Good morning. 
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty. Sunrise is 7:18 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 03m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 93.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred thirty-first day.
On this day in 1896, Frederick Jackson Turner delivers his “Significance of the Frontier in American History” address at the forty-first annual meeting of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
Recommended for reading in full:
Bruce Vielmetti and Patrick Marley report Judge orders state to purge more than 200,000 Wisconsin voters from the rolls:
Lawyers for the League and for the Wisconsin Elections Commission indicated they will appeal and asked Malloy to stay his ruling pending those appeals, but he declined.
At issue is a letter the state Elections Commission sent in October to about 234,000 voters who it believes may have moved. The letter asked the voters to update their voter registrations if they had moved or alert election officials if they were still at their same address.
The commission planned to remove the letter’s recipients from the voter rolls in 2021 if it hadn’t heard from them. But Malloy’s decision would kick them off the rolls much sooner, and well before the 2020 presidential election.
Three voters sued the commission last month with the help of the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. They argued election officials were required to remove voters from the rolls 30 days after sending the letters if they hadn’t heard from them.
They asked Malloy to issue an injunction that would require election officials to purge their rolls. Kaul, commissioners and others say that would lead to some people getting knocked off the rolls who shouldn’t be.
But Malloy went further than issuing an injunction. In granting a writ of mandamus — essentially a court order that a government official or agency do its job — he said he was convinced the commission had a clear, positive, plain legal duty to purge the voter rolls within 30 days.
Nick Miroff reports Pentagon inspector general to review $400 million border wall contract given to firm Trump favored:
The Defense Department’s inspector general’s office will audit a $400 million border wall contract that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers awarded to a North Dakota construction company run by a GOP donor whom President Trump repeatedly urged military officials to hire.
Glenn A. Fine, the top official at the Pentagon office, authorized a review of the contract in response to a Dec. 4 letter from Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, asking inspectors to take a closer look. Fine informed Thompson of the audit in a letter Thursday.
[Read the Defense Department’s inspector general’s letter]
“You raised concerns about the possibility of inappropriate influence on USACE’s contracting decision, and questioned whether the bid submitted by Fisher Sand and Gravel Co. met solicitation standards,” Fine wrote in his letter to Thompson. “You also questioned whether USACE made the award in accordance with federal procurement law and regulations.
It is interesting to note that the community getting the most vote-snuffing letters is none other than Whitewater. That is the same Whitewater that is a Gerrymandered ameboid appendage on the district that Big Fitz is running for the house out of. Gee…Rick Esenberg and the WILL, rabid Republican Ozaukee Cty judge, Big Fitz running for the house..What a happy set of coincidences!
Did you note the excellent Foxconn update in the Verge, which is doing Pulitzer levels of work on the subject?
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/13/21020885/foxconn-wisconsin-deal-renegotiate-tax-subsidy-lcd-factory-plant
Good evening. Quite something – as you note – for Whitewater to be bearing so much of this by proportion of voter suppression effort.
Saw the Verge article, and will post on it tomorrow. (They’ve been so diligent with their coverage of Foxconn. I agree about their work – it’s of the highest quality. So very admirable.)