Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-four. Sunrise is 6:58 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, for 9h 25m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the seven hundred forty-fifth day.
On this day in 1859, Darin publishes On the Origin of Species. On this day in 1959, I-90 opens to traffic between Janesville and Beloit. The latter, it turns out, moves at about the same speed as the evolutionary forces described in the former.
Recommended for reading in full:
Tory Newmyer reports Wall Street predicts economy slowing dramatically as 2020 nears:
More than a third of top forecasters believe the U.S. economy will enter a recession in 2020; and a new Reuters poll of economists found they think the probability of a recession in the next two years is rising, to a median 35 percent. (The Fed projects GDP will slow to 2.5 percent next year, a 2 percent in 2020, before slipping to 1.8 percent in the longer run.)
(Emphasis in original.)
Ron Brownstein observes California Has Become a Crisis for the Republicans:
For years, the state’s massive congressional delegation was highly competitive, but not anymore. Of 53 House seats, Democrats now hold at least 45.
….
The GOP’s retreat in California long predated Trump, but there’s no question he has intensified and accelerated it. In the past two years, California House Republicans, under pressure from then–Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, compounded their risk by voting with Trump more reliably than their Republican counterparts in other blue-leaning coastal states such as New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
“They bet on Trump and they bet wrong,” says John J. Pitney, a Claremont McKenna University political scientist and former aide at the Republican National Committee.
Margaret Sullivan writes Embattled and in over his head, Mark Zuckerberg should — at least — step down as Facebook chairman:
Leaders — capable leaders — don’t do what Zuckerberg has done in the face of disaster that they themselves have presided over.
They don’t hide and deny.
They don’t blame-shift.
And they don’t insist on speaking in the worst kind of fuzzy corporate cliches.
Jennifer Rubin observes If Republicans don’t want to be called racists …
When a former Trump campaign adviser tried defending Hyde-Smith [a GOP candidate with a love for things Confederate] by claiming this was all part of “the outrage culture,” Carpenter countered, “It’s wrong when someone says something so provocative that you blame the people who are offended.” She bluntly declared, “If Republicans want to quit being accused of being racist, they have to stop saying racist things.”
Consider The secret physics of dandelion seeds: