Good morning. 
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with a dusting of snow, and a high of forty. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 5:54 PM, for 10h 30m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 77.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand four hundred forty-eighth day.
The Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 7 PM.
On this day in 1944, America is victorious at the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
Recommended for reading in full —
Lisa Rein, Josh Dawsey, and Toluse Olorunnipa report Trump’s historic assault on the civil service was four years in the making:
President Trump’s extraordinary directive allowing his administration to weed out career federal employees viewed as disloyal in a second term is the product of a four-year campaign by conservatives working from a little-known West Wing policy shop.
Soon after Trump took office, a young aide hired from the Heritage Foundation with bold ideas for reining in the sprawling bureaucracy of 2.1 million came up with a blueprint. Trump would hold employees accountable, sideline their labor unions and give the president more power to hire and fire them, much like political appointees.
The plan was a counterweight to the “deep state” Trump believed was out to disrupt his agenda. Coordinating labor policy for the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, James Sherk presented his bosses with a 19-page to-do list titled “Proposed Labor Reforms.” A top category was “Creating a government that serves the people.”
The result this week threatens to be the most significant assault on the nonpartisan civil service in its 137-year history: a sweeping executive order that strips job protections from employees in policy roles across the government. Exactly which roles would be affected will be up to personnel officials at federal agencies, who were tasked on Friday with reviewing all of their jobs and deciding who would qualify.
Julian Borger reports Republicans closely resemble autocratic parties in Hungary and Turkey – study (Swedish university finds ‘dramatic shift’ in GOP under Trump, shunning democratic norms and encouraging violence):
The Republican party has become dramatically more illiberal in the past two decades and now more closely resembles ruling parties in autocratic societies than its former centre-right equivalents in Europe, according to a new international study.
In a significant shift since 2000, the GOP has taken to demonising and encouraging violence against its opponents, adopting attitudes and tactics comparable to ruling nationalist parties in Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey.
The shift has both led to and been driven by the rise of Donald Trump.
By contrast the Democratic party has changed little in its attachment to democratic norms, and in that regard has remained similar to centre-right and centre-left parties in western Europe. Their principal difference is the approach to the economy.
The new study, the largest ever of its kind, was carried out by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, using newly developed methods to measure and quantify the health of the world’s democracies at a time when authoritarianism is on the rise.
Anna Lührmann, V-Dem’s deputy director, said the Republican transformation had been “certainly the most dramatic shift in an established democracy”.
Belarus protests: Riot police use stun grenades as opposition calls for a general strike: