Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-four. Sunrise is 6:21 AM and sunset 7:30 PM, for 13h 08m 44s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 16.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred eighty-first day.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1865, the Confederate Army under Lee surrenders:
Union forces led by General Ulysses S. Grant caught up with Confederate forces commanded by General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. The 5th, 6th, 7th, 19th, 36th, 37th and 38th Wisconsin Infantry regiments were among the troops that had helped corner the enemy there. The 36th were present at the court house and witnessed the formal surrender ceremony.
Recommended for reading in full:
Amber Phillips describes Kirstjen Nielsen’s ignominious end:
As The Fix’s Aaron Blake has chronicled, Nielsen has blatantly contradicted or ignored findings by the State Department, the U.S. intelligence community and her own agency to toe the president’s line on a number of issues:
— Her agency’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border. She once argued “we do not have a policy of separating families at the border, period,” even though it was her agency’s interpretation of existing law that separated the families. Trump implicitly acknowledged as much when he abruptly ended it, shortly after Nielsen tweeted that.
— Whether border crossings rise to a national emergency. When Trump went around Congress and declared a national emergency at the border to build his wall earlier this year, Nielsen had to go before lawmakers and defend that legally questionable move. But she was undercut by her boss when Trump said he didn’t have to declare this emergency.
— Trump’s worldview on race. She refused to confirm whether Trump called Haiti, El Salvador and African nations “shithole countries,” even though she was present at the meeting where it happened. Then, when asked by members of Congress why Trump said he wanted more immigrants from Norway instead of these majority-minority countries, she feigned ignorance that Norway is a mostly white country so as to avoid having to talk about the undeniable racial component of Trump’s comments.
— Whether terrorists are crossing the border. During the government shutdown fight over the border this year, Nielsen more than any other Trump official insisted on repeating a falsehood that terrorists have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. The State Department has said there’s “no credible evidence” that terrorists are in Mexico trying to cross the border, let alone have made it across.
— Basic facts about Russian election interference. She has said she didn’t know if Russia interfered in the 2016 president election to help Trump win, despite a thorough intelligence report declaring as much. “That the specific intent was to help President Trump win? I’m not aware of that,” she said as recently as summer of 2018, more than two years after the report was released to the public.