Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty. Sunrise is 6:35 AM and sunset 5:39 PM, for 11h 04m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 60.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred thirty-eighth day.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School Board meets in open session beginning at 7 PM.
On this day in 1862, James Loom demonstrates a new canon at Camp Randall. (“James Loom exhibited a new breech-loading cannon at Camp Randall in Madison, Wisconsin The cannon was said to be effectively discharged 50 times in four minutes.”)
Recommended for reading in full:
Ellen Nakashima reports Former senior national security officials to issue declaration on national emergency:
A bipartisan group of 58 former senior national security officials will issue a statement Monday saying that “there is no factual basis” for President Trump’s proclamation of a national emergency to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
The joint statement, whose signatories include former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former defense secretary Chuck Hagel, will come a day before the House is expected to vote on a resolution to block Trump’s Feb. 15 declaration.
….
“Under no plausible assessment of the evidence is there a national emergency today that entitles the president to tap into funds appropriated for other purposes to build a wall at the southern border,” the group said.
Albright served under President Bill Clinton, and Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, served under President Barack Obama.
Also signing were Eliot A. Cohen, State Department counselor under President George W. Bush; Thomas R. Pickering, President George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations; John F. Kerry, Obama’s second secretary of state; Susan E. Rice, Obama’s national security adviser; Leon E. Panetta, Obama’s CIA director and defense secretary; as well as former intelligence and security officials who served under Republican and Democratic administrations.
Juliet Eilperin reports EPA regulator skirts the line between former clients and current job:
Less than a month into his tenure as the top air policy official at the Environmental Protection Agency, Bill Wehrum hopped into the EPA’s electric Chevy Volt and rode to the Pennsylvania Avenue offices of his former law firm.
There, he met with representatives of the nation’s largest power companies — including two groups that, shortly, had been his paying clients — to brief them on the Trump administration’s plans to weaken federal environmental regulations.
The Dec. 7, 2017, meeting is just one example of interactions between Wehrum, a skilled lawyer and regulator, and former clients that ethics experts say comes dangerously close to violating federal ethics rules. Since joining the EPA in November 2017, Wehrum acknowledges that he has met with two former clients at his old firm — without consulting in advance with ethics officials, even though they had cautioned him about such interactions. He also weighed in on a policy shift that could have influenced litigation involving DTE Energy, a Detroit-based utility represented by his former firm.