Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 22m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 85.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the seven hundred forty-seventh day.
The Library Board’s Personnel Committee meets at 5 PM today.
On this day in 1838, the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature assembles in Madison for the first time.
Recommended for reading in full:
Rick Barrett reports Wisconsin dairy farmers barely hanging on as crisis deepens with no end in sight:
Wisconsin is on track to lose more dairy farms this year than in any year since at least 2003, according to state Agriculture Department figures for dairy producer licenses.
As of Nov. 1, the dairy state had lost 660 cow herds from a year earlier, and the number of herds was down nearly 49 percent from 15 years ago. The number of dairy cows in Wisconsin has remained steady even as the number of farms has fallen. That’s because the remaining dairy operations are, in many cases, much bigger. But even some of the bigger farms have not survived.
Tory Newmyer writes Trump says he wants to cut the deficit. His track record says otherwise:
President Trump says he wants to get serious about tackling the deficit. But he also wants to spend big on infrastructure, slash taxes for the middle class and build a Mexican border wall. He won’t allow cuts to Social Security or Medicare. And he is demanding a mostly hands-off approach to military funding.
In other words, the president isn’t actually serious about tackling the deficit. Trump’s conflicting instincts on the matter are laid bare in a Sunday report from The Post’s Josh Dawsey and Damian Paletta. The takeaway: The red ink exploding on his watch has spooked the president — just not enough to force the sort of hard choices that will rein it in.
Anton Troianovski reports To avoid sanctions, Kremlin goes off the grid:
The Kremlin has for years bankrolled an array of pro-Russian breakaway states within the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. For Moscow, the goals could not be bigger — rebuilding Russia’s influence and countering the region’s drift toward the West.
The network of semi-states has become so important for Russia that an off-the-grid financial system now ties some of them together, bridging hundreds of miles and circumventing international sanctions.
Javier Blas reports Texas Is About to Create OPEC’s Worst Nightmare:
An infestation of dots, thousands of them, represent oil wells in the Permian basin of West Texas and a slice of New Mexico. In less than a decade, U.S. companies have drilled 114,000. Many of them would turn a profit even with crude prices as low as $30 a barrel.
OPEC’s bad dream only deepens next year, when Permian producers expect to iron out distribution snags that will add three pipelines and as much as 2 million barrels of oil a day.