Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 10m 48s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 84.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is both the one thousand four hundred eighty-seventh day and the twenty-eighth day.
On this day in 1783, at Fraunces Tavern in New York City, General Washington bids farewell to his officers.
Recommended for reading in full —
Susan Glasser writes The President Is Acting Crazy, So Why Are We Shrugging It Off?:
Donald Trump in defeat, it turns out, is even more whiny, dishonest, and self-absorbed than he was before his decisive loss to Biden a month ago. In the speech, delivered to an empty room and released straight to Facebook, for reasons that remain unclear, Trump repeated many of the election conspiracy theories, lies, and laments which he has been sending forth for weeks on Twitter and via emissaries like Rudy Giuliani. The news was that these baseless claims—the only impact of which will be to further undermine public confidence in the U.S. government—were coming directly from the President, as he stood at a lectern bearing the Presidential seal. And what words they were. The pollsters were liars. “Detroit is corrupt.” “Millions of votes were cast illegally in the swing states alone.”
….
There are only two possible conclusions from listening to this folly: either the President actually believes what he is saying, in which case he is crazy, or he does not, in which case he is engaged in the most cynical attack on American democracy ever to come from the White House. Is Trump “increasingly detached from reality,” as even the dispassionate, strictly nonpartisan Associated Press put it, in recounting the speech? Or is that conclusion, harsh as it is, giving Trump the benefit of the doubt by implying that he is just misguided or uninformed? There is another explanation, after all, for this reckless speech: What if, in fact, the President is not delusional but is the purposeful, malevolent creator of an alternate reality, knowingly spewing disinformation, discord, and division? Either variant, of course, is terrible.
Silvia Amaro reports EU proposes a plan to revive U.S. ties and work with Biden:
The European Union announced a new plan on Wednesday to improve relations with the U.S. ahead of the inauguration of Joe Biden.
It’s been a tense four years of trans-Atlantic ties, with President Donald Trump and the EU clashing over trade, defense, technology and foreign relations — to name a few points of contention.
As the Biden administration is due to arrive at the White House on Jan. 20, the EU has not wasted any time and has prepared a new plan to reset that relationship.
“We are taking the initiative to design a new transatlantic agenda fit for today’s global landscape,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement Wednesday.
“It is time to reconnect,” she added. Meanwhile, the commission’s executive vice president, Valdis Dombrovskis, told CNBC the EU was sending a “signal that we are ready and willing to engage with the U.S.”
In a document entitled “A new EU-U.S. agenda for global change,” the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, defined four major policy areas to focus on: health response, climate change, trade and tech, and security.