Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of fifty-five. Sunrise is 7:02 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 20m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 59.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred eighty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM.
On this day in 1903, Green Bay Packer Johnny Blood is born: “Johnny Blood (aka John McNally) was born in New Richmond. Blood was an early NFL halfback playing for Green Bay from 1929 to 1933 and 1935 to 1936. He also played for the Milwaukee Badgers, Duluth Eskimos, Pottsville Maroons, and the Pittsburgh Pirates. An elusive runner and gifted pass receiver, he played a major role in the Packers’ drive to the first three championships in 1929, 1930 and 1931. Johnny Blood died on November 28, 1985, at the age of 82. Titletown Brewing Co. in Green Bay named their brew Johnny “Blood” Red Ale after the famed halfback.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Paul Schwartzman reports Why a historically conservative county in Virginia is making national Republicans nervous:
….Until Gov.-elect Ralph Northam (D) won Chesterfield County three weeks ago, the stretch of suburban and rural communities southwest of Richmond had been considered reliably Republican.
Democrat Ralph Northam won the Virginia governor’s race over Republican Ed Gillespie on Nov. 7. Here are some other takeaways from the state’s election.
Yet voters infuriated by Trump, many of them women and Hispanics who have migrated to the county in recent years, are redefining Chesterfield and alarming Virginia Republicans who have depended on the area to make up for the support the party lacks in urban areas.
The results in Chesterfield are also a potential harbinger of what looms beyond Virginia, in suburbs where anger toward Trump is motivating voters bent on defeating Republican candidates in next year’s midterm elections….
(National Republicans’ nervousness comes from their support of Trumpism, and it’s not nervousness but shame they should be feeling.)
Rick Wilson writes Roy Moore Is Deplorable, and Donald Trump Condoning His Sins Is Unforgivable:
A society where nothing is forgivable is as untenable as one where every transgression is hand-waved away. The things we forgive in the name of compassion should be many. The things we forgive in the name of comity should be large. That said, the things we forgive in service to partisan tribalism should be tightly constrained.
The things we should forgive for a child-molesting, law-breaking, edge-case whackjob who will stain the Senate and the Republican party with his creepy sexual predilections, his contempt for the rule of law, his thinly-veiled racial animus, and his role in the firmament of Bannonite political arsonists? Pretty much nothing.
The judge’s behavior is unforgivable, no matter what your ideological leanings and party identification may be. That hasn’t stopped President Trump and Steve Bannon from continuing to back Roy Moore. The only people in Washington with even vaguely clean hands are in the hated Establishment, which dropped Moore like a radioactive potato after his grotesque behavior with teenage girls made the news….
(Forgiveness would require a confession of wrongdoing, but Trump admits none.)
Raphael Satter, Jeff Donn, and Desmond Butler report FBI gave heads-up to fraction of Russian hackers’ US targets:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI failed to notify scores of U.S. officials that Russian hackers were trying to break into their personal Gmail accounts despite having evidence for at least a year that the targets were in the Kremlin’s crosshairs, The Associated Press has found.
Nearly 80 interviews with Americans targeted by Fancy Bear, a Russian government-aligned cyberespionage group, turned up only two cases in which the FBI had provided a heads-up. Even senior policymakers discovered they were targets only when the AP told them, a situation some described as bizarre and dispiriting.
“It’s utterly confounding,” said Philip Reiner, a former senior director at the National Security Council, who was notified by the AP that he was targeted in 2015. “You’ve got to tell your people. You’ve got to protect your people”….
(Silence is injury.)
Yoni Applebaum considers The Banality of White Nationalism:
The New York Times reporter Richard Faussett recently sat down to dinner with Tony Hovater [a white nationalist], and his wife, Maria, at an Applebee’s in Huber Heights. Faussett was struck by how ordinary Hovater seemed. “His Midwestern manners would please anyone’s mother,” he wrote, calling him “polite and low key.” They had turkey sandwiches at a Panera Bread. Faussett had come to Ohio, “amid the row crops and rolling hills, the Olive Gardens and Steak ’n Shakes,” to solve a riddle, as he later reflected: “Why did this man—intelligent, socially adroit and raised middle class amid the relatively well-integrated environments of United States military bases—gravitate toward the furthest extremes of American political discourse?”
….Faussett went to Ohio, he wrote, determined to find Hovater’s “Rosebud,” the extraordinary, radicalizing experience that set him on a path to extremism. His reporting contrasts the “quotidian” details of Hovater’s life with the virulence of his beliefs. Ultimately, he conceded, “there is a hole at the heart of my story,” which “would have to serve as both feature and defect,” the inability to explain a white nationalist growing out of an ordinary suburban landscape.
But if Faussett was asking the right question, he may have been looking in the wrong places for answers. Faussett was looking for a radical disjuncture to explain Hovater. But the disjuncture in America’s history is not the emergence of virulent racism, it’s the uneven, often halting progress the nation has made toward greater equality, enlarged tolerance, and defensible rights. It’s a complicated story. It requires understanding what made a man like [black Air Force captain Ed] Dwight hold the nation to its articulated ideals, despite the risks. Or what made a man like Fuller, a mason who laid the bricks for many of his neighbor’s homes, insist that he, too, had the right to live in such a house….
(‘Greater equality, enlarged tolerance, and defensible rights’: a worthy, ongoing effort.)
Fiona the Hippo, of the Cincinnati Zoo, is ready for a nap: