Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of twelve below, and much colder wind chill temperatures. Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 5:05 PM, for 9h 55m 20s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 24.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred twelfth day.
On this day in 1948, an assassin kills Gandhi.
Recommended for reading in full:
Conservative Michael Gerson writes Trump is a fraud:
His reputation as a self-made billionaire lies in ruins. An extensive New York Times article on Trump’s wealth found a bassinet millionaire, consistently bailed out of bad bets, who dodged gift taxes, milked his empire for cash and cultivated a deceptive image of business brilliance. And special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation may reveal serious corruption and perjury in cataloguing Trump’s 30-year panting desire to sell his brand in Russia.
And who can take Trump seriously as a manager? He has a talent for weeding out the talented and responsible. He is a world-class nepotist. He is incapable of delegation or of taking conflicting advice. He is unreliable in dealing with his allies. He is capable of taking several conflicting policy views on the same topic — be it health care, or the “dreamers,” or gun control — in a matter of days or hours. He often has no clear goals. He has no attention span and is consistently ignorant of details. He is prone to vicious and public abuse of rivals and of employees. Try to put that profile up on LinkedIn.
Those 37 percent who approve of Trump’s performance may point to the state of the economy or the composition of the Supreme Court. They may be impressed by his destruction of norms or enthused by his promotion of exclusion. They may want a president who speaks his mind, even when it is hateful gibberish. They may want a president who is an institutional arsonist, even if the result is mere destruction.
….
We have plumbed the shallows of his boasts. They are refuted lies. And whatever else the president may be, he is a fraud.
Chuck Rosenberg writes Roger Stone’s Arrest Was Appropriate, Not Heavy-Handed:
Read, for instance, page 20 of the indictment, where prosecutors note that Stone emailed one witness and called him a “rat” and a “stoolie” and threatened to take that witness’s dog away from him. In another email that same day to that same witness, according to the indictment, Stone wrote “I am so ready. Let’s get it on. Prepare to die [expletive].”
Law enforcement simply does not hand a summons to someone who threatens to kill a witness and trust that person to act responsibly with it. No conscientious prosecutor would think a summons appropriate there, or think that a threat to kill a witness is simply what targets of grand jury investigations routinely do.
The witness tampering alleged here is more than just someone asking another, “pretty please,” to lie. Rather, it includes a death threat against a witness: “Prepare to die [expletive].”
Bringing a fossil to life by reverse-engineering locomotion: