Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of twenty-six. Sunrise is 6:19 AM and sunset 5:52 PM, for 11h 32m 59s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred forty-eighth day.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission is scheduled to meet at 6 PM.
On this day in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone:
Bell’s patent 174,465, was issued to Bell on March 7, 1876, by the U.S. Patent Office. Bell’s patent covered “the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically … by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound”[82][N 15] Bell returned to Boston the same day and the next day resumed work, drawing in his notebook a diagram similar to that in Gray’s patent caveat.
Recommended for reading in full:
Damian Paletta reports The federal deficit ballooned at start of new fiscal year, up 77 percent from a year before:
The federal budget deficit ballooned rapidly in the first four months of the fiscal year amid falling tax revenue and higher spending, the Treasury Department said Tuesday, posing a new challenge for the White House and Congress as they prepare for a number of budget battles.
The deficit grew 77 percent in the first four months of fiscal 2019 compared with the same period one year before, Treasury said.
The total deficit for the four-month period was $310 billion, Treasury said, up from $176 billion for the same period one year earlier.
“It’s big tax cuts combined with big increases in spending when they already had big deficits,” said former Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.). “So guess what, it’s craziness!”
William Frey writes A vast majority of counties showed increased Democratic support in 2018 House election:
When Democrats took 40 congressional districts from Republicans in the 2018 election, the House of Representatives experienced what many considered to be a blue wave. What does this shift mean for the 2020 presidential election? To get a better sense of this, the following analysis examines the 2018 House votes distributed across the nation’s more than 3,100 counties. This provides a more fine-grained geographic assessment of how the 2018 House support for Democrats compared with votes in the 2016 presidential election.
From this perspective, the Democratic wave is all encompassing: 83 percent of the voting population lived in counties where support for Democrats has improved since 2016. This increased Democratic support was not confined to traditional Democratic base counties. It occurred in suburbs, smaller metropolitan and rural counties, and most noticeably, in counties with concentrations of older, native-born and white residents without college degrees. Moreover, at the state level, enough states flipped from Republican majorities in the 2016 presidential election to Democratic majorities in the 2018 House elections to project a 2020 Democratic Electoral College win.