Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with snow in the afternoon, and a high of twenty-eight. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:48 PM, for 9h 27m 41s of daytime. The moon is in its third-quarter with 50% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred sixty-fifth day.
On this day in 1998, Matt Drudge breaks the news of the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky affair on his Drudge Report website.
Recommended for reading in full —
Paul Fanlund writes Can any of the Democratic candidates inspire ‘low-information’ voters as Obama did?:
That same evening in Milwaukee, Donald Trump was doing what he always does — spouting hate, telling lies — and simply being bizarre. “Trump went on another rambling rant about ‘worthless’ new dishwashers, weak showers, and lightbulbs that make you ‘look orange’ at a Milwaukee rally,” said the Business Insider headline.
Two asides. One, does he really think it’s lightbulbs that make him look orange?
Two, I recall covering President Ronald Reagan’s speech many years ago in the same Milwaukee arena. Reagan was relentlessly sunny, all optimism and opportunity. Trump has moved the GOP 180 degrees — it’s all about anger, illusory threats and grievances.
It was another in a seemingly endless string of rallies in which Trump surrounds himself with sycophants. Borrowing a passage from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Trump’s was a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Sadly, the Democratic debate also signified little. It was another tedious, mixed-decision event that probably attracted the already decided and few others. I’d imagine many here were tuned instead to Badgers basketball as they beat Maryland on a last-second shot.
Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Vanessa Williams, Dan Balz, and Scott Clement report Black Americans deeply pessimistic about country under Trump, whom more than 8 in 10 describe as ‘a racist,’ Post-Ipsos poll finds:
President Trump made a stark appeal to black Americans during the 2016 election when he asked, “What have you got to lose?” Three years later, black Americans have rendered their verdict on his presidency with a deeply pessimistic assessment of their place in the United States under a leader seen by an overwhelming majority as racist.
The findings come from a Washington Post-Ipsos poll of African Americans nationwide, which reveals fears about whether their children will have a fair shot to succeed and a belief that white Americans don’t fully appreciate the discrimination that black people experience.
While personally optimistic about their own lives, black Americans today offer a bleaker view about their community as a whole. They also express determination to try to limit Trump to a single term in office.
More than 8 in 10 black Americans say they believe Trump is a racist and that he has made racism a bigger problem in the country. Nine in 10 disapprove of his job performance overall.
The pessimism goes well beyond assessments of the president. A 65 percent majority of African Americans say it is a “bad time” to be a black person in America. That view is widely shared by clear majorities of black adults across income, generational and political lines. By contrast, 77 percent of black Americans say it is a “good time” to be a white person, with a wide majority saying white people don’t understand the discrimination faced by black Americans.
(These poll respondents are right about Trump, and right in their dedication to cast him into a political outer darkness.)