Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-four. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:46 PM, for 9h 24m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 62.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the seven hundred ninety-seventh day.
Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1967, the Packers win the first Super Bowl (35-10 over the Chiefs).
Recommended for reading in full:
Julian E. Barnes and Helene Cooper report Trump Discussed Pulling U.S. From NATO, Aides Say Amid New Concerns Over Russia:
There are few things that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia desires more than the weakening of NATO, the military alliance among the United States, Europe and Canada that has deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years.
Last year, President Trump suggested a move tantamount to destroying NATO: the withdrawal of the United States.
Senior administration officials told The New York Times that several times over the course of 2018, Mr. Trump privately said he wanted to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Current and former officials who support the alliance said they feared Mr. Trump could return to his threat as allied military spending continued to lag behind the goals the president had set.
(No greater gift to Vladimir Vladimirovich than the end of American participation in the NATO alliance.)
Fred Kaplan considers Trump and Putin’s Cone of Seclusion (“It’s not just unusual that there are no notes from Trump’s meetings with Putin. It’s unprecedented”):
Whether his translator’s notes hold anything incriminating about Trump’s fealty to Putin, it is appalling that he would go into a one-on-one meeting with the Russian president without a note taker—especially given his shallow grasp of the issues and the very real possibility that he could have given away U.S. interests or disclosed vital secrets without understanding what he was doing. He also conducted his one-on-one with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, at their summit in Singapore, without a note taker present.
….
Quite aside from matters that may be of concern to special counsel Robert Mueller, who knows what concessions Trump may have made in these sessions? In the follow-on meetings that have since taken place between U.S. and North Korean negotiators, American diplomats have sometimes raised points that they consider vital—only to have their North Korean counterpart wave it away, saying, “Go talk with your president.” Did Trump concede these issues in his one-on-one without telling his subordinates? We may never know; some U.S. officials suspect he did.
Meg Jones reports USO Wisconsin collecting gift cards for Coast Guardsmen working without pay because of shutdown:
Like other federal workers working without pay, Coast Guard members and their families are facing hardship paying bills, buying groceries and filling gas tanks.
To help, USO Wisconsin has started a gift card collection for local Coast Guardsmen and their families.