Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of ninety. Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 6:45 PM, for 11h 58m 48s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 26.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twentieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the School Board at 7:00 PM.
On this day in 1957, federal soldiers escort nine black students to assure the legally-required and morally-necessary beginning of integration at Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas: “Under escort from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, nine black students enter all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Three weeks earlier, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had surrounded the school with National Guard troops to prevent its federal court-ordered racial integration. After a tense standoff, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,000 army paratroopers to Little Rock to enforce the court order.”
On this day in 1961, “Wisconsin Governor Gaylord Nelson signed into law a bill that required all 1962 cars sold in Wisconsin to be equipped with seat belts.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Robert Barnes writes that a Supreme Court case offers window into how representatives choose their constituents:
MADISON, Wis. — Behind the locked doors of a “map room,” in a politically connected law firm’s offices across from the historic Capitol, three men worked in secret to ensure the future of the state’s newly triumphant Republican Party.
They were drawing the legislative districts in which members of the Wisconsin Senate and State Assembly would be elected. When the men — two aides to legislative leaders and a lobbyist brought in to help — finished in the early summer of 2011, they headed across the street to present their work.
“The maps we pass will determine who’s here 10 years from now,” read the notes for the meeting, which were made public as part of a lawsuit. “We have an opportunity and an obligation to draw these maps that Republicans haven’t had in decades.”
The maps are now at the center of a Supreme Court case to be argued next month that could change the dynamics of American politics — if the justices decide for the first time that a legislative map is so infected with political favoritism that it violates the Constitution….
Josh Dawsey reports that Kushner used private email to conduct White House business (“The senior adviser set up the account after the election. Other West Wing officials have also used private email accounts for official business”):
Presidential son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has corresponded with other administration officials about White House matters through a private email account set up during the transition last December, part of a larger pattern of Trump administration aides using personal email accounts for government business.
Kushner uses his private account alongside his official White House email account, sometimes trading emails with senior White House officials, outside advisers and others about media coverage, event planning and other subjects, according to four people familiar with the correspondence. POLITICO has seen and verified about two dozen emails.
“Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business,” Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, said in a statement Sunday. “Fewer than 100 emails from January through August were either sent to or returned by Mr. Kushner to colleagues in the White House from his personal email account. These usually forwarded news articles or political commentary and most often occurred when someone initiated the exchange by sending an email to his personal rather than his White House address.”….
Adam Entous, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg report that Obama tried to give Zuckerberg a wake-up call over fake news on Facebook:
Nine days after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg dismissed as “crazy” the idea that fake news on his company’s social network played a key role in the U.S. election, President Barack Obama pulled the youthful tech billionaire aside and delivered what he hoped would be a wake-up call.
For months leading up to the vote, Obama and his top aides quietly agonized over how to respond to Russia’s brazen intervention on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign without making matters worse. Weeks after Trump’s surprise victory, some of Obama’s aides looked back with regret and wished they had done more.
Now huddled in a private room on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, two months before Trump’s inauguration, Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously. Unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, Obama warned, it would only get worse in the next presidential race….
Jennifer Agiesta reports that in a CNN poll: 54% say Russia-backed content on social media moved 2016 election:
Although President Donald Trump insists otherwise, most Americans say it’s likely that Russian-backed content on social media did affect the outcome of the 2016 election, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.
The poll result comes on the heels of Facebook’s announcement that it would turn over to Congressional investigators information related to more than 3,000 ads the company says were sold to accounts linked to a Russian troll farm between June 2015 and May 2017. And Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr said he’s planning to hold a public hearing next month on Russian election interference through Facebook and other social media platforms.
Overall, 54% say it’s very or somewhat likely that such Russian-backed content on Facebook or other social media affected the 2016 presidential vote, 43% say that’s not too or not at all likely. More appear to see this social media effort as having affected the outcome of the election than said so about information released due to Russian hacking. According to a CNN poll back in January, just 40% said that information was significant enough to change the outcome of the election….
If diets changed, then the climate might, too:
In America, beef accounts for 37 percent of all human-induced methane released into the air. Methane is 23 times as warming to the climate as carbon dioxide. In a recent article, The Atlantic writer James Hamblin shows how one dietary change—replacing beef with beans—could get the U.S. 74 percent of the way to meeting 2020 greenhouse-gas emission goals. As Hamblin notes, it’s worth being reminded that individual choices matter.