Daily Bread for 1.17.17

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be rainy, with a high of thirty-five, and an even chance of afternoon snow showers. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:49 PM, for 9h 29m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 72.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}seventieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Common Council will meet tonight at 6:30 PM (part of the session will include a joint meeting with the Planning Commission).

On this day in 1706, Benjamin Franklin is born. On this day in 1900, women working at a cotton mill near Janesville go on strike for higher wages.

Recommended for reading in full —

Andrew Kaczynski and Jim Acosta report that Monica Crowley bows out of Trump administration post following plagiarism revelations: “The move comes after CNN’s KFile uncovered multiple instances of plagiarism in her 2012 book, her columns for the Washington Times, and her 2000 Ph.D. dissertation for Columbia University. Crowley was slated to be the senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council in Trump’s administration….CNN’s KFILE originally reported last week that Crowley had plagiarized more than 50 times in her 2012 book “What the Bleep Just Happened.” In response to the story, publisher HarperCollins pulled the book from sales until it could be updated to include proper attribution. CNN’s KFILE later found thousands of words plagiarized in Crowley’s 2000 dissertation for her Columbia University Ph.D. Columbia has said any review of her work would be kept confidential. A review of Crowley’s columns for the Washington Times also found plagiarism in seven columns.”

Paul Farhi reports on How Ed Schultz transformed from MSNBC lefty to the American face of Moscow media: “In mid-2015, MSNBC handed Schultz his last paycheck. After six years on the air, the ratings of his daily program, “The Ed Show,” were soft and MSNBC was going for more news in Schultz’s time slot, not opinion. His daily radio show had ended the previous year. So Schultz went back to his lakefront home in Detroit Lakes, Minn., and took stock. At 61, after a lifetime in broadcasting, he concluded he wasn’t done. In early 2016, he returned to television, albeit in an unlikely place and role for a guy who once styled himself as a “prairie populist.” He became the lead news anchor for RT America, the domestic network of what was once known as Russia Today, a globe-spanning multimedia organization funded by the Russian government….Stanford professor Michael McFaul, the former American ambassador to Russia, calls RT “an instrument of the Russian state. Their mission is to advance the mission of Mr. Putin and the [Russian] government.” By mimicking the look and feel of an American newscast — even to the extent of permitting an occasional dissent from the Kremlin-centric line — RT is trying to “disguise” its real intent, he said. And Schultz is part of the strategy, says McFaul. “They put on a lot of Americans as hosts and journalists,” he said. “The idea is to obfuscate and confuse people about it being a government entity.”

Brian Stetler describes Team Trump tactics: Deny, conflate, confuse:

Robert McFadden reports that Eugene Cernan, Last Human to Walk on Moon, Dies at 82: “A ferocious competitor with a test pilot’s reckless streak, Mr. Cernan (pronounced SIR-nun) rocketed into space three times, was the second American to drift weightless around the world on a tether, went to the moon twice and shattered aerospace records on the Earth and the moon. He also slid down a banister on a visit to the White House and once crashed a helicopter in the Atlantic while chasing a dolphin. Skimming the lunar surface in a rehearsal for the first manned landing, he erupted with salty language heard by millions when his craft briefly spun out of control. But he made spacewalks and romps over the lunar surface look routine, and in a way they were. Three and a half years after Neil A. Armstrong took mankind’s first step onto the lunar surface in 1969, Mr. Cernan, a Navy captain and one of the nation’s most experienced astronauts, landed with a geologist-astronaut near the Sea of Serenity in the final chapter of the Apollo program, America’s audacious venture to fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 pledge to put Americans on the moon.”

DJI World presents The Eagle Huntress (for see Aisholpan’s full story, see the SONY Pictures feature-length documentary The Eagle Huntress at http://sonyclassics.com/theeaglehuntress):