Good morning. 
Tuesday in Whitewater will see morning rain or snow showers with a high of forty. Sunrise is 6:52 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 35m 39s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 54% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred sixth day.
Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1863, Pres. Lincoln delivers his Gettysburg Address.
Recommended for reading in full:
Patrick Marley and Craig Gilbert report In letter to House Republicans, Ron Johnson gives most detailed account yet of his Ukraine involvement:
Johnson wrote that he viewed the inquiry as a “continuation of a concerted, and possibly coordinated, effort to sabotage the Trump administration,” and he questioned the motives of government witnesses who have voiced concerns about Trump’s handling of Ukraine.
Johnson has given his version of events in numerous interviews in recent weeks but provided some new details Monday.
He talked to National Security Adviser John Bolton before calling Trump when he heard allegations that aid to Ukraine was being withheld until Ukraine launched an investigation. He tried, unsuccessfully, to talk to Vice President Mike Pence about it.
Johnson wrote that it “did not register” with him if Trump told his aides to talk to his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, about matters related to Ukraine. And according to Johnson, Trump told Johnson he barely knew Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador who oversaw dealings with Ukraine.
(Johnson’s letter is available online. Representing a state that has had a decade of extreme politics – gerrymandering, union-busting, sweetheart business subsidies, voter suppression, Foxconn — Johnson pushes ahead with a list of crackpot conspiracy theories. For Wisconsin, bad goes to worse.)
Catherine Rampell writes Trump and Republicans are on the hunt for Real Crimes:
For a party that prides itself on being the champion of law and order, the GOP has some peculiar ideas about crime.
Nothing President Trump does, it turns out, is a crime, let alone a “high” one. That’s not only because some crimes are not crimes, according to both Trump and his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. It is also not only because a sitting president is supposedly immune from criminal prosecution — including for shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, per another Trump lawyer.
According to Republicans’ airtight legal reasoning, nothing Trump does can be considered criminal because somebody else somewhere might be doing something worse. And just as O.J. Simpson pledged to search for the real killer, Trump and his fellow Republicans are on the hunt for the Real Crimes.
For instance: The Real Crime isn’t that Trump secretly withheld military aid to extort a desperate ally into announcing a sham investigation into a political rival. Heavens no. The Real Crime is that the public knows that this happened.
At least so says Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who recently railed against the whistleblower’s decision to “leak” information about Trump’s Ukrainian shakedown by reporting it to the intelligence community’s inspector general. That leak, Johnson complained, “exposed things that didn’t need to be exposed.”