Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-nine. Sunrise is 5:32 AM and sunset 8:10 PM, for 14h 37m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 76.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the nine hundred seventeenth day.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6:00 PM.
On this day in 1804, the Lewis and Clark (Corps of Discovery) Expedition departs for the west:
President Thomas Jefferson commissioned the expedition shortly after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 to explore and to map the newly acquired territory, to find a practical route across the western half of the continent, and to establish an American presence in this territory before Britain and other European powers tried to claim it. The campaign’s secondary objectives were scientific and economic: to study the area’s plants, animal life, and geography, and to establish trade with local American Indian tribes.
Recommended for reading in full:
Patrick Marley and Molly Beck report Wisconsin Republican Party maxed out credit card, racked up $600 in monthly interest as it tried to save Scott Walker:
The state Republican Party fell so far behind financially in recent months that it missed payments to insurers and racked up nearly $600 a month in interest on a maxed-out credit card, according to a draft of an internal report.
The review, commissioned by U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and other top Wisconsin Republicans in the wake of statewide losses in 2018, also showed the party was “recklessly reliant” on consultants, some of whom made more than $500,000 doing routine work for the party.
In a final version of the report released Monday, GOP leaders also concluded the party and statewide campaigns fell short with women by including very few in their 2018 campaigns.
Zach Beauchamp writes Hungary’s leader is waging war on democracy. Today [Monday], he’s at the White House:
[S]ince winning the country’s 2010 election, [Hungarian leader Viktor] Orban has subtly consolidated power and rendered elections almost impossibly unfair. He and allies of his political party, Fidesz, control nearly all of Hungary’s media; he manipulates the state’s economic powers to weaken potential rivals and empower his cronies. Widespread anti-immigrant sentiment, kicked off by the 2015 refugee crisis, has become a key propaganda tool Orban uses to legitimize his power grabs.
Orban has also been explicit that his goal is the defeat of liberal democracy. Trump hasn’t gone that far, but he has flashed some authoritarian instincts, and his party has shown it’s willing to go along. David Cornstein, a longtime Trump associate currently serving as US ambassador to Hungary, told the Atlantic that the president “would love to have the [political] situation that Viktor Orban has.”
It’s hard to imagine a military coup or outright abolition of elections in the United States. It’s much easier to imagine a gradual hollowing-out of democracy akin to what’s happened in Hungary, a rise of soft fascism cheered on by Fox News and Breitbart. (Steve Bannon has called Orban “the most significant guy on the scene right now.”)
‘Disgusting’: Video shows students forcing dog to drink beer from keg: