Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of thirty-four. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 05m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 47% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred ninety-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1864, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. accepts the Nobel Peace Prize is Oslo, Norway. On this day in 1864, the 3rd Wisconsin Infantry reaches Savannah, Georgia: “The Wisconsin 3rd Infantry arrived at the front lines for the Battle of Savannah, Georgia. After marching from Atlanta under General William T. Sherman, Wisconsin troops assembled outside the coastal city of Savannah and laid siege to it.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Conservative Christian Peter Wehner writes Why I Can No Longer Call Myself an Evangelical Republican:
Just the other day I received a note from a friend of mine, a pastor, who told me he no longer uses the label “evangelical” to describe himself, even though he meets every element of its historical definition, “because the term is now so stained as to ruin my ability to be what evangelicalism was supposed to be.”
Another pastor who is a lifelong friend told me, “Evangelical is no longer a word we can use.” The reason, he explained, is that it’s become not a religious identification so much as a political one. A third person, who heads a Christian organization, told me the term evangelical “is now a tribal rather than a creedal description.” In October, the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship, a campus ministry for more than 80 years, changed its name to the Princeton Christian Fellowship. “We’re interested in being people who are defined by our faith and by our faith commitments and not by any sort of political agenda,” according to Bill Boyce, who has led the campus group for decades.
There are of course a great many honorable individuals in the Republican Party and the evangelical movement. Those who hold different views than I do lead exemplary lives. Yet I cannot help believing that the events of the past few years — and the past few weeks — have shown us that the Republican Party and the evangelical movement (or large parts of them, at least), have become what I once would have thought of as liberal caricatures….
In the latest example of this, a rising number of Republicans are attempting to delegitimize the special counsel’s investigation into whether there were links between Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and Mr. Putin’s Russia because they quake at what he may find. Prominent evangelical leaders, rather than challenging the president to become a man of integrity, have become courtiers. What’s happening with Mr. Moore in Alabama — with the president, the Republican National Committee, the state party and many white evangelicals rallying around him — is a bridge too far for many of us. Where exactly is the bottom? And at what point do you pull back from associating yourself with a political party and a religious term you once took pride in but that are now doing harm to the things you treasure?
Institutional renewal and regeneration are possible, and I’m going to continue to push for them. But for now a solid majority of Republicans and self-described evangelicals are firmly aboard the Trump train, which is doing its utmost to give a seat of privilege to Mr. Moore. So for those of us who still think of ourselves as conservative and Christian, it’s enough already.
(Better for Wehner to preserve his fundamental religious and political principles than debase himself within Trumpism’s autocratic and perverse ideology.)
Rebecca Ruiz writes Report Shows Vast Reach of Russian Doping: 1,000 Athletes, 30 Sports:
LONDON — International sports’ antidoping watchdog on Friday laid out mountainous evidence that for years Russian officials orchestrated a doping program at the Olympics and other competitions that involved or benefited 1,000 athletes in 30 sports. The findings intensified pressure on the International Olympic Committee to reassess Russia’s medals from the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and penalize the nation ahead of the 2018 Winter Games.
The evidence, published by the World Anti-Doping Agency, was the coda to a set of investigations led by the Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren, who issued a damning report in July that prompted more than 100 Russian athletes to be barred from the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
The follow-up report outlined competitions that had been tainted by years of extraordinary preparations, ensuring Russia’s dominance at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, the 2013 track and field world championships in Moscow and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi — the “apex” of Russia’s cheating, the report said, because as the host of the event it controlled drug testing.
The subterfuge included using table salt and Nescafé instant–coffee granules to help conceal tainted urine and bypass controls, according to the inquiry. Some samples were clearly fraudulent: Urine provided by two female hockey players at the Sochi Games contained male DNA.
Yet Mr. McLaren suggested that the full extent of the cheating might never be known.
“It is impossible to know just how deep and how far back this conspiracy goes,” he said on Friday, calling the “immutable facts” of his report clear but far from comprehensive. “For years, international sports competitions have unknowingly been hijacked by the Russians”….
(Putin’s Russia, like the former Soviet Union, is a state of lies and corruption.)
Agence France-Press reports on Putin’s cult of personality:
“He is a super president and a super leader” – New “SuperPutin” exhibition opens in Moscow with the Russian leader portrayed in various heroic roles; from riding a bear to firing missiles in the colours of the Russian flag pic.twitter.com/LxQ9WZOxfD
— AFP news agency (@AFP) December 10, 2017
(Even – and especially – in the face of international censure, the Russian state – and these displays would not happen without the approval of the Russian state – bolsters its dictator. To critics of Putin, of course, this will all seem like parody, both inside and outside Russia.)
The New York Times reports from Inside Trump’s Hour-By-Hour Battle for Self-Preservation:
Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals. People close to him estimate that Mr. Trump spends at least four hours a day, and sometimes as much as twice that, in front of a television, sometimes with the volume muted, marinating in the no-holds-barred wars of cable news and eager to fire back….
Mr. Kelly is trying, quietly and respectfully, to reduce the amount of free time the president has for fiery tweets by accelerating the start of his workday. Mr. Priebus also tried, with only modest success, to encourage Mr. Trump to arrive by 9 or 9:30 a.m….
(He may be the most powerful – but at least there is the advantage – that Trump is the laziest nativist in all America. Our situation would be far worse if he put in a full day’s work.)
NASA believes that the 2017 Geminids Will Be Dazzling: