Good morning. 
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-five. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 5:52 PM, for 10h 27m 33s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand eighty-fourth day.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets at 6:30 PM in closed session, with an open session beginning at 7 PM.
On this day in 1886, Pres. Cleveland presides over the dedication of the Statue of Liberty.
Recommended for reading in full:
Nicholas Fandos and Michael S. Schmidt report Moving Closer to Trump, Impeachment Inquiry Faces Critical Test:
House impeachment investigators are speeding toward new White House barriers meant to block crucial testimony and evidence from the people who are closest to President Trump — obstacles that could soon test the limits of Democrats’ fact finding a month into their inquiry.
What has been a rapidly moving investigation securing damning testimony from witnesses who have defied White House orders may soon become a more arduous effort. Investigators are now trying to secure cooperation from higher-ranking advisers who can offer more direct accounts of Mr. Trump’s actions but are also more easily shielded from Congress.
Democrats are likely to face the first such roadblock on Monday, when one of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers is expected to defy a subpoena as he awaits a federal court to determine whether he can speak with impeachment investigators. But others could soon follow, legal experts and lawmakers say, forcing Democratic leaders toward a consequential choice: Try to force cooperation through the courts or move on to begin making an argument for impeachment in public.
Craig Gilbert observes The white blue-collar vote is seen as Trump’s base in Wisconsin. But it’s actually divided into multiple parts:
“Blue-collar white” has become shorthand for the Trump vote.
But as voluminous polling on Trump in Wisconsin makes clear, white blue-collar voters are far from a uniform bloc.
While they were the primary force behind Trump’s 2016 victory in this state, they have been very divided over his performance in office.
Since he entered the White House, Trump’s approval rating with blue-collar whites of all ages in Wisconsin is only slightly more positive than negative: 50% approve, 45% disapprove, combining more than three years of surveys by the Marquette University Law School. That is a little worse than Trump’s numbers with this same demographic group in national polls.
The Marquette polling shows Trump’s standing among non-college whites varies dramatically by gender, age, marital status and religion – many of the chief dividing lines in modern politics.
In fact, Trump’s true demographic base in Wisconsin is not blue-collar white voters collectively, but blue-collar white men, and — above all — blue-collar white evangelicals, who support him overwhelmingly.
Among many other segments of the blue-collar white vote, opinions of the Trump presidency are either evenly divided (as they are among married women and mainline Protestants), or negative (as they are among unmarried women and non-religious voters).
It looks like our own RoJo has managed to get himself involved in Trump’s Ukrainian adventure:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sen-johnson-ally-of-trump-and-ukraine-surfaces-in-crucial-episodes-in-the-saga/2019/10/28/40b9e44c-f684-11e9-8cf0-4cc99f74d127_story.html
He is, as you note, “America’s Dumbest Senator ™, but getting involved in the Ukrainian sinkhole is radically sub-stupid, assuming he did it voluntarily.
RoJo is feeling the heat, clearly, as his epic meltdown on “Meet the Press” showed. He’s about to spend some time in the “barrel”. He got too close to Trump and he is now flecked with feces. It was inevitable.
Most people are sharp, but there’s an exception in the case of Johnson. He’s been a Washington fiasco in the making for years, hasn’t he? (2012: In Pivot to Messaging, Ron Johnson Looks to Purge Staff.) Perhaps Johnson is the sort of slow-witted catspaw who makes denial-after-the-fact easier, on the theory that he couldn’t have possibly have known what he was doing.
Preceding any trademark, there is one law that comes to mind, that holds true: “Joe’s First Law of Trump: You get anywhere near Trump, you get covered in shit.”
This is just starting to get ugly for RoJo. All that Russian/NRA money he took for his campaign is going to get looked at really hard, as is his private meetings with various Ukrainian oligarchs.
In all fairness, shouldn’t we start referring to RoJo as a “Wisconsin Plastics Oligarch”, and Dianne Hendricks as a “Wisconsin Shingle Oligarchette” and F. Jim Sensenbrenner as a “Wisconsin Ass-Wipe Oligarch”??