Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will bring thunderstorms and a high of thirty-eight. Sunrise is 7 AM and sunset 5:17 PM, for 10h 16m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 85.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}ninety-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Common Council meets this evening at 6:30 PM.
Charles Dickens is born this day in 1812. Laura Ingalls Wilder is born this day in 1867, in a village near Pepin, Wisconsin.
Recommended for reading in full —
Former Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, argues that We can’t let Trump go down Putin’s path: “In retrospect, Russians who lament the consolidation of Putin’s autocracy all say they reacted too slowly at the beginning. They didn’t believe things could get so bad. They didn’t believe Putin would ever go as far as he did. Back in 2000, Putin had few allies within the state, and lukewarm support in society. He won his first election because of government support and weak opponents, not because of wild enthusiasm among voters for him or his ideas. Back then, important actors in Russia’s business class remained autonomous from the state, regional leaders also acted a check on Moscow’s power, independent media still existed and parliament still enjoyed some real power. Had these forces pushed back immediately against creeping authoritarianism, Russia’s political trajectory might have been different. Sounds familiar? Trump also had never run for office before last year. He presented himself emphatically as a law-and-order candidate. He has promised to cut taxes, thus ensuring support from the business community. Like Putin in 2000, he has pledged “to make America great again.” Just as Putin ordered the Russian army into Chechnya, Trump has already threatened to send federal forces into Chicago. Just like Putin, Trump and his team have labeled as enemies protesters, journalists and members of allegedly “terrorist” nations. Trump’s recent Twitter screed against those opposing him — “Professional anarchists, thugs and paid protesters” — sounds eerily similar to Putin’s reaction to crowds mobilized against him in 2011-2012.”
Conor Friedersdorf explains Why Donald Trump Bears Blame for Making America Less Safe: “First, Trump’s executive order shows an economic illiterate’s disregard for opportunity cost. At the stroke of a pen, he ensured that the parts of the U.S. government that vet immigrants, whether at foreign consulates or U.S. ports of entry, would spend months of additional time and effort on tens of thousands of people who’ve already been through years of vetting. It would be as if TSA forced a bunch of people who’d already gone through security to line up again for screening without realizing that less time and attention would be paid to folks who’ve not been screened. What’s more, are new hurdles for, say, Iranian grandparents or Libyan children who aren’t even old enough to have been alive on 9/11, possibly the best use of scarce resources? How many additional smugglers from unaffected countries slipped through customs last week while agents were busy handcuffing Green Card holders? If you were a “bad guy” from an unaffected country like Saudi Arabia, what better time to try slipping into the United States than the chaos of last week? And who focuses on countries that pose terror risks without listing Pakistan?”
David Frum offers advice on How to Beat Trump: “The more conservative you are [in style, manner], the more radical you are. You want to scare Trump? Be orderly, polite, and visibly patriotic. Trump wants to identify all opposition to him with the black-masked crowbar thugs who smashed windows and burned a limo on his inauguration day. Remember Trump’s tweet about stripping citizenship from flag burners? It’s beyond audacious that a candidate who publicly requested help from Russian espionage services against his opponent would claim the flag as his own. But Trump is trying. Don’t let him get away with it. Carry the flag. Open with the Pledge of Allegiance. Close by singing the Star Spangled Banner––like these protesters at LAX, in video posted by The Atlantic’s own Conor Friedersdorf. Trump’s presidency is itself one long flag-burning, an attack on the principles and institutions of the American republic. That republic’s symbols are your symbols. You should cherish them and brandish them. Don’t get sucked into the futile squabbling cul-de-sac of intersectionality and grievance politics.”
Kurt Eichenwald asks, Can Trump Tell the Difference Between Truth and His Lies?: “Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower and probably every politician ever has used spin or told some whoppers to achieve a specific goal. But the benefit from the stories Trump has spun recently was not only zero, it harmed him. No rational person could possibly have cared how many people attended Trump’s inauguration; anyone could see the same photographs and read the same data about television viewership and Washington’s mass transit usage as everyone else. None could have reasonably believed that the most incredible voter fraud campaign in American history had just taken place, with millions of illegal votes cast for Democrats, particularly when Republicans won most of the key Senate races in that election and maintained control of the House. He could have said nothing about those two topics and no one would have thought the worse of him. But if he knows he is lying, he not only accomplishes nothing, he harms himself by showing he will lie over irrelevant trivialities. And that raises the question of whether he knows when he is lying. “Although deception is in almost everyone’s social repertoire, it is generally employed as a tactical or strategic option of last resort,’’ said Dr. Timothy R. Levine, a communications professor at Michigan State University who co-authored a 2010 report on experiments about lying. ”Absent psychopathology, people do not deceive when the truth works just fine.” (Emphasis mine.)
Why there are small bumps on the ‘F’ and ‘J’ keys of every keyboard? Here’s why —