Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with afternoon thunderstorms and a high of eighty-four. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 20m 10s of daytime. The moon is in its third quarter, with 49.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred twenty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1972, Virgilio González, Bernard Barker, James McCord, Eugenio Martínez, and Frank Sturgis, who were charged with attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone and other communications at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate office building. On this day in 1673, Marquette & Joliet reach the Mississippi:
“Here we are, then, on this so renowned river, all of whose peculiar features I have endeavored to note carefully.” It’s important to recall that Marquette and Joliet did not discover the Mississippi: Indians had been using it for 10,000 years, Spanish conquistador Hernan De Soto had crossed it in 1541, and fur traders Groseilliers and Radisson may have reached it in the 1650s. But Marquette and Joliet left the first detailed reports and proved that the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, which opened the heart of the continent to French traders, missionaries, and soldiers. View a Map of Marquette & Joliet’s route.
Recommended for reading in full —
John Taschler reports that Mosquitoes have been scarce so far, but signs point to bumper crop ahead (and ticks, too):
“Usually a week or two weeks after you get a lot of rain, you’d get a lot of mosquitoes,” said Edward Blumenthal, who is an associate professor of biological sciences at Marquette University. “There doesn’t seem to be as many as you’d expect.”
But just wait. Wisconsin’s mosquito season is just beginning, and businesses that deal with the pesky critters are bracing for clouds of them to erupt in the next couple weeks.
“Mosquitoes, they are going to go off full blast here in probably, I’m guessing, the next week,” said John Esser, owner of The Mosquito Guy, a bug control company based in Waukesha. “They’re coming. I think once the mosquitoes kick off, it’s going to get pretty crazy. That’s my guess, just from what I’m seeing.”
Part of that forecast is based on the types of mosquitoes Esser and his crews are encountering.
“We’re seeing plenty of male mosquitoes out there, and we haven’t seen a lot of males the last five or six years,” Esser said. “So they were out early fertilizing eggs.”
The main hatch of mosquitoes usually goes off around July 4, he added.
Although the mosquitoes have been scarce, ticks have been abundant, Esser said.
“I’ve had plenty of customers telling me about their kids coming in with ticks on them,” Esser said.
McKay Coppins describes Evan McMullin’s War:
And yet, for all his time spent studying authoritarianism overseas, he says, “I didn’t expect to see [it] here in the United States in my lifetime.” Now that he believes American democracy is at risk, McMullin says he’s less fixated than he once was on the ideological debates that have dominated partisan politics. “When authoritarians come to power,” he told me, “it can reshuffle the political spectrum. Instead of having the traditional right versus left, you end up with a dynamic in which there are those who decide they are supporting the authoritarian regime, and then you have a group that opposes them.” What’s needed, he argues, is for antiauthoritarians of all ideological persuasions to set aside their disagreements and link arms in defense of core democratic principles.
Stephanie Kirchgaessner reports that a Lobbyist for Russian interests says he attended dinners hosted by Sessions:
An American lobbyist for Russian interests who helped craft an important foreign policy speech for Donald Trump has confirmed that he attended two dinners hosted by Jeff Sessions during the 2016 campaign, apparently contradicting the attorney general’s sworn testimony given this week.
Sessions testified under oath on Tuesday that he did not believe he had any contacts with lobbyists working for Russian interests over the course of Trump’s campaign. But Richard Burt, a former ambassador to Germany during the Reagan administration, who has represented Russian interests in Washington, told the Guardian that he could confirm previous media reports that stated he had contacts with Sessions at the time.
“I did attend two dinners with groups of former Republican foreign policy officials and Senator Sessions,” Burt said.
Jason Grotto describes The Tax Divide: Cook County failed to value homes accurately for years. The result: a property tax system that harmed the poor and helped the rich:
An unprecedented analysis by the Tribune reveals that for years the county’s property tax system created an unequal burden on residents, handing huge financial breaks to homeowners who are well-off while punishing those who have the least, particularly people living in minority communities.
The problem lies with the fundamentally flawed way the county assessor’s office values property.
The valuations are a crucial factor when it comes to calculating property tax bills, a burden that for many determines whether they can afford to stay in their homes. Done well, these estimates should be fair, transparent and stand up to scrutiny.
But that’s not how it works in Cook County, where Assessor Joseph Berrios has resisted reforms and ignored industry standards while his office churned out inaccurate values. The result is a staggering pattern of inequality.
For Caturday, a Tiny House Cat Squares Up To A Lion: