Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of 54. Sunrise is 5:21 AM and sunset 8:23 PM, for 15h 02m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1969, the Walt Disney Company releases the cartoon Three Little Pigs, with its hit song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”
Recommended for reading in full —
Patrick Marley reports Top Wisconsin Republican Robin Vos hires former cops to investigate November election:
Vos in a Wednesday interview said he was giving the investigators a broad mandate to spend about three months reviewing all tips and following up on the most credible ones. In addition to the grant spending, he said they may look into claims of double voting and review how clerks fixed absentee ballot credentials.
“Is there a whole lot of smoke or is there actual fire? We just don’t know yet,” Vos said.
Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who leads the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said she was worried the investigation would undermine confidence in an election that was conducted properly.
Stephanie Mencimer writes Doctor, Lawyer, Insurrectionist: The Radicalization of Simone Gold:
When rioters broke into the US Capitol on January 6, chants of “Fuck the police!” “USA!” or “Treason!” echoed in the marble halls. When Dr. Simone Gold got inside the rotunda, she stepped over a velvet rope and announced to anyone who would listen, “I am a Stanford-educated attorney!”
Thus she distinguished herself among the motley crew of Proud Boys, MAGA types, and the QAnon shaman who paraded through the Capitol to overturn the 2020 presidential election, an event that left five people dead. Not only is Gold a Stanford-educated lawyer, she’s also a board-certified emergency room physician. Neither qualification prevented the FBI from coming to her Beverly Hills house on January 18 and arresting her. Nor did it make a federal grand jury think twice in early February before indicting her on five criminal counts, including entering a restricted building and obstructing an official proceeding.
The arrest marked the end of one chapter in her Icarian trajectory into right-wing fame. Before April 2020, Gold had been just another over-achieving Beverly Hills doctor. But with the arrival of the pandemic, she donned her white lab coat to protest lockdowns and promote President Donald Trump’s favorite unproven COVID treatment, the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine. It seems that’s all it took to find an enthusiastic audience among the MAGA faithful, putting her on a glide path to a certain kind of right-wing stardom. Conservatives who love to bash educated, liberal elites as out of touch quickly embraced Gold and gleefully touted her impressive credentials to support their attacks on public health measures designed to combat the pandemic. She sailed into their well-funded ecosystem, snagging speaking gigs, appearances on cable talk shows, and robust opportunities to fundraise.
Elizabeth Dwoskin report Russia is still the biggest player in disinformation, Facebook says:
A Facebook report released Wednesday says that Russia is still the largest producer of disinformation, a notable finding just five years after Russian operatives launched a far-reaching campaign to infiltrate social media during the 2016 presidential election campaign.
Facebook says it has uncovered disinformation campaigns in more than 50 countries since 2017, when it began the cat-and-mouse game of cracking down on political actors seeking to manipulate public debate on its platform. The report, which summarizes 150 disinformation operations the company says it has disrupted in that period, highlights how such coordinated efforts have become more sophisticated and costly to run in recent years — even as these operators struggle to influence large numbers of people as they once did.