Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 7:02 AM and sunset 6:21 PM, for 11h 18m 37s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 81.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred thirty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets this evening at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1861, the 1st Wisconsin Infantry musters in: “The 1st Wisconsin Infantry mustered in on October 9, 1861. It left Wisconsin for Louisville, Kentucky, and moved gradually through Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia during the war. It would participate in the battles of Perryville and Chickamauga and the Siege of Atlanta. It would lose 300 men during its service. Six officers and 151 enlisted men were killed in combat and one officer and 142 enlisted men died from disease.”
Recommended for reading in full —
David Filipov reports on The notorious Kremlin-linked ‘troll farm’ and the Russians trying to take it down:
SHUSHARY, Russia — She rode into a pitch-black truck stop on a scooter, stepped out of the pouring rain into a gas station cafe on the outskirts of St. Petersburg and recounted her quest to bring down Russia’s infamous “troll farm.”
Lyudmila Savchuk is one of a disparate handful of Russian journalists, activists and legal experts who have tried to shed light on the shadowy operation that has become a focal point of U.S. investigations into Kremlin meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
And like most people who challenge the established order in today’s Russia, Savchuk and the others are jousting against a nebulous entity with apparent Kremlin ties and evident protection from government and law-enforcement agencies. For them, this is a task that entails significant risks and little chance of success.
How much the trolls affected the outcome of the U.S. election is unclear. But their omnipresence is evident on Twitter, where one recent study suggested that trolling by pro-Putin bots trolling dominates political talk about Russia, and in the comments section of publications like The Washington Post, where trolls can be found criticizing the premises, lambasting other posters and accusing one another of being trolls.
While the troll farm’s operations have stirred concerns about the reach of Kremlin propaganda across Europe and the United States, Savchuk and her cohorts are concerned about their own country….
Jason Landers reports White Supremacists Return to Charlottesville Chanting, ‘Russia is Our Friend’:
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia—White supremacist Richard Spencer suddenly reappeared on Saturday night with torch-bearing supporters, two months after he organized an infamous hate march here.
Spencer and his 50 or so followers gathered around a statue of Robert E. Lee in Emancipation Park chanting white supremacist slogans.
“They were shouting ‘You will not replace us,’ ‘Russia is our friend,’ ‘the South will rise again,’ ‘we’ll be back,’” said a University of Virginia faculty member, who wished not to be named for fear of retribution….
Michael Shear reports White House Makes Hard-Line Demands for Any ‘Dreamers’ Deal:
….The demands were developed by a half-dozen agencies and departments, officials said. But among the officials behind the demands are Stephen Miller, the president’s top policy adviser, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, both of whom have long advocated extremely aggressive efforts to prevent illegal entry into the country and crack down on undocumented immigrants already here.
The demands represented a concerted effort to broaden the expected congressional debate about the Dreamers to one about overhauling the entire American immigration system — on terms that hard-line conservatives have been pursuing for decades….
James Fallows writes that It’s What Bob Corker Does Next That Counts (“After the senator warned that Trump’s reckless threats may set the nation ‘on the path to World War III,’ the question is whether the Tennessee Republican intends to do anything about it”):
Senator Bob Corker, a Republican of Tennessee, deserves credit for saying in public this evening to The New York Times what most prominent Republicans have known and many have said (in careful privacy) over the past two years.
Namely: that Donald Trump is irrational, ill-informed, impulsive, unfit for command, and increasingly a danger to the country and the world. The man who has ultimate authority over the world’s most powerful military, including its nuclear weaponry, is recklessly issuing threats to North Korea and others that set the nation “on the path to World War III,” according to Corker—who, for the record, is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him,” he told Jonathan Martin and Mark Landler of the Times.
This situation is not normal. It is not safe. And the group which for now has a monopoly on legislative and investigative power in Washington, Corker’s own Republican Party, has an obligation to the country’s past and its future to do something about it. Talk is better than nothing, but action is what counts….
Great Big Story describes Summiting Mountains Without Sight:
Scaling the world’s tallest mountains is a feat in and of its own—doing it while blind is extraordinary. Erik Weihenmayer is the first blind rock climber to summit the tallest peak in every continent, Mount Everest included. At a young age, Weihenmayer was diagnosed with retinoschisis, a rare eye disease that left him sightless by age 13. But he didn’t let that hold him back from seeking out adventure, proving that what others may see as a hinderance can oftentimes be your greatest asset. Now, he’s using his incredible spirit to inspire others to live a life with no barriers.