Good morning. 
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of thirty-one. Sunrise is 7:18 AM and sunset 4:53 PM, for 9h 34m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 46.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is both the one thousand five hundred thirty-fourth day, the seventy-fifth day.
Whitewater’s Parks and Recreation Board will meet via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1986, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is celebrated as a federal holiday for the first time.
Recommended for reading in full —
Susan Glasser writes Obituary for a Failed Presidency:
In the end, Trump was everything his haters feared—a chaos candidate, in the prescient words of one of his 2016 rivals, who became a chaos President. An American demagogue, he embraced division and racial discord, railed against a “deep state” within his own government, praised autocrats and attacked allies, politicized the administration of justice, monetized the Presidency for himself and his children, and presided over a tumultuous, turnover-ridden Administration via impulsive tweets. He leaves office, Gallup reported this week, with the lowest average approval ratings in the history of the modern Presidency. Defeated by Joe Biden in the 2020 election by seven million votes, Trump became the first incumbent seeking reëlection to see his party lose the White House, Senate, and the House of Representatives since Herbert Hoover, in 1932. A liar on an unprecedented scale, Trump made more than thirty thousand false statements in the course of his Presidency, according to the Washington Post, culminating in perhaps the biggest lie of all: that he won an election that he decisively lost.
Yet Republicans—the vast majority, that is, of those who still identify themselves as Republicans—continue to embrace Trump and the conspiracy theories about his defeat that the departing President has spread to explain his loss. This, more than anything, might have been the most surprising thing about Trump’s tenure: his ability to turn one of America’s two political parties into a cult of personality organized around a repeatedly bankrupt New York real-estate developer. And so we are ending these four years having learned not that Donald Trump is a bad man—the evidence of that was already voluminous and incontrovertible before he entered politics—but that there are millions of Americans who were willing to overthrow our constitutional system in order to keep him in power, who would follow Trump’s dark lies rather than acknowledge unwelcome truths.
Molly Blackall writes Hand on the Bible, eyes on the future at Biden’s inauguration:
Joe Biden will be sworn in as the next president of the US today, taking the oath of office at the Capitol two weeks after it was stormed, smashed and looted by rioters seeking to overturn his election victory. Washington is a far cry from the usual inauguration setting: the parades and cheering crowds have been replaced by a militarised zone and 25,000 National Guard troops. A dozen troops were removed from their posts yesterday after FBI screening, amid fears of an insider attack.
Back in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden gave a tearful address to his supporters before he traveled to Washington to take up residency at the White House. He paid homage to his home town and issued a message of hope, saying: “I know these are dark times but there’s always light.” The oldest president yet, Biden will take the reins at midday today.
Wanted to take a moment to say thanks Free Whitewater. Some of us thought Trump was going to be okay but you were right. Lots of guys kept their heads down to avoid a stand. It would have been easy to split the difference here but yes he was the crap slinger Free Whitewater said he was. You took a hard line on Trump from the start plus kept laying it out. Big dogs take the lead I guess. Congrats John Adams you gained extra credibility with 4 yrs of hard truth. Keep it up. (We know you will)