Good morning.
Whitewater will have a partly cloudy Monday with a high of twenty degrees. Sunrise is 7:17 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 03m 58s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6:30 PM tonight.
On this day in 1897, the pioneering comic strip The Katzenjammer Kids (by German immigrant Rudolph Dirks and drawn by Harold H. Knerr) is first published. (“Dirks was the first cartoonist to express dialogue in comic characters through the use of speech balloons,” see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Katzenjammer_Kids.)
Worth reading in full —
He unconvincingly talks free trade, but Donald Trump’s ‘dumb market’ position on trade breaks with decades of Republican views: “TRUMP: That is–that’s not free market when they go out and they move and they sell back into our country. WALLACE: But that’s the free market. They made a decision and it makes — TRUMP: No. That’s — that’s the dumb market, okay? That’s the dumb market.”
Alex Nowrasteh observes that The Right Has Its Own Version of Political Correctness. It’s Just as Stifling: “But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences. Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.”
Jackson Diehl predicts Trump’s coming war against Islam: “Donald Trump is about to lead the West into the third and darkest phase of its 15-year quest to neutralize the threat of Islamic extremism. The first was George W. Bush’s freedom initiative, which posited that political liberalization in the Middle East’s rotting autocracies would dry up terrorist recruiting. The second was the engagement policy of Barack Obama, who bet that respectful dialogue and attention to Muslim demands for justice — above all for the Palestinians — would make the West a less compelling target. Both were widely judged to be failures. Now the new president will embrace the approach that both Bush and Obama explicitly ruled out as morally wrong and practically counterproductive: civilizational conflict.”
Derek Thompson describes The Dangerous Myth That Hillary Clinton Ignored the Working Class: “Perhaps the clearest takeaway from the November election for many liberals is that Hillary Clinton lost because she ignored the working class. In the days after her shocking loss, Democrats complained that Clinton had no jobs agenda. A widely shared essay in The Nation blamed Clinton’s “neoliberalism” for abandoning the voters who swung the election. “I come from the white working class,” Bernie Sanders said on CBS This Morning, “and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to where I came from.” But here is the troubling reality for civically minded liberals looking to justify their preferred strategies: Hillary Clinton talked about the working class, middle class jobs, and the dignity of work constantly. And she still lost.”
Quartz shows How Olympic athletes cheat without getting caught: