Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of thirty.  Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:40 PM, for 9h 16m 07s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 16.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduces the original iPhone at a Macworld keynote in San Francisco.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny report Extremists made little secret of ambitions to ‘occupy’ Capitol in weeks before attack:

“Everyone who was a law enforcement officer or a reporter knew exactly what these hate groups were planning,” [Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl A.] Racine said. “They were planning to descend on Washington, D.C., ground center was the Capitol, and they were planning to charge and, as Rudy Giuliani indicated, to do combat justice at the Capitol,”

On the fringe message board 8kun, which is popular with QAnon followers, for example, users talked for weeks about a siege of the Capitol, some talking about it like a foregone conclusion. Others simply debated how violent the uprising should be, and if police should be exempt.

“You can go to Washington on Jan 6 and help storm the Capital,” said one 8kun user a day before the siege. “As many Patriots as can be. We will storm the government buildings, kill cops, kill security guards, kill federal employees and agents, and demand a recount.”

….

A day before the rally, the investigative journalism website Bellingcat published an article detailing the online convergence of radical conservative groups with QAnon and white supremecist groups leading up to what the president promised would be a “wild protest,” specifically mentioning their online discussion about storming and burning the Capitol and specific threats directed at D.C. government officials and police.

The Washington Post published a similar article, citing specific posts on the encrypted app Telegram and Parler, a Twitter alternative, about sneaking illegal weapons into the rally. NBC News also published an article highlighting the threats, using research from Advance DemocracyInc., a global research organization that studies disinformation and extremism.

(Emphasis added.)

 Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman report Trump Is Said to Have Discussed Pardoning Himself:

In several conversations since Election Day, Mr. Trump has told advisers that he is considering giving himself a pardon and, in other instances, asked whether he should and what the effect would be on him legally and politically, according to the two people. It was not clear whether he had broached the topic since he incited his supporters on Wednesday to march on the Capitol, where some stormed the building in a mob attack.

Mr. Trump has shown signs that his level of interest in pardoning himself goes beyond idle musings. He has long maintained he has the power to pardon himself, and his polling of aides’ views is typically a sign that he is preparing to follow through on his aims. He has also become increasingly convinced that his perceived enemies will use the levers of law enforcement to target him after he leaves office.

No president has pardoned himself, so the legitimacy of prospective self-clemency has never been tested in the justice system, and legal scholars are divided about whether the courts would recognize it. But they agree a presidential self-pardon could create a dangerous new precedent for presidents to unilaterally declare they are above the law and to insulate themselves from being held accountable for any crimes they committed in office.

Closest brown dwarf star to Earth has ‘stripes’:

NASA’s TESS space telescope was used to measure brown dwarf Luhman 16B’s brightness. A University of Arizona-led research team used the high precision light data to create a visualization of the star and its atmosphere.

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be overcast with a high of thirty.  Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:39 PM, for 9h 14m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 26.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1982, AT&T agrees to divest itself of twenty-two subdivisions. 

Recommended for reading in full — 

Margaret Sullivan writes The pro-Trump media world peddled the lies that fueled the Capitol mob. Fox News led the way:

“Fair and balanced” was the original Fox News lie, one of the rotten planks that built the foundation for Wednesday’s democratic disaster.

Over decades, with that false promise accepted as gospel by millions of devotees, Fox News radicalized a nation and spawned more extreme successors such as Newsmax and One America News.

Day after day, hour after hour, Fox gave its viewers something that looked like news or commentary but far too often lacked sufficient adherence to a necessary ingredient: truth.

Birtherism. The caravan invasion. Covid denialism. Rampant election fraud. All of these found a comfortable home at Fox.

In the Trump era, the network — now out of favor for not being quite as shameless as the president demands — was his best friend and promoter. So to put it bluntly: The mob that stormed and desecrated the Capitol on Wednesday could not have existed in a country that hadn’t been radicalized by the likes of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, and swayed by biased news coverage.

 The Wall Street Journal editorial board assesses Donald Trump’s Final Days:

If Mr. Trump wants to avoid a second impeachment, his best path would be to take personal responsibility and resign. This would be the cleanest solution since it would immediately turn presidential duties over to Mr. Pence. And it would give Mr. Trump agency, a la Richard Nixon, over his own fate.

This might also stem the flood of White House and Cabinet resignations that are understandable as acts of conscience but could leave the government dangerously unmanned. Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, in particular should stay at his post.

We know an act of grace by Mr. Trump isn’t likely. In any case this week has probably finished him as a serious political figure. He has cost Republicans the House, the White House, and now the Senate. Worse, he has betrayed his loyal supporters by lying to them about the election and the ability of Congress and Mr. Pence to overturn it. He has refused to accept the basic bargain of democracy, which is to accept the result, win or lose.

It is best for everyone, himself included, if he goes away quietly.

 Jeremy Peters reports How Trump’s Allies Are Still Defending Him: Denial, Deflection, Disinformation:

This was one mob they found a way to excuse.

Even as scores of President Trump’s usually unfailing loyalists condemned him for moving too slowly to call off the swarm of demonstrators that stormed and ransacked the Capitol, many of his most vocal and visible allies in Congress, the media and conservative politics still could not bring themselves to fault him for the surreal and frightening attack carried out by people he had just urged to “fight like hell.”

They downplayed the violence as acts of desperation by people who felt lied to by the news media and ignored by their elected representatives. They deflected with false equivalencies about the Democratic Party’s embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Some even tried to dispute the fact that Trump supporters were actually the perpetrators, suggesting that far-left activists had infiltrated the crowd and posed as fans of the president.

These were not isolated or trivial assertions from little-known people on the fringes of Mr. Trump’s movement. Rather, they came from some of his highest-profile allies who helped enable his rise in the Republican Party and have aided him in his unrelenting assault on anyone who questions his actions.

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be overcast with a high of thirty-three.  Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:38 PM, for 9h 13m 27s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 37.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Fire Department Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

  On this day in 1927, the first transatlantic telephone service is established from New York City to London.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Dan Rather writes of the Trumpists that

All of this was predictable. It was predicted. And the lasting shame of history will be on all those who refused to act out of cowardice, ambition, or their own allegiance to an authoritarian movement.

 John Cassidy writes This Violent Insurrection Is What Trump Wanted:

Before the mob broke into the Capitol, Trump addressed a large group of his supporters who had gathered on the Ellipse, the park just south of the White House. Referring to the election, he declared, “There has never been anything like this—it’s a pure theft—in American history.” Later on, after repeating a long litany of bogus claims about voter fraud, he said, “This is a criminal enterprise.” He ended his speech by saying, “We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Ave. . . . We’re going to try and give our Republicans—the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help—we’re going to try and give them kind of pride and boldness they need to take back our country.”

For the past four years, there has been a tendency in some quarters to downplay Trump’s incendiary rhetoric. Ever since the election, it has been incessant. With Mitch McConnell and other leading Republicans pledging to accept the election results, Trump’s attempt to bully Congress into submission was—and is—destined to fail. But, when you are dealing with would-be authoritarians like Trump, it is a mistake to focus exclusively on the formal institutions of government; the danger comes from outside the system.

Dan Barry and Sheera Frenkel report ‘Be There. Will Be Wild!’: Trump All but Circled the Date:

For weeks, President Trump and his supporters had been proclaiming Jan. 6, 2021, as a day of reckoning. A day to gather in Washington to “save America” and “stop the steal” of the election he had decisively lost, but which he still maintained — often through a toxic brew of conspiracy theories — that he had won by a landslide.

And when that day came, the president rallied thousands of his supporters with an incendiary speech. Then a large mob of those supporters, many waving Trump flags and wearing Trump regalia, violently stormed the Capitol to take over the halls of government and send elected officials into hiding, fearing for their safety.

But if the chaos in the Capitol shocked the country, one of the most disturbing aspects of this most disturbing day was that it could be seen coming. The president himself had all but circled it on the nation’s calendar.

“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Mr. Trump tweeted on Dec. 19, just one of several of his tweets promoting the day. “Be there, will be wild!”

Robin Givhan writes Flying the flag of fascism for Trump:

What to call these people? To describe them as protesters is to undermine those who take to the streets in peace, who raise their voices in hopes of making the country better — not to demolish it. Are they traitors? Terrorists? Radicals? Thugs? They are all of those things — a national quilt of our worst impulses and characteristics.

….

And they rampaged through the Capitol posting photos of themselves and one another breaking into the offices of the speaker of the House, looting and rioting and threatening — and, at least initially, being greeted like overzealous tourists compared with the way in which some law enforcement has beaten back Black Lives Matter and racial justice demonstrators.

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be overcast with a high of thirty.  Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:37 PM, for 9h 12m 12s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 48.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1912, German geophysicist Alfred Wegener first presents his theory of continental drift.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Prosecutors clear white police officer over Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha:

US prosecutors have cleared white police officer Rusten Sheskey in the shooting of 29-year-old Black man Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. ’It is my decision now … that no Kenosha law enforcement officer in this case will be charged with any criminal offense,’ said Michael Graveley, the Kenosha County district attorney. Sheskey shot Blake seven times in the back, leaving him paralyzed. B’Ivory Lamarr, a lawyer for the Blake family, said the decision shows there are ‘three justice systems’ in America: ‘One for black and brown people, one for police officers and one for the rest of America.’ Lamarr said the fight for justice will continue: ‘We won’t stop until there is actually truly one nation under God with justice and liberty for us all.’

 Luke Winkie writes Trump’s presidency is ending. Is the reign of Newsmax and OAN just beginning?:

Yochai Benkler is a professor at Harvard Law School who has studied the ebbs and flows of right-wing media for decades. According to the research in his book Network Propaganda, the fervor for Fox News deteriorated during the early months of 2016, as the Republican party was engulfed in a contentious primary and the Murdoch Estate hadn’t yet formally backed a candidate. “They got attacked viciously by Breitbart and Trump, and our data showed clearly that, at least online, attention to Fox declined and became less central to the right wing media ecosystem,” says Benkler. “It was only with their adoption of the full-throated Trump support that they really came back.”

….

He believes the rot at the core of the right-wing media sphere has percolated for much longer than the lifespans of this current crop of Twitter malcontents. Specifically, he names Rush Limbaugh and his talk radio generation, who initially pioneered the sneering, fuck-your-feelings demeanor that was quickly normalized into an abating media industry. “The craziness didn’t start on social media and migrate to TV,” says Benkler. “It started on radio and TV and migrated online.”

 Michael Kranish reports Cleta Mitchell, who advised Trump on Saturday phone call, resigns from law firm:

Republican lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who advised President Trump during his Saturday phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state in an effort to overturn the election, resigned on Tuesday as a partner in the Washington office of the law firm Foley & Lardner.

Mitchell’s resignation came after the law firm on Monday issued a statement saying it was “concerned by” her role in the call. The firm noted that as a matter of policy, its attorneys do not represent “any parties seeking to contest the results of the election.”

The Washington Post on Sunday published audio and a transcript of the hour-long call in which Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the election results. During the call, Mitchell complained that she had not been given access to certain information from Raffensperger’s office, and Trump relied on her to an extraordinary degree during the call.

How ‘Ratatouille’ Became A TikTok Musical:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty.  Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:36 PM, for 9h 11m 02s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 59.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1855, King Camp Gillette, inventor of the Gillette safety razor, is born in Fond du Lac. 

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Mary Astor reports A Georgia election official debunked Trump’s claims of voter fraud, point by point:

In a searing news conference on Monday, Gabriel Sterling, a top election official in Georgia, systematically debunked President Trump’s false claims of voter fraud. Again.

“The reason I’m having to stand here today is because there are people in positions of authority and respect who have said their votes didn’t count, and it’s not true,” said Mr. Sterling, a Republican who last month condemned the president’s failure to denounce threats against election officials, and who was tasked on Monday with responding to the news of a phone call in which Mr. Trump pressured Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to change the outcome of the presidential race.

….

TRUMP’S CLAIM: That, amid the disruption caused by a broken water main at a vote-counting center in Fulton County, election workers brought in “suitcases or trunks” of ballots.

STERLING’S EXPLANATION: Late in the evening, after the water main break had been fixed, election workers prepared to go home for the night and followed standard procedures to store ballots securely: placing them in containers and affixing numbered seals. But when Mr. Raffensperger found out that they were closing up shop, he ordered them to continue counting through the night — so the workers retrieved the containers and resumed counting ballots.

All of this is on video footage that the secretary of state’s office posted publicly.

“This is what’s really frustrating: The president’s legal team had the entire tape,” Mr. Sterling said. “They watched the entire tape. They intentionally misled the State Senate, the voters and the people of the United States about this.”

(Astor’s reporting lists Sterling’s nine other point-by-point refutations of Trump’s claims.)

Helen Davidson writes Where is Jack Ma? Chinese tycoon not seen since October:

Speculation is mounting over the whereabouts of the Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, who has not been seen or heard in public for more than two months.

Ma, the co-founder and former chairman of the technology firm Alibaba, has fallen out of favour with China’s leadership. In late October, he stood alongside senior officials and delivered a blunt speech criticising national regulators, reportedly infuriating China’s president, Xi Jinping.

In the following months, regulators summoned Ma and other executives in for questioning and halted what would have been the world’s biggest share offering of his company, Ant Group. They later launched anti-monopoly investigations into Alibaba and its key competitor TenCent, and called Ant Group in for questioning. In late December, regulators ordered Ma to pare down his empire.

 This cross-border cycle path links the Atlantic Pyrenees to towns on the Spanish side of the border:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-one.  Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:35 PM, for 9h 09m 56s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 70.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 2004, Spirit, a NASA Mars rover, lands successfully on Mars.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 All 10 living former defense secretaries write Involving the military in election disputes would cross into dangerous territory:

Ashton Carter, Dick Cheney, William Cohen, Mark Esper, Robert Gates, Chuck Hagel, James Mattis, Leon Panetta, William Perry and Donald Rumsfeld are the 10 living former U.S. secretaries of defense.

As former secretaries of defense, we hold a common view of the solemn obligations of the U.S. armed forces and the Defense Department. Each of us swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We did not swear it to an individual or a party.

American elections and the peaceful transfers of power that result are hallmarks of our democracy. With one singular and tragic exception that cost the lives of more Americans than all of our other wars combined, the United States has had an unbroken record of such transitions since 1789, including in times of partisan strife, war, epidemics and economic depression. This year should be no exception.

Our elections have occurred. Recounts and audits have been conducted. Appropriate challenges have been addressed by the courts. Governors have certified the results. And the electoral college has voted. The time for questioning the results has passed; the time for the formal counting of the electoral college votes, as prescribed in the Constitution and statute, has arrived.

As senior Defense Department leaders have noted, “there’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.” Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.

 Steve Schmidt describes The Seven Aspects of Trumpism [three excerpted below]:

Trumpism is an American autocratic movement with fascistic markers. There are seven specific parts that comprise its core.

1. THE LEADER: Donald Trump is the unquestioned leader of this movement. It is a cult of personality, and there are no serious challengers against his leadership.

2. THUGS: The Proud Boys are but one example in a toxic stew of heavily-armed militias, white nationalists and other right-wing extremists. As is always the case, their ranks are filled with people on the fringes of society; the lonely, dispossessed, aggrieved and resentful. Not so long ago, there would have been a near-societal consensus around describing these people as losers. These people bring the menace of violence to politics and are akin to the same thuggish rabble that were wearing brown and black shirts 100 years ago.

4. PROPAGANDISTS: Autocratic movements are built on and sustained by lies. Political lying and conspiracy theories have become billion-dollar businesses. Fox News, Newsmax, One America News Network, social media, talk-radio dividers, Infowars, and others have poisoned the American polity and created the conditions for Trump to create an alternate reality that is now a lethal threat to American liberty.

  Bali’s famous beaches covered in plastic garbage: