Good morning.

Thew work week’s end in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-two. Sunrise is 7:13 AM and sunset is 5:02 PM, for 9h 49m 33s of daytime. The moon is new, with .3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}eightieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1945, the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp is liberated. On this day in 1862, the 9th Wisconsin Light Artillery Battery musters in at Burlington, Wisconsin.

Recommended for reading in full —

Nico Savidge reports that a UW-Madison student trying to start ‘alt-right’ group was convicted of arson at black churches: “A UW-Madison student seeking to start what he calls a “pro-white student club” was convicted in 2005 of setting fires at predominantly black churches in a racially motivated arson attack, officials confirmed Thursday. Chancellor Rebecca Blank said the university was not aware of student Daniel L. Dropik’s conviction when he was admitted to UW-Madison because the university is barred from asking about or considering an applicant’s criminal history. Dropik, 33, was sentenced to five years in federal prison after authorities said he set fires at two churches in predominantly black neighborhoods in Milwaukee and Lansing, Michigan, in April 2005. According to court documents, Dropik set out from his home in Oconomowoc specifically looking for black churches “as racial retaliation” for earlier incidents between him and African-Americans. Dropik, who also works as a student hourly employee, has handed out slips of paper at UW encouraging students to “fight anti-white racism on campus” by joining a Madison chapter of the white nationalist American Freedom Party, according to The Badger Herald. The flier included the hashtag #UWAltRight, using a common term for the ideology that mixes racism and white nationalism.”

Mirah Curzer describes four good tips for How to #StayOutraged Without Losing Your Mind: “Professional organizers and veteran activists have strategies for staying sane during a long fight. If you’re serious about sticking it out in the picket lines for the duration of the Trump presidency, you’re going to have to learn these strategies….”

Masha Gessen describes The Styrofoam Presidency: “On Saturday it emerged that the inaugural-ball cake that Trump and Vice President Mike Pence cut with a sword was a knock-off of President Obama’s 2013 inaugural-ball cake. Obama’s was created by celebrity chef Duff Goldman. Trump’s was commissioned from a decidedly more modest Washington bakery than Goldman’s, and the transition-team representative who put in the order explicitly asked for an exact copy of Goldman’s design—even when the baker suggested creating a variation on the theme of Goldman’s cake. Only a small portion of Trump’s cake was edible; the rest was Styrofoam (Obama’s was cake all the way through). The cake may be the best symbol yet of the incoming administration: much of what little it brings is plagiarized, and most of it is unusable for the purpose for which presidential administrations are usually intended. Not only does it not achieve excellence: it does not even see the point of excellence.”

Chico Harlan reports that In these six American towns, laws targeting ‘the illegals’ didn’t go as planned: “HAZLETON, Pa. — Starting a decade ago, a group of small U.S. cities began passing laws to block undocumented immigrants from living within their borders. They were a collection of mostly white exurbs and faded manufacturing towns whose populations suddenly were transforming. More Latinos were arriving in search of jobs, and the towns’ leaders complained of burdened schools and higher crime. Here in this northeastern Pennsylvania city, then-Mayor Lou Barletta said he would do what he could to restore “law and order” and take back his city. It was time, Barletta said, for a “war on the illegals.” And while that sentiment is shared among some advisers to President Trump, the experiences of these towns show how measures targeting undocumented immigrants can leave lasting and bitter racial divisions while doing little to address the underlying forces that often determine where newcomers settle. The laws in most cases aimed to make it illegal for landlords to rent to undocumented immigrants and threatened fines for employers who hired them. But among the six most high-profile towns that tried to pass such laws, all have been foiled by court rulings, settlements or challenges with enforcement. Several have been ordered to pay the legal fees for the civil rights groups that brought suits. And in five of the six towns, the Latino population — legal or illegal — has continued to grow, attracted by a continued rise in low-paying jobs. “It wound up costing our city $9 million in attorney’s fees,” said Bob Phelps, the mayor of Farmers Branch, Tex., a Dallas suburb that saw its ordinance defeated in court after a seven-year legal battle. “And we accomplished zero.”

Here’s a bird’s eye view of the Abbaye du Bec-Hellouin:

Good morning.

Whitewater’s Thursday will be cloudy with a high of thirty-four. Sunrise is 7:13 AM and sunset 5:01 PM, for 9h 47m 18s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}seventy-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1788, the first European settlers in Australia landed at what’s now Sydney. On this day in 1925, a fire destroys the Whitewater Hospital, with losses estimated at $20,000.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jeet Heer writes that Donald Trump Is Becoming an Authoritarian Leader Before Our Very Eyes: “Turning a speech at an intelligence agency [at the CIA] into a political rally is a deep betrayal of political norms. But it is very much in keeping with Trump’s disturbing habit of claiming the armed wing of the state, including the military and law enforcement, as his political allies. He said early in the CIA speech that “the military gave us tremendous percentages of votes. We were unbelievably successful in the election with getting the vote of the military. And probably almost everybody in this room voted for me, but I will not ask you to raise your hands if you did.” At the end of his speech, Trump sounded like a pathetic suitor making his final pitch: “I just wanted to really say that I love you, I respect you. There’s nobody I respect more.” While Trump’s antics might have impressed his fans watching from home, they seem to have done little to assuage worries in the agency. The New Yorker interviewed a variety of intelligence experts, including John MacGaffin, a high-ranking veteran of the agency. “What self-centered, irrational decision process got him to this travesty?” MacGaffin told the magazine. “Most importantly, how will that process serve us when the issues he must address are dangerous and incredibly complex?”

David Zirin writes about his experiences at the inauguration in I Was at Trump’s Inauguration. It Was Tiny: “Walter, a Trump supporter from Virginia, said to me, “This isn’t what I thought it would be. I thought this was going to be like our version of Woodstock. Instead I’m just cold.” Susan from West Virginia said to me, “On the plus side, I guess it can’t get worse. And I’m still glad we’re going to get the Supreme Court. But today—this is sad.” Raymond from West Virginia shrugged his shoulders and said, “I thought it would be like one of his rallies. Instead, it’s this.” (Raymond then asked if I was Jewish. I said yes and he said “Just checking.” I said, “C’mon Raymond! Even your anti-Semitism sounds demoralized.” He looked down, sadly.) In addition, the Secret Service and TSA personnel in charge of the checkpoints, both groups maligned by this administration, were cracking jokes about the president-elect as we were going through the metal detectors. One TSA agent even took a button from me that said, “Solidarity Trumps Hate.” He wasn’t confiscating the button. He took it to wear (“later,” he told me). If it wasn’t for the thousands of protesters who came out for both permitted and non-permitted demonstrations, the day would’ve had no life at all.”

Conservative Peter Wehner explains why he’s opposed to Trump in Why I Cannot Fall in Line Behind Trump: “…Mr. Trump has continued to demonstrate impulsivity and narcissism, an affinity for conflict and vindictiveness. Which leads to my main worry about Mr. Trump: His chronic lack of restraint will not be confined to Twitter. His Twitter obsessions are a manifestation of a deeper disorder. Donald Trump is a transgressive personality. He thrives on creating disorder, in violating rules, in provoking outrage. He is a shock jock. This might be a tolerable (if culturally coarsening) trait in a reality television star; it is a dangerous one in a commander in chief. He is unlikely to be contained by norms and customs, or even by laws and the Constitution. For Mr. Trump, nothing is sacred. The truth is malleable, instrumental, subjective. It is all about him. It is always about him. In “The Abolition of Man,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.” Donald Trump has not only spent much of his life stepping outside of traditional morality; he seems to delight in doing so. If I am right about Mr. Trump, and Lewis is right about history, then it is unlikely that President Trump will use his power benevolently. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

Aaron Blake reports that ‘Eight years. Eight years.’: Donald Trump and his team are already assuming a 2020 reelection win: “Trump and his advisers have increasingly taken to speaking not just about what they’ll do over the next four years, but what will happen over the next eight — a premise that takes for granted that he will be reelected in 2020. Call it confidence or call it presumptuousness, it’s increasingly a part of the talking points. “The White House and the media are going to share joint custody of this nation for eight years,” Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway said Monday night on Fox News’s “Hannity.” “And we ought to figure out how to co-parent.” The day before, during a White House ceremony swearing in his new aides, Trump promised that “we are going to do some great things over the next eight years.” And then he repeated, for good measure: “Eight years.”

Thinking about a plant? Here are some tips on plant selection —

Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will see freezing rain and a probability of light afternoon snowfall, with a high of thirty-six. Sunrise is 7:14 AM and sunset 4:59 PM, for 9h 45m 06s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 6.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}seventy-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1959, the jet age really takes off (of course it does) on 1.25.1959 with an transcontinental flight (New York to Los Angeles) of an American Airlines Boeing 707.   On this day in 1932, Janesville, Wisconsin continues its probition of dancing on Sundays.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Brian Stetler and Frank Pallotta report that Publisher printing more copies of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ after spike in demand: “The book publisher Penguin is printing more copies of George Orwell’s dystopian classic “1984” in response to a sudden surge of demand. On Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning the book was #1 on Amazon’s computer-generated list of best-selling books. The list reflects hourly book sales. The 68-year-old novel appeared on the list on Monday, hovered around the #6 spot for much of the day, rose to #2 by Tuesday afternoon and then hit #1. Lower down on Amazon’s best sellers list are two other classic novels with similar themes: “It Can’t Happen Here,” by Sinclair Lewis, and “Brave New World,” by Aldous Huxley. It is hard to say for sure how much of the interest is related to Donald Trump’s inauguration and the rise of “alternative facts,” a term coined by Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway on Sunday.”

Dylan Byers reports that Trump’s Chicago tweet is another response to cable news: “When President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Tuesday night and said he would send federal agents into Chicago if the city failed to address its growing violence, the threat seemed to emanate from nowhere. But like so many of Trump’s tweets, it appeared to be inspired by cable news. The 45th President of the United States is known to be an avid cable news consumer, and his tweets often seem to be in direct response to something he’s just seen on television. In this case, Trump appeared to be responding to a segment on Fox News. Shortly after 8 p.m. on Tuesday night, Fox’s “O’Reilly Factor” ran a segment about violence in Chicago that included the following statistics: “228 shootings in 2017 (up 5.5% from last year” and “42 homicides in 2017 (up 24% from last year).” One of the show’s guests, Horace Cooper, an adjunct fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank, said, “I don’t know another word besides ‘carnage’ to describe the devastation that’s been taking place.” Just over an hour later, at 9:25 p.m. ET, Trump took to Twitter using the same statistics Fox News had used and the same language as Cooper. “If Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible ‘carnage’ going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds!” Examples of Trump seemingly reacting to cable news abound.”

Jennifer Rubin explains that Trump’s actions will invite nonstop litigation: “Ironically, for a man who loved to bring litigation to torment opponents and squash criticism, President Trump will likely face nonstop litigation for his entire term. Lawyers contesting him on everything from the emoluments clause to the lease for his Washington hotel with the federal government say, in essence, that he has no one to blame but himself. Instead of divesting entirely of his businesses, Trump chose to keep ownership. “This will be in play for the length of the Trump presidency,” Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said to me in a telephone interview on Monday.”

Matt Velazquez reports that it was MU 74, Villanova 72: Golden Eagles stun AP No. 1 Wildcats: “Marquette has played men’s basketball for more than 100 years. There have been plenty of memorable games and historic moments in that time, but never before had Marquette knocked off the top-ranked team in the Associated Press top 25 during a regular-season game. That changed Tuesday night at the BMO Harris Bradley Center. After trailing by as many as 17 points and staying behind by double digits for most of the second half, the Golden Eagles finished with a 19-4 run to claim a 74-72 victory over reigning-champion Villanova, the No. 1 team in the AP poll and No. 2 in the USA Today coaches poll. The victory was Marquette’s second in 12 meetings with the AP No. 1 team, with the other coming against Kentucky in the Elite Eight of the 2003 NCAA Tournament.”

BRIC TV describes One Man’s Search for Meaning in the Rhythm of Tap:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 4:58 PM, for 9h 42m 56s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 11.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}seventy-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Patrick Marley writes that Teen Lincoln Hills inmates allege excessive pepper spraying: “Madison — Juvenile inmates filed a class action lawsuit Monday against Wisconsin officials, alleging they used pepper spray excessively and kept teens in solitary confinement for weeks or months at a time. Over eight months last year, one 14-year-old boy was kept in solitary confinement for all but two weeks, the lawsuit alleges. Pepper spray was used nearly 200 times over 10 months at Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls, which share a campus 30 miles north of Wausau, according to the lawsuit. “The state routinely subjects these youth to unlawful solitary confinement, mechanical restraints and pepper spraying,” attorney Rachel Graham wrote in the suit. “Prior to state and federal raids on the facility at the end of 2015, staff also regularly physically abused youth in the facility….In the first 10 months of last year, pepper spray was used 198 times, according to the lawsuit. Often, a brand of pepper spray is used that is meant to protect hikers from bears.”

Michael D. Shear and Emmarie Huetteman report that Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers: “WASHINGTON — President Trump used his first official meeting with congressional leaders on Monday to falsely claim that millions of unauthorized immigrants had robbed him of a popular vote majority, a return to his obsession with the election’s results even as he seeks support for his legislative agenda. The claim, which he has made before on Twitter, has been judged untrue by numerous fact-checkers. The new president’s willingness to bring it up at a White House reception in the State Dining Room is an indication that he continues to dwell on the implications of his popular vote loss even after assuming power.”

Patrick Thornton explains that Headlines Matter When Your President Lies All the Time: “The most important part of your story on Trump’s lie is, in fact, your headline. If your headline reports the claim, and doesn’t note it’s false, that it isn’t based on a shred of evidence, it would deliberately misinform the public, no matter what you wrote beneath it. Why? Because for a lot of your audience now, the headline is the story. 72 percent of Americans get news on smartphones, where they discover stories via news alerts (most recipients don’t click through to stories) and social media. Most users catch glimpses of headlines on Facebook and Twitter. Sometimes they click through to read the story, but many times they do not. Journalists must craft headlines that live with the reality of how people actually consume news online. Our job as journalists is not to wish that people slowed down and read every word we write; our job is to deliver information to people in ways that they’ll actually consume and internalize it.”

In Forbes, Ally Bogard and Allie Hoffman describe Resilience: How Laura Dunn Went From Campus Assault Survivor To Groundbreaking Legal Advocate: “Laura Dunn became an activist, an advocate, a lawyer, a litigator, a founder and an entrepreneur – the day that she survived a campus assault. It was the life-defining experience that could have catapulted her into despair, or become the ultimate act of resilience. She chose the latter; today she runs the national nonprofit SurvJustice, which provides vital legal assistance to fellow survivors. Since its founding in 2014, they’ve assisted on 189 cases, and Laura has been recognized by the American Law Institute, the American Bar Association, and the White House for her pioneering advocacy. We hope she inspires you, as she did us….”

The local University of Wisconsin campus, UW-Whitewater, has been the subject of two federal complaints to the U.S. Department of Education and one federal lawsuit, all directly or relatedly concerning reporting of sexual assaults on campus. Atty. Dunn represents two of those survivors. For a category link to posts about these cases, and the topic more generally, see Assault Awareness & Prevention.

Barnaby Dixon doesn’t just make puppets, he makes amazing puppets, including a first-class raptor: