Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will see a high of eighty-seven and an even chance of thunderstorms. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:43 PM, for 15h 18m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 91.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets this evening at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1776, Virginia’s colonial legislature adopts a Declaration of Rights. On this day in 1899, a tornado in New Richmond proves to be the worst tornado disaster in Wisconsin history.
Recommended for reading in full —
Conservative Christian Schneider observes that Donald Trump supporters concoct their own James Comey story:
To say that Comey’s testimony “vindicates” Trump in any way ignores giant swaths of what the former FBI director actually said — it’s like leaving the theater after seeing Wonder Woman and telling people it’s a World War I documentary.
(Trump, a serial liar, makes liars or fiction writers of his ardent supporters.)
Aaron Davis reports that D.C. and Maryland to sue President Trump, alleging breach of constitutional oath:
Attorneys general for the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland say they will sue President Trump on Monday, alleging that he has violated anti-corruption clauses in the Constitution by accepting millions in payments and benefits from foreign governments since moving into the White House.
The lawsuit, the first of its kind brought by government entities, centers on the fact that Trump chose to retain ownership of his company when he became president. Trump said in January that he was shifting his business assets into a trust managed by his sons to eliminate potential conflicts of interests.
But D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D) and Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D) say Trump has broken many promises to keep separate his public duties and private business interests. For one, his son Eric Trump has said the president would continue to receive regular updates about his company’s financial health.
Patrick Wintour reports that Trump’s state visit to Britain put on hold:
Donald Trump has told Theresa May in a phone call he does not want to go ahead with a state visit to Britain until the British public supports him coming.
The US president said he did not want to come if there were large-scale protests and his remarks in effect put the visit on hold for some time.
The call was made in recent weeks, according to a Downing Street adviser who was in the room. The statement surprised May, according to those present.
The conversation in part explains why there has been little public discussion about a visit.
May invited Trump to Britain seven days after his inauguration when she became the first foreign leader to visit him in the White House. She told a joint press conference she had extended an invitation from the Queen to Trump and his wife Melania to make a state visit later in the year and was “delighted that the president has accepted that invitation”.
Many senior diplomats, including Lord Ricketts, the former national security adviser, said the invitation was premature, but impossible to rescind once made.
Margaret Sullivan asks (and answers) Is media coverage of Trump too negative? You’re asking the wrong question:
“Look at the way I’ve been treated lately, especially by the media,” he complained in a commencement address last month to U.S. Coast Guard graduates. “No politician in history — and I say this with great surety — has been treated worse or more unfairly.”
Looked at through this lens, Trump’s press coverage has been a political nightmare.
Isn’t that terribly unfair?
Here’s my carefully nuanced answer: Hell, no.
That’s because when we consider negative vs. positive coverage of an elected official, we’re asking the wrong question.
The president’s supporters often say his accomplishments get short shrift. But let’s face it: Politicians have no right to expect equally balanced positive and negative coverage, or anything close to it. If a president is doing a rotten job, it’s the duty of the press to report how and why he’s doing a rotten job.
The idea of balance is suspect on its face. Should positive coverage be provided, as if it were a birthright, to a president who consistently lies, who has spilled classified information to an adversary, and who fired the FBI director who was investigating his administration?
Adam West, Gotham’s Caped Crusader, passed away recently after a brief bought with leukemia. Colin Fleming, in Adam West’s Criminally Overlooked Contribution to Cinematic History, recalls a film with West that’s great fun:
Most of the West tributes will focus on television’s Batman, naturally, but what even the most robust cineastes often overlook is West’s one great contribution to movie history, to the art house.
The 1960s were largely a bad time for sci-fi films. They’d blown their load in the 1950s, with pictures about atomically-altered bugs and extraterrestrial beings, all manner of body-snatching alien interlopers, peaceful Martians who get attacked by paranoid earthlings, you name it. We remember 2001: A Space Odyssey from the tail end of the ‘60s, but it wasn’t exactly box office gold. What sci-fi there was was commonly tucked away in low-budget productions, and there was none finer than 1964’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars….
In Robinson Crusoe on Mars there are Martian canals, a polar ice cap, snow shelters, subterranean tunnels, autodestruct buttons, alien blasters, and a slave revolt, but the film’s haunting solemnity, its crucial, post-earth poetry, comes largely from West—the right-hand man in the cockpit, the space ghost who intervenes when reason is all but lost, and helps it again be found.
I’ve seen the Robinson Crusoe on Mars more than once, and have enjoyed more each time. Here’s the trailer from a fun, memorable film: