Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty-eight. Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 6:30 PM, for 11h 34m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 37.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand sixtieth day.
On this day in 1957, the Soviets launch Sputnik 1 into orbit.
Recommended for reading in full:
Patrick Marley reports Nearly 40,000 Wisconsinites would lose benefits under proposed Trump administration food stamp rule:
The change would boost costs for Wisconsin taxpayers by millions of dollars a year because the state would have to upgrade the computer systems that administer the FoodShare program, retrain workers and more thoroughly scrutinize the assets of people who apply for benefits.
The computer upgrade would cost $2.3 million, according to the state Department of Health Services. Operational costs would rise by $17.7 million a year. State and local taxpayers would have to pick up about half of both sets of costs, with the federal government paying for the rest.
“The bottom line is you’d have more cost on bureaucracy and administration and fewer benefits going to Wisconsinites,” Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul said.
Kaul and 23 other attorneys general sent a letter last week urging the U.S. Department of Agriculture not to implement the new rule for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, which is widely known as the food stamp program. In Wisconsin, it is called FoodShare.
(This federal mandate asks too much, and takes from those who have too little.)
Jeff Stein, Tom Hamburger, and Josh Dawsey report IRS whistleblower said to report Treasury political appointee might have tried to interfere in audit of Trump or Pence:
An Internal Revenue Service official has filed a whistleblower complaint reporting that he was told that at least one Treasury Department political appointee attempted to improperly interfere with the annual audit of the president’s or vice president’s tax returns, according to multiple people familiar with the document.
Trump administration officials dismissed the whistleblower’s complaint as flimsy because it is based on conversations with other government officials. But congressional Democrats were alarmed by the complaint, now circulating on Capitol Hill, and flagged it in a federal court filing. They are also discussing whether to make it public.
The details of the IRS complaint follow news of a separate, explosive whistleblower complaint filed in August by a member of the intelligence community. That complaint revealed Trump’s request of Ukranian leaders to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, a political rival. It has spurred an impeachment probe on Capitol Hill.