Good morning.

In Whitewater, we’ll have a cloudy Monday with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 4:57 PM, for 9h 40m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 18.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}seventy-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM.

On this day in 1864, the 23rd Wisconsin Infantry continues its reconnaissance mission on the Matagorda Peninsula in Texas.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Margaret Sullivan writes that The traditional way of reporting on a president is dead. And Trump’s press secretary killed it: “Anyone — citizen or journalist — who is surprised by false claims from the new inhabitant of the Oval Office hasn’t been paying attention. That was reinforced when Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told “Meet the Press” Sunday that Spicer had been providing “alternative facts” to what the media had reported, making it clear we’ve gone full Orwell. Official words do matter, but they shouldn’t be what news organizations pay most attention to, as they try to present the truth about a new administration. White House press briefings are “access journalism,” in which official statements — achieved by closeness to the source — are taken at face value and breathlessly reported as news. And that is over. Dead. Spicer’s statement should be seen for what it is: Remarks made over the casket at the funeral of access journalism. As Jessica Huseman of ProPublica put it: “Journalists aren’t going to get answers from Spicer. We are going to get answers by digging. By getting our hands dirty. So let’s all do that.”

The New York Times showcases Pictures From Women’s Marches on Every Continent: Crowds in hundreds of cities around the world gathered Saturday in conjunction with the Women’s March on Washington: HIGHLIGHTS, 360 VIDEO, MAPS.

Esme Cribb reports that Merriam-Webster Gets In On The ‘Alternative Facts’ Fun: “After top Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts” on Sunday, Merriam-Webster decided to weigh in by reminding everybody that some definitions just aren’t that subjective. In an interview Sunday morning, Conway argued that White House press secretary Sean Spicer wasn’t lying about crowd size at Donald Trump’s inauguration—he was just giving “alternative facts.”

 

?A fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality. https://t.co/gCKRZZm23c

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) January 22, 2017

Krishnadev Calamur offers A Short History of ‘America First’: “From this day forward,” Trump said at one point [during his inaugural address], “it’s going to be only America first. America first….the phrase “America first” also has a darker recent history and, as my colleague David Graham pointed out Friday, was associated with opponents of the U.S. entering World War II. The America First Committee (AFC), which was founded in 1940, opposed any U.S. involvement in World War II, and was harshly critical of the Roosevelt administration, which it accused of pressing the U.S. toward war. At its peak, it had 800,000 members across the country, included socialists, conservatives, and some of the most prominent Americans from some of the most prominent families. There was future President Ford; Sargent Shriver, who’d go on to lead the Peace Corps; and Potter Stewart, the future U.S. Supreme Court justice. It was funded by the families who owned Sears-Roebuck and the Chicago Tribune, but also counted among its ranks prominent anti-Semites of the day.”

Here’s an orangutan, showing how smart she is —

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-four. Sunrise is 7:17 AM and sunset 4:56 PM, for 9h 38m 44s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 26.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}seventy-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1905, on what’s now known as to Russians as Bloody Sunday, soldiers of Russia’s Imperial Guard fire on petitioners led by Father Georgy Gapon as they march toward the Winter Palace to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Over one-thousand are killed or wounded. On this day in 1964, the World’s Largest Block of Cheese (to that date) is produced “from 170,000 quarts of milk by the Wisconsin Cheese Foundation specifically for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. It weighed 34,665 pounds (17.4 tons). The cheese was consumed in 1965 at the annual meeting of the Wisconsin Cheesemakers Association at Eau Claire.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Gary D’Amato writes that McCarthy, Rodgers chase history: “Winning one Super Bowl game as a coach or a quarterback places you among the best of the best and lands you a fat contract extension and TV commercials. Do it in Green Bay and they’ll name a street after you. Winning two Super Bowls? Now that’s a fame-changer. Mike McCarthy and Aaron Rodgers are two victories away from joining the ultra-elite group of head coaches and quarterbacks who have won the Big One multiple times. If the Packers get past the Atlanta Falcons in the NFC Championship Game on Sunday and then beat the AFC champion — either New England or Pittsburgh — in the Super Bowl in Houston on Feb. 5, McCarthy will become the 14th head coach and Rodgers the 13th quarterback to have done it more than once.”

Michael Schmidt, Eric Lipton, and Charlie Savage report that Jared Kushner, Trump’s Son-in-Law, Is Cleared to Serve as Adviser: “WASHINGTON — Hours after President Trump took his oath on Friday, the Justice Department issued an opinion saying that his appointment of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a senior White House adviser would be lawful despite a federal antinepotism law. In a 14-page opinion signed on Friday, a longtime career lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel said that the president’s special hiring authority exempted White House positions from a 1967 law barring the president from employing relatives at a federal agency. Mr. Koffsky’s opinion acknowledged that in several cases since 1978, the Office of Legal Counsel had determined that the antinepotism statute prevented presidents from appointing relatives to positions.”

Tim Wallace and Alicia Parlapiano report that Crowd Scientists Say Women’s March in Washington Had 3 Times More People Than Trump’s Inauguration: “The women’s march in Washington was roughly three times the size of the audience at President Trump’s inauguration, crowd counting experts said Saturday. Marcel Altenburg and Keith Still, crowd scientists at Manchester Metropolitan University in Britain, analyzed photographs and video taken of the National Mall and vicinity and estimated that there were about 160,000 people in those areas in the hour leading up to Mr. Trump’s speech Friday. They estimated that at least 470,000 people were at the women’s march in Washington in the areas on and near the mall at about 2 p.m. Saturday. The two images below show the crowds when they were at their peak density at the two events.”

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will see morning fog give way to afternoon clouds and a high of fifty-two. Sunrise is 7:18 AM and sunset 4:54 PM, for 9h 36m 42s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 34.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}seventy-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1954, the USS Nautilus (SSN-571), the world’s first operational nuclear-powered submarine, was christened by Mamie Eisenhower launched into the Thames River. On this day in 1945 the Medal of Honor is awarded posthumously to Sgt. Truman C. Olson of Cambridge, WI for “stopping a German counterattack on the beachhead in Anzio, Italy, on January 30, 1944. Twice wounded, Olson nevertheless manned his machine-gun for 36 hours. He killed 20 Germans and wounded many others.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Jennifer Rubin describes how Trump’s America [in his own mind] is a rotten place: “President Trump delivered a campaign speech, not an inaugural address, on Friday. That he and his staff do not understand the difference goes to the heart of his insufficiency as a leader. Addressing a shockingly sparse crowd, he painted a picture of a hellish America that can only be restored by turning inward, deciding the world is a burden and our allies are thieves….He perfectly channels the resentment of the white working class. And in case you didn’t know how rotten a country this is, he described, as he did on the campaign trail, a dystopia bearing little resemblance to the real United States. (“Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted-out factories, scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge. And the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”) You would not know that unemployment stands at 4.7 percent, crime is down and productivity up. He sees only blight. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” he declared. Carnage. Take that in for a moment. Does he see America as a decimated, destroyed and weak country? Apparently yes — or he would like us to believe so in order to, in a year or so, declare how everything has improved.”

Michael Kruse interviews three of Trump’s biographers who explain that ‘He Has This Deep Fear That He Is Not a Legitimate President’: ‘[Michael] D’Antonio: Those early influences are essential, and I also think it’s correct that he has been conducting his entire life as a vanity show, and he’s been rewarded, most recently since his reality TV show, by ever-greater public interest in him. This is a guy who is a president-elect who describes himself as a ratings machine, which is an absolutely absurd thing for a president to be reflecting on, but that matters to him. But one thing I think that we have overlooked as we see Trump trying to delegitimize others is what I suspect is a feeling he has inside that nothing he’s ever achieved himself has ever been legitimate. This is a person who has never known whether anybody wants to be around him because he’s a person they want to be around or they want to be around his money. And since he’s promoted himself as this glamorous, incredibly wealthy person, that’s the draw he’s always given. So he doesn’t know if he has any legitimate relationships outside of his family, and that’s why he emphasizes family. … He’s always kind of gaming the system—not, in my view, winning on the merits. And even his election was with almost 3 million fewer votes than his opponent. So he has this deep fear that he is himself not a legitimate president, and I think that’s why he goes to such great lengths to delegitimize even the intelligence community, which is the president’s key resource in security, and he’s going to do this demeaning and delegitimizing behavior rather than accept what they have to tell him.”

Anthony Romero offers the ACLU’s 7-Point Plan of Action to Take on the Trump Administration: “The first rock in our slingshot is a Freedom of Information Act request asking several government agencies to turn over documents relating to President Trump’s actual or potential conflicts of interest due to his business and family connections. The American people deserve to know their president will govern in the best interest of the nation and not his self-interest. Our first legal action is part of the ACLU’s Seven-Point plan to fight back against the Trump administration when it seeks to violate the rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. The plan is supported by our new Constitution Defense Fund, established after the election, to provide the manpower and resources necessary to take on the most powerful government on earth. Going forward, the ACLU’s plan of action includes concrete steps….”

Sasha Abramsky explains How to build a moral resistance movement against Trumpism: “Grassroots groups that, for decades, have been preoccupied with their particular, micro-focused issues and identity themes will now have to put aside their differences and campaign en masse, protest in vast and sustained numbers on the streets, and, if necessary, engage in ongoing civil disobedience, to counter the unleashed assault against the progressive values that we hold dear. This resistance will have to emanate from universities, from faith communities, from networks of social justice campaigners, from environmentalists, and from anti-police brutality organisers. It will have to be so large, so loud, so uncompromising, that it will render impossible the implementation of Trumpism.”

Zelda the Canine is adorable, but has trouble fetching (and she’s not blind):

I tell people my dog is the worst, they don’t believe me. Now hard video evidence emerges. pic.twitter.com/Z8gMK34i5f

— Al Baker (@alandhisguitar) January 18, 2017

Good morning.

Whitewater will see morning showers with a daytime high of forty. Sunrise is 7:18 AM and sunset is 4:53 PM, for 9h 34m 42s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 44.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}seventy-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1942, fifteen high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” On this day in 1865, the 25th Wisconsin Infantry reconnoiters the Salkehatchie River in South Carolina prior to battles in the first week of February.

Recommended for reading in full —

Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth describes Words as Weapons of Authoritarian Control on Primary Concerns:

David Corn suggests that investigators on the Trump-Russia Beat Should Talk to This Man: “Last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee announced it was commencing an investigation of Russian hacking during the 2016 campaign that would include an examination of connections between Russia and the Trump camp. And a veiled but public exchange between Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the committee, and FBI Director James Comey during a hearing on January 10 suggested the FBI has collected information on possible ties between Trump associates and Russians and may still be probing this matter. So with subpoena-wielding investigators on this beat, here’s a suggestion: The gumshoes ought to talk to an American from Belarus named Sergei Millian, who has boasted of close ties to Trump and who has worked with an outfit the FBI suspected of being a Russian intelligence front. If they haven’t already. Millian, who is in his late 30s and won’t say when he came to the United States or how he obtained US citizenship, is an intriguing and mysterious figure with a curious connection to Trump.”

Ryan Koronowski writes that Trump made a lot of promises about what he will do as president. We’ve documented 663 of them: “ThinkProgress examined 583 days of Trump’s public statements, from his campaign announcement speech on June 16, 2015 all the way up to the day before his inauguration. This included thousands of radio and television interviews, speeches, tweets, and campaign policy documents?—?well over 4 million words and counting. Our basic criteria were: 1) a statement made by Trump or by a policy document or questionnaire issued in his name, 2) about what would or would not happen during or as a result of his presidency, 3) about which a reasonable person could be disappointed should the promise be broken. Every time Trump made a new statement or claim about what he would or would not do as president, or guarantees about what he’d ensure would or would not happen, it went on the list. This includes instances when Trump straightforwardly said “I promise” or “I guarantee,” but also instances when he said that “we will” do something or that something “will never” happen if he became president.”

Patrick Marley and Jason Stein report that Vos calls for $300 million more for roads: “Madison — Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and other Republicans in his house called Thursday for sending $300 million to state highways over the next two years and cutting taxes by the same amount or more. Catching hold of more than $700 million in new state money now expected through the summer of 2019, Vos essentially called for raising either the gas tax or vehicle registration fees to pay for roads while cutting income taxes or property taxes.”

In So Fly: The Impossibly Acrobatic Martial Art of Tricking, Great Big Story shows what happens “when you combine the ferocious kicks of taekwondo, the grace of wushu, the improvised movements of capoeira, and gymnastics [into] the head-spinning martial art of tricking:

So Fly: The Impossibly Acrobatic Martial Art of Tricking from Great Big Story on Vimeo.

Good morning.

Thursday will be cloudy, with a likelihood of afternoon showers, and a high of forty-four. Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 4:52 PM, for 9h 32m 45s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 54.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}seventy-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 2006, NASA launches the New Horizons spacecraft on a three-billion-mile journey to Pluto. See, Image gallery: New Horizons’ images of Pluto. On this day in 1939, Ernest Hausen of Ft. Atkinson sets the world’s record for chicken plucking.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Dan Egan reports that the Straits of Mackinac ‘worst possible place’ for a Great Lakes oil spill: “The pipes were not expanded, replaced or thickened to increase the oil and natural gas they carry; the capacity was largely added by increasing pressure on the steel tubes. In 2013, the pipeline owner ratcheted up the maximum capacity on the lines to 540,000 barrels per day. That is a volume far greater than the 470,000 barrels per day planned for the state-of-the-art Dakota Access Pipeline, which drew thousands of protesters to the Great Plains this fall. Many were upset over the risk the Dakota line poses to the Missouri River, though engineers never planned to drape the pipe across the river bottom. Instead, they prepared to tunnel the pipe as deep as 115 feet below the riverbed to protect the waters above. Given the age of the Mackinac lines, and the fact that they were laid in what one prominent hydrodynamics expert now calls the “worst possible” place for an oil spill in the Great Lakes, environmentalists, politicians and Michigan regulators are taking a new look at the old pipes.”

Scott Shane describes From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece: “A few weeks later [after a Trump speech in Ohio], Cameron Harris, a new college graduate with a fervent interest in Maryland Republican politics and a need for cash, sat down at the kitchen table in his apartment to fill in the details Mr. Trump had left out. In a dubious art just coming into its prime, this bogus story would be his masterpiece. Mr. Harris started by crafting the headline: “BREAKING: ‘Tens of thousands’ of fraudulent Clinton votes found in Ohio warehouse.” It made sense, he figured, to locate this shocking discovery in the very city and state where Mr. Trump had highlighted his “rigged” meme. “I had a theory when I sat down to write it,” recalled Mr. Harris, a 23-year-old former college quarterback and fraternity leader. “Given the severe distrust of the media among Trump supporters, anything that parroted Trump’s talking points people would click. Trump was saying ‘rigged election, rigged election.’ People were predisposed to believe Hillary Clinton could not win except by cheating.”

The Pew Research Center shows how Trump, Clinton Voters Divided in Their Main Source for Election News: “According to a new Pew Research Center survey, Americans who say they voted for Trump in the general election relied heavily on Fox News as their main source of election news leading up to the 2016 election, whereas Clinton voters named an array of different sources, with no one source named by more than one-in-five of her supporters. The survey was conducted Nov. 29-Dec. 12, 2016, among 4,183 adults who are members of Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel.

Jonathan Capehart describes, in response to Trump’s criticism of Rep. John Lewis’s congressional district, how Trump wanted to build a project in Atlanta. You can pretty much guess where it was going to be: “if Trump “believes Georgia’s fifth congressional district is ‘falling apart,’ then he believes Atlanta is falling apart.” But here’s the best part. When Trump wanted to slap his name on a project there, it was right there in Lewis’s district. The headline on a February 2010 story by Douglas Sams of the Atlanta Business Chronicle was to-the-point: “Proposed Trump Towers site listed for foreclosure.” The plan was to have two condo towers, luxury shopping and restaurants bearing the name of the Manhattan builder, who Sams reported, also lent his marketing and architectural teams to the effort.”

Peter Stone and Greg Gordon report that FBI, 5 other agencies probe possible covert Kremlin aid to Trump: “WASHINGTON – The FBI and five other law enforcement and intelligence agencies have collaborated for months in an investigation into Russian attempts to influence the November election, including whether money from the Kremlin covertly aided President-elect Donald Trump, two people familiar with the matter said. The agencies involved in the inquiry are the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and representatives of the director of national intelligence, the sources said. Investigators are examining how money may have moved from the Kremlin to covertly help Trump win, the two sources said. One of the allegations involves whether a system for routinely paying thousands of Russian-American pensioners may have been used to pay some email hackers in the United States or to supply money to intermediaries who would then pay the hackers, the two sources said.”

Scientists at Scripps Oceanography announced a new species of sea dragon, colloquially known as the ruby sea dragon:

Good morning.

Wednesday in town will see afternoon clouds give way to afternoon sunshine, with a high of forty-four. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:51 PM, for 9h 30m 51s. The moon is a waning gibbous with 63.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}seventy-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meets at 6:30 PM.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Conservative Jennifer Rubin asks Can Democrats learn to fight fire with fire?: “Democrats will need to shape the political battlefield if they want to stop elements of President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda and set themselves up to at least hold even, if not gain seats, in 2018. They have figured out that Trump watches TV a lot, so their opposition must often take the form of big events (e.g. marches to preserve Obamacare) or ready-made media narratives (e.g. more than 50 Democrats won’t go to the inauguration). They will have another chance on Saturday with the Women’s March on Washington (and local marches all over the country) for which they hope crowds and participants will be nearly as big as, or bigger than, the inauguration audience. Flashy, dramatic, made for TV. Using the Trump playbook against him may be the most effective way to at least get his attention, if not persuade him.”

David A. Graham considers Monica Crowley and the Limits of Trump’s Dismissal of the Press: “But Trump’s repeated claims that the press was irrelevant and powerless should never have been taken at face value, and Crowley’s withdrawal underscores this. Trump’s political genius was not in steering away from the press. It was recognizing how important the press was and figured out ways to marshal it to his own ends. When he blasted the press as powerless early in the campaign, it was disingenuous posturing. Throughout his career as a businessman, Trump grasped the power of using the media to his own ends, and that may be the most important lesson he brings to Washington. (By the end of the campaign, his attacks on the media seemed to become personal, as he got angrier and angrier at the stories about him.) The Crowley affair shows that while the president-elect may be unusually skilled at manipulating the press, he is not omnipotent.”

Conor Friedersdorf ponders  The Irrationally Divided Critics of Donald Trump: “A large cohort of Americans have reservations about the presidency of Donald Trump, who lost the popular vote by 2.9 million, strikes many who did vote for him as a highly flawed “lesser of two evils,” and has a dismal 37 percent approval rating. These ideologically diverse skeptics must cooperate if they hope to minimize the damage they believe the Trump Administration will do to America if left unopposed. But so far, they are easily divided. In fact, they cannot even refrain from attacking or alienating one another on matters where they are mostly in agreement.”

Gael Fashingbauer Cooper reports that Chewbacca rips off arm in deleted ‘Force Awakens’ scene: “The dramatic scene is less than a minute long, but it shows heroine Rey (Daisy Ridley) being threatened by hulking junk boss Unkar Plutt, who wants revenge and the return of the Millennium Falcon. As you can guess, Falcon co-pilot Chewbacca isn’t going to let that happen, and he rips Unkar Platt’s entire arm off and tosses it onto a table. The scene is included as an extra on the “Force Awakens” 3D Blu-ray. It started trending this weekend after a fan posted it to YouTube.”

There are alligators, and then there are alligators –