Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of fifty-one. Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 7:16 PM, for 12h 32m 44s of daytime. The moon is new, with .4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred thirty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority is scheduled to meet this afternon at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1513, Juan Ponce de León spots what he believes is an island, but was likely his first sighting of Florida. On this day in 1865, the 8th, 11th, 14th, 20th, 23rd, 27th, 28th, 29th, 33rd and 35th Wisconsin Infantry regiments join in the Battle of Spanish Fort began on the Gulf Coast of Alabama.
Recommended for reading in full —
John Schmid and Kevin Crowe report on An intractable problem (for the last half-century, Milwaukee has been caught in a relentless social and economic spiral): “At the start of the 1970s, Milwaukee’s industrial heyday, just 17% of the city’s population lived in census tracts in which 20% to 40% of the residents lived below the federal poverty line. That’s a level labeled “concentrated poverty,” and social scientists consider it the combustion point for social toxins like crime, teen pregnancies, dropping out of school. (A Milwaukee census tract averages about 3,000 people.) Milwaukee’s rate was far healthier than other industrial cities like Detroit (25%), Philadelphia (21%) or Chicago (20%). By the end of that watershed decade, amid the first wave of industrial shutdowns, 22% of the city lived in 20%-40% poverty tracts, and there was a proliferation of “extreme poverty” tracts, where 40% or more lived below the line. Then came the booming ’80s and the greatest bull market on Wall Street since the 1920s. The aphorism is that a rising economic tide lifts all boats, but Milwaukee missed out. By the end of the decade, the percentage of people living in tracts with 20%-plus poverty rose to 43.5% — including both concentrated and extreme poverty. During the tech-driven ’90s, as the internet minted new fortunes and Google was born, the number of 20%-40% tracts increased from 48 to 74. By the end of the decade, the percentage of city residents in 20%-plus tracts was 47.2%, almost half the city’s population. By 2014, 145 of the city’s 209 census tracts — home to almost three-quarters of the city’s population — had at least 20% of the population living in poverty, and more than one out of four Milwaukeeans lived in neighborhoods of extreme poverty.”
Margaret Sullivan notes that Scott Pelley is pulling no punches on the nightly news — and people are taking notice: “Pelley, of CBS Evening News, has set himself apart — especially in recent weeks — with a spate of such assessments, night after night. Perhaps the most notable one, on Feb. 7, went like this: “It has been a busy day for presidential statements divorced from reality. Mr. Trump said this morning that any polls that show disapproval of his immigration ban are fake. He singled out a federal judge for ridicule after the judge suspended his ban, and Mr. Trump said that the ruling now means that anyone can enter the country. The president’s fictitious claims, whether imaginary or fabricated, are now worrying even his backers, particularly after he insisted that millions of people voted illegally, giving Hillary Clinton her popular-vote victory.” And then Pelley added a reality-check kicker: “There is not one state election official, Democrat or Republican, who supports that claim.” There are plenty of other examples: One evening last month, he described Trump aide Kellyanne Conway as “a fearless fabulist.” Another night, he referred to the president as having had “another Twitter tantrum.” Far more than his competitors — Lester Holt on NBC and David Muir on ABC — Pelley is using words and approaches that pull no punches. It’s not that the others don’t provide fact-checks or report on criticism; they do. But Pelley, 59, despite his calm delivery, is dogged, night after night — and far blunter.”
Colbert King contends It’s time for the feds to follow the Russian money: “There’s plenty of ground for federal agencies to plow. The Financial Times reported in October that an investigation that it conducted had turned up evidence of ties between one Trump venture and an alleged international money-laundering network. Title deeds, bank records and correspondence showed that a Kazakh family accused of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars bought apartments in a Manhattan building part-owned by Trump and pursued business ventures with one of his partners. This week, ABC News reported that from 2011 to 2013, the FBI had a warrant to eavesdrop on a Russian money-laundering network that operated out of Trump Tower in New York. “The FBI investigation led to a federal grand jury indictment of more than 30 people, including one of the world’s most notorious Russian mafia bosses, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov,” ABC’s Brian Ross and Matthew Mosk reported. “He was the only target to slip away, and he remains a fugitive from American justice.” Bloomberg Businessweek reported this month: “Two months before Trump broke ground in New York in October 1998, Russia defaulted on $40 billion in domestic debt, and some of the biggest banks started to collapse. Millionaires scrambled to get their money out and into New York. Real estate provides a safe haven for overseas investors. It has few reporting requirements and is a preferred way to move cash of questionable provenance. Amid the turmoil, buyers found a dearth of available projects. Trump World Tower, opened in 2001, became a prominent depository of Russian money.”
Conor Dougherty reports that the Push for Internet Privacy Rules Moves to Statehouses: “California and Connecticut, for instance, recently updated laws that restrict government access to online communications like email, and New Mexico could follow soon. Last year, Nebraska and West Virginia passed laws that limit how companies can monitor employees’ social media accounts, while legislators in Hawaii, Missouri and elsewhere are pushing similar bills for employees, as well as for students and tenants. “More and more, states have taken the position that, if Congress is not willing or able to enact strong privacy laws, their legislatures will no longer sit on their hands,” said Chad Marlow, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union. Online privacy is the rare issue that draws together legislators from the left and the far right. At the state level, anyway, some of the progress has come from a marriage between progressive Democrats and libertarian-minded Republicans, who see privacy as a bedrock principle, Mr. Marlow said.”