Good morning. 
Sunday in Whitewater will be intermittently cloudy with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:35 PM, for 9h 10m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 72.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred fifty-third day.
On this day in 1781, British troops led by Benedict Arnold burn Virginia’s capital of Richmond.
Recommended for reading in full —
Hope Kirwan reports Wisconsin Egg Producers Set New Records As Demand For Cage-Free Continues:
The latest data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows Wisconsin farms produced 193 million eggs in November. That’s about 19 percent higher than in 2018 and the second month in a row that the state’s producers have set a new record high.
….
Scott Schneider owns Nature Link Farms in Jefferson and has produced cage-free eggs for the last 15 years.
“It seems to me anyway that that will be sort of the standard in the future, whereby most egg production will be cage-free,” Schneider said. “The big purchasers of eggs, the McDonald’s, the mayonnaise companies, those types of uses for eggs and egg products, those will be the ones that will start leading the pack. And I think it will take a little bit longer for the retail consumer to really start making those decisions to purchase cage-free eggs when they go to the grocery store.”
Schneider said smaller farms like his will need to find new ways to differentiate their products, like using free-range production or transitioning to organic.
David Corn and Matt Cohen write With a War Against Iran Brewing, Don’t Listen to the Hawks Who Lied Us Into Iraq:
Shortly after the news broke that a US airstrike in Baghdad ordered by President Donald Trump had killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Quds Force, Ari Fleischer went on Fox News and proclaimed, “I think it is entirely possible that this is going to be a catalyst inside Iran where the people celebrate this killing of Soleimani.”
Here we go again.
Fleischer was press secretary for President George W. Bush when the Bush-Cheney administration deployed a long stretch of false statements and lies—Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al Qaeda! Saddam had WMDs! Saddam intended to use WMDs against the United States! Saddam’s defeat would lead to peace and democracy in Iraq and throughout the region!—to grease the way to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. In that position, Fleischer was a key spokesperson for the war. Prior to the invasion, he promised the war would lead to a bright future: “Once the Iraqi people see that Saddam and those around him will be removed from power, they’ll welcome freedom, they’ll be a liberated people.” Instead, Iraq and the region were wracked with destabilization and death that continues to this day. About 200,000 Iraqi civilians lost their lives in the chaos and violence the Bush-Cheney invasion unleashed, and 4,500 US soldiers were killed in their war.