Good morning.
Whitewater’s Monday will be mostly sunny with a high of forty-eight. Sunrise is 6:31 AM and sunset 5:42 PM, for 11h 11m 16s of daytime. The moon is new, with just .9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred eleventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM. Whitewater’s School Board meets in open session beginning at approximately 7 PM.
On this day in 1933, Germany’s Reichstag catches fire. The ruling Nazis, blaming the Communists, quickly use the fire in the parliament as a pretext to suspend civil liberties. On this day in 1949, the Kittoe Mine Fire leaves fourteen miners trapped 168 feet underground in smoke, debris and knee-deep water for seven hours.
Recommended for reading in full —
Andrew Higgins reports that Trump Embraces ‘Enemy of the People,’ a Phrase With a Fraught History: “MOSCOW — The phrase was too toxic even for Nikita Khrushchev, a war-hardened veteran communist not known for squeamishness. As leader of the Soviet Union, he demanded an end to the use of the term “enemy of the people” because “it eliminated the possibility of any kind of ideological fight.” “The formula ‘enemy of the people,’” Mr. Khrushchev told the Soviet Communist Party in a 1956 speech denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality, “was specifically introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating such individuals” who disagreed with the supreme leader. It is difficult to know if President Trump is aware of the historic resonance of the term, a label generally associated with despotic communist governments rather than democracies. But his decision to unleash the terminology has left some historians scratching their heads. Why would the elected leader of a democratic nation embrace a label that, after the death of Stalin, even the Soviet Union found to be too freighted with sinister connotations?
Meg Jones asks What if they held a town hall meeting and Rep. Paul Ryan didn’t come?: “KENOSHA – Lining up behind microphones Sunday evening, a few hundred of Rep. Paul Ryan’s constituents directed their wrath and disapproval toward an empty chair. “It says a lot to me that he’s not here,” said Lee Hansen of Racine, who served in the 82nd Airborne in the 1970s. “Maybe we should repeal and replace Paul Ryan.” Forward Kenosha organizers scheduled the town hall meeting Sunday evening at a union hall to give residents of the 1st Congressional District a way to get their thoughts and opinions to the Janesville Republican. Julia Kozel, a Forward Kenosha board member, said Ryan was invited to the event but didn’t respond. She said she found out he wasn’t coming through a story in the Kenosha News a few days earlier. “I don’t think he appreciates hearing things contrary to his ideology,” said Kozel.”
Jenna Johnson reports that These Iowans voted for Trump. Many of them are already disappointed: “Of the six swing states that were key to Trump’s unexpected win in November, his margin of victory was the highest in Iowa, where he beat Clinton by 9 percentage points. Yet at the dawn of his presidency, only 42 percent of Iowans approve of the job that he’s doing and 49 percent disapprove, according to a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll this month.”
Jennifer Rubin describes Trump vs. an America that works: “We don’t think it is a coincidence that in the election Trump lost the most economically productive areas of the United States. Brookings found, “The less-than-500 counties that Hillary Clinton carried nationwide encompassed a massive 64 percent of America’s economic activity as measured by total output in 2015. By contrast, the more-than-2,600 counties that Donald Trump won generated just 36 percent of the country’s output—just a little more than one-third of the nation’s economic activity.” To be clear, Clinton carried the most diverse, most cosmopolitan and most successful parts of America. (“Her base of 493 counties was heavily metropolitan. By contrast, Trumpland consists of hundreds and hundreds of tiny low-output locations that comprise the non-metropolitan hinterland of America, along with some suburban and exurban metro counties.”)
Nature on PBS shows how to Build Animatronic Animals That Go Undercover and Infiltrate the Pack: