Good morning. 
Christmas Eve in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-eight. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, for 9h 02m 04s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 3.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred forty-first day.
On this day in 1968, Apollo 8 becomes the first crewed spacecraft to leave Earth orbit, reach the Moon, orbit it, and return.
Recommended for reading in full —
Philip Bump reports Trump notwithstanding, incomes in blue America continue to grow faster than in red areas:
New data from the Census Bureau, though, suggest that, even under Trump, it’s bluer areas of the country that are seeing bigger gains.
There are several reasons for this, including the increasing centralization of technology jobs in certain regions, as the Brookings Institution reported this month. Part of it, too, is that areas that once relied on manufacturing haven’t evolved their economies enough to prevent younger workers from migrating elsewhere, as Well Fargo Securities economist Mark Vitner told the Associated Press. The AP was reporting on the new census data, which found “household income grew the most in tech and entertainment centers like Austin, Texas; Nashville, Tennessee; and large chunks of the West Coast.”
If we break out that data by congressional district and overlay 2016 voting preference, clear patterns emerge. Incomes in districts that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 or more narrowly preferred Trump tend to range across a number of median incomes. Districts that were more heavily supportive of Trump are clustered in lower income ranges. (These figures are not adjusted for inflation.)
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The extent to which Trump can shape the economy was always more limited than he suggested. He has enacted some policies, such as tariffs, that have had an effect opposite to the one he promised. (Thanks in part to those tariffs, employment growth in the Midwest is trailing other areas of the country.)
The implicit promise of Trump’s campaign, though, was that red America would thrive at blue America’s expense. Under Trump, blue America is doing just fine.
Gerry Shih reports ‘Everyone is getting locked up’: As workers grow disgruntled, China strikes at labor activists:
In meetings of senior officials in January, Xi stressed the need for a “high degree of vigilance” against political and economic challenges, while a key ally, Wang Huning, told cadres of the need to “defuse major risks” that could undermine the party’s rule.
In the past year, authorities have severely punished students from elite universities for trying to organize electronics workers. They have also sentenced several nonprofit workers and bloggers for advocating for sick construction workers. China’s government has not commented on the labor crackdown, and police in Guangzhou declined to answer questions about Chen.
Ground zero both for activists and the government response has been southern Guangdong province, which has been rocked by strikes, factory relocations and closures as China’s exports dip.