Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 68. Sunrise is 5:32 AM and sunset 8:09 PM, for 14h 36m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM and there will be a Tax Increment District Planning Town Hall via audiovisual conferencing at 7 PM.
On this day in 1862, the USS Planter [briefly the CSS Planter], a steamer and gunship, steals through Confederate lines and is passed to the Union, by a southern slave, Robert Smalls, who later was officially appointed as captain, becoming the first black man to command a United States ship.
Recommended for reading in full —
David Leonhardt writes Why Cheney Matters:
If even a small portion of Republicans insist that the party supports democracy, they can succeed. As several experts have pointed out — including Anne Applebaum, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — the most successful strategy for beating back a political party’s authoritarian shift has depended on defections among people who otherwise agree with that party. That’s why Cheney, Jeff Flake, Mitt Romney and other Republicans criticizing Trump’s big lie are significant.
The same experts advise Democrats to welcome the courage of those Republicans and not obsess over their many other disagreements. Cheney’s stance matters because she is a pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-regulation, deeply conservative Republican.
“The Republican Party is sliding into authoritarianism at a terrifyingly rapid clip,” Jonathan Chait has written in New York magazine. “That fate of American democracy is the biggest issue in American politics.”
For more:
The ouster of Cheney may embolden her and allow “a household-name conservative to take her case against Trumpism far beyond a Capitol conference room,” The Times’s Jonathan Martin writes.
(The ongoing defense of liberal democracy relies, as did the defeat of Trump in 2020, on a large but disparate coalition. That Cheney and her father are not libertarians, for example, does not prevent their opposition to Trump from serving a purpose useful for those committed to a constitutional, liberal democratic order. Churchill: “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”)
Maggie Astor reports ‘A Perpetual Motion Machine’: How Disinformation Drives Voting Laws:
Former President Donald J. Trump’s monthslong campaign to delegitimize the 2020 election didn’t overturn the results. But his unfounded claims gutted his supporters’ trust in the electoral system, laying the foundation for numerous Republican-led bills pushing more restrictive voter rules.
The bills demonstrate how disinformation can take on a life of its own, forming a feedback loop that shapes policy for years to come. When promoted with sufficient intensity, falsehoods — whether about election security or the coronavirus or other topics — can shape voters’ attitudes toward policies, and lawmakers can cite those attitudes as the basis for major changes.
The embrace of the falsehoods also showcases the continuing power of Mr. Trump inside the Republican Party, which has widely adopted and weaponized his election claims. Many Republicans, eager to gain his support, have raced to champion the new voting laws. Those who have stood up to his falsehoods have paid the price.
(Having lost decisively, these Trumpists are committed to winning dishonestly.)