Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 29. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:45 PM for 9h 23m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 89.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1952, NBC’s long-running morning news program Today debuts, with host Dave Garroway.
Michelle Cottle writes that Ron Johnson Wasn’t Always Like This. The Trump Years Broke Him:
Like so many citizen legislators before him, however, Mr. Johnson says he failed to anticipate just how desperately Wisconsin voters — nay, the entire nation — would need him at this moment.
“America is in peril,” he declared in an essay in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday. Out-of-control Democrats, aided by media and tech elites, are luring the nation down the path to “tyranny,” he warned. “Countless” concerned citizens implored him to keep up his “fight for freedom,” he noted, “to be their voice, to speak plain and obvious truths other elected leaders shirk from expressing.” What choice does he have but to soldier on?
Claims of national crisis and delusions of indispensability are standard among lawmakers looking to justify abandoning their term-limit pledges. But Mr. Johnson is correct that he has distinguished himself for his willingness to tread where many other officials dare not, at least in the Senate. He has becomeknown as perhaps the chamber’s foremost spreader of absurd yet dangerous conspiracy theories — especially in the areas of anti-vaccine insanity and the election-fraud delusions of a certain former president.
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RonJon wasn’t always like this. He used to be a relatively straightforward pro-market, small-government, budget-conscious conservative. He seemed to have a more or less solid grip on reality. But the Trump years broke him, as they broke so many in the Republican Party.
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Do the nation a solid, Wisconsin: Commit to helping Mr. Johnson stick by his original promise to serve only two terms. After everything it has been through lately, America shouldn’t have to suffer through another six years of his twisted take on truth and freedom.
Cottle is, needless to say, no admirer of Johnson. Her essay details the many ways he’s repulsive to reasonable people.
It may be true, however, that he was once different. I’ll not bother to speculate about why, if at all, the Trump years changed Johnson. So many others who were once better — too many libertarians, too many conservatives — are now worse. They bear the responsibility for embracing Trump, they are culpable for their own deviant decline, they made these choices.
Those of us who have held firm, those few of us who have not abandoned traditional libertarian teachings, for example, look on in contempt and opposition at a fanatical horde that redefines moral concepts to suit its own malevolent appetites.
Was Trump enough to change these men? If so, then these men were scarcely men at all. They were instead mere shells, empty husks vulnerable to drifting about one way or another.
What Johnson once might have been matters less than what he now is: detestable.
Huge icefish colony of 60 million nests found on Antarctic seabed: