Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will see an afternoon shower with a high of fifty-one. Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 7:14 PM, for 12h 29m 07s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 71.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}five hundred first 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.
On this day in 1945, the United States is victorious, after weeks of intense fighting, at the Battle of Iwo Jima.
On this day in 1881, a famous Wisconsin mascot passes away: “On this date Old Abe, famous Civil War mascot, died from injuries sustained during a fire at the State Capitol. Old Abe was the mascot for Company C, an Eau Claire infantry unit that was part of the Wisconsin 8th Regiment. During the Capitol fire of 1881, smoke engulfed Old Abe’s cage. One of his feathers survived and is in the Wisconsin Historical Museum. [Source: Wisconsin Lore and Legends, pg. 51]”
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Craig Timberg and Tom Hamburger report Former Cambridge Analytica workers say firm sent foreigners to advise U.S. campaigns:
LONDON — Cambridge Analytica assigned dozens of non-U.S. citizens to provide campaign strategy and messaging advice to Republican candidates in 2014, according to three former workers for the data firm, even as an attorney warned executives to abide by U.S. laws limiting foreign involvement in elections.
The assignments came amid efforts to present the newly created company as “an American brand” that would appeal to U.S. political clients even though its parent, SCL Group, was based in London, according to former Cambridge Analytica research director Christopher Wylie.
Wylie, who emerged this month as a whistleblower, provided The Washington Post with documents that describe a program across several U.S. states to win campaigns for Republicans using psychological profiling to reach voters with individually tailored messages. The documents include previously unreported details about the program, which was called “Project Ripon” for the Wisconsin town where the Republican Party was born in 1854.
➤ Margaret Hartmann reports After Losing Pennsylvania Gerrymandering Battle, GOP Representative Costello Won’t Seek Reelection:
After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a new map to replace the gerrymandered version that favored the GOP, U.S. Representative Ryan Costello was among the handful of Republicans who called forthe judges to be impeached. A month later, with even the Republican majority leader of the state House criticizing the impeachment effort, Costello has decided to withdraw from the midterm race instead.
Costello, who was first elected in 2014, was already facing a difficult reelection campaign before the new congressional map shifted his district from being an area where Hillary Clinton won by one point to one she would have taken by ten points. However, Costello denied that he was retiring from Congress because he was afraid of losing. In addition to considerations for his young family, he cited the “political environment” for his decision.
➤ Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman report At a Crucial Juncture, Trump’s Legal Defense Is Largely a One-Man Operation:
Working for a president is usually seen as a dream job. But leading white-collar lawyers in Washington and New York have repeatedly spurned overtures to take over the defense of Mr. Trump, a mercurial client who often ignores his advisers’ guidance. In some cases, lawyers’ firms have blocked any talks, fearing a backlash that would hurt business.
Joseph diGenova, a longtime Washington lawyer who has pushed theories on Fox News that the F.B.I. made up evidence against Mr. Trump, left the team on Sunday. He had been hired last Monday, three days before the head of the president’s personal legal team, John Dowd, quit after determining that the president was not listening to his advice. Mr. Trump had also considered hiring Mr. diGenova’s wife, Victoria Toensing, but she will also not join the team.
That leaves the president with just one personal lawyer who is working full time on the special counsel’s investigation as Mr. Trump is facing one of the most significant decisions related to it: whether to sit for an interview.
➤ Eliot A. Cohen makes A Modest Plea for Patriotic History (“If Americans were more familiar with the complex heroes of their past, they would be better equipped to recognize people of good character today”):
It is telling that those who speak loudest about Making America Great Again tend to refer to themselves as nationalists rather than patriots. George Orwell took the measure of contemporary nationalism in a 1945 essay on the subject. Nationalism, he noted, is “the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects.” Patriotism, on the other hand, is “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world.” The United States could do with more patriots and fewer nationalists.
One of the ways to grow patriots is through engagement with the past. Self-described white nationalists do not need to know anything—in fact, it is easier if they do not. It is not surprising that the chief American nationalist these days has proudly noted that he has not read a book for half a century. To understand and truly appreciate one’s own requires knowledge; to cruise the world inflaming your supporters, looking for trade fights with allies and murmuring soft words for dictators, on the other hand, ignorance does the job quite nicely.
Unsurprisingly, the events of the last two years have evoked a resurgence of interest in civic education, and particularly historical education. This is a good thing. Amid all the dismal statistics about American kids being unable to describe what is in the Bill of Rights, from which country the US won its independence, and whether Benjamin Franklin was president, there is good news. Even the usually wary Thomas B. Fordham Institute cheered the revamping of the Advanced Placement US History program by the College Board in 2014. At a grass-roots level there are a lot of teachers, school boards, and anxious parents who realize that the kids need to learn about who Americans are, how to think critically, and how democracy works.
➤ This Map Shows [Just Perhaps] Where We’ll Live On Mars: