Good morning.
Sunday in town will be a snowy day, with total weekend accumulations of five to eight inches, and a daytime high of twenty-four. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 04m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 91% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1941, Germany and Italy declare war on the United States. On this day in 1901, Morris Pratt incorporated the Morris Pratt Institute for spiritualism, then-located in Whitewater, Wisconsin.
Worth reading in full —
Wisconsin’s State Democrats wonder: What went wrong?: “The win may have been narrow, but Trump’s triumph completed what amounts to an eight-year Republican take down of the state Democratic Party. In 2008, Wisconsin Democrats were riding high, holding the governor’s office, the Legislature, two U.S. Senate seats and five of the state’s eight congressional seats. Since then, Democrats have been wiped out at the statehouse, losing their legislative majorities and three straight governor’s races to Scott Walker, including the 2012 recall.”
Not everyone in Washington see calls for a probe of Russian hacking the same way, because As Democrats demand probe over CIA election claim, GOP senators express doubt: “Democrats immediately embraced the conclusions of the secret CIA report, which asserted that the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails — and their release to WikiLeaks — was the work of Russian operatives with ties to the government of President Vladimir Putin, all intended to help elect Trump. Key Republicans did not automatically accept that conclusion, despite many of them believing that Russia was behind the DNC hacks and other election interference. For Republicans, giving credence to the CIA assessment probably would cause them to anger Trump even before the president-elect has been inaugurated.”
Across America, An Alt-Right Makeover Shrouds the Swastikas: “in November, as the country’s divisive presidential campaign became ever more jagged, the National Socialist Movement, a leading neo-Nazi group, did away with its swastika. In its stead, the group chose a symbol from a pre-Roman alphabet that was also adopted by the Nazis. According to Jeff Schoep, the movement’s leader, the decision to dispense with the swastika was “an attempt to become more integrated and more mainstream.” Let us pause. Not even two years ago, white supremacists like Mr. Schoep would rant from the fringe of the fringe, their attention-desperate events rarely worth mention. Today, though, the Schoeps of America are undergoing a rebranding, as part of the so-called alt-right: a grab bag of far-right groups generally united by the belief that white identity has become endangered in what they deride as this era of dangerous diversity and political correctness.”
Lauren Duca observes that Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America: “To gas light is to psychologically manipulate a person to the point where they question their own sanity, and that’s precisely what Trump is doing to this country. He gained traction in the election by swearing off the lies of politicians, while constantly contradicting himself, often without bothering to conceal the conflicts within his own sound bites. He lied to us over and over again, then took all accusations of his falsehoods and spun them into evidence of bias. At the hands of Trump, facts have become interchangeable with opinions, blinding us into arguing amongst ourselves, as our very reality is called into question. There is a long list of receipts when it comes to Trump’s lies. With the help of PolitiFact, clear-cut examples of deception include Trump saying that he watched thousands of people cheering on 9/11 in Jersey City (police say there’s no evidence of this), that the Mexican government forces immigrants into the U.S. (no evidence), that there are “30 or 34 million” immigrants in this country (there are 10 or 11 million), that he never supported the Iraq War (he told Howard Stern he did), that the unemployment rate is as high as “42 percent” (the highest reported rate is 16.4 percent), that the U.S. is the highest taxed country in the world (not true based on any metric of consideration), that crime is on the rise (it’s falling, and has been for decades), and too many other things to list here because the whole tactic is to clog the drain with an indecipherable mass of toxic waste. The gas lighting part comes in when the fictions are disputed by the media, and Trump doubles down on his lies, before painting himself as a victim of unfair coverage, sometimes even threatening to revoke access.”
New Pokémon are coming to Pokémon GO: