Good morning. 
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 45. Sunrise is 6:25 AM and sunset 5:47 PM, for 11h 22m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 77.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 2005, Steve Fossett becomes the first person to fly an airplane non-stop around the world solo without refueling.
Recommended for reading in full —
Moustafa Bayoumi writes ICE reached a new low: using utility bills to hunt undocumented immigrants:
If you had to choose between having running water at home or risking your home being raided by the authorities, which would you choose? The correct answer is: this shouldn’t even be a question.
But it’s become one. The startling truth is that signing up for even basic utilities in this country has turned into a gamble for many people, particularly undocumented immigrants. Last week, the Washington Post revealed that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] has paid tens of millions of dollars since 2017 for access to a private database that contains more than “400m names, addresses and service records from more than 80 utility companies covering all the staples of modern life, including water, gas and electricity, and phone, internet and cable TV”. The information has been mined by Ice, the Post reported, for immigration surveillance and enforcement operations.
Neither [ICE] nor any other federal agency should have unfettered access to this data. In fact, there are strict protocols and regulations that determine how the federal government can gather your information and when it can infringe on your privacy, much of this is codified in the Privacy Act of 1974, as the Post notes. So how are federal agencies like Ice getting around these legal safeguards, which would otherwise prevent them from scooping up such data on their own and without a court order? Simple. They just buy it. With taxpayer money.
Lisa Lerer and Reid J. Epstein report Abandon Trump? Deep in the G.O.P. Ranks, the MAGA Mind-Set Prevails:
In Cleveland County, Okla., the chairman of the local Republican Party openly wondered “why violence is unacceptable,” just hours before a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol last week. “What the crap do you think the American revolution was?” he posted on Facebook. “A game of friggin pattycake?”
….
Interviews with more than 40 Republican state and local leaders conducted after the siege at the Capitol show that a vocal wing of the party maintains an almost-religious devotion to the president, and that these supporters don’t hold him responsible for the mob violence last week. The opposition to him emerging among some Republicans has only bolstered their support of him.
And while some Republican leaders and strategists are eager to dismiss these loyalists as a fringe element of their party, many of them hold influential roles at the state and local level. These local officials are not only the conduits between voters and federal Republicans, but they also serve as the party’s next generation of higher-level elected officials, and would bring a devotion to Trumpism should they ascend to Washington.