Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will see occasional thunderstorms with a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 5:19 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 18m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 21.3% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the nine hundred sixty-second day.
On this day in 1832, Gen. Atkinson starts up the Rock River in the Black Hawk War.
Recommended for reading in full:
Dan Balz reports Harris upstages Biden and Sanders with dominating performance:
Harris delivered a dominating performance through much of the two hours, attacking Biden on civil rights, showing passion on race and other issues and silencing her fellow candidates when their crosstalk early in the debate threatened to show Democrats as a squabbling and disagreeable family.
It was when, as others talked about racial issues, that she broke in and changed the flow of the evening by reminding voters of the attributes that help define her candidacy. “As the only black person on this stage, I would like to speak on the issue of race,” she declared.
Biden asserted that Harris’s criticisms on race were a “mischaracterization of my position across the board.” But her attacks, delivered at close range and with forcefulness and personal references, left a mark on the former vice president and established her as a candidate to be reckoned with.
Harris has often struggled to match the promise of her candidacy, but in her first opportunity arrayed as one of 10 candidates, she made the most of the opportunities she was given — and took some on her own to announce her arrival on the big stage.
Thursday’s debate may not change the polls much but it will probably reorder how Democrats begin to think about the choices before them.
(Some points and disclosures. I’m not a Democrat but a Never Trump libertarian. That places my views, along with many others, into an opposition that Benjamin Wittes has called a Coalition of All Democratic Forces, a vast group of particular views united in the defense of a traditional liberal democratic political order. A third party would prove useless against Trump; it’s a grand coalition in support of a major party – in this case the Democratic Party – that will end his political career. Harris’s particular views often diverge from libertarian lines, needless to say. She is, however, unquestionably intelligent, knowledgeable, and in temperament well-suited to face Trump. I am a Harris donor, and although I would support any major-party opponent to Trump, it seems to me impossible for a discerning person to doubt her strengths and the promise of her candidacy.)
The New York Times podcast The Daily offers corroboration of E. Jean Carroll’s accusations against Donald Trump:
The writer E. Jean Carroll came forward last week with explosive accusations that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s. Today, the two women she confided in after the alleged attack discuss it publicly for the first time.
How IOT – an Internet of Things – Gives Rise To Smart Stores: