Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 21. Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 5:32 PM, for 10h 48m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 47.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1868, photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis is born near Whitewater.
Recommended for reading in full —
Kelly Meyerhofer reports UW campuses planning for fall semester to be ‘as close to normal as possible:
Meeting the 75% benchmark would represent a significant change from how classes are currently being delivered.
At UW-Madison, 82% of classes this spring semester are fully online, according to System data. That’s up from 64% of classes delivered remotely last fall.
In fact, every single UW campus increased its share of online classes this semester from what schools offered last fall.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial board writes Ron Johnson’s whitewash of the U.S. Capitol riot shows why Wisconsin’s senior senator has to go:
To hear Ron Johnson tell it, nothing much happened on Jan. 6 inside the U.S. Capitol.
Just a few bad apples got a little rowdy.
“This didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me,” the Oshkosh Republican told talk radio show host Jay Weber.
“I mean ‘armed,’ when you hear ‘armed,’ don’t you think of firearms? … How many firearms were confiscated? How many shots were fired?”
Johnson’s grasp on reality has been tenuous for years, but even more so since he aligned himself lockstep with former President Donald Trump.
Since Trump left office, two kinds of Republicans have emerged:
Those who want to purge Trump and his cult of white supremacists and conspiracy theorists from the party and those, like Johnson, who long for the return of their would-be king.
From the week the votes were cast last November, Johnson helped spread Trump’s lie that the election was stolen, helped perpetuate the myth that voter fraud cost the former president the election. Johnson used the levers of government to spread the lie, calling a bogus Senate hearing to “investigate” election “irregularities.”
In fact, this election, held during a deadly pandemic, was the “most secure in American history,” according the nation’s lead cybersecurity agency.
See also U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson: Ambitious, Compromised, or Crackpot? and Ron Johnson: ‘No Enemies to the Right’?
Tariq Panja reports Fake Doctors, Fake Documents: How a Russian Doping Lie Fell Apart (‘With investigators closing in, the high jumper Danil Lysenko needed a paper trail to support his story. Top Russian track officials provided it by creating a fake hospital’):
If the cover-up was to work, the high jumper Danil Lysenko realized far too late, he had better familiarize himself with the Moscow hospital where Russian track and field officials had insisted he had undergone a battery of medical tests.
The details mattered. The tests were the centerpiece of Russia’s explanation for why antidoping officials had been unable to locate Lysenko in the spring of 2018.
….
So in September 2018, fearing investigators were closing in on the truth, a nervous Lysenko sent an email to a top Russian track official, asking if he could provide photographs of the hospital, so at least the athlete would know how to describe it if anyone asked. Then, accompanied by the same official, he drove to the address listed on the hospital’s website. When the car stopped and Lysenko looked around, he was stunned.
There was no hospital. There wasn’t even a building. All he could see was a construction site.
This was going to be harder to explain.
See exactly where Perseverance landed in Mars’ Jezero Crater:
What has become of the J-S? Are they reverting back into a newspaper that takes it’s place in the community seriously? It is refreshing to see them address a real problem, like RoJo/Big Fitz/Tom Tiffany rather than doing yet another fawning life-style write-up of some Wisco-oligarch’s mansion in White-Folks Bay.
Unexpected and belated, but perhaps another way that 2021 will be better than recent years (and all of the capitalist Walker years).