Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of twenty-four. Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 5:11 PM, for 10h 06m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 42.2% iof its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}eighty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1917, the United States breaks off diplomatic relations with Germany over that nation’s policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. On this day in 1865, the 25th and 32nd Wisconsin Infantry regiments fight in the Battle of River’s Bridge in South Carolina.
Recommended for reading in full —
Doug Schneider reports that Despite claim to contrary, WI as tested only 9 backlogged rape kits: “GREEN BAY – Two days after the state’s top prosecutor said “a few hundred” of Wisconsin’s 6,000 backlogged rape kits had been tested, his office acknowledged that the number is a fraction of that. The state has completed testing of nine kits, said Rebecca Ballweg, a spokeswoman in the office of Attorney General Brad Schimel. Another 200 are being tested. The news angered leaders who have been pressing the state to move faster with testing. Schimel’s office received $4 million in grants from the federal government and New York prosecutors to address the issue 16 months ago, and is seeking additional grant money.
Matt O’Brien thinks Wall Street believes a myth about Donald Trump’s presidency. It will face a rude awakening: “It’s not just that Trump has backed up his tough talk about trade and immigration like Wall Street hoped he wouldn’t. It’s that he might have a tough time cutting taxes and boosting spending like they hoped he would. Take corporate tax reform. It might seem like a sure thing that a Republican White House, Senate and House of Representatives would be able to agree on this, but it’s a lot less so when their plan might actually increase taxes for retailers like Walmart….It’s the same story with infrastructure. Trump’s ideological consigliere Steve Bannon wants a trillion-dollar infrastructure package that would be “as exciting as the 1930s,” but the rest of the Republican Party isn’t too enthused about this. They’d rather focus on the things they’ve been waiting years to do, like repealing Obamacare and slashing the safety net and coming to terms on some tax cut for the rich. The Democrats, for their part, want to rebuild our roads and bridges, but they don’t want to do it the way Bannon does. They’d rather have the government spend the money directly on what it thinks the most important projects are than give private companies tax breaks to do what it thinks the most profitable ones are. In other words, all the stimulus the market thought would help the economy in the short-term might not materialize, but all the isolationism that would hurt it in the long-term is already starting to.”
Jonathon Chait contends that America’s Leading Authoritarian Intellectual Is Working for Trump: “Race is integral to [Michael] Anton’s sense of his own persecution. He sees the enthusiasm for Trump among avowed white supremacists as more reason to support Trump: “The Left was calling us Nazis long before any pro-Trumpers tweeted Holocaust denial memes,” he argues. “And how does one deal with a Nazi — that is, with an enemy one is convinced intends your destruction? You don’t compromise with him or leave him alone. You crush him.” It is a fascinating line of reasoning: There are Nazis supporting his chosen candidate, therefore the left will crush conservatives like Nazis, therefore his chosen candidate’s triumph is all the more necessary.”
Carl Zimmer writes about The Purpose of Sleep? To Forget, Scientists Say: “A pair of papers published on Thursday in the journal Science offer evidence for another notion: We sleep to forget some of the things we learn each day. In order to learn, we have to grow connections, or synapses, between the neurons in our brains. These connections enable neurons to send signals to one another quickly and efficiently. We store new memories in these networks. In 2003, Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli, biologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, proposed that synapses grew so exuberantly during the day that our brain circuits got “noisy.” When we sleep, the scientists argued, our brains pare back the connections to lift the signal over the noise.
Cold temperatures mean that thousands of people can walk over largest lake in central Europe: