Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-one.  Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 10m 48s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 84.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1783, at Fraunces Tavern in New York City, General Washington bids farewell to his officers.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Susan Glasser writes The President Is Acting Crazy, So Why Are We Shrugging It Off?:

Donald Trump in defeat, it turns out, is even more whiny, dishonest, and self-absorbed than he was before his decisive loss to Biden a month ago. In the speech, delivered to an empty room and released straight to Facebook, for reasons that remain unclear, Trump repeated many of the election conspiracy theories, lies, and laments which he has been sending forth for weeks on Twitter and via emissaries like Rudy Giuliani. The news was that these baseless claims—the only impact of which will be to further undermine public confidence in the U.S. government—were coming directly from the President, as he stood at a lectern bearing the Presidential seal. And what words they were. The pollsters were liars. “Detroit is corrupt.” “Millions of votes were cast illegally in the swing states alone.”

….

There are only two possible conclusions from listening to this folly: either the President actually believes what he is saying, in which case he is crazy, or he does not, in which case he is engaged in the most cynical attack on American democracy ever to come from the White House. Is Trump “increasingly detached from reality,” as even the dispassionate, strictly nonpartisan Associated Press put it, in recounting the speech? Or is that conclusion, harsh as it is, giving Trump the benefit of the doubt by implying that he is just misguided or uninformed? There is another explanation, after all, for this reckless speech: What if, in fact, the President is not delusional but is the purposeful, malevolent creator of an alternate reality, knowingly spewing disinformation, discord, and division? Either variant, of course, is terrible.

 Silvia Amaro reports EU proposes a plan to revive U.S. ties and work with Biden:

The European Union announced a new plan on Wednesday to improve relations with the U.S. ahead of the inauguration of Joe Biden.

It’s been a tense four years of trans-Atlantic ties, with President Donald Trump and the EU clashing over trade, defense, technology and foreign relations — to name a few points of contention.

As the Biden administration is due to arrive at the White House on Jan. 20, the EU has not wasted any time and has prepared a new plan to reset that relationship.

“We are taking the initiative to design a new transatlantic agenda fit for today’s global landscape,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement Wednesday.

“It is time to reconnect,” she added. Meanwhile, the commission’s executive vice president, Valdis Dombrovskis, told CNBC the EU was sending a “signal that we are ready and willing to engage with the U.S.”

In a document entitled “A new EU-U.S. agenda for global change,” the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, defined four major policy areas to focus on: health response, climate change, trade and tech, and security.

How Autonomous Robots Are Changing Construction:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty.  Sunrise is 7:09 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 11m 57s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 90.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 3:30 PM, and the Fire Department via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1775, the USS Alfred becomes the first vessel to fly the Grand Union Flag (the precursor to the Stars and Stripes); the flag is hoisted by John Paul Jones.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Philip Rucker reports Trump escalates baseless attacks on election with 46-minute video rant:

Escalating his attack on democracy from within the White House, President Trump on Wednesday distributed an astonishing 46-minute video rant filled with baseless allegations of voter fraud and outright falsehoods in which he declared the nation’s election system “under coordinated assault and siege” and argued that it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost to President-elect Joe Biden.

Standing behind the presidential lectern in the Diplomatic Reception Room and flanked by the flags of his office and of the country whose Constitution he swore an oath to uphold, Trump tried to leverage the power of the presidency to subvert the vote and overturn the election results.

The rambling and bellicose monologue — which Trump said “may be the most important speech I’ve ever made” and was delivered direct-to-camera with no audience — underscored his desperation to reverse the outcome of his election loss after a month of failed legal challenges and as some key states already have certified Biden’s victory.

A guide to Trump’s false election claims:

 Stephanie Saul, Kate Kelly, and Michael LaForgia report 2,596 Trades in One Term: Inside Senator Perdue’s Stock Portfolio (‘The Georgia Republican’s stock trades have included a range of companies within his Senate committees’ oversight, an analysis shows’):

An examination of Mr. Perdue’s stock trading during his six years in office reveals that he has been the Senate’s most prolific stock trader by far, sometimes reporting 20 or more transactions in a single day.

The Times analyzed data compiled by Senate Stock Watcher, a nonpartisan website that aggregates publicly available information on lawmakers’ trading, and found that Mr. Perdue’s transactions accounted for nearly a third of all senators’ trades reported in the past six years. His 2,596 trades, mostly in stocks but also in bonds and funds, roughly equal the combined trading volume of the next five most active traders in the Senate.

The data also shows the breadth of trades Mr. Perdue made in companies that stood to benefit from policy and spending matters that came not just before the Senate as a whole, but before the committees and subcommittees on which he served.

Nearly half of Mr. Perdue’s FireEye trades, for example, occurred while he sat on the cybersecurity panel, a role that potentially could have provided him with nonpublic information about companies like FireEye. During that period, FireEye landed a subcontract worth more than $30 million with the Army Cyber Command, which had operations at Fort Gordon, in Mr. Perdue’s home state. In 2018, Mr. Perdue reported capital gains of up to $15,000 from FireEye trades.

 Family in South Australia finds live koala in their Christmas tree:

An Adelaide family came home to find their Christmas tree topped with a new, furry decoration after a juvenile koala wandered inside their home, climbed up the plastic tree and sampled the leaves. The family immediately called the Adelaide and Hills Koala Rescue, but co-founder Dee Hearne-Hellon said the group didn’t believe the story at first. After being removed from the tree, the koala was released into bushland nearby.

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of forty.  Sunrise is 7:08 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 13m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waning  gibbous with 95.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1954, the United States Senate votes 65 to 22 to censure Joseph McCarthy for “conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt report Trump Has Discussed With Advisers Pardons for His 3 Eldest Children and Giuliani (‘Rudolph W. Giuliani, who is promoting baseless claims of widespread election fraud, talked about a pardon with President Trump as recently as last week’):

President Trump has discussed with advisers whether to grant pre-emptive pardons to his children, to his son-in-law and to his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, and talked with Mr. Giuliani about pardoning him as recently as last week, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Trump has told others that he is concerned that a Biden Justice Department might seek retribution against the president by targeting the oldest three of his five children — Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump — as well as Ms. Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner, a White House senior adviser.

Donald Trump Jr. had been under investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, for contacts that the younger Mr. Trump had had with Russians offering damaging information on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, but he was never charged. Mr. Kushner provided false information to federal authorities about his contacts with foreigners for his security clearance, but was given one anyway by the president.

The nature of Mr. Trump’s concern about any potential criminal exposure of Eric Trump or Ivanka Trump is unclear, although an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney into the Trump Organization has expanded to include tax write-offs on millions of dollars in consulting fees by the company, some of which appear to have gone to Ms. Trump.

Presidential pardons, however, do not provide protection against state or local crimes.

Christopher Krebs writes Trump fired me for saying this, but I’ll say it again: The election wasn’t rigged:

(Christopher Krebs is the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.)

The combined efforts over the past three years moved the total number of expected votes cast with a paper ballot above 90 percent, including the traditional battleground states. While I no longer regularly speak to election officials, my understanding is that in the 2020 results no significant discrepancies attributed to manipulation have been discovered in the post-election canvassing, audit and recount processes.

This point cannot be emphasized enough: The secretaries of state in Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania, as well officials in Wisconsin, all worked overtime to ensure there was a paper trail that could be audited or recounted by hand, independent of any allegedly hacked software or hardware.

That’s why Americans’ confidence in the security of the 2020 election is entirely justified. Paper ballots and post-election checks ensured the accuracy of the count. Consider Georgia: The state conducted a full hand recount of the presidential election, a first of its kind, and the outcome of the manual count was consistent with the computer-based count. Clearly, the Georgia count was not manipulated, resoundingly debunking claims by the president and his allies about the involvement of CIA supercomputers, malicious software programs or corporate rigging aided by long-gone foreign dictators.

Tonight’s Sky for December:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of thirty-five.  Sunrise is 7:07 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 14m 27s of daytime.  The moon is a waning  gibbous with 98.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1913, Ford Motor Company introduces the first moving assembly line.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Philip Bump writes Debunking Trump allies’ latest arguments about fraud in the 2020 election:

1.8 million ballots were mailed out in Pennsylvania, but 2.5 million were returned. This claim conflates ballots sent in the primary (1.8 million) with the number returned (2.6 million) in the general. More than 3 million ballots were requested for the general election.

Biden’s leads in key states are a function of the suspicious addition of large numbers of ballots. It is true that large batches of votes shifted the lead in several states. The important distinction, though, is that this is not evidence of anything suspicious or nefarious occurring.

Take Wisconsin, for example. The sudden surge in votes that has prompted consternation from Trump and his allies was the reporting of results from Milwaukee County, where more than 1 in 8 votes statewide were cast. Those votes went heavily for Biden, just as they had gone heavily for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

….

It’s inconceivable that Biden received 80 million votes. It isn’t. Never have there been more people living in the United States and, by extension, more citizens of voting age. As we reported last week, although Biden’s vote total is higher than that of any candidate in history, as a percentage of the population that is eligible to vote, it’s somewhere among the top-10 performances in history.

That doesn’t answer the question of how Biden did so well. The answer to that question, though, is also simple: He was running against Trump. Trump has been the most polarizing president in history, with a majority of Americans disapproving of his job performance and with fervent opposition from most Democrats and many independents. Polling showed that many of them were motivated to vote not by Biden but by Trump. Trump likes to tout how energetic his supporters were — but to ignore the energy of his opponents.

 Tim Miller writes Trump Lawyer: Former DHS Senior Official Should Be Executed:

On Monday President Trump’s campaign lawyer and former U.S. Attorney Joe diGenova said that fired Trump cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs should be executed for saying that the election was the “most secure in United States history.”

DiGenova, appearing on the Howie Carr show, which simulcasts on Newsmax, took aim at Krebs as an aside during a wheels-off segment full of false claims about how the United States election had been rigged.

“Anybody who thinks that this election went well, like that idiot Krebs who used to be the head of cybersecurity [for Trump]. That guy is a class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot,” diGenova said.

This is not just a random Parler troll trying to get attention. This is an attorney speaking on behalf of the President of the United States’ re-election campaign. And while it may read like a macabre joke, the direct nature of diGenova’s comments make it impossible to interpret as anything other than a real wish/threat against a public servant for offering truthful testimony.

Carr responded to the statement with an awkward pause and a laugh and then changed the subject. Some shit is so weird that it even makes Newsmax people uncomfortable.

(Trump promised ‘the best people’ but he has delivered only freakish misfits.)

Amazon deforestation at highest level in 12 years:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-four.  Sunrise is 7:06 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 15m 47s of daytime.  The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1803, Spanish representatives officially transfer the Louisiana Territory to an official from the French First Republic. Just 20 days later, France transfers the same land to the United States as the Louisiana Purchase.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Jaclyn Peiser reports Trump lashes out as former top DHS official reasserts that election was secure:

In his first interview after President Trump fired him from his post leading the Department of Homeland Security’s effort to help to secure the election, Christopher Krebs reaffirmed on Sunday that there was no evidence of voter fraud and the integrity of the election had not been compromised.

“There is no foreign power that is flipping votes [in 2020]. There’s no domestic actor flipping votes. I did it right. We did it right,” Krebs told CBS News’s Scott Pelley on “60 Minutes.” “This was a secure election.”

….

During his interview with “60 Minutes,” Krebs spoke frankly about the effect the president’s rhetoric has had on state elections officials. He specifically mentioned secretaries of state in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, all women, who are “under attack from all sides, and they’re defending democracy,” Krebs said.

“Look at Secretary [Brad] Raffensperger in Georgia, lifelong Republican,” Krebs said. “He put country before party in his holding a free and fair election in that state. There are some real heroes out there. There are some real patriots.” Raffensperger has forcefully rejected criticisms of the election processand been attacked by fellow Republicans, including Trump.

Krebs also quashed the false assertions made by the president and his team, which included claims that Venezuela hacked voting machines and that votes are being tabulated in foreign countries. “I don’t understand this claim,” Krebs said. “All votes in the United States of America are counted in the United States of America. Period.”

He later added: “The American people should have 100 percent confidence in their vote.”

 Molly Blackall reports Biden boosts diversity of top team while Trump continues election assault:

Joe Biden has announced an all-female senior communications team at the White House, as he presses on with preparations for his administration despite Donald Trump’s continued attempts to derail the transition.

The communications director of Biden’s election campaign, Kate Bedingfield, will move up to the same position in the White House, while Jen Psaki, a longstanding Democratic spokeswoman, will become press secretary. Biden is also expected to announce the appointment of the liberal thinktank executive Neera Tanden as head of the Office of Management and Budget – all three women are veterans of the Obama administration.

The president-elect has so far tread a decidedly centrist line with his senior staff picks, managing not to rile the left wing of the Democratic party too strongly, writes Daniel Strauss. His selection of women and people of color for top positions has won him praise from the party’s progressive wing.

….

Trump made his first media appearance since losing the election on Sunday, phoning Fox News to blame judges for his failure to overturn the election result. The president said his team was “not allowed to put in our proof”, pledging – in true Trump style – that he would “file one nice, big, beautiful lawsuit”.

The claims came a day after Pennsylvania’s high court rejected a lower court’s order that prevented the state from certifying results, the latest in the Trump campaign’s series of unsuccessful lawsuits against the election results.

What You Need to Know About Saturn’s Moon Titan:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-five.  Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 17m 11s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1972, Atari releases Pong, the first commercially successful video game.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Catherine Rampell describes Trump’s legacy, by the numbers:

261,000 (and growing): If anything is sacred, it is human life. This number is the minimum tally of U.S. lives lost to the novel coronavirus as of Wednesday night. By the time Trump leaves office it will be higher. Even by Thanksgiving morning, it will be higher.

$750: The amount Trump reportedly paid in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. He paid the same amount his first year in the White House, too.

14.7 percent: The unemployment rate in April 2020. Also the highest unemployment rate on recordsince modern statistics on joblessness began in 1948 and likely the highest rate since the Great Depression.

$421 million: The amount of loans and other debts for which Trump is personally responsible, with most of it reportedly coming due within four years — that is, a period when Trump had hoped to serve his second presidential term.

100.1 percent: Federal debt held by the public as a share of gross domestic product, in the fiscal year that recently ended, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The last time this measure exceeded 100 percent was just after World War II.

$1.9 trillion: The 10-year cost of Trump’s 2017 tax cut. (This is “dynamic” cost — that is, it accounts for the effects of economic growth.) This contributes to the debt number above.

$130,000: The amount Trump paid an adult-film actress with whom he had an affair; this bought her silence ahead of the 2016 election.

26: The number of women who have publicly accused Trump of sexual misconduct.

26 million: The number of American adults who reported that their household didn’t have enough to eat just ahead of Election Day.

Jeremy Roebuck reports Pennsylvania Supreme Court tosses GOP congressman’s suit seeking to throw out all ballots cast by mail:

The last active legal challenge to Pennsylvania’s presidential election results was tossed Saturday by the state’s highest court, which balked at a request from one of President Donald Trump’s top boosters in Congress to disenfranchise some 2.6 million voters by throwing out every ballot cast by mail.

In a unanimous decision, the justices declared that Rep. Mike Kelly (R., Butler) had waited too long to bring his lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2019 law that created no-excuse mail voting in the state for the first time, and they declared the remedy he sought too extreme.

Had Kelly and the suit’s seven other Republican plaintiffs been forthright in their concerns over the constitutionality of the mail-voting statute, the court found, they would have filed their legal challenge before the new law was used in a primary and general election and would not have waited only until after it had become apparent that their favored candidate had lost.

“It is not our role to lend legitimacy to such transparent and untimely efforts to subvert the will of Pennsylvania voters,” Justice David N. Wecht wrote in an opinion concurring with the full court’s terse, three-page order. “Courts should not decide elections when the will of the voters is clear.”

Motorist’s Ominous View of Fire on California-Nevada State Line:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-eight.  Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 18m 38s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in  1989, after widespread protests, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia announces it will give up its monopoly on political power.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Ken Dilanian asks When he leaves office, can ex-President Trump be trusted with America’s national security secrets?:

[Former CIA officer David] Priess and other former intelligence officials say Joe Biden would be wise not to let that tradition continue in the case of Donald Trump.

They argue soon-to-be-former President Trump already poses a danger because of the secrets he currently possesses, and they say it would be foolish to trust him with more sensitive information. With Trump’s real estate empire under financial pressure and his brand suffering, they worry he will see American secrets as a profit center.

“This is not something that one could have ever imagined with other presidents, but it’s easy to imagine with this one,” said Jack Goldsmith, who worked as a senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration.

“He’s shown as president that he doesn’t take secret-keeping terribly seriously,” Goldsmith said in an interview. “He has a known tendency to disrespect rules related to national security. And he has a known tendency to like to sell things that are valuable to him.”

Goldsmith and other experts noted that Trump has a history of carelessly revealing classified information. He told the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in 2017 about extremely sensitive terrorism threat information the U.S. had received from an ally. Last year he tweeted what experts said was a secret satellite photo of an Iranian nuclear installation.

The president also may be vulnerable to foreign influence. His tax records, as reported by The New York Times, reveal that Trump appears to face financial challenges, having personally guaranteed more than $400 million of his companies’ debt at a time when the pandemic has put pressure on the hotel industry, in which Trump is a major player.

Dan Friedman asks Was Trump’s Pardon of Flynn Part of a Deal?:

On November 22, 2017, John Dowd, then one of President Donald Trump’s lawyers, left a voicemail for Robert Kelner, who was representing Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser. Trump had fired Flynn for lying about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in late 2016, and Dowd suspected, correctly, that Flynn, who was under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, was about to cut a deal with Mueller.

Dowd asked for a “heads up,” if Flynn was giving Mueller information “that implicates the President.” Apparently referring to the possibility that Flynn would cooperate without giving prosecutors damning information about Trump, Dowd also said, “remember what we’ve always said about the President and his feeling toward Flynn, and all that still remains.”

That sounded like a suggestion that Trump would pardon Flynn if he didn’t flip on Trump. In his April 2019 final report, Mueller cited the voicemail in a section analyzing whether Trump obstructed justice by dangling pardons to former aides being investigated by Mueller.

Dowd denies that he was hinting at a presidential pardon for Flynn. “It’s nonsense,” he said when reached by phone Wednesday, after the news broke that Trump was pardoning Flynn. “It’s not true. It’s a fucking lie.” Then he hung up.

Flynn did cooperate without implicating Trump. Flynn told investigators that Trump was not aware of his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition. And on Wednesday, Trump gave Flynn that pardon.

Video from Space – Weekly Highlights: Week of 11.22.20: