Good morning.
Christmas Eve in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-five. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 02m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 19.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1968, astronauts orbit the moon ten times before returning to Earth: “Apollo 8 took three days to travel to the Moon. It orbited ten times over the course of 20 hours, during which the crew made a Christmas Eve television broadcast where they read the first 10 verses from the Book of Genesis. At the time, the broadcast was the most watched TV program ever. Apollo 8’s successful mission paved the way for Apollo 11 to fulfill U.S. President John F. Kennedy‘s goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s. The Apollo 8 astronauts returned to Earth on December 27, 1968, when their spacecraft splashed down in the Northern Pacific Ocean. The crew was named Time magazine‘s “Men of the Year” for 1968 upon their return.”
Worth reading in full —
Jason Stein reports that, concerning a high-level state administrator who sought to evade the public records law, Panel upholds firing of ex-Corrections secretary: “Madison — Former state Corrections secretary Ed Wall knowingly sought to evade Wisconsin’s open records law, a state panel found in upholding his firing. In a six-page opinion this month, the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission threw out Wall’s appeal of his dismissal from a backup job by Attorney General Brad Schimel earlier this year. The case was an unexpected outgrowth of the controversy over abuses at a juvenile prison that worsened under Wall’s watch as corrections head….”Here Wall understood that the document indeed was a public record and that the only way to avoid the required disclosure was to unlawfully keep it ‘strictly between you and me’ as Wall proposed,” the panel’s decision reads. “Once the communication was disclosed, the attorney general had no choice but to terminate Wall. The action of a high-level administrator attempting to evade the law would significantly undermine the (Department of Justice) had lesser discipline been imposed.”
It should come as no surprise, as Philip Rucker reports in Trump tweets praise of Putin for attack on Clinton, that a would-be autocrat loves a Russian one more than his own people: “WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President-elect Donald Trump late Friday publicly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin for attacking Trump’s former Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. In a striking statement that seems to further align Trump with Putin, the incoming U.S. president tweeted that he agreed with the Russian leader’s assessment that Clinton and the Democratic Party generally have not shown “dignity” following widespread loses in the November election. “So true!” Trump tweeted of Putin’s comments, apparently referencing statements the Russian made at his year-end news conference.”
Earlier yesterday, as Harper Neidig reports, Trump share[d] letter from Putin: ‘His thoughts are so correct’: “President-elect Donald Trump on Friday praised Vladimir Putin and shared a Christmas letter the Russian president sent him. “A very nice letter from Vladimir Putin; his thoughts are so correct,” Trump said in a statement. “I hope both sides are able to live up to these thoughts, and we do not have to travel an alternate path.”
On reads that Carl Paladino, Trump Ally [co-chair of Trump’s New York state campaign], Wishes Obama Dead of Mad Cow Disease in ’17: “Mr. Paladino’s comments were published in Artvoice, a weekly Buffalo newspaper. They came in response to an open-ended feature in which local figures were asked about their hopes for 2017. “Obama catches mad cow disease after being caught having relations with a Herford,” said Mr. Paladino, who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2010, making an apparent reference to the Hereford cattle breed. He said he hoped the disease killed the president. Asked what he most wanted to see “go away” in the new year, Mr. Paladino — who has a reputation in New York political and business circles for speaking in an unfiltered manner reminiscent of Mr. Trump’s — answered, “Michelle Obama.” “I’d like her to return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla,” he said.”
At the Toronto Zoo, it’s a Giant Panda vs. a Snowman: