Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-nine. Sunrise is 6:35 AM and sunset 4:41 PM, for 10h 05m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 79.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand four hundred fifty-eighth day.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 3:30 PM, and Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 2007, Google unveils the Android mobile operating system.
Recommended for reading in full —
Kate Taylor reports Smashing a single-day record, U.S. enters new terrain as hospitalizations increase:
The United States on Wednesday recorded over 100,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day for the first time since the pandemic began, bursting past a grim threshold even as the wave of infections engulfing the country shows no sign of receding.
The total count of new infections was at least 107,000, according to a New York Times database. Twenty-three states have recorded more cases in the past week than in any other seven-day stretch.
Five states — Colorado, Indiana, Maine, Minnesota and Nebraska— set single-day case records on Wednesday. Cases were also mounting in the Mountain West and even in the Northeast, which over the summer seemed to be getting the virus under control.
North and South Dakota and Wisconsin have led the country for weeks in the number of new cases relative to their population. But other states have seen steep recent increases in the last 14 days.
University of Texas School of Law professor Steve Vladeck observes that
For anyone complaining about the “late” shift in totals toward Democrats in MI, PA, and WI, most of those votes actually came in *first.* It’s only because those states’ Republican-controlled state legislatures wouldn’t allow “pre-canvassing” that they’re now being counted last.
Susan Glasser writes Biden May Win, but Trump Remains the President of Red America:
There have been many times, over the past four years, that covering Trump’s Washington felt like a foreign assignment to me, never more so than while driving around the capital these past few days and seeing boarded-up storefronts and streets cordoned off for blocks around the White House, in anticipation of unprecedented post-election violence. I have seen such scenes before, in places like Azerbaijan and Russia. This is Trump’s America. It is not the America I have known.
….
Trump was always a minority President, governing for part of the country in opposition to the rest of it. The shock of his 2016 election upset became its own political rationale and, ultimately, for Trump, the blueprint for his reëlection plan. Why do something different when he had defied everyone and won the first time? When the final votes are counted, they will almost surely show Biden surpassing Clinton’s popular-vote margin of 2.87 million, and yet Trump believed until the end that nothing mattered except keeping the support of his Republican base. He may turn out to have been wrong, but it will have been a much, much closer call for American democracy than it should have been. And, even without final results, we can already say that there are still two Americas, and that Trump, despite the catastrophes of his rule, has retained the loyalty of the vast majority of red America—his America.