Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-nine. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:34 PM, for 15h 18m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 85.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred seventeenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
At 6:30 PM, the Library Board will hold a meeting.
On this day in 1967, Pres. Johnson nominates Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court (“the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place”).
On this day in 1863, Wisconsinites defending the Union continued their engagement at the Seige of Vicksburg (” The 8th, 11th, 12th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 20th, 23rd, 25th,27th, 29th and 33rd Wisconsin Infantry regiments, the 1st, 6th, 7th and 12th Wisconsin Light Artillery batteries and the 2nd Wisconsin Cavalry were among Union forces surrounding the city”).
Recommended for reading in full —
Michael Shear and Maggie Haberman report that Friend Says Trump Is Considering Firing Mueller as Special Counsel:
WASHINGTON — A longtime friend of President Trump said on Monday that Mr. Trump was considering whether to fire Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating possible ties between the president’s campaign and Russian officials.
The startling assertion comes as some of Mr. Trump’s conservative allies, who initially praised Mr. Mueller’s selection as special counsel, have begun trying to attack his credibility.
The friend, Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media, who was at the White House on Monday, said on PBS’s “NewsHour” that Mr. Trump was “considering, perhaps, terminating the special counsel.”
“I think he’s weighing that option,” Mr. Ruddy said.
His comments appeared to take the White House by surprise.
“Mr. Ruddy never spoke to the president regarding this issue,” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said in a statement hours later. “With respect to this subject, only the president or his attorneys are authorized to comment.”
(I’m with Sarah Kendzior @sarahkendzior on this: it’s only a matter of time until Trump pressures the Justice Department to fire Mueller; if they resist that pressure, he’ll fire Justice Department officials until he finds someone to fire Mueller. Kendzior observes: “As I’ve been saying, they enjoy the flagrancy. Autocrat logic: “We know that you know what we did, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”)
Ellen Nakashima reports that Russia has developed a cyberweapon that can disrupt power grids, according to new research:
Hackers allied with the Russian government have devised a cyberweapon that has the potential to be the most disruptive yet against electric systems that Americans depend on for daily life, according to U.S. researchers.
The malware, which researchers have dubbed CrashOverride, is known to have disrupted only one energy system — in Ukraine in December. In that incident, the hackers briefly shut down one-fifth of the electric power generated in Kiev.
But with modifications, it could be deployed against U.S. electric transmission and distribution systems to devastating effect, said Sergio Caltagirone, director of threat intelligence for Dragos, a cybersecurity firm that studied the malware and issued a report Monday.
And Russian government hackers have shown their interest in targeting U.S. energy and other utility systems, researchers said.
Ron Brownstein asks Are Demographics Really Destiny for the GOP?:
Despite President Trump’s magnetic appeal for working-class whites, those fiercely contested voters continued their long-term decline as a share of the national electorate in 2016, a new analysis of recent Census Bureau data shows.
That continued erosion underscores the gamble Trump is taking by aligning the GOP ever more closely with the hopes and fears of a volatile constituency that, while still large, has been irreversibly shrinking for decades as a share of the total vote. The data analysis on 2016 voting, conducted for The Atlantic by Robert Griffin and Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress’s States of Change project, found that non-college-educated whites declined as a share of the electorate even in the key Midwestern states that tipped the election to Trump.
“This is a good example of just how hard it is to reverse an ongoing trend like this,” said Teixeira, a co-founder of the project, which studies how demographic change affects politics and policy. “It says to Republicans: ‘You have intrinsically placed your bets on a political group that under almost any conceivable circumstances will continue to decline as a share not only of eligible voters, but [of actual] voters going forward.’ If that didn’t [reverse] in this election, you have to say it’s not going to happen.”
(Even in an election that she lost, It’s official: Clinton swamps Trump in popular vote: “The Democrat outpaced President-elect Donald Trump by almost 2.9 million votes, with 65,844,954 (48.2%) to his 62,979,879 (46.1%), according to revised and certified final election results from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.”)
John Wagner reports on Praise for the chief: Trump’s Cabinet tells him it’s an ‘honor’ and ‘blessing’ to serve:
(Part perverse, part heretical: Priebus is nothing more than a groveling supplicant.)
What does an airliner look like when recorded from a weather balloon at 38,000 feet? It looks like this: