Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny, with a high of sixteen. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:47 PM, for 9h 25m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 61.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred sixty-fourth day.
On this day in 1945, facing defeat on all fronts, Hitler moves into his underground Fuhrerbunker located near the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.
Recommended for reading in full —
Bruce Murphy writes Why a Voter Purge Is So Critical (‘The goal is to reelect Trump. Even if that means purging some Republican voters, too’):
Nationally and in Wisconsin, purging the voting list has been proven a great way to remove Democratic-leaning voters. “The number of purged voters has been especially dramatic in Milwaukee and Dane counties, the state’s two heaviest Democratic strongholds, where nearly one in four voters have been removed from the rolls,” the CMD found. “Milwaukee County has lost 150,954 voters since the end of 2016, a 26% decrease; Dane County has lost 88,254, a 23% drop.”
Yes, the system drops some voters in Republican areas, but GOP strategists are willing to disenfranchise some of their likely voters in return for wiping out much larger numbers of Democratic voters. Moreover, Milwaukee and Dane County have by far the most outmanned election polls, where the confusion caused by purged voters could cause the most problems. “It is very likely that thousands of voters will show up to vote in November only to find that they are no longer registered,” said CMD’s David Armiak. “Fortunately, Wisconsin allows election day registration, but this could lead to confusion and delays during what is expected to be a high turnout election.”
Justin Clark, a senior political adviser and senior counsel to Trump’s reelection campaign, recently told told influential Republicans in Wisconsin that the party has “traditionally” relied on voter suppression to compete in battleground states. Esenberg and his ever-growing staff of Harvard degree lawyers are doing their best to assure that happens.
And never has that strategy made more sense than for a president who has never had the approval of a majority of the voters. Republicans need to find every way possible to suppress or discourage voting by Democrats and independents in the 2020 election or President Trump won’t be reelected. And no state is more critical to that effort. The vote in Wisconsin, many experts believe, could decide the election, and even the purging of a small percent of the state’s voters could do the trick. Trump won this state in 2016 by just 22,748 out of about 2.9 million cast.
To Jacobs, the giveaway is that [Rick] Esenberg and others pushing to purge the voter lists only want efforts “to kick voters off the rolls,” not to add any voters who were mistakenly removed. “That tells you what this is all about.”
Riley Vetterkind reports Incumbent Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly outraises rivals as he gets nod from Donald Trump:
Conservative-backed Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly raised more than double the amount of liberal-backed opponent Jill Karofsky in the last half of 2019, and he garnered President Donald Trump’s endorsement at a rally Tuesday evening.
As the state nears the Feb. 18 primary, preliminary reports show Kelly raised $556,184, compared with $227,553 for Karofsky, a Dane County Circuit Court judge. The other liberal-supported candidate in the race, Marquette Law School professor Ed Fallone, hasn’t yet provided detailed fundraising figures for the last half of the year, but his campaign says he raised $150,000 during all of 2019.