Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see occasional showers with a high of fifty-five. Sunrise is 6:32 AM and sunset 7:23 PM, for 12h 51m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 3.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred seventy-fifth day.
On this day in 1860, the Pony Express begins service.
Recommended for reading in full:
The Associated Press reports Federal Court Allows Wisconsin To Leave Health Care Lawsuit:
A federal judge has granted Wisconsin’s request to withdraw from a multistate lawsuit seeking repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
The judge on Tuesday granted the state’s request made by Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul at the order of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. The judge also allowed Wisconsin to withdraw in a second case also related to the health care law, which opponents sometimes call Obamacare.
Kaul moved to withdraw Wisconsin after a law passed in a lame-duck legislative session taking away that power was repealed by a Wisconsin judge.
Former Republican Gov. Scott Walker had Wisconsin join the multistate effort to repeal the health care law. Both Evers and Kaul ran last year in opposition to that move and said they would withdraw the state. They were temporarily blocked from doing that by the law passed in the lame-duck session.
Molly O’Toole, Noah Bierman, and Eli Stokols report As Trump threatens to close border, experts warn of billions in economic damage:
When the Trump administration abruptly shuttered the San Ysidro border crossing for five hours on the Sunday after Thanksgiving following a skirmish with a group of migrants, holiday traffic snarled for hours south of San Diego.
Businesses on the U.S. side of the border lost about $5.3 million in sales, local officials said. Tens of thousands of people were temporarily stuck on both sides of the border, creating chaos in nearby areas.
President Trump now is threatening to exponentially increase the scale of that disruption, vowing to indefinitely close the U.S. border with Mexico to show his resolve — and his pique — as tens of thousands of Central American migrants continue to jam legal entry points and unguarded remote areas.
Squeezing ports of entry almost certainly would put more strain on the officers and Border Patrol agents who are dealing with the crisis, however. Administration efforts to hire 15,000 new border agents and immigration officers have largely flopped — the agencies face thousands of vacancies instead.
If trucks carrying farm produce and car parts are barred from crossing the border, the economic impact would quickly spread.
Nearly $13.7 million in agricultural products move through the port of entry at Nogales, Ariz., every day, for example, said Veronica Nigh, an economist with the American Farm Bureau Federation in Washington. Because those products are perishable, even a short closure could hurt farmers and consumers on both sides.