one Snow Guardian of the Rockies:

Good morning.

The last day of January in this small town will be cloudy, with a few flurries or snow showers possible, and a high of thirty-five. Sunrise is 7:09 AM and sunset 5:07 PM, for 9h 58m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 13.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}eighty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1958, America launches Explorer 1, her first satellite, into orbit: “Explorer 1 was launched on January 31, 1958 at 22:48 Eastern Time (equal to February 1, 03:48 UTC) atop the first Juno booster from LC-26 at the Cape Canaveral Missile Annex, Florida. It was the first spacecraft to detect the Van Allen radiation belt,^[2] returning data until its batteries were exhausted after nearly four months. It remained in orbit until 1970, and has been followed by more than 90 scientific spacecraft in the Explorer series.” On this day in 1846, Wisconsin’s territorial legislature charters Carroll College.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Conservative David Frum describes How Donald Trump Could Build an Autocracy in the U.S.: “Donald Trump, however, represents something much more radical. A president who plausibly owes his office at least in part to a clandestine intervention by a hostile foreign intelligence service? Who uses the bully pulpit to target individual critics? Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off? If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. It’s happening here instead, and so we are baffled….

Those citizens who fantasize about defying tyranny from within fortified compounds have never understood how liberty is actually threatened in a modern bureaucratic state: not by diktat and violence, but by the slow, demoralizing process of corruption and deceit. And the way that liberty must be defended is not with amateur firearms, but with an unwearying insistence upon the honesty, integrity, and professionalism of American institutions and those who lead them. We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered. What happens next is up to you and me. Don’t be afraid. This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.”

Conservative David Brooks considers The Republican Fausts: “With most administrations you can agree sometimes and disagree other times. But this one is a danger to the party and the nation in its existential nature. And so sooner or later all will have to choose what side they are on, and live forever after with the choice.”

Conservative and former G.W. Bush Administration official Eliot Cohen Responds to Donald Trump’s First Week: “Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him. It will probably end in calamity—substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have. It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment. The sooner Americans get used to these likelihoods, the better.

The question is, what should Americans do about it? To friends still thinking of serving as political appointees in this administration, beware: When you sell your soul to the Devil, he prefers to collect his purchase on the installment plan. Trump’s disregard for either Secretary of Defense Mattis or Secretary-designate Tillerson in his disastrous policy salvos this week, in favor of his White House advisers, tells you all you need to know about who is really in charge. To be associated with these people is going to be, for all but the strongest characters, an exercise in moral self-destruction.”

Patrick Marley reports that Former teen inmate, now brain damaged, sues state: “Madison – A former inmate at Wisconsin’s teen prison filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Monday over a suicide attempt that left her severely brain damaged. The lawsuit by former Copper Lake School for Girls inmate Sydni Briggs and her mother alleges psychiatrists and prison officials failed to put protections in place even though Briggs had sent signals she was suicidal. She told a therapist she was thinking about suicide and twice scratched her arms so hard they bled, the suit says. “They knew that staff was stretched too thin,” Briggs’ attorneys wrote of prison officials in their lawsuit. “They knew that they were under-trained on how to prevent suicide attempts. They knew that a prolonged rash of suicide attempts had taken place at Copper Lake. Given the large number of attempts, it was only a matter of time before one was fatal.”

Consider how the planet, itself, has changed over the last few decades:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will see a likelihood of an afternoon snow shower and a high of twenty-nine. Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 5:06 PM, for 9h 56m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 6.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}eighty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1919, Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu, a citizen who challenged the legality of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the internment of Japanese Americans. While the EO was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States,  Korematsu’s conviction was overturned decades later after the disclosure of new evidence challenging the necessity of the internment, evidence which had been withheld from the courts by the U.S. government during the war. On this day in 1866, the 9th Wisconsin Infantry musters out after serving in Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas, they lost 191 enlisted men during service.

Recommended for reading in full —

Alia Dastagir reports that Outrage over Trump’s immigrant ban helps ACLU raise more money online in one weekend than in all of 2016: “The American Civil Liberties Union shattered fundraising records this weekend after taking the White House to court over President Trump’s executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. The ACLU said it has received more than 350,000 online donations totaling $24 million since Saturday morning. The non-profit organization that aims to protect individuals’ rights and liberties guaranteed in the Constitution typically raises about $4 million online in a year, according to Executive Director Anthony Romero. “It’s really clear that this is a different type of moment,” Romero said. “People want to know what they can do. They want to be deployed as protagonists in this fight. It’s not a spectator sport.”

Janna Remes of Brookings considers Aging and urban divergence [reflections on a report from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), Urban world: Meeting the demographic challenge in cities] : “How cities cope with demographic change matters, not only for their economies but also for their politics and societies. Pessimism and optimism among voters—and the political choices those voters subsequently make—appear, more than ever, to depend on where they live. In the U.S. presidential election, Clinton voters were heavily metropolitan (and from areas with high economic output) while Trump voters tended to be in (lower-output) suburban and rural areas, as shown by Mark Muro and Sifan Liu. As the demographics of cities—and the strategies they deploy to cope with change—diverge, so too do perceptions of economic opportunity. The divide between rural and urban communities is already evident in the election results. As demographics create an ever-more-differentiated urban landscape, the divide between citizens of different cities is set to widen too.”

Brian Nyhan of Dartmouth has updated his solid reference guide, a Reading list: Understanding the authoritarian turn in US politics.

Bob McGinn writes that Ted Thompson’s formula for success fizzles: “the Packers have squandered still another realistic chance in the era of Aaron Rodgers to capture their 14th NFL championship. They’ve had enough talent to win the Super Bowl nine times in 11 seasons under Thompson and coach Mike McCarthy, and just once have they claimed the Lombardi Trophy. Thompson’s aversion to signing players that have been with other teams is holding hostage McCarthy and his coaches, Rodgers and his teammates and members of his own personnel department. None of them like it but they can’t do one thing about it. Packers President Mark Murphy, the one man who can do something, goes about praising Thompson whenever the opportunity presents itself for the wonderful job he has done and the wonderful job he is doing. Thompson is a good general manager with a long list of admirable qualities. If he were a great general manager, the Packers would have been in the Super Bowl more than once in his 12-year tenure, especially considering his quarterbacks have been Favre and Rodgers.”

Could this be the loneliest whale in the world?

Somewhere in the North Pacific Ocean there is a whale. There are, of course, many whales, if rather fewer than there were a couple of hundred years ago. But this whale is different. It is a male and vocalizes during mating season in a way that only male whales do. Its species, however, is uncertain. It may be a fin whale, or perhaps a blue whale, the largest whale of them all. It may even be a hybrid — an unusual but not unheard-of scenario.

Nobody is certain because nobody has claimed to have seen it. But several people have heard it. And many more have heard of it. And what this latter group has heard about it has turned the whale into an unwitting celebrity, a cultural icon and a cypher for the feelings of many unconnected people around the globe. It is, allegedly, the Loneliest Whale in the World.

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will bring an even chance of snow showers and a high of twenty-seven. Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset is 5:05 PM, for 9h 54m 08s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}eighty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1845, Poe’s The Raven is first published in the Evening Mirror. On this day in 1865, 12th Wisconsin Light Artillery fights a skirmish at the Combahee River, and the 3rd Wisconsin Infantry fights another one 50 miles west at Robertsville, both cities in South Carolina.

Recommended for reading in full —

David Barstow describes how ‘Up Is Down’: Trump’s Unreality Show Echoes His Business Past: “As a businessman, Donald J. Trump was a serial fabulist whose biggest-best boasts about everything he touched routinely crumbled under the slightest scrutiny. As a candidate, Mr. Trump was a magical realist who made fantastical claims punctuated by his favorite verbal tic: “Believe me”….But for students of Mr. Trump’s long business career, there was much about President Trump’s truth-mangling ways that was familiar: the mystifying false statements about seemingly trivial details, the rewriting of history to airbrush unwanted facts, the branding as liars those who point out his untruths, the deft conversion of demonstrably false claims into a semantic mush of unverifiable “beliefs”….Deception, dissembling, exaggeration — what Fortune magazine called his “astonishing ability to prevaricate” — has deep roots in Mr. Trump’s business career. In innumerable interviews over the years, Mr. Trump glibly inflated everything from the size of his speaking fees to the cost of his golf club memberships to the number of units he had sold in new Trump buildings. In project after project, he faced allegations of broken promises, deceit or outright fraud, from Trump University students who said they had been defrauded, to Trump condominium buyers who said they had been fleeced, to small-time contractors who said Mr. Trump had fabricated complaints about their work to avoid paying them.”

Jennifer Rubin describes how Trump and America lose again: The Mexico blunder: “Trump is the perfect storm when it comes to foreign policy. He lacks knowledge of the world, his White House staff and children have no diplomatic training and in advance of Rex W. Tillerson’s confirmation he has scared off the top echelon at the State Department, as my colleague Josh Rogin reports. (“Suddenly on Wednesday afternoon, [undersecretary for management Patrick] Kennedy and three of his top officials resigned unexpectedly, four State Department officials confirmed. Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Joyce Anne Barr, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond and Ambassador Gentry O. Smith, director of the Office of Foreign Missions, followed him out the door. All are career foreign service officers who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations.”)….One might expect resignations to continue in the State Department and elsewhere as veteran public servants decide that the Trump circus is not something they want any part of — not even during the extended transition phase as a new team gets up to speed. Running the State Department is hard enough in normal times; running it when the president apparently strikes career diplomats as erratic, self-destructive and clueless will be a struggle.”

Robert P. Jones reports that Not Even the Reddest States Support Deportation: “But lost amid the anti-immigrant bluster of his campaign, the flurry of executive orders, and the whirlwind of partisan politics in Washington, is a stubborn fact: Very few Americans, and even few Republicans, say their preferred policy solution to the country’s illegal immigration problem is the deportation of an estimated 11 million people. That is the clear result of a study based on over 120,000 interviews with Americans—including 40,509 conducted during the 2016 campaign—that was conducted by my organization, PRRI, over the last three years. Through the ups and downs of immigration-reform legislation and even under the darker shadows of the 2016 election season, American opinions about concrete policy solutions have remained remarkably stable. When asked about how the immigration system should deal with immigrants who are currently living in the country illegally, the new study found nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of Americans say we should allow them a way to become citizens provided they meet certain requirements, and another 15 percent say we should allow them a way to become permanent legal residents but not citizens. Only 16 percent of Americans, and only 28 percent of Republicans, say their preferred policy option is to identify and deport those who are living in the country without legal documentation.”

(N.B.: I would expect that there certainly are communities within America where nativist residents will turn on others, gleefully so. See, Neither Shocked Nor Awed (Some “small, rural towns will offer the Trump Administration the advantage of many collaborators who will aid federal authorities, and many residents who will identify neighbors as targets for deportation. Almost no one in these places will say a word in public opposition; outspoken residents will hail deportation as a necessary part of Making America Great Again.”)

Alan Yuhas reports that White House defends Trump Holocaust statement that didn’t mention Jews: “The White House has defended its omission of Jews and antisemitism from a statement remembering the Holocaust by saying that Donald Trump’s administration “took into account all of those who suffered”. On International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Friday, the White House made no mention of Jews, Judaism or the antisemitism that fueled Nazi Germany’s mass murder of six million Jews in the 1940s. The head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, wondered aloudabout the “puzzling and troubling” statement, and its break with the precedent. The executive director of the Anne Frank Center, Steven Goldstein, similarly scolded the president: “How can you forget, Mr President, that six million Jews were murdered because they were Jews? You chose the vague phrase ‘innocent people.’ They were Jews, Mr President.”

Here’s Smoked Salmon the Old-School Way:

Sheepshead Bay on Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way are stunning and picturesque. It’s the setting for Declan McConnellogue’s The Haven Smokehouse, which is a quaint throwback to the way people used to smoke salmon—with care, attention, and time. “Each Haven Smokehouse salmon is treated with the respect it deserves, carefully honoring our finest Irish traditions,” reads the smokehouse’s website. This short film, Turf Salmon Smoke, follows Declan’s process of using 10,000-year-old turf to smoke salmon in the way he remembers from his childhood. It comes to us from the world-traveling web series The Perennial Plate. To learn more about this series, visit its Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages.

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty. Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset is 5:03 PM, for 9h 51m 49s of daytime. It’s the lunar new year, and the Chinese year of the Fire Rooster.

Recommended for reading in full —

Deadspin’s Diana Moskovitz reports on the allegations in a Lawsuit: Baylor Football Players Committed 52 Rapes In Four Years Under Art Briles: “Baylor football players committed 52 rapes in four years, the majority at off-campus parties hosted by football players, including five gang rapes; the university paid off one woman who said she was raped by giving her free tuition; and football staff arranged for women to have sex with recruits on their campus visits, according to a Title IX lawsuit filed today in federal court in Texas. The 26-page lawsuit—filed against Baylor on behalf of Elizabeth Doe—goes into immense detail about both a specific report of gang rape at the center of the complaint as well as how, it says, “football and rape became synonymous” under former football coach Art Briles, aided by a policy for football players described as “show ’em a good time.”

Keegan Kyle reports that Wisconsin’s State senators [are] up for 31 percent per-diem raise: “MADISON – After legislators in Wisconsin’s Assembly hiked how much cash they can pocket for working in Madison, their Senate peers plan to take a similar step. Most state senators last year were allowed to claim up to $88 for each day they worked in Madison, on top their $51,000 annual salary, under a decades-old benefit called per diems. This year, Senate leaders are interested in hiking the maximum rate to $115 a day, a spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald confirmed Friday. “As a result of input from members of both parties, several updates are being made to the Senate policy manual including a shift in per diem rates,” Myranda Tanck wrote in an email to USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin.”

Daniel Drezner cautions Never underestimate the staying power of autocratic rulers: “One of the few correct themes of my public writing is that incompetent autocrats tend to stay in power far longer than pundits predict that they will stay in power. I have written that Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro would continue to rule their countries despite their abjectly awful economic policies. Back in 2011 I wrote that “Kim Jong Un will hold power for longer than any Western analyst expects him to hold power,” and the North Korean leader continues to be large and in charge….The trouble with buffoonish autocratic personalities is that there is a natural psychological bias to focus on the clownish parts of what the Dear Leader is doing and not enough on the consolidation of political power.”

Luz Gonlazez describes Going Rogue: “9 federal government agencies have gone rogue, I suspect largely in response to Trump and his administration’s determination to disrespect the value of its work, spread a false narrative of their mission and goals, and create a toxic environment of mistrust, misinformation, and uncooperative discourse.  In other words, federal employees are doing for the American people what the Republican majority will not do, stand up to an authoritarian President and administration who do not even remotely resemble or represent the American people.

On January 26, all the senior staff at the United States Department of State resigned.  Since Trump took office on January 20 (has it really been only 6 days) federal employees have created twitter accounts and tweets in defiance to the new administration’s attacks on truth and science.  Showing courage and conviction. Days old rogue accounts @rogueNASA, @AltNatParkSer, @ActualEPAFacts, @Alt_NASA, and @WhiteHouseLeaks have tens of thousands of followers.”

Alexandra Horowitz describes How dogs can tell time with their noses: