Good morning, Whitewater.
Midweek in town will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-nine. Sunrise is 7:06 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 15m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with just .9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1835, Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Mo. On this day in 1874, Winston Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.
Worth reading in full —
In Wisconsin, a Judge rejects Stein’s request for hand recount: “Madison — Green Party candidate Jill Stein paid $3.5 million Tuesday to clear the way for Wisconsin’s presidential vote recount but had a judge reject her lawsuit to require all Wisconsin counties to do the recount by hand. Dane County Circuit Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn said the effort to force the hand recount — which was backed by Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign — did not meet the state’s legal standard for prohibiting the use of machines in the recount, saying that the two campaigns did not show a hand recount, though more thorough, was necessary or show there was a clear and convincing evidence of fraud or other problems. Bailey-Rihn said there were good reasons to do a hand recount but no legal basis for her to mandate it.”
Paul Smith reports that the state’s Deer kill, license sales drop to lowest levels in more than 30 years: “Hunters registered 196,785 deer during the 2016 Wisconsin gun deer season, the lowest total in 34 years, according to preliminary data released Tuesday by the Department of Natural Resources. Notably, hunter participation also was down. The agency sold 598,867 gun licenses, a 40-year low and the first time the number has dipped below 600,000 since 1976. Five non-fatal shooting incidents were reported during the season, which ran Nov. 19 to 27. The 2016 deer kill was down despite a statewide herd that was likely larger this year, according to DNR preseason forecasts.”
Reporter Paul Waldman observes, of his profession, that Trump has already defeated the news media. And it’s unclear what we can do about it: “First, Trump says something outrageously false, but which his supporters either believe already or would like to believe. Then Trump gets criticized in the media for it, and his supporters say, “There they go again, the liberal anti-Trump media.” Instead of convincing everyone that the claim was false, the criticism only reinforces for Trump’s fans the idea that nothing the media says can be believed, which further undermines their ability to act as neutral arbiters in any debate. The more outrageous his claim, the more coverage it gets. At first, a disturbing amount of that coverage just passes along what Trump is saying, particularly in headlines and brief mentions on television, which often take the form of “Trump says world is flat.” Then the news media find their footing a bit and begin explicitly calling him out for the falsehood. But the more it ends up looking like an argument between Trump and the media, the more that even Republicans who are skeptical of Trump will get pulled to his side, because they’ve long been invested in the idea that the media are hopelessly infected with liberal bias. The entire sequence of events enables Trump to create a meta-message, which is that there’s no such thing as truth and no such thing as genuine authority. Think about it: the president-elect is claiming that an election that he won was beset by fraud, because he heard it from a lunatic radio host who thinks that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged using child actors and the 9/11 attacks were carried out by the U.S. government.”
As for the presidential election, Jessica Huseman and Scott Klein report that There’s No Evidence Our Election Was Rigged: “ProPublica was an organizing partner in Electionland, a project run by a coalition of organizations including Google News Lab, Univision, WNYC, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and the USA Today Network. We monitored the vote with a team of more than 1,000 people, including about 600 journalism school students poring over social media reports and more than 400 local journalists who signed up to receive tips on what we found. We had access to a database of thousands of calls made to a nonpartisan legal hotline. We had four of the nation’s leading voting experts in the room with us and election sources across the country. Thousands of people texted us to tell us about their voting experience. We had an unprecedented real-time understanding of voting in the United States, and while we saw many types of problems, we did not see mass voter fraud of any kind — especially of the sort Donald Trump alleges.”
Catherine King and Wayne Adams don’t just have a home, they’ve a homemade island –
Off the Grid on a Homemade Island from Great Big Story on Vimeo.