Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 6:32 AM and sunset 5:42 PM, for 11h 10m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 92.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred seventy-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1922, Justice Brandeis delivers the unanimous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Leser v. Garnett, upholding the constitutionality of the Nineteenth Amendment that recognized women’s right to vote.
On this day in 1904, Wisconsin’s second state capitol building burns: “On the evening of the 26th, the generator was turned off for the night. The only lights visible were two gas jets serving the night watchman. At approximately 2 a.m., night watchman Nat Crampton smelled smoke and followed the odor to a recently varnished ceiling, already in flames. A second watchman arrived to assist, but there was no water pressure with which to operate a hose. The fire department encountered a similar situation upon arrival. Governor Robert M. La Follette telegraphed fire departments in Janesville and Milwaukee for assistance. La Follette was at the capitol, directing efforts to douse the fire and entering the burning building to retrieve valuable papers. The fire was completly extinguished by 10 p.m. the next day. Losses were estimated to be close to $1 million.”
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Max Boot writes Trump vs. Mueller is a battle for America’s soul:
Reading Marc Fisher and Sari Horwitz’s extraordinary article comparing the lives of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and President Trump made me realize that the war between the two men is not just a struggle over the fate of this presidency. It is a battle for the soul of America, because each of them represents a recognizable American archetype.
Mueller was born to wealth and attended elite institutions — St. Paul’s School, Princeton University, the University of Virginia School of Law — but felt compelled to serve his country. During the Vietnam War, when most of his classmates were avoiding the draft, he volunteered for the Marine Corps and earned numerous decorations leading a rifle platoon in fierce combat. Returning home, he became a prosecutor and eventually ran the Justice Department’s criminal division. In the 1990s Mueller went into private practice. It was lucrative, but he hated it. Watching the spike of drug-driven murders in the District of Columbia, he volunteered to become a line prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office. It was as if a retired general had volunteered to serve as a private in wartime.
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Trump is Mueller’s opposite in every meaningful respect save that he was also born to privilege. He has much in common with the land promoters who bamboozled English immigrants into coming to the New World in the 17th century with fanciful tales of riches — what Trump would describe as “truthful hyperbole.” He is the kind of charming con man who peddled patent medicines in the 19th century and then, in the 20th century, penny stocks and time-shares. These scofflaws and scammers were the inspiration for the phony duke and dauphin in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Jay Gatsby and the Wizard of Oz.
Trump combines the hedonism of the 1970s with the bigotry and sexism of the 1950s: the worst of both worlds. His consciousness was not raised in the 1960s, but his libido was. He did not take part in the civil rights or antiwar movements and won five draft deferments — including one for “bone spurs” — so that he could devote his life to the pursuit of women and wealth. He later said that fear of catching a sexually transmitted disease was “my personal Vietnam.”
(An American majority opposes Trump, and always has. What’s been said of him so many times, in similar variations, is true: Trump’s a stupid person’s idea of a smart person, and an ignorant person’s idea of a knowledgeable one.)
➤ James Palmer contends China’s Stability Myth Is Dead:
The announcement on Sunday that China would abolish the two-term limit for the presidency, effectively foreshadowing current leader Xi Jinping’s likely status as president for life, had been predicted ever since Xi failed to nominate a clear successor at last October’s Communist Party Congress. But it still came as a shock in a country where the collective leadership established under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s was once considered inviolable. Xi, like every leader since Deng, combines a trinity of roles that embody the three pillars of power in China: party chairman, president, and head of the Central Military Commission. But like every leader since Deng, he was once expected to hand these over after his appointed decade, letting one generation of leadership pass smoothly on to the next.
It’s virtually impossible to gauge public opinion in China, especially as censorship has gripped ever tighter online. But among Chinese I know, including those used to defending China’s system, the move caused dismay and a fair amount of gallows humor involving references to “Emperor Pooh” and “West Korea.”
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Perhaps the system was always doomed, as soon as a cunning enough leader emerged — though Xi was not only skilled but lucky, utilizing the fall of his likely rival Bo Xilai to consolidate his own supremacy. There will be a certain grim amusement in watching intellectual apparatchiks scuttle to explain how their previous arguments in favor of collective rule have been superseded by the needs of the times and that strongman rule is now the only answer. As the New York Times’s Chris Buckley pointed out, Hu Angang, a regular and vocal apologist for the government, made collective rule the centerpiece of his book on the superiority of the Chinese political system — published in 2013, just after Xi’s initial ascension.
(One can’t say that the China has chosen her fate, but rather that Xi and the CCP have chosen for her.)
➤ Jason Stein reports Eric Holder’s group sues Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker over not calling special elections:
A group led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder sued Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker Monday over his refusal to call special elections to fill two open legislative seats.
Fresh off a victory in a Senate special election last month, Wisconsin Democrats have demanded that Walker call these two additional special elections and give their party an opportunity to notch more wins.
With Democrats seeing an opportunity — and Republicans seeing a threat — the controversy over the special election has taken on a strong political cast.
Holder’s group, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, jumped into the fight Monday, bringing the lawsuit in Dane County Circuit Court on behalf of Wisconsin Democrats who live in the two districts.
“Governor Scott Walker’s refusal to hold special elections is an affront to representative democracy,” Holder said in a statement. “Forcing citizens to go more than a year without representation in the general Assembly is a plain violation of their rights, and we’re hopeful the court will act quickly to order the governor to hold elections.”
➤ Andrew Cohen reports Exclusive: Rep. Adam Schiff Offers New Insight into Steve Bannon and the Democratic Memo:
Rep. Adam Schiff seems ready to acknowledge the theory that Steve Bannon is trying to run out the clock on Capitol Hill lawmakers. Speaking to Esquire.com, the California Democrat said that the House Intelligence Committee has been somewhat tougher on Bannon than it has been with other former Trump aides called to testify in the Russia probe—namely Corey Lewandowski. But Schiff believes that Bannon has spoken instead to Robert Mueller and his investigators because he thinks he’d likely lose a legal showdown over executive privilege if he were to cross the special counsel.
“Steve Bannon apparently is a man without a country, neither in with the White House nor in with Breitbart, so the majority is willing to take him on in a way they have not been willing with other witnesses,” Schiff said.
Schiff also responded to a report over the weekend that he has rattled President Trump.
“I am doing my job and clearly there is something in it that is threatening to the president, or at least he views it that way, and he’s even more alarmed at what Bob Mueller is doing,” Schiff said. “He seems to think that these playground bully tactics are going to work. They don’t work at all. They just steel people’s resolved to be more disciplined about their work.”
➤ Karin Brulliard reports A ‘one in a million’ yellow cardinal is dazzling the Internet with its sunshiny feathers:
[Photographer Jeremy] Black said in a Facebook post that he learned about the bird from a friend, Charlie Stephenson, a longtime birdwatcher who had spotted the sun-hued fellow at her feeder. At first, she told Al.com, she figured it was a species of yellow bird she had never seen before. Then she realized that the creature, with its black mask and crested head, looked just like a cardinal — just one of a different color.This coloration is not unique, but it is aberrant, according to a 2003 research paper on what at the time was said to be the first-ever reported yellow northern cardinal in the United States. It was a specimen collected in 1989 in Baton Rouge by scientists at Louisiana State University. Researchers who studied its feathers concluded that the bird had a genetic mutation that impaired the metabolic processes that normally make red feathers out of the carotenoid-rich yellow and orange foods in a male cardinal’s diet.