Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of forty. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:33 PM, for 9h 08m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 5.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the seven hundred eighty-fifth day.
Whitewater’s Fire Department Board of Directors is scheduled to meet at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1959, Alaska becomes the 49th state.
Recommended for reading in full:
Shawn Johnson reports Evers Planning To Visit Lincoln Hills During His First Week In Office:
Gov.-elect Tony Evers said he’ll visit the troubled Lincoln Hills juvenile prison during his first week in office, a move he said will let people working and serving time there know that he cares about what happens to them.
The visit would stand in sharp contrast to the approach of Gov. Scott Walker, who never visited Lincoln Hills or any other Wisconsin correctional facility during his eight years in office.
Ali Breland writes In 2018, Americans Took a Page From the Russian Disinformation Playbook:
Domestic disinformation and misinformation isn’t new. Outlandish conspiracy theories like Pizzagate went viral before 2018. Infowars, a pivotal progenitor of internet misinformation, has been online since 1999. “What’s new is the technology that makes it easy to set up websites, write dubious stories, modify videos, and spread them through social media, which gives them exposure that’s unprecedented,” explains Alan Rosenblatt, director of digital research at Lake Research Partners and a professor at George Washington University.
Before social media could amplify information in the way it does now, Infowars’ outrageous claims, including one that the 2010 film Machete was a part of a government plot to incite a race war, went relatively unnoticed. Now, hoaxes rip across the internet, leaving wakes big enough to cascade into national discourse.
In 2018, major technology giants finally deplatformed prominent hoax peddlers like Infowars creator Alex Jones, but his impact couldn’t be reversed. Even though he’s no longer on Facebook and Twitter, Jones’ domestic misinformation playbook is still etched into far-right internet circles.
Anne Gearan reports A defensive Trump calls a Cabinet meeting and uses it to boast, deflect and distract:
President Trump, 12 days into a government shutdown and facing new scrutiny from emboldened Democrats, inaugurated the new year Wednesday with a Cabinet meeting. It quickly became a 95-minute stream-of-consciousness defense of his presidency and worldview, filled with falsehoods, revisionist history and self-aggrandizement.
(Ninety-five minutes: now we know how long crushed Adderall can keep a morbidly obese, septuagenarian man going.)
Jennifer Rubin observes Trump doesn’t understand his leverage is gone:
One wondrous result of the 2018 election, we will discover, is the near-total irrelevance of Trump’s tweets. He can say whatever wacky thing he wants, throw out whatever insults he pleases, but Pelosi (D-Calif.), the incoming House speaker, is not going to be thrown off track or even alarmed. She takes his tweets as confirmation he is clueless and unstable.