Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy, with a high of thirty-two. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 4:58 PM, for 9h 42m 25s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 46.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fortieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1935, the first canned beer goes on sale: “Krueger’s Cream Ale and Krueger’s Finest Beer were the first beers sold to the public in cans. Canned beer was an immediate success. The public loved it, giving it a 91 percent approval rating. Compared to glass, the cans were lightweight, cheap, and easy to stack and ship. Unlike bottles, you didn’t have to pay a deposit and then return the cans for a refund. By summer Krueger was buying 180,000 cans a day from American Can, and other breweries decided to follow.” (Draft or bottled seems – to me – preferable to canned, but the practicality of cans is understandable.)
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Jesse Garza reports Aurora Sinai suspends employees after homeless patient is left on sidewalk in Milwaukee:
An undisclosed number of employees at Aurora Sinai Medical Center in downtown Milwaukee were suspended Tuesday after reports that a mentally ill homeless patient was discharged and left on a cold, wet sidewalk outside the hospital.
A photo and video of a shoeless man – clad in pants and what appears to be a hospital gown and sitting on a sidewalk outside the hospital –began circulating on social media and television stations after the incident allegedly occurred Monday.
Eva Welch, director of Street Angels Milwaukee Outreach, said the person who took the video told her the man was rolled across the street from the hospital in a wheelchair and left on the sidewalk outside the facility, 945 N. 12th St.
Welch said the man is mentally ill and was brought to a shelter two weeks before by West Allis police after being treated at a different hospital for frostbite to his right foot.
➤ Emily Guskin reports Most Americans don’t trust President Trump with the ‘nuclear button’:
About half of Americans are concerned that President Trump might launch a nuclear attack without justification, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
This worry comes as Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un continue to provoke each other on Twitter and follows a previous Post-ABC poll that found a large majority of Americans are concerned about the United States going to war with North Korea.
Overall, 38 percent of Americans trust Trump to handle the authority to order nuclear attacks on other countries, while 60 percent do not. Among those who distrust Trump, almost 9 in 10 are very or somewhat concerned the president might launch an attack.
Combining those results, the poll finds 52 percent of the public overall is concerned the president might launch a nuclear attack without reason, including one-third who say they are “very” concerned, according to the poll.
➤ Ellen Nakashima, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett report Trump asked the acting FBI director how he voted during Oval Office meeting:
Shortly after President Trump fired his FBI director in May, he summoned to the Oval Office the bureau’s acting director for a get-to-know-you meeting.
The two men exchanged pleasantries, but before long, Trump, according to several current and former U.S. officials, asked Andrew McCabe a pointed question: Whom did he vote for in the 2016 election?
McCabe said he didn’t vote, according to the officials, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about a sensitive matter.
Trump, the officials said, also vented his anger at McCabe over the several hundred thousand dollars in donations that his wife, a Democrat, received for her failed 2015 Virginia state Senate bid from a political action committee controlled by a close friend of Hillary Clinton.
(There’s almost no political, ethical, or cultural norm Trump won’t violate.)
➤ Conor Friedersdorf explains Trump and Russia Both Seek to Exacerbate the Same Political Divisions (“A country is in a precarious place when its foreign adversaries and its president are both trying to increase its political polarization along the same lines.”):
But if the share of today’s whites who regard black NFL players as uppity ingrates significantly shrinks; if fear of Muslim immigrants wanes; if native-born Americans bear less animosity toward undocumented Mexican immigrants, regardless of their views on border security or illegal immigration; then all of those wins for American unity would be blows to the political prospects of Trump, Pence, the GOP in the 2018 midterms, and the foreign adversaries who want to weaken the United States.
Thus, they divide Americans as a means to an end, and the GOP as a whole is implicated. The deal with the devil that Republicans made by embracing a charlatan birther, sticking with him through a bigoted campaign, and propelling him to a victory that thrilled the likes of Richard Spencer has a clause that does ongoing harm to our country: One of America’s two political parties now benefits politically, in the short term, from the polarization of the country along racial and ethnic lines, just as surely as the Republican Party of 1968 and 1972 benefited from that era’s tumult and division.
Not all or even most Trump supporters are racists or authoritarians, but the 2018 midterms will go better for the GOP if turnout among racists and authoritarians is strong, and it will go poorly for the party if anti-authoritarians turn out in record numbers. That is the unenviable incentive structure that Trumpism creates.
➤ This New Google App Finds Your Fine Art Doppelgänger