Good morning. 
Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-eight. Sunrise is 7:09 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 11m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 52% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred twenty-first day.
On this day in 1864, the Wisconsin 10th Light Artillery fights in the Battle of Waynesborough, Georgia.
Recommended for reading in full:
Aaron Blake writes John Kennedy vs. Vladimir Putin: How Trump defenders’ Ukraine talking points compare to what Russians say:
On Sunday, for the second time in two weekends, Republican Sen. John Neely Kennedy (La.) spouted what U.S. officials have characterized as Russian propaganda about 2016 election interference. After suggesting that Ukraine rather than Russia might have hacked the Democrats in 2016 — and then recanting — he took to another show this weekend and said that he believes “both Russia and Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election.”
David Corn writes How the Republicans Are Trying to Gaslight America With Their Impeachment Report:
In a slapdash fashion, staffers for Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, who has been implicated himself in the Trump-Ukraine scandal, and two other Republican ranking members—Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Michael McCaul of Texas—have cobbled together a report on the impeachment inquiry that unshockingly proclaims Donald Trump innocent of…everything. This document was released on Monday ahead of the committee’s 300-page, highly detailed summary of its investigation and hearings that was unveiled on Tuesday and forwarded to the judiciary committee for that panel’s impeachment deliberations.
See also The GOP’s impeachment report is a series of red herrings.
Margaret Sullivan writes ‘I don’t know what to believe’ is an unpatriotic cop-out. Do better, Americans:
The New York Times published a story Monday with this headline: “ ‘No one believes anything’: Voters Worn Out by a Fog of Political News.” The reporters quoted a Wisconsin woman who said she didn’t know what to think of the various conflicting claims she’d heard about President Trump’s apparent abuse of power.
“You have to go in and really research it,” she said, and she doubted that many people cared enough to do that.
….
If every American did any two of the following things, the “who knows?” club could be swiftly disbanded.
Subscribe to a national newspaper and go beyond the headlines into the substance of the main articles; subscribe to your local newspaper and read it thoroughly — in print, if possible; watch the top of “PBS NewsHour” every night; watch the first 15 minutes of the half-hour broadcast nightly news; tune in to a public-radio news broadcast; do a simple fact-check search when you hear conflicting claims.
For those who can’t afford to subscribe to newspapers, almost all public libraries can provide access.
“Whatever the president wants us to believe, there are tested and reliable news sources,” [chief operating officer of PEN America Dru] Menaker noted. “There are even more firsthand sources than ever where you can judge yourself — links to documents, video clips, hours of televised testimony.”