Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-nine. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 01m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 35.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred thirty-seventh day.
Recommended for reading in full —
Ashley Luthern and Gina Barton report A powerful Milwaukee real estate developer accused of sexual assault was questioned at a shelter instead of the police station:
A woman who told police a real estate developer drugged and raped her took five years to come forward largely because she feared for her safety and was afraid he would retaliate against her, according to a police report obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The woman told police Kalan Haywood Sr. “is a man of importance in Milwaukee and is known to associate with high-level political officials including senators and the mayor,” according to the report.
Haywood, 45, denied the allegations, telling a Milwaukee police detective any sexual activity he had with the woman was consensual and he did not remember the November 2014 encounter she described, according to a video obtained by the Journal Sentinel.
“Me drugging a lady to have sex with her? Totally insane,” Haywood told the Journal Sentinel in a lengthy interview. “Totally, totally, totally, totally, totally insane.”
When a detective questioned Haywood, he did so at the Sojourner Family Peace Center, without the knowledge of the center’s executive director.
In the video of Haywood’s interview with police, the detective appeared to assuage Haywood’s fears that he’d be recognized by telling him the domestic violence shelter was a place where suspects are never questioned.
Haywood has not been arrested or charged in the case. The investigation remains open. The Journal Sentinel is using his name because he is a high-profile developer, sits on numerous civic boards, has received city funding for real estate projects and has been publicly identified by the Milwaukee Police Association as a suspect in a sexual assault case.
Nathalie Baptiste writes Trump’s Food Stamp Cuts Will Be Devastating to Trump Country:
Earlier this month, the US Department of Agriculture finalized new restrictions on eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, which provided food assistance to 40 million people in 2018. Millions of low-income families, seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities access this vital benefit. Under the new rule, which goes into effect in April 2020, work requirements for the 700,000 SNAP users who are labeled as “able-bodied” adults without any dependents (ABAWD) will be tightened, potentially leaving them without access to the program and pushed deeper into poverty.
But an unintended consequence of this measure is the damage that it will do to rural communities and the grocery stores they rely on.
….
“SNAP users help grocery stores’ bottom line,” says David Procter, director of Kansas State University’s Rural Grocery Initiative. According to a report from Civil Eats, a news organization that reports on America’s food system, SNAP cuts will mean that places as different as Detroit and rural Alaska could suffer. In Detroit, two different grocers told researchers that SNAP makes up 80 percent of their business. In rural Alaska, according to Eater, a food news site, for some village grocers, SNAP benefits make up 40 percent of their profits. Oregon Food Bank CEO Susannah Morgan estimated that the state stands to lose $18 million in revenue at grocery stores and agricultural production.
Whitewater’s esteemed member of congress, F. Jim Sensenbrenner, has reinforced his reputation as a clueless Trumper with a valedictory editorial in the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/opinion/trump-impeachment-sensenbrenner.html
In it he moans about how manifestly unfair the impeachment of Trump is, and delivers a big wet kiss to Ken Starr about how exemplary his impeachment handling was for the Clenis BJ.
Whitewater will be well served by F. Jim’s departure. Wisconsin will be well served by Fitz going to DC. The inner beauty of that is that he won’t be in state politics any more and he won’t have much opportunity to do a lot of damage in DC, at least for a while, as he will just be a back-bencher, and lost in the roiling army of Trump cultists.
I’ve come around to your view, much as I dislike Fitzgerald – I’ll vote against him, of course, but be happy to see him out of state politics in any event.
Sensenbrenner – clueless indeed. Funny, at the Whitewater town hall he most recently held, he accused those in the audience of being partisan (replying to their remarks by saying that ‘the partisan cat was out of the bag.’) What a dim man he must be, to think others would be cowed by an accusation that fit him more than it did his audience. An aged, entitled dunce – he’ll be missed by none.