Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see morning snow with a high of twenty-eight.  Sunrise is 7:13 AM and sunset 5:01 PM, for 9h 45m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 94.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4:30 PM.

It’s a snow day for the Whitewater Schools. Play responsibly.

On this day in 1915, an act of Congress establishes Rocky Mountain National Park.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Antonia Noori Farzan reports Wealthy couple chartered a plane to the Yukon, took vaccines meant for Indigenous elders, authorities said:

Located deep in Canada’s Yukon, the remote community of Beaver Creek is home to only about 100 people, most of them members of the White River First Nation.

So when an unfamiliar couple who claimed to work at a local motel showed up at a mobile clinic to receive coronavirus vaccines, it didn’t take long for locals to become suspicious. Authorities soon found that the couple were actually wealthy Vancouver residents who had chartered a private plane to the isolated outpost so that they could get shots intended to protect vulnerable Indigenous elders.

….

Canadian media outlets have identified the couple as casino executive Rodney Baker, 55, and his wife, Ekaterina Baker, a 32-year-old actress whose recent credits include the 2020 films “Fatman” and “Chick Fight.” Each faces fines totaling the equivalent of about $900 for violating quarantine guidelines. Neither could immediately be reached for comment late Monday, and it was not clear if they have attorneys.

Investor disclosures show that Baker earned more than $10.6 million in 2019 as CEO and president of the Great Canadian Gaming Corporation, which owns more than 20 casinos across Canada and isthe subject of a separate money laundering probe. He resigned Sunday after charges were filed. A spokesman said that Great Canadian “has no tolerance for actions that run counter to the company’s objectives and values.”

Ramenda Cyrus writes A Year Ago Today, Trump Said COVID Would “All Work Out Well”:

One year ago, on the same day that the CDC announced a test for COVID-19 and a day after Wuhan had gone into lockdown, Donald Trump tweeted the following:

China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!

The relevant context for this tweet isn’t just the disease that would soon become a pandemic. Trump had struck a trade deal with China just days before, and this tweet was part of the political effort to maintain an air of sunny relations with a country that only four months earlier he’d called “threat to the world,” a country he would be demonizing again by spring.

It will all work out well. The English language is not yet evolved enough to accurately describe what Trump managed to do on Twitter during his presidency. He loved walking the line between lying and misleading, between sincerity and insincerity, the bullshitter-in-chief who sometimes seemed to bullshit himself most of all. This case was no different. His optimism was unfounded, unrealistic, and ultimately self-serving, and that was clear even then, when we had no idea how the coronavirus would unfold.

Harriet Tubman $20 Bill in the Works Under Biden Admin:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty.  Sunrise is 7:14 AM and sunset 4:59 PM, for 9h 45m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 88.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4:30 PM, Downtown Whitewater’s board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM in closed session and 7 PM in open session.

On this day in 1945, the Battle of the Bulge ends in an Allied (principally American) victory. 

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jacqueline Alemany writes Distance from the Jan. 6 Capitol riots may ultimately prove to be a double-edged sword:

It can provide GOP leaders with some space to navigate tricky terrain, but it also gives Democrats more time to investigate.

“As the days go on, more and more evidence comes out about the president’s involvement in the incitement of this insurrection, the incitement of this riot, and also his dereliction of duty once it was going on,” House impeachment manager Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) told NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro.

“I think we’re going to get more and more evidence over the next few weeks, as if it’s not enough that he sent an angry mob down the Mall to invade the Capitol, didn’t try to stop it and a police officer was killed,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said, pointing to the bombshell New York Times story about Trump’s desire to install an attorney general sympathetic to nullifying Biden’s legitimate election. “I don’t really know what else you need to know. The facts were there.”

 Glenn Kessler writes Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims as president. Nearly half came in his final year:

For more than 10 years, The Fact Checker has assessed the accuracy of claims made by politicians in both parties, and that practice will continue. But Trump, with his unusually flagrant disregard for facts, posed a new challenge, as so many of his claims did not merit full-fledged fact checks. What started as a weekly feature — “What Trump got wrong on Twitter this week” — turned into a project for Trump’s first 100 days. Then, in response to reader requests, the Trump database was maintained for four years, despite the increasing burden of keeping it up.

The database became an untruth tracker for the ages, widely cited around the world as a measuring stick of Trump’s presidency — and as of noon Wednesday it was officially retired.

Whether such a tracker will be necessary for future presidents is unclear. Nonetheless, the impact of Trump’s rhetoric may reverberate for years.

“As a result of Trump’s constant lying through the presidential megaphone, more Americans are skeptical of genuine facts than ever before,” presidential historian Michael Beschloss said.

How Bioplastic Is Made From Avocado Waste:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see morning snow with a daytime high of thirty-one.  Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 4:58 PM, for 9h 43m 00s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 81.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1984, Apple Computer places the Macintosh personal computer on sale in the United States.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Jason Breslow reports Protests Swell Across Russia Calling for the Release of Kremlin Critic Alexei Navalny:

Tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets in protest on Saturday to demand the release of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, braving the threat of mass arrests in what were some of the largest demonstrations against the Kremlin in years.

From the port city of Vladivostok in the east to the capital of Moscow seven time zones away in the west, protesters swept across the country in open defiance of warnings from Russian authorities that the demonstrations have been deemed illegal.

In Moscow, protesters gathered in Pushkin Square for what appeared to be the largest of the day’s protests. They were met by police trucks and city buses filled with riot officers, who blared messages from a public-address system warning them that the protest was unlawful. In all, Navalny supporters said that protests were planned across 90 cities, including the Siberian city of Yakutsk, where temperatures plunged to minus 60 Fahrenheit.

 Elizabeth Dias reports In Biden’s Catholic Faith, an Ascendant Liberal Christianity:

Mr. Biden, perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief in half a century, regularly attends Mass and speaks of how his Catholic faith grounds his life and his policies.

And with Mr. Biden, a different, more liberal Christianity is ascendant: less focused on sexual politics and more on combating poverty, climate change and racial inequality.

His arrival comes after four years in which conservative Christianity has reigned in America’s highest halls of power, embodied in white evangelicals laser-focused on ending abortion and guarding against what they saw as encroachments on their freedoms. Their devotion to former President Donald J. Trump was so fervent that many showed up in Washington on Jan. 6 to protest the election results.

Mr. Biden’s leadership is a repudiation of the claim by many conservative leaders that Democrats are inherently anti-Christian.

Canadian Inuit Dogs Get Their Wilderness Chops from Wolves:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be clear in the morning, partly cloudy in the afternoon, with a high of twenty-three.  Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 4:57 PM, for 9h 40m 53s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 73.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1556, the deadliest earthquake in history, the Shaanxi earthquake, hits Shaanxi province, China. The death toll may have been as high as 830,000.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Katie Benner reports Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney General:

The Justice Department’s top leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their peers, they were told, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.

The unassuming lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising ways to cast doubt on the election results and to bolster Mr. Trump’s continuing legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president’s entreaties to carry out those plans, Mr. Trump was about to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark.

The department officials, convened on a conference call, then asked each other: What will you do if Mr. Rosen is dismissed?

The answer was unanimous. They would resign.

Their informal pact ultimately helped persuade Mr. Trump to keep Mr. Rosen in place, calculating that a furor over mass resignations at the top of the Justice Department would eclipse any attention on his baseless accusations of voter fraud. Mr. Trump’s decision came only after Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark made their competing cases to him in a bizarre White House meeting that two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” albeit one that could prompt a constitutional crisis.

 Keith E. Whittington writes Is There a Free Speech Defense to an Impeachment?:

The First Amendment does not shrink the scope of the impeachment power or alter what conduct would fall within the terms of high and misdemeanors. When drafting the Bill of Rights, James Madison took care to include only provisions that he thought were compatible with the existing body of the Constitution drafted in 1787. The adoption of the First Amendment, from Madison’s perspective, would reaffirm what was already true about the Constitution, not carve out new exceptions to it. It is inconceivable that Madison would have thought that his proposed affirmation that the freedom of speech may not be abridged by the new federal government meant that an exception was being carved out of the power of Congress to impeach and remove officers for high crimes and misdemeanors. That which was impeachable before the adoption of the First Amendment was still impeachable after.

….

If a civil service employee in the Department of Justice had done the things contained in the article of impeachment, he could be justly terminated from his federal employment despite the First Amendment. If the attorney general had done the things alleged by the House of Representatives, the president could justly fire him despite the First Amendment. There are many things that could get a government employee or a Cabinet secretary fired that would not rise to the level of impeachable offenses, but there is nothing that would otherwise be an impeachable offense for which the First Amendment would shelter an officer from Senate conviction and removal.

There is only one impeachment power and one standard for impeachment. That standard for impeachable offenses applies equally to all the government officials subject to it, whether judges, executive branch officers or presidents.

Launch-a-palooza — SpaceX, Virgin Orbit, Rocket Lab, and China lifted-off this week:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be clear with a high of eighteen.  Sunrise is 7:17 AM and sunset 4:56 PM, for 9h 38m 48s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 65.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1968, the NBA awards a basketball franchise to Milwaukee.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Mary Ilyushina reports Navalny releases investigation into decadent billion-dollar ‘Putin palace’:

Navalny and his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) called the report their “biggest investigation yet.” It contains allegations of vast corruption schemes related to what they say is Putin’s property estimated to be worth around $1.4 billion.

CNN is not independently able to verify the FBK’s claims. Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov denied the Russian leader was linked to the estate on Tuesday.

“They are repeating the old story. It was the year of 2017 or 2016, if I’m not mistaken, that the first time it was mentioned there should be the so-called palace of Putin in Gelendzhik. This is not true. There is no palace, he is not an owner of any palace,” Peskov told CNN.

….

But Navalny’s new investigation, which he says he thought of while getting treated at the Berlin Charite clinic, purports to show the scale of the estate and expose dubious financial schemes behind the grand project.

The report and an almost two-hour-long documentary film also offer a more comprehensive look inside the palace. FBK says a subcontractor involved in construction handed over detailed plans of the building along with itemized lists of purchased furniture and samples of floor patterns. The group then used these documents and photos obtained from construction workers to create 3D-models of the interiors.

“This is like a state within a state where one irremovable czar rules,” Navalny says in the documentary. “It is built in a way that no one can reach it by land, sea or air, thousands of people working there are banned from bringing even a simple cell phone with a camera… but we will take a look inside.”

See Putin’s palace. History of world’s largest bribe (The settings of the YouTube video provide English-language captioning. The video is lengthy, but gripping from first to last):

  Peter Wehner writes The End of Trump Can Be the Beginning of America:

This is a text I received from a prominent conservative Christian minutes after President Biden’s Inaugural Address: “I broke down sobbing. It’s been a long five-and-a-half years.”

Shortly after that, Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., emailed me a note that said, “I never thought I would be moved to tears watching a Democratic president get sworn in, but I was. It just felt so good to hear someone who understands and loves this country and constitution, and is an honorable person, take the oath. I’m praying for healing.”

I’ve had conversations with others who tell similar stories.

Joe Biden is an admirable human being, empathetic and generous in spirit, and his speech was elegant and uplifting. But the tears had to do with something else: We had just emerged from a national trauma. It was only two weeks earlier that the Capitol, on whose steps Mr. Biden took the oath of office, was under assault from a mob that had been incited by his predecessor, Donald Trump, in order to undo an election Mr. Trump lost.

Scientists are using satellites to count elephants from space:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be clear with a high of thirty-four.  Sunrise is 7:18 AM and sunset 4:54 PM, for 9h 36m 46s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 56% of its visible disk illuminated.

Good begins with normal: Today is a good day, in the District of Columbia, and across the nation.

On this day in 1954, the first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, is launched in Groton, Connecticut.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Michael Gerson writes In his speech, Biden helps us believe he can make our rusty system work:

At a moment of historic firsts — the first female, Black and South Asian vice president, the first inaugural address given at a recent crime scene, the first passing of presidential power from a classless, unhinged narcissist who tried to destroy the constitutional order — the most compelling attribute of President Biden’s inaugural address was its moral normalcy. I had a cascading sense of relief at hearing a president take the “pro” side of empathy, compassion and inclusion.

After Donald Trump’s “American carnage” inaugural address — essentially declaring war on the whole congressional “establishment” that sat in uncomfortable attendance — former president George W. Bush reportedly commented, “That was some weird s–t.” Biden’s speech was neither. Behind the new president’s words you could almost hear the work crews rebuilding America’s moral and political guardrails. That infrastructure project is a precondition for the return of a politics that is normal and noble.

The address was more authentic to Biden than rhetorically ambitious, objectives that typically diverge. It was clearly intended to give a sense of the president as a man — upbeat, forthright, practical, welcoming. The speech was a rhetorical X-ray. It showed that Biden’s heart is in the right place — something that could not be assumed in Trump’s alien anatomy. It is usually not high praise to say that an inaugural address puts you to sleep. But I will sleep better at night knowing that a man of admirable character holds the presidency.

 The Guardian reports Avril Haines confirmed by US Senate as first female national intelligence chief:

Haines, a former CIA deputy director, will become a core member of Biden’s security team, overseeing the agencies that make up the nation’s intelligence community. She succeeds John Ratcliffe, a Texas Republican and Trump loyalist who was widely regarded as having too little experience for the position.

Praising Haines, Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who will chair the intelligence committee in the new Senate, said: “After being deliberately undermined for four years, the intelligence community deserves a strong, Senate-confirmed leader to lead and reinvigorate it.”

Marco Rubio, the acting outgoing Republican chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said in a statement: “Our adversaries will not stand by and wait for the new administration to staff critical positions, and I am pleased my Senate colleagues joined me in swiftly confirming director Haines to this important post.”

Ron Wyden, a committee Democrat who has regularly criticised spy agency activities, said he voted for Haines after her response to questions, including how spy agencies treat whistleblowers and concerns he raised about how the CIA had spied on committee officials when they were working on a report detailing the agency’s use of harsh interrogation techniques, which critics described as torture.

During an intelligence committee confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Haines said the United States should take an “aggressive stance” toward the threat posed by an aggressive and assertive China.

How 715,000 Pounds of Cargo Moves Through Dallas Fort Worth Airport In 24 Hours: