Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of sixty. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 5:54 PM, for 10h 31m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waxing cresent with 37% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 5 PM, and her Community Development Authority at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1881, the Earps and Doc Holliday battle the Clanton Gang at the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral:
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…a 30-second shootout between lawmen and members of a loosely organized group of outlaws called the Cowboys that took place at about 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday, October 26, 1881 in Tombstone, Arizona Territory. It is generally regarded as the most famous shootout in the history of the American Wild West. The gunfight was the result of a long-simmering feud, with Cowboys Billy Claiborne, Ike and Billy Clanton, and Tom and Frank McLauryon one side and town MarshalVirgil Earp, Special PolicemanMorgan Earp, Special Policeman Wyatt Earp, and temporary policeman Doc Holliday on the other side. All three Earp brothers had been the target of repeated death threats made by the Cowboys, who objected to the Earps’ interference in their illegal activities. Billy Clanton and both McLaury brothers were killed. Ike Clanton claimed that he was unarmed and ran from the fight, along with Billy Claiborne. Virgil, Morgan, and Doc Holliday were wounded, but Wyatt Earp was unharmed. The shootout has come to represent a period of the American Old West when the frontier was virtually an open range for outlaws, largely unopposed by law enforcement officers who were spread thin over vast territories….
On this date in 1863, Wisconsin’s governor receives authority to recruit black soliders in the defense of the Union:
Wisconsin Governor Edward Salomon received authority from the War Department to raise a regiment of African-American soldiers from Wisconsin. Colonel John A. Bross of Chicago sent African-American recruiting agents from Chicago into Wisconsin and succeeded in enlisting about 250 African-American soldiers. The 29th U.S. Colored Troops were eventually organized at Quincy, Illinois in April 1864.
Recommended for reading in full —
Raphael Satter reports [Russian software mogul] Kaspersky: We uploaded US documents [from our National Security Agency] but quickly deleted them:
PARIS (AP) — Sometime in 2014, a group of analysts walked into the office of Eugene Kaspersky, the ebullient founder of Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab, to deliver some sobering news.
Kaspersky’s anti-virus software had automatically scraped powerful digital surveillance tools off a computer in the United States and the analysts were worried: The data’s headers clearly identified the files as classified.
“They immediately came to my office,” Kaspersky recalled, “and they told me that they have a problem.”
He said there was no hesitation about what to do with the cache.
“It must be deleted,” Kaspersky says he told them.
The incident, recounted by Kaspersky during a brief telephone interview on Tuesday and supplemented by a timeline and other information provided by company officials, could not immediately be corroborated. But it’s the first public acknowledgement of a story that has been building for the past three weeks — that Kaspersky’s popular anti-virus program uploaded powerful digital espionage tools belonging to the National Security Agency from a computer in the United States and sent them to servers in Moscow.
The account provides new perspective on the U.S. government’s recent move to blacklist Kaspersky from federal computer networks, even if it still leaves important questions unanswered….
(Kaspersky would be nothing more than a ratcatcher without Putin’s approval. Nothing more. For it all, these are the men with whom Trump believes “we could have a good relationship.”)
Peter Baker reports Pitched as Calming Force, John Kelly Instead Mirrors Boss’s Priorities:
WASHINGTON — This past summer, the Trump administration debated lowering the annual cap on refugees admitted to the United States. Should it stay at 110,000, be cut to 50,000 or fall somewhere in between? John F. Kelly offered his opinion. If it were up to him, he said, the number would be between zero and one.
Mr. Kelly’s comment made its way around the White House, according to an administration official, and reinforced what is only now becoming clear to many on the outside. While some officials had predicted Mr. Kelly would be a calming chief of staff for an impulsive president, recent days have made clear that he is more aligned with President Trump than anticipated.
For all of the talk of Mr. Kelly as a moderating force and the so-called grown-up in the room, it turns out that he harbors strong feelings on patriotism, national security and immigration that mirror the hard-line views of his outspoken boss. With his attack on a congresswoman who had criticized Mr. Trump’s condolence call to a slain soldier’s widow last week, Mr. Kelly showed that he was willing to escalate a politically distracting, racially charged public fight even with false assertions….
(Kelly is, in meaningful measure, what Trump is – he wouldn’t be near Trump otherwise.)
Logan Wroge writes Wisconsin has largest well-being gap between white and black children, report says:
African-American children in Wisconsin are facing the biggest gap across the nation in well-being compared to their white counterparts, according to a report released Tuesday.
The Race for Results report, prepared by nonprofit The Annie E. Casey Foundation, used 12 indexes to determine the overall well-being of children across the United States based on a composite score of 1,000. Wisconsin had the biggest disparity between black and white children, the report said….
Of 44 states for which data was available, Wisconsin ranked 41st for African-American children with a score of 279. Across all states, white Wisconsin children ranked 10th with a well-being score of 762. The 483-point difference was the largest among the 44 states with data for white and black children…
Kevin Crowe and Ashley Luthern report The cost of police misconduct in Milwaukee: $21 million – and growing:
Police misconduct has cost Milwaukee taxpayers at least $17.5 million in legal settlements since 2015, forcing the city to borrow money to make the payouts amid an ever-tightening budget.
That amount jumps to at least $21.4 million when interest paid on the borrowing and fees paid to outside attorneys are factored in, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis found.
In some cases, the costs pile up as the city continues to fight the cases for months or years, even after officers have been fired or criminally convicted in the same misconduct case. The costs far outstrip the $1.2 million the city sets aside each year for settling all of the claims it faces.
And they likely will keep rising.
The price of police misconduct has come under scrutiny as city officials face a daunting budget and consider closing six fire stations and cutting jobs in the police and fire departments. At budget hearings, Common Council members have repeatedly pressed police officials and the city attorney’s office on what more could be done to ward off lawsuits.
“Better training, better screening of applicants, all kinds of factors that could enter into the picture,” Ald. Robert Bauman said in an interview.
“But clearly, for acts that have already occurred, we’re on the hook,” he said. “Just have the police stop violating civil rights, and we’d have plenty of money for fire houses”….
What did fruits and vegetables looked like before we domesticated them? Like this —