Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of twenty-three. Sunrise is 6:58 AM and sunset 5:19 PM, for 10h 21m 29s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}ninety-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy contends, without ever producing evidence, that the U.S. Department of State is riddled with communists. On this day in 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signs a joint resolution authorizing a National Weather Service.
Recommended for reading in full —
Joe Pompeo reports that Wall Street Journal editor to face critics: “Amid growing newsroom discontent over his perceived resistance to critical coverage of Donald Trump, Wall Street Journal editor in chief Gerry Baker will host a town hall meeting next week where he is expected to address the paper’s reporting on the new administration and answer questions from his staff. The meeting, announced in a company email on Wednesday and scheduled for Monday, February 13, is billed as a wide-ranging session on the state of the Journal, but Trump coverage is expected to be high on the list of discussion topics….While other major news outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, have covered Trump aggressively throughout the campaign, the transition and the early days of the 45th presidency, repeatedly stoking the ire of Trump and his aides, the Journal has taken an arguably more circumspect, if not softer approach. Baker has been hesitant to allow Journal reporters to characterize Trump’s false assertions as lies and has suggested that media “elites” are out to get Trump. During the campaign, reporters say, some of his editorial decisions tended to downplay Trump’s transgressions while he urged his staff to be tougher on Hillary Clinton.”
Josh Feldman reports on a critic of House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz in Toobin: Chaffetz Won’t Investigate Trump Because He Only Cares About Investigating Democrats: “Do you think there were enough investigations of Benghazi by the Republican House?… Jason Chaffetz is only interested in investigating Democrats. Period. That’s the reason why Jason Chaffetz is in Congress, which is to investigate Democrats. He has no interest in making trouble for Donald Trump and he’s not going to make trouble for Donald Trump.”
Anna Nemtsova writes that America’s ‘Resistance’ Has a Lot to Learn From Russia’s Opposition: ““Whoever tries to understand Russia should know that this country is changing, every little town has volunteer movements, human-rights defenders and street journalists investigating the true story, “ Zygar, the author of the international best seller All the Kremlin’s Men, told The Daily Beast. But the opposition leaders still believe that only persistent street protests can change the power and politics in Russia. “We plan to revive the Solidarity movements that were originally founded by Nemtsov and hit the streets again this spring, one year before presidential elections—a good time to start,” Yashin told The Daily Beast.”
Jennifer Rubin observes that Trump’s lies all make America look worse: “President Trump does not tell lies randomly. Watch him long enough and you will see a pattern: America is rotten, and the press is lying to cover it up. During the campaign, one might have written this off as an effort to discredit the results of the Obama presidency, for which Hillary Clinton was effectively seeking a third term. Most every candidate, regardless of power, will argue that the incumbent party has failed in any number of regards because there still is plenty of (fill in the blank: poverty/homelessness/unemployment/terrorism). Now that Trump is president, however, his efforts to denigrate the country seem strange, not to mention false.”
It was only a matter of time – and this is that time – before someone combined a tiny house with a van: