Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be overcast with a high of thirty-three. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:38 PM, for 9h 13m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 37.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is both the one thousand five hundred twenty-first day and the sixty-second day.
The Whitewater Fire Department Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1927, the first transatlantic telephone service is established from New York City to London.
Recommended for reading in full —
Dan Rather writes of the Trumpists that
All of this was predictable. It was predicted. And the lasting shame of history will be on all those who refused to act out of cowardice, ambition, or their own allegiance to an authoritarian movement.
John Cassidy writes This Violent Insurrection Is What Trump Wanted:
Before the mob broke into the Capitol, Trump addressed a large group of his supporters who had gathered on the Ellipse, the park just south of the White House. Referring to the election, he declared, “There has never been anything like this—it’s a pure theft—in American history.” Later on, after repeating a long litany of bogus claims about voter fraud, he said, “This is a criminal enterprise.” He ended his speech by saying, “We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Ave. . . . We’re going to try and give our Republicans—the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help—we’re going to try and give them kind of pride and boldness they need to take back our country.”
For the past four years, there has been a tendency in some quarters to downplay Trump’s incendiary rhetoric. Ever since the election, it has been incessant. With Mitch McConnell and other leading Republicans pledging to accept the election results, Trump’s attempt to bully Congress into submission was—and is—destined to fail. But, when you are dealing with would-be authoritarians like Trump, it is a mistake to focus exclusively on the formal institutions of government; the danger comes from outside the system.
Dan Barry and Sheera Frenkel report ‘Be There. Will Be Wild!’: Trump All but Circled the Date:
For weeks, President Trump and his supporters had been proclaiming Jan. 6, 2021, as a day of reckoning. A day to gather in Washington to “save America” and “stop the steal” of the election he had decisively lost, but which he still maintained — often through a toxic brew of conspiracy theories — that he had won by a landslide.
And when that day came, the president rallied thousands of his supporters with an incendiary speech. Then a large mob of those supporters, many waving Trump flags and wearing Trump regalia, violently stormed the Capitol to take over the halls of government and send elected officials into hiding, fearing for their safety.
But if the chaos in the Capitol shocked the country, one of the most disturbing aspects of this most disturbing day was that it could be seen coming. The president himself had all but circled it on the nation’s calendar.
“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Mr. Trump tweeted on Dec. 19, just one of several of his tweets promoting the day. “Be there, will be wild!”
Robin Givhan writes Flying the flag of fascism for Trump:
What to call these people? To describe them as protesters is to undermine those who take to the streets in peace, who raise their voices in hopes of making the country better — not to demolish it. Are they traitors? Terrorists? Radicals? Thugs? They are all of those things — a national quilt of our worst impulses and characteristics.
….
And they rampaged through the Capitol posting photos of themselves and one another breaking into the offices of the speaker of the House, looting and rioting and threatening — and, at least initially, being greeted like overzealous tourists compared with the way in which some law enforcement has beaten back Black Lives Matter and racial justice demonstrators.
I sat around yesterday in front of the wide-screen TV with the eerie feeling that if I only had a hamper filled with cold fried chicken and potato salad, I could be re-enacting the picnickers-at-the-battle-of-Bull-Run slice of civil war history. As a politics junkie, it doesn’t get a lot better than watching a coup fail in real-time.
It got real for the Republican Party yesterday. Four years ago, they had it all. Now the House, The Senate, and the Presidency is gone. The party is irreparably split, with some calling for 25th amendment solutions and most others going down with the ship. Amongst those lashed to the Trumpian mast are Wisco-World’s own Tom Tiffany, Scott Fitzgerald, and especially RoJo, all of which are sure that the very same persons that elected them (most recently Tiffany and Fitz) did so illegally. 147 Republicans voted against certification. This was after they were invaded by Trumpers, affirming their positions as agreeing to the coup. That’s a tough position for a party of bogo-patriots to explain. “Antifa False Flag” won’t work.
The problem, of course, is that Trump is impossibly bad at everything he does except dispensing bullshit. Staging a coup w/o military backing is precision insurrection, and Trump is not really all that cunning. Somehow, subverting the Capitol Police isn’t the same as having the 82nd Airborne parachute in. What he has done is hang all of his supporters, from Pence on down, out to dry. The first law of coups to get them done, as Truth and Reconciliation commissions can be uncomfortable to participate in. That is the position that Trump has put the Republicans in. They don’t have Barr and Yertle to protect them anymore. The guy they stiffed for the Supreme Court is going to be the Attorney General. I remain of the opinion the Trump will go into exile. The blowback from yesterday will be ugly, and Trump will be made uncomfortable, at the least. I thought he would likely skate in the name of “looking forward” before yesterday, but I’m not so sure, now.
He, his eponymous buffoon spalpeen, and his insane attorney, , incited a coup on TV, then retired to the West-Wing to watch it all unfold on FOX, while sipping Diet Cokes, no doubt. Trump, of course, astride his white horse, sword unsheathed and at the ready, led the charge, at least in the minds of his supporters.
He has nothing left but a wag-the-dog war, and I think the military got all of the excuse they needed yesterday to ignore him. He’ll be out of the country by the inauguration.
Yes, to all of this – he did fail, as he has failed all his life: with his family, in business, in relations with others, and in the four years of misery he has brought to America.
He should go, out of America never to return. It would make reasonable Americans happier to know he will not live among us. He is unworthy of this nation. One sees that Scotland’s first minister would rather he stayed away, and who can blame her? And yet, there must be some place that will take him, for a price.
Yesterday (into this morning, truly) ended better than it began.
There were astonishing sights along the way. Most people are very clever, but most would not apply to this horde, having as its composition the deluded, deranged, or simply dim. One may be thankful for their deficiencies: a more capable band would have done more harm. The ones who carried zip ties must have hoped for hostages; it’s fortunate that they were inadequate to their task.
(A troop of baboons, for example, let loose from the National Zoo, would have had keener – and so dangerous – instincts. But these people were more dangerous through their numbers and fanaticism. There are no animating conspiracy theories among apes…)
Out with him. Afterward, America can respond through litigation and ostracism to operatives, surrogates, etc., over the next two years.