Good morning. 
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-seven. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 03m 30s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 93.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is both the one thousand five hundred tenth and the fifty-first day.
On this day in 1929, Soviet General Secretary Stalin orders the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” leading to millions deported or dead.
Recommended for reading in full —
Patricia Cohen reports The Struggle to Mend America’s Rural Roads (‘As supersize vehicles bear heavier loads, maintenance budgets can’t keep up. Meet the Wisconsin farmers paying the price’):
Like hundreds of other small agricultural counties and towns around the country, Trempealeau County in central-west Wisconsin is overwhelmed with aging, damaged roads and not enough money to fix them.
“Our road hasn’t been paved since the ’60s,” said Kellen Nelson, whose family owns Triple Brook Farms on County Road O outside Osseo. “Patching and seal coating is all they’ve ever done.”
The roads look like losers in a barroom brawl. Thick, jagged cracks run down the asphalt like scars, interrupted at points by bruised bumps. In some places, guardrails are tilted off their moorings like a pair of glasses knocked askew.
“It is not real stable — the shoulders are eroding in many places,” Mr. Nelson said. “When you’re going through with an 80,000-pound load of soybeans and meeting cars, that’s dangerous.”
Throughout much of the Midwest and South, the rural transportation system is crumbling. Two-thirds of the nation’s freight emanates from rural areas. Traffic volume has increased. And over the years, tractor-trailers and farm equipment have been supersized, ballooning in length, breadth and weight.
A legally loaded semi-trailer truck can produce 5,000 to 10,000 times the road damage of one car according to some estimates, said Benjamin J. Jordan, director of the Wisconsin Transportation Information Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Sarah Ellison asks What happened to Maria Bartiromo?:
Her conviction that the rest of the media is biased against Trump now extends to social media. Like the president, the newswoman herself has seen some of her tweets flagged by Twitter for promoting misinformation — such as the Federalist article she shared the day after the election headlined, “Yes, Democrats Are Trying To Steal The Election in Michigan, Wisconsin, And Pennsylvania,” and her following day’s evidence-free claims of “AZ poll workers forcing voters to use sharpies thereby invalidated ballots” and “4 am dumps” delivering tens of thousands of swing state votes for Biden.
She decried the media’s role in calling the election for Biden. “The media’s role is to report the facts, and I think it’s up to the electors to report on who the president is,” she said on her show long after all the major networks had called the election for Biden but before the electors voted on Dec. 14. Now that that vote has happened, Bartiromo told The Post that she acknowledges Biden as the president-elect. “That said, you still have a sitting president contesting the election, which I will cover as well. I will also ensure to cover any instances of fraud, not just for this election but for future elections.”
She’s going to have to be a bit more careful covering claims of election fraud. Bartiromo was one of several Fox hosts, including Dobbs, who were forced to air a corrective segment on their shows in response to a legal threat sent by voting technology company Smartmatic. Bartiromo was mentioned 46 times in the letter to Fox, the most of any Fox personality, largely for giving so much airtime to Trump allies Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell.
Through a spokesperson, Bartiromo declined to comment further.