Good morning.
After a night of stormy weather, Whitewater’s Thursday will be cloudy with a high of sixty-nine. Sunrise is 5:27 AM and sunset 8:14 PM, for 14h 46m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 54.5% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the {tooltip}one hundred ninety-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Police and Fire Commission is scheduled to meet at 6:30 PM this evening.
On this day in 1804, the Sénat conservateur vested the powers of the French First Republic in an emperor. Napoleon’s coronation, and acquisition of effectively absolute power, would follow later that year. On this day in 1863, the Union Siege of Vicksburg begins, with “[s]seventeen different Wisconsin regiments involved in the assault that began the next day (8th, 11th, 12th, 14th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 20th, 23rd, 25th, 27th, 29th and 33rd Wisconsin Infantry regiments and the 1st, 6th and 12th Wisconsin Light Artillery batteries as well as the 2nd Wisconsin Cavalry).”
Recommended for reading in full —
Rick Romell reports that For third straight year, Wisconsin ranks last in business startup activity:
Another year, another last-place ranking for Wisconsin on the business startup front.
For the third year running, Wisconsin has placed 50th among the 50 states in startup activity as measured by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, one of the country’s leading entrepreneurship advocacy and research organizations.
Not only was Wisconsin last; the gap between Wisconsin and the next-lowest states widened significantly from 2016 and 2015. While other states are clustered with relatively small differences from one state to the next, Wisconsin stands as an outlier – on the low end.
“It just feels like such a broken record,” said Joe Kirgues, co-founder of gener8tor, a company with offices in Milwaukee and Madison that runs a respected training program for startups. “We’ve played this song so many times in terms of we’ve been dead last and dead last and dead last.”
The New York Times Editorial Board writes of The Special Counsel America Needs:
If President Trump thought that by sacking the F.B.I. director, James Comey, he could kill off the investigation into his associates’ ties to the Russian government and its attempt to deliver him the White House, he was wrong.
The investigation will go on, now under the leadership of a former F.B.I. director — and this one the president can’t fire on his own. Robert Mueller III, who was named special counsel on Wednesday to oversee the Trump-Russia investigation, is charged with revealing the truth about suspicions that reach into the highest levels of the Trump campaign and White House.
Given the “unique circumstances” of the case, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in making the appointment, a special counsel “is necessary in order for the American people to have full confidence in the outcome” of the investigation.
Mr. Rosenstein is absolutely right, and he has done the nation a service in choosing Mr. Mueller, one of the few people with the experience, stature and reputation to see the job through….
Michael Kranish observes that As president, Trump’s legacy of lawsuits and minimal briefings isn’t helping:
the tactics that Trump believed served him so well in business may be adding to his self-inflicted wounds as a special counsel prepares to launch an investigation into allegations that Russia sought to influence the 2016 election.
Trump’s family has no government background, and most of his most trusted advisers never worked in a White House. His demands to government officials for personal loyalty are superseded by their loyalty to the Constitution. His threats — such as tweeting that fired FBI Director James B. Comey “better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” — have often backfired. Comey’s associates provided quotes from a memo about the conversation that appear to support Comey’s version of events.
And Trump’s famous aversion to in-depth analysis — he once wrote that “The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience” — has led to concerns that he doesn’t absorb complicated briefing material from intelligence agencies and other sources.
Where Trump is gluttonous, rambling, egomaniacal, and undisciplined—the leader of the free world as an unmade bed—Yates is a human laser beam, focused on her target.
And also, despite all that, immensely likable.
That’s the persona that emerged from the lengthy sit-down, presented in multiple segments on AC 360, that covered her decisions not only to oppose the president’s anti-Muslim executive order that was later adjudged unconstitutional by a series of federal trial and appeals courts, but also to alert the White House that retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Trump’s trusted national security adviser, had discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador and then lied about it to the vice president and the FBI, opening himself up to criminal prosecution by U.S. law enforcement authorities and blackmail by the Kremlin.
How fast are F1 cars? Really fast —