Good morning.
Election Day in Whitewater will be cloudy & windy with a high of forty-eight. Sunrise is 6:36 AM and sunset 4:40 PM, for 10h 03m 58s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 1.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the seven hundred twenty-eighth day.
On this day in 1837, Burlington, Iowa becomes our temporary capital:
On this date Burlington, Iowa was chosen as a temporary capital of the Wisconsin Territory. A year earlier, legislators offered a bill making Madison the capital with a temporary capital in Dubuque until which time a permanent building could be constructed in Madison. Legislators also proposed the City of Belmont as a temporary capital. One month later, on December 12th, a fire destroyed the two-story temporary capital in Burlington. The new legislature moved its headquarters to the Webber and Remey’s store in Burlington where they conducted government affairs until June 1838.
Recommended for reading in full — fantasy at a Trump rally, consequences of Trump’s trade war, hacking attempts against election systems, Hannity as a Fox News Trump TV anchor, and video about Apollo 8’s trip to the far side of the moon —
Andrew Kragie reports Inside the Alternative Universe of the Trump Rallies:
He has a line that casts employment growth as beyond anyone’s expectations during the 2016 campaign: “If I would have told the kind of numbers that we’ve achieved, nobody would have believed it. They would not have let us get away with it,” he says in every city, pointing his index finger at the press pen directly opposite. A scattered round of boos breaks out. For anyone who doesn’t peruse economic data—most people—this allusion to a theoretical fact check from “the enemy of the people” makes his claim sound all the more impressive.
But federal data show fewer jobs were created in Trump’s first 21 months in office than during the last 21 months of the Obama administration—4.1 million after January 2017 versus 4.5 million up to then. (Trump prefers his election as the starting post, but the comparison stands: 4.5 million after November 2016 versus 5.0 million in the comparable period before.) While it’s notable that economic growth has continued so long since the Great Recession, Trump misleadingly creates the impression that gains have accelerated.
But supporters eat it up. “It was all doom and gloom under Obama. I lost a ton of money,” Charlotte Shiflett, the retired Tennessee bookkeeper, said of her 401(k)-retirement savings account. But the data show that while the stock market has been strong for two years, it was no weaker under Obama, whose tenure saw average annualized S&P 500 returns of 16.3 percent. It seems a symptom of the increasingly polarized views of the economy; for the last decade, the Pew Research Center has found that Americans increasingly assess the economy and even their own personal finances based on whether their party controls the presidency rather than on actual results.
Binyamin Appelbaum reports Their Soybeans Piling Up, Farmers Hope Trade War Ends Before Beans Rot:
President Trump sees tariffs as a tool to force changes in America’s economic relationships with China and other major trading partners. His tough approach, he says, will revive American industries like steel and auto manufacturing that have lost ground to foreign rivals. But that is coming at a steep cost for some industries, like farming, that have thrived in the era of globalization by exporting goods to foreign markets.
China and other trading partners hit with the tariffs, including the European Union, have sought to maximize the political impact of their reprisals. The European Union imposed tariffs on bourbon, produced in Kentucky, the home state of the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and on Harley-Davidson motorcycles, from Wisconsin, the home state of House Speaker Paul Ryan. China’s decision to impose tariffs on soybeans squeezes some of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters across the Midwestern farm belt.
(Emphasis added.)
Jana Winter reports Hackers targeting election networks across country prior to midterms:
Hackers have ramped up their efforts to meddle with the country’s election infrastructure in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s midterms, sparking a raft of investigations into election interference, internal intelligence documents show.
The hackers have targeted voter registration databases, election officials, and networks across the country, from counties in the Southwest to a city government in the Midwest, according to Department of Homeland Security election threat reports reviewed by the Globe. The agency says publicly all the recent attempts have been prevented or mitigated, but internal documents show hackers have had “limited success.”
The recent incidents, ranging from injections of malicious computer code to a massive number of bogus requests for voter registration forms, have not been publicly disclosed until now.
Peter Baker reports Fox News Personalities Embrace Trump at His Final Rally Before the Election:
On Sunday, the Trump campaign organization announced that Mr. Hannity and Mr. Limbaugh would join the president at the Cape Girardeau rally as “special guests.”
By Monday afternoon, Mr. Hannity was disputing that. “In spite of reports, I will be doing a live show from Cape Girardeau and interviewing President Trump before the rally,” he wrote on Twitter. “To be clear, I will not be on stage campaigning with the President. I am covering final rally for my show. Something I have done in every election in the past.” The Trump campaign news release was deleted from the web.
Except then he was on stage campaigning with the president. “Sean Hannity, come on up,” beseeched Mr. Trump.
Mr. Hannity climbed onto the stage and took the microphone. Referring to the news media pen in the back of the arena, Mr. Hannity echoed one of the president’s favorite lines. “By the way,” he said, “all those people in the back are fake news.” The crowd booed.
Presumably, he did not mean all those people since they included a crew from none other than Fox News with the correspondent Kristin Fisher.
How Apollo 8 Survived the Risky Trip to the Far Side of the Moon: