Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of fifty-seven. Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 6:28 PM, for 11h 30m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 17.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred ninety-sixth day.
On this day in 1846, Wisconsin’s first constitutional convention meets:
On this date Wisconsin’s first state Constitutional Convention met in Madison. The Convention sat until December 16, 1846. The Convention was attended by 103 Democrats and 18 Whigs. The proposed constitution failed when voters refused to accept several controversial issues: an anti-banking article, a homestead exemption (which gave $1000 exemption to any debtor), providing women with property rights, and black suffrage. The following convention, the Second Constitutional Convention of Wisconsin in 1847-48, produced and passed a constitution that Wisconsin still very much follows today.
Recommended for reading in full — Rev. Dr. William Barber receives award, Nobel Peace Prize for work against sexual violence, Salk Lake Tribune blasts Orrin Hatch, states could seek restitution from Trump, and video on the evolution of Mark Hamill —
Michelle Boorstein reports ‘Closest person we have to Martin Luther King Jr.’: Pastor-activist William J. Barber wins $625,000 ‘genius’ grant:
On Thursday, the day the Rev. William Barber Jr. was awarded a $625,000 “genius grant,” Barber was hard to reach, because he was being arrested. Which is related to why the North Carolina preacher was given one of the rare MacArthur Foundation awards.
Barber, 55, is one of the country’s best-known public advocates fighting racism and poverty, known for successfully organizing tens of thousands of people in marches and other nonviolent acts of civil disobedience around the country. On Thursday, as MacArthur was announcing that Barber was among 25 people “on the precipice of great discovery or a game-changing idea,” Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign was tweeting about his arrest.
“I’ve just been arrested in Chicago, and I’m waiting on their process,” he said in a call to the Raleigh News & Observer. “For minimum wage, in front of McDonald’s headquarters.”
“It doesn’t say rest on your laurels, but to keep on pushing. In this work, sometimes you get heavy criticism. People do say ugly things, ‘You just want money.’ I just want other people to have health care. You know, Jesus healed everybody and never charged a co-pay,” he told the paper.
Rukmini Callimachi, Jeffrey Gettleman, Nicholas Kulish, and Benjamin Mueller report Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad for Fighting Sexual Violence:
The 2018 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to two campaigners against wartime sexual violence: Dr. Denis Mukwege, 63, a Congolese gynecological surgeon; and Nadia Murad, 25, who became the bold voice of the women who survived sexual violence by the Islamic State.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee said the two were given the award “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.”
Dr. Mukwege campaigned relentlessly to shine a spotlight on the plight of Congolese women, even after nearly being assassinated a few years ago. Ms. Murad, who was held captive by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has told and retold her story of suffering to organizations around the world, helping to persuade the United States State Department to recognize the genocide of her people at the hands of the terrorist group.
[Read about the struggles of Dr. Mukwege and Ms. Murad, in their own words.]
In a year when the “Me Too” movement has turned the world’s attention to survivors of sexual assault and abuse, the Nobel Committee’s decision focused on the continuing global campaign to end the use of mass rape as a weapon in global conflict.
A Salt Lake Tribune editorial contends Hatch attack on alleged witness is despicable:
Apparently, a former TV weatherman from Washington, D.C., provided the committee with a sworn statement revealing, allegedly, some details about [Julie] Swetnick’s personal sexual preferences that are both none of anyone’s damn business and utterly irrelevant to the question of what Kavanaugh might or might not have done all those years ago.
In a sleazy nutshell, the story is that Dennis Ketterer claims that Swetnick approached him at a Washington bar one night and struck up first a conversation and then a brief relationship in which sex was discussed but never performed.
And, Ketterer said, Swetnick never said anything about seeing, knowing or being attacked by Kavanaugh.
Clearly, the only reason for any individual to say any of this, and the only reason for the committee to make it public, is the belief that any women who would approach a self-described fat man in a bar, any women who would choose to discuss sex, is some kind of libertine who, for that reason, cannot be trusted.
Adam Davidson explains How State Officials and Unpaid Taxes Could Force Trump to Liquidate Part of His Family Fortune:
Sean Shaw, the Democratic candidate for state attorney general in Florida, has a message for Donald Trump. If elected, Shaw will investigate the President’s financial activities across the Sunshine State. “We’ll pursue any area that is worthy of pursuit,” Shaw told me in an interview this week. “The charity not being charitable. Trump Mar-a-Lago and emoluments.” Shaw told me he would go “where the law takes me.” He plans to investigate whether “the President of the United States is personally profiting from the Presidency in Florida.”
Trump, of course, has several properties in Florida, including Mar-a-Lago, a private club that doubled its initiation fee after Trump was elected. Since Trump took office, three of its members have exerted sweeping influence on the Department of Veterans Affairs. Another member was named the U.S. Ambassador to the Dominican Republic. Shaw also said that he will investigate reports that a Trump-branded development project in Sunny Isles, Florida, bears hallmarks of possible money laundering. Shaw made clear that his investigations would be broad and open-ended: “They may lead you to tax returns, financial records. I don’t know where they lead. No one is above the law in Florida. No one. We are going to make it such that if I find bad stuff going on, we’re going to go where it takes us, no matter how big.”
One recent poll put Shaw just behind his Republican opponent, Ashley Moody, who has expressed support for President Trump. Even if Shaw loses, Trump may be vulnerable in several other states where he has done business. In New York, the Democratic candidate for attorney general, Letitia James, is all but assured a victory. James is promising Democratic voters that she will aggressively investigate the President. After this week’s stunning Times investigation alleged that the Trump Organization’s wealth was built, in large part, on a variety of complex tax schemes, many of which could be illegal.