Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of twenty-three. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 4:58 PM, for 9h 41m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 84.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred sixth day.
On this day in 1864, the 23rd Wisconsin Infantry continues its reconnaissance mission on the Matagorda Peninsula, Texas.
Recommended for reading in full:
Seung Min Kim and Felicia Sonmez report Pelosi tells Trump: No State of the Union address in the House until government is reopened:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday rescinded her invitation to President Trump to deliver the State of the Union in the House next week — denying him a national platform for the annual speech in an extraordinary standoff between the two most powerful figures in the nation.
Late Wednesday, the president signaled a retreat from the standoff, announcing on Twitter that he will wait till the shutdown is over to deliver the address to Congress.
(David Frum, in 2017, was right about Trump: “Regular reminder that Donald Trump’s core competency is not dealmaking with powerful counter-parties. It is duping gullible victims.” Trump thought that he could force his way into a State of the Union address – Pelosi properly asserted an independent legislative authority to bring the House into session.)
George Will asks Why do people such as Lindsey Graham come to Congress?:
Back in the day, small rural airports had textile windsocks, simple and empty things that indicated which way the wind was blowing. The ubiquitous Sen. Lindsey O. Graham has become a political windsock, and as such, he — more than the sturdy, substantial elephant — is emblematic of his party today.
When in 1994, Graham, a South Carolina Republican, first ran for Congress, he promised to be “one less vote for an agenda that makes you want to throw up.” A quarter-century later, Graham himself is a gastrointestinal challenge.
….
Seven times, Graham has taken the oath of congressional office, “solemnly” swearing to “support and defend the Constitution” and to “bear true faith and allegiance” to it, “without any mental reservation.” Graham, who is just 1 percent of one-half of one of the three branches of one of the nation’s many governments, is, however, significant as a symptom. When the Trump presidency is just a fragrant memory, the political landscape will still be cluttered with some of this president’s simple and empty epigones, the make-believe legislators who did not loudly and articulately recoil from the mere suggestion of using a declared emergency to set aside the separation of powers.
Tom Jones reports Gannett lays off journalists across the country. The Journal Sentinel bought out six reporters in December; there are likely to be more departures in January. (Of those departures, that of Karen Herzog – a punch-pulling reporter if ever there were one – is no loss to local journalism.)