Good morning. 
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-eight. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, for 9h 01m 42s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 45.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is both the one thousand five hundred fourth day and the forty-fifth day.
Whitewater’s Library Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School District Board meets via audiovisual conferencing in closed session at 6:15 PM and open session at 7 PM.
On this day in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the world’s first full-length animated feature, premieres at the Carthay Circle Theatre.
Recommended for reading in full —
Erica Newland writes ‘I’m Haunted by What I Did’ as a Lawyer in the Trump Justice Department:
I was an attorney at the Justice Department when Donald Trump was elected president. I worked in the Office of Legal Counsel, which is where presidents turn for permission slips that say their executive orders and other contemplated actions are lawful. I joined the department during the Obama administration, as a career attorney whose work was supposed to be independent of politics.
I never harbored delusions about a Trump presidency. Mr. Trump readily volunteered that his agenda was to disassemble our democracy, but I made a choice to stay at the Justice Department — home to some of the country’s finest lawyers — for as long as I could bear it. I believed that I could better serve our country by pushing back from within than by keeping my hands clean. But I have come to reconsider that decision.
My job was to tailor the administration’s executive actions to make them lawful — in narrowing them, I could also make them less destructive. I remained committed to trying to uphold my oath even as the president refused to uphold his.
But there was a trade-off: We attorneys diminished the immediate harmful impacts of President Trump’s executive orders — but we also made them more palatable to the courts.
….
Watching the Trump campaign’s attacks on the election results, I now see what might have happened if, rather than nip and tuck the Trump agenda, responsible Justice Department attorneys had collectively — ethically, lawfully — refused to participate in President Trump’s systematic attacks on our democracy from the beginning. The attacks would have failed.
….
No matter our intentions, we were complicit. We collectively perpetuated an anti-democratic leader by conforming to his assault on reality. We may have been victims of the system, but we were also its instruments. No matter how much any one of us pushed back from within, we did so as members of a professional class of government lawyers who enabled an assault on our democracy — an assault that nearly ended it.
We owe the country our honesty about that and about what we saw. We owe apologies. I offer mine here.
Gregory S. Schneider reports Virginia’s statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee removed from U.S. Capitol:
Workers have removed a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that represented Virginia in the U.S. Capitol, laboring in the wee hours of Monday morning to take the figure out of Statuary Hall.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) had requested the removal over the summer after a commission chartered by the General Assembly decided that a man who fought to uphold slavery was not a fitting symbol for a diverse and modern state.
How Elon Musk’s 700 MPH Hyperloop Concept Could Become the Fastest Way to Travel: