Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of nine. Sunrise is 7:14 AM and sunset 5:00 PM, for 9h 46m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 64.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred eighth day.
On this day in 1925, a fire destroys the Whitewater Hospital (“monetary losses were estimated at $20,000, but no deaths were reported.”).
Recommended for reading in full:
Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey, and Seung Min Kim report ‘Prisoner of his own impulse’: Inside Trump’s cave to end shutdown without wall:
His poll numbers were plummeting. His FBI director was decrying the dysfunction. The nation’s air travel was in chaos. Federal workers were lining up at food banks. Economic growth was at risk of flatlining, and even some Republican senators were in open revolt.
So on Friday, the 35th day of a government shutdown that he said he was proud to instigate, President Trump finally folded. After vowing for weeks that he would keep the government closed unless he secured billions in funding for his promised border wall, Trump agreed to reopen it.
He got $0 instead.
Trump’s capitulation to Democrats marked a humiliating low point in a polarizing presidency and sparked an immediate backlash among some conservative allies, who cast him as a wimp.
….
“He was the prisoner of his own impulse and it turned into a catastrophe for him,” said David Axelrod, who was a White House adviser to President Barack Obama. “The House of Representatives has power and authority — and now a speaker who knows how to use it — so that has to become part of his calculation or he’ll get embarrassed again.”
(If Axelrod should be right – and it seems so – then a disordered man like Trump, in the grip of his impulses, will get embarrassed again. Such a man will learn nothing from past mistakes.)
Kelly Meyerhofer reports $840,000 redistricting contract released after Robin Vos initially refused to provide it:
A law firm hired by Republican state lawmakers to help defend them in a redistricting lawsuit can collect up to an $840,000 fee, but taxpayers could end up paying even more, according to a newly released contract.
The lawsuit is part of an ongoing court battle over Wisconsin’s legislative district maps passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature and then-Gov. Scott Walker in 2011. Before the latest contract, taxpayers had already paid some $2.5 million to outside law firms to draft and defend the maps in court.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, initially refused to release the latest contract to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in late December, citing an attorney-client privilege exemption in the state’s open records law.
Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council president Bill Lueders said at the time that he believed the denial of the newspaper’s request was illegal.
(Vos relented and released this contract, but claims a right to withhold other similar contracts in the future.)
Here’s the contract:
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