Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 25. Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 5:31 PM, for 10h 45m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 38% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1930, while studying photographs taken in January, Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto.
Recommended for reading in full —
Rory Linnane reports Superintendent candidate Deborah Kerr deletes account after tweets about her experience with the N-word:
Screenshot: Kerr Campaign Website
The prompt, from Madison Payton, host of the Race Through Education Podcast: “When was the first time someone called you the n- word?”
Kerr replied, “I was 16 in high school and white — my lips were bigger than most and that was the reference given to me.”
When another Twitter user asked how the experience impacted her, she replied, “It made me realize that we are all different and that is the gift we give to one another.”
(There’s dense and then there’s denser: the consequence of the racial slur directed at the alabaster Kerr would be different from the same slur directed at someone Black, and use of the slur is not a reminder of diversity but an expression of bigotry.)
Henry Redman reports Election Commissioner Bob Spindell can vote whether or not to investigate himself for election fraud:
Republican elections commissioner Robert Spindell, who has been accused by Law Forward of fraudulently casting an Electoral College vote for former President Donald Trump, will have a say in the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) decision over whether or not he should be investigated, unless he recuses himself due to a conflict of interest.
Spindell and nine others, including Wisconsin Republican Party chair Andrew Hitt, met on Dec. 14 to cast Wisconsin’s ten electoral votes for Trump, even though Joe Biden won Wisconsin and was awarded the state’s votes.
Progressive legal outfit Law Forward wrote a letter to Milwaukee County District AttorneyJohn Chisholm and sent a complaint to the Elections Commission alleging that the actions of Spindell, Hitt and others was a violation of state law.
The Milwaukee County DA has the authority to decide whether or not to file criminal charges against the group and the WEC has the authority to decide whether or not to investigate the allegations made in the complaint.
Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper report Promotions for Female Generals Were Delayed Over Fears of Trump’s Reaction:
Last fall, the Pentagon’s most senior leaders agreed that two top generals should be promoted to elite, four-star commands.
For the defense secretary at the time, Mark T. Esper, and Gen. Mark A. Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the tricky part was that both of the accomplished officers were women. In 2020 America under President Donald J. Trump, the two Pentagon leaders feared that any candidates other than white men for jobs mostly held by white men might run into turmoil once their nominations reached the White House.
Mr. Esper and General Milley worried that if they even raised their names — Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost of the Air Force and Lt. Gen. Laura J. Richardson of the Army — the Trump White House would replace them with its own candidates before leaving office.
So the Pentagon officials agreed on an unusual strategy: They held back their recommendations until after the November elections, betting that if Joseph R. Biden Jr. won, he and his aides would be more supportive of the Pentagon picks than Mr. Trump, who had feuded with Mr. Esper and had a history of disparaging women. They stuck to the plan even after Mr. Trump fired Mr. Esper six days after the election.
It would be unfortunate to not note a passing.
Rush is dead. God called the note from the man with “Talent on loan from God”. The country, and the world, would have been a better place if the loan had been called 30 years ago.
He accomplished a lot in his life. Rather little of it was positive. He did singlehandedly rescue AM radio from the technological ash-heap, with his show airing on 600+ stations at one point. It turns out that vitriol trumps static, and rank bigotry does not have to be delivered in either Stereo or even Hi-Fidelity. He inspired thousands of imitators, who hoped to hate their way to the big-time, just like Rush. Here in Wisco-World we have his bastard progeny like Mark Behling, Vicki McKenna, and Jeff Wagner spewing non-stop propaganda daily. That group used to include Charlie Sykes, until he figured out that he was getting lost in the swelling crowd of hate-radio jocks and there was a nascent market for reformed Trumpers. He made the right choice, and has profited handsomely from his epiphany.
And profit *IS* the reason Rush, and his fellow hate-shit spewers exist. Rush collected a reputed eighty million bux a years for sitting in his basement studio and bull-shitting venom for three hours a day. His last contract was for 200 million. What Rush understood first was that there was/is an enormous market for hate/fear/misogyny/white-resentment/racism/grievance in the Republican party, and he was absolutely masterful at exploiting all of those pathologies for fame and profit. It got him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a logical result only in the warped land of Trump.
It is hard to overestimate Rush’s influence on the modern Republican Party. There would be no Tea Party, Freedom Caucus, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Scott Walker, or DJ Trump if Rush had not blazed the trail and promoted them unconscionably. What he, and his orange-headed step-child DJT, demonstrated beyond doubt, was that towering hypocrisy is the fundamental characteristic of the Republican party. Rush and Trump personally demonstrated that all of the pious natterings about fiscal frugality, family values, personal responsibility, and patriotism were all just Potemkin aspirations, and put out to disguise the real reason the party exists: To make sure white folks still rule.
And Rush, like Trump, found an enormous audience. It didn’t matter if what he spouted was true, just that it fed the fears/resentments/grievances of his fans. He and Trump have built an alternate reality that will far outlast either of them in the Republican party. We now have one completely unmoored political party, where fact does not intrude,. science is all wrong, racial anger and resentment are celebrated, and fcking with people, just because you can, is celebrated. Rush made the Republican party what it is today, and will be celebrated, along with Trump, as the guys that killed it. The formerly respectable Republican party is now at the far end of the classic arc of good idea–>business–>racket.
Thanks, Rush. Rot in hell…
As you so, this is Limbaugh’s progeny: “The formerly respectable Republican party is now at the far end of the classic arc of good idea–>business–>racket.”
Few worse epitaphs than that…
It’s hard to ignore the Lincoln Project’s accelerated balistic path along that arc…
Yes, very hard to ignore. They played a role in a coalition against Trump, but there’s no worthiness in coalition partners who are, themselves, corrupted and compromised. One can and should go on without them.