Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of fifty-two. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 05m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 22.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is both the one thousand four hundred ninety-third day and the thirty-fourth day.
Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4:30 PM.
On this day in 1864, during Major General William Tecumseh Sherman‘s March to the Sea, his troops reach the outer Confederate defenses of Savannah, Georgia.
Recommended for reading in full —
Charlie Warzel writes Inside the Battle Between Biden and Facebook:
In early September, the Biden campaign met with Facebook’s elections integrity team. With just weeks to go before election night, the meeting was an opportunity for Facebook to clarify how it would handle disinformation efforts to discourage people from voting and to undermine confidence in the results.
According to multiple Biden staff members in attendance, the Facebook team was unequivocal and reassuring. Under no circumstances, the company’s employees said, would Facebook tolerate the use of falsehoods to discredit mail-in voting. Facebook promised decisive action on voting disinformation, even if it were to come from President Trump himself.
The promise was put to the test shortly after, when Mr. Trump on his Facebook page urged North Carolina voters to show up to polling places even if they previously submitted a mail-in ballot. “Don’t let them illegally take your vote away from you,” the post read.
Mr. Trump’s call for his supporters to vote twice was roundly condemned by officials, including North Carolina’s attorney general. But when the Biden campaign asked Facebook to remove the post, it refused, instead appending a small label saying that mail-in voting “has a long history of trustworthiness.” (BuzzFeed News reported that Facebook’s internal data show that its warning labels don’t meaningfully stop the spread of Mr. Trump’s posts.)
For the Biden team, the moment was emblematic of its frustrating yearlong battle with the platform to enforce its own rules. “It was a total reversal,” a senior staff member told me recently. “You have half-baked policies on one hand, and the political reality on the other. And when push comes to shove, they don’t enforce their rules as they describe them.” (Like this staff member, those I interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity for this article for fear of reprisals.)
Patrick Marley reports Thursday could prove crucial in Trump’s elections lawsuits in Wisconsin:
A federal judge will hold a hearing Thursday as he mulls whether to throw out Wisconsin’s election results at the request of President Donald Trump, who has been thwarted by courts across the country in recent weeks.
Thursday could offer up a legal doubleheader in Wisconsin because a state judge hopes to hold a hearing in a separate lawsuit brought by Trump as well. But if the 9 a.m. hearing in the federal case goes long — a distinct possibility — the state hearing will be put off until Friday.
The two cases, along with a third one brought by a Republican official from La Crosse County, must be resolved soon because the Electoral College meets Monday. Wisconsin officials have certified Democrat Joe Biden as the winner by about 21,000 votes, or 0.6 percentage points.