Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of twenty-seven.  Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 4:52 PM, for 9h 32m 49s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 36.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Alcohol Licensing Committee will meet via audiovisual conferencing at 6 PM, and the Whitewater Common Council via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1983, Apple announces the Apple Lisa, the first commercial personal computer from Apple Inc. to have a graphical user interface and a computer mouse.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Philip Rotner describes The Legal Case for the Senate to Convict Trump:

The specific ground for Trump’s second impeachment, “incitement of insurrection,” immediately takes off the table two of the core defenses Trump asserted last year when he was impeached for the first time:

1. The conduct alleged against him might have been inappropriate, but it wasn’t a crime; and

2. Crime or no crime, the alleged misconduct didn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

Defense No. 2—that the alleged misconduct doesn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offense—is plainly not available in Impeachment II. The very thought that inciting an insurrection against the United States doesn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offense is laughable. If inciting an insurrection against the United States isn’t an impeachable offense, nothing is.

Defense No. 1—that a specific statutory crime must be alleged and proved to impeach and remove a president—isn’t really a defense at all. Rather, it’s a fringe theory rejected by the vast majority of constitutional scholars.

But even if proof of a statutory crime were required, it would not help Trump escape conviction this time around because Impeachment II does charge Trump with a crime.

Incitement of insurrection is a crime, full stop: 18 U.S.C §2383 states that any person who “incites” or “assists” an insurrection, or “gives aid or comfort thereto,” shall be fined or imprisoned for not more than ten years, “and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”

 Charlie Warzel asks Can Donald Trump Survive Without Twitter?:

To think of Mr. Trump as an influencer is to suggest that his message can be contained. That his ideas live and die with him and his ability to broadcast them. To suggest that Trumpism is something bigger — that it is a platform itself — is to argue that Mr. Trump and his followers have constructed a powerful, parallel information ecosystem that is as strong and powerful (one could argue even more powerful) than any system built to oppose it. But anyone plugged into the pro-Trump universe realizes that Trumpism is bigger than the figurehead.

So which is Mr. Trump: the influencer or the platform?

 paul Waldman writes Twitter’s Trump ban is even more important than you thought:

Without Twitter, he won’t be able to speak to his people on an hourly basis, maintaining that affinity and crowding out the other Republicans who might compete for their affection.

He could go to some upstart conservative social media platform, like Gab or Parler (if it gets restored). But those don’t have the mainstream legitimacy he craves, and reporters aren’t on them, so their reach is much more limited.

That means that when new events occur, Trump won’t be able to make himself the core of the story. He won’t be able to constantly remind Republicans that they need to fear him. While many of his supporters will remain loyal, others will drift away, not turning against him but just no longer thinking about him every day.

These Baboons Are Branch-Hopping Into the Darkness:

Good morning.

The Dr. King Holiday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of twenty-seven.  Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:51 PM, for 9h 30m 55s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 27.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1977, Scientists identify a previously unknown bacterium as the cause of the mysterious Legionnaires’ disease.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Ben Smith writes Fox Settled a Lawsuit Over Its Lies. But It Insisted on One Unusual Condition:

On Oct. 12, 2020, Fox News agreed to pay millions of dollars to the family of a murdered Democratic National Committee staff member, implicitly acknowledging what saner minds knew long ago: that the network had repeatedly hyped a false claim that the young staff member, Seth Rich, was involved in leaking D.N.C. emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. (Russian intelligence officers, in fact, had hacked and leaked the emails.)

Fox’s decision to settle with the Rich family came just before its marquee hosts, Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity, were set to be questioned under oath in the case, a potentially embarrassing moment. And Fox paid so much that the network didn’t have to apologize for the May 2017 story on FoxNews.com.

But there was one curious provision that Fox insisted on: The settlement had to be kept secret for a month — until after the Nov. 3 election. The exhausted plaintiffs agreed.

Why did Fox care about keeping the Rich settlement secret for the final month of the Trump re-election campaign? Why was it important to the company, which calls itself a news organization, that one of the biggest lies of the Trump era remain unresolved for that period? Was Fox afraid that admitting it was wrong would incite the president’s wrath? Did network executives fear backlash from their increasingly radicalized audience, which has been gravitating to other conservative outlets?

 Robyn Dixon reports Global pressure mounts for release of newly detained Russian opposition leader Navalny:

MOSCOW — As international pressure mounted for the release of arrested Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, he was abruptly summoned to a court hearing Monday which he described as “the highest degree of lawlessness.”

His lawyers said they were given just minutes’ notice of the hearing on whether he should be jailed.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Navalny, 44, said in a videoed comment in court, where pro-Kremlin media had been ushered in through a side entrance. “A few minutes ago I was taken from my cell to meet my lawyers and they brought me here to a session of the Khimki city court. There are unknown people in the room, unknown people recording video,” he said in the video released by his press secretary.

The hearing took place at the Khimki police department near Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Alexander S. Pushkin International Airport where he was arrested after flying home to Russia from Germany where he had been receiving medical treatment after from an August poison attack.

Victoria Bekiempis reports VOA journalists call on director to resign over ‘propaganda event’ for Pompeo:

[Reporter patsy] Widakuswara posted to Twitter a description of the questioning which allegedly led to her removal from her beat. On 11 January, she wrote, she asked Pompeo “What are you doing to repair [the] US reputation around the world?” and “Mr Secretary, do you regret saying there will be a second Trump administration?”

“The nation’s top diplomat [ignored] my questions,” she wrote.

According to the VOA journalists’ letter, Reilly shouted at Widakuswara: “‘You obviously don’t know how to behave. … You are out of order!’”

Several hours later, the letter said, [Deputy Director] Robbins removed Widakuswara from covering the White House.

Anatomy of a Scene — Gal Gadot Fights Crime at the Mall: 

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be overcast with a high of thirty-one.  Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:49 PM, for 9h 29m 03s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 19.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1917, the United States pays Denmark $25 million for the Virgin Islands.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Michael S. Schmidt and Kenneth P. Vogel report Prospect of Pardons in Final Days Fuels Market to Buy Access to Trump:

As President Trump prepares to leave office in days, a lucrative market for pardons is coming to a head, with some of his allies collecting fees from wealthy felons or their associates to push the White House for clemency, according to documents and interviews with more than three dozen lobbyists and lawyers.

The brisk market for pardons reflects the access peddling that has defined Mr. Trump’s presidency as well as his unorthodox approach to exercising unchecked presidential clemency powers. Pardons and commutations are intended to show mercy to deserving recipients, but Mr. Trump has used many of them to reward personal or political allies.

The pardon lobbying heated up as it became clear that Mr. Trump had no recourse for challenging his election defeat, lobbyists and lawyers say. One lobbyist, Brett Tolman, a former federal prosecutor who has been advising the White House on pardons and commutations, has monetized his clemency work, collecting tens of thousands of dollars, and possibly more, in recent weeks to lobby the White House for clemency for the son of a former Arkansas senator; the founder of the notorious online drug marketplace Silk Road; and a Manhattan socialite who pleaded guilty in a fraud scheme.

Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer John M. Dowd has marketed himself to convicted felons as someone who could secure pardons because of his close relationship with the president, accepting tens of thousands of dollars from a wealthy felon and advising him and other potential clients to leverage Mr. Trump’s grievances about the justice system.

 Ed Pilkington reports Major NRA donor to challenge gun group’s bankruptcy over alleged fraud:

A major donor to the National Rifle Association is poised to challenge key aspects of the gun group’s bankruptcy filing, in an attempt to hold executives accountable for allegedly having defrauded their members of millions of dollars to support their own lavish lifestyles.

Dave Dell’Aquila, a former tech company boss who has donated more than $100,000 to the NRA, told the Guardian on Saturday he was preparing to lodge a complaint in US bankruptcy court in Dallas, Texas. If successful, it could stop top NRA executives discharging a substantial portion of the organisation’s debts.

It could also stop Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s controversial longtime chief executive, avoiding ongoing lawsuits that allege he defrauded the pro-gun group’s members to pay for luxury travel to the Bahamas and Europe and high-end Zegna suits.

Isabelle Khurshudyan and Loveday Morris report Russian opposition leader Navalny again tests Kremlin: Supporters await return while officials threaten arrest:

But jailing Navalny could create another conundrum for Putin’s government, analysts said. A throng of supporters are expected to greet Navalny at Vnukovo International Airport — more than 2,000 people responded “going” to one Facebook group.

Arresting him would certainly elevate his image as a political martyr among his backers. A response from Western governments, perhaps in the form of more sanctions, is also possible.

Tatiana Stanovaya, head of political analysis firm R. Politik, wrote on the Telegram messaging app that Navanly’s possible arrest would trigger protests that would test “how far [Russian security services] and the most repressive apparatus of the state can go.”

Paris Receives First Snowfall of the Season:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with occasional light snow and a high of thirty-four.  Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:48 PM, for 9h 27m 15s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 12.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1945, Adolf Hitler moves into his underground bunker, the so-called Führerbunker. 

Recommended for reading in full — 

Gwynn Guilford and Hannah Lang report U.S. Unemployment Claims Rise as Coronavirus Weighs on Economy (‘Initial claims for benefits jump to highest level since pandemic began; Fed chairman says job market has a long way to go’):

The number of workers filing for jobless benefits posted its biggest weekly gain since the pandemic hit last March and the head of the Federal Reserve warned the job market had a long way to go before it is strong again.

Applications for unemployment claims, a proxy for layoffs, rose by 181,000 to 965,000 last week, the Labor Department said Thursday, reflecting rising layoffs amid a winter surge in coronavirus cases.

The total for the week ended Jan. 9 also was the highest in nearly five months and put claims well above the roughly 800,000 a week they had averaged in recent months.

“We are a long way from maximum employment,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said in a webcast hosted by Princeton University, his undergraduate alma mater, an indication that the central bank’s easy-money policies will remain in place for the foreseeable future.

The U.S. labor-market recovery stalled last month with the December jobs report showing the U.S. lost 140,000 payroll positions. The economic recovery’s slowdown has included

Holly Bailey and Tim Craig report Nation’s governors prepare for worst, warn of long-term dangers to their capitols:

“It’s going to take quite a while to turn back what’s been started here,” said Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), who has participated in joint calls in recent days with other Midwestern governors about the possibility of fresh violence in the aftermath of last week’s riot at the U.S. Capitol and an FBI warning about armed far-right extremists gathering across the country this weekend.

The weekly calls began last spring between the governors — mostly Democrats, but some Republicans — as a way to informally coordinate and trade ideas about how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic amid a perceived leadership vacuum by the Trump administration.

But in recent days, the calls — which have included the governors of Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin — have taken on a new urgency as state officials have shared information and advice about how to confront what many believe could be a dark and dangerous period of extended insurgency against state and even local governments.

Neil MacFarquhar, Jack Healy, Mike Baker, and Serge F. Kovaleski report Capitol Attack Could Fuel Extremist Recruitment For Years, Experts Warn:

Overthrowing the government. Igniting a second Civil War. Banishing racial minorities, immigrants and Jews. Or simply sowing chaos in the streets.

The ragged camps of far-right groups and white nationalists emboldened under President Trump have long nursed an overlapping list of hatreds and goals. But now they have been galvanized by the outgoing president’s false claims that the election was stolen from him — and by the violent attack on the nation’s Capitol that hundreds of them led in his name.

“The politicians who have lied, betrayed and sold out the American people for decades were forced to cower in fear and scatter like rats,” one group, known for pushing the worst anti-Semitic tropes, commented on Twitter the day after the attack.

(Trump is finished, but Trumpism will slither along. See Man and Movement.)

 Weekly Space Highlights — Starship test-fired, lunar transit, and more: 

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-four.  Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:47 PM, for 9h 25m 30s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 6.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1967, the Packers win the first Super Bowl, defeating the Chiefs, 35-10. 

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Reuters reports Capitol rioters planned to capture and kill politicians, say prosecutors:

Prosecutors offered that view in a filing asking a judge to detain Jacob Chansley, the Arizona man and QAnon conspiracy theorist who was photographed wearing horns as he stood at the desk of the vice-president, Mike Pence, in the chamber of the US Senate.

The detention memo, written by justice department lawyers in Arizona, goes into greater detail about the FBI’s investigation into Chansley, revealing that he left a note for Pence warning that “it’s only a matter of time, justice is coming”.

“Strong evidence, including Chansley’s own words and actions at the Capitol, supports that the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and assassinate elected officials in the United States government,” prosecutors wrote.

A public defender representing Chansley could not be immediately reached for comment. Chansley is due to appear in federal court on Friday.

Prosecutors and federal agents have begun bringing more serious charges tied to violence at the Capitol, including against a retired firefighter, Robert Sanford, that he hurled a fire extinguisher at the head of one police officer and another, Peter Stager, accused of beating a different officer with a pole bearing an American flag.

In Chansley’s case, prosecutors said the charges “involve active participation in an insurrection attempting to violently overthrow the United States government”, and warned that “the insurrection is still in progress” as law enforcement prepares for more demonstrations in Washington and state capitals.

 Paul Farhi report Voice of America journalists demand resignation of news agency’s top leadership:

Simmering tensions between journalists and managers at Voice of America grew into open rebellion Thursday, with more than two dozen newsroom employees signing a petition demanding the immediate resignation of their new director and his top deputy.

VOA staff said Robert Reilly and Elizabeth Robbins had abdicated their responsibility to remain independent of government influence by ordering the global broadcaster to air a speech that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered at its Washington headquarters Monday — a “propaganda event,” the staffers called it.

The letter also criticized Reilly and Robbins for disciplining a reporter for seeking to question Pompeo afterward. The reporter, Patsy Widakuswara, who was removed from the White House beat after the incident, was one of the letter’s signatories. A top editor was reassigned in the wake of the event as well.

 Yellowstone National Park — Wolverine Trail Camera Footage:

Last month, park biologists were excited to find one of Yellowstone’s rarest mammals triggered a remote trail camera outside the Mammoth Hot Springs area!

Wolverines (Gulo gulo), mid-sized carnivores in the weasel family that typically occupy high-elevation alpine and forest habitats, exist in low densities in the park and are rarely detected. Park biologists have used remote cameras to monitor the cougar population since 2014, but this technology has since become increasingly valuable for detecting and monitoring a variety of species and aspects of Yellowstone’s ecology. This is the first video footage of a wolverine since remote cameras have been deployed in the park.

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with afternoon showers and evening snowfall, and a high of thirty-five.  Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:46 PM, for 9h 23m 47s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.11% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1952, NBC’s long-running morning news program Today debuts, with host Dave Garroway.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Drew Harwell, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Razzan Nakhlawi, and Craig Timberg report QAnon reshaped Trump’s party and radicalized believers. The Capitol siege may just be the start:

The siege on the U.S. Capitol played out as a QAnon fantasy made real: The faithful rose up in their thousands, summoned to Washington by their leader, President Trump. They seized the people’s house as politicians cowered under desks. Hordes wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the “Q” symbol and toting Trump flags closed in to deliver justice, armed with zip-tie handcuffs and rope and guns.

The “#Storm” envisioned on far-right message boards had arrived. And two women who had died in the rampage — both QAnon devotees — had become what some were calling the first martyrs of the cause.

The siege ended with police retaking the Capitol and Trump being rebuked and losing his Twitter account. But the failed insurrection illustrated how the paranoid conspiracy theory QAnon has radicalized Americans, reshaped the Republican Party and gained a forceful grip on right-wing belief.

The baseless conspiracy theory, which imagines Trump in a battle with a cabal of deep-state saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex, helped drive the day’s events and facilitate organized attacks. A pro-Trump mob overwhelmed Capitol Police officers, injuring dozens, and one officer later died as a result. One woman was fatally shot by police inside the Capitol. Three others in the crowd died of medical emergencies.

QAnon devotees joined with extremist group members and white supremacists at the Capitol assault after finding one another on Internet sanctuaries: the conservative forums of TheDonald.win and Parler; the anonymous extremist channels of 8kun and Telegram; and the social media giants of Facebook and Twitter, which have scrambled in recent months to prevent devotees from organizing on their sites.

Alan Feuer and Luke Broadwater report More Arrests Made Amid New Calls for Investigation of Capitol Attack:

Led by Representative Mikie Sherrill, a New Jersey Democrat and former Navy pilot, more than 30 lawmakers called on Wednesday for an investigation into visitors’ access to the Capitol on the day before the riot. In a letter to the acting House and Senate sergeants-at-arms and the U.S. Capitol Police, the lawmakers, many of whom served in the military and said they were trained to “recognize suspicious activity,” demanded answers about what they described as an “extremely high number of outside groups” let into the Capitol on Jan. 5 at a time when most tours were restricted because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Separately, the inspector general’s office of the Capitol Police said it was opening a potentially wide-ranging inquiry into security breaches connected to the siege. The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan federal watchdog agency, signaled that it would look into what role, if any, members of Congress may have played in inciting the mob of Trump supporters who breached metal barricades and shattered windows on Jan. 6, seeking to overturn the results of the election.

How Covid-19 Accelerated the Rise of Ghost Kitchens:

Ghost kitchens are kitchens designed for delivery-only businesses, without dine-in areas or customer-facing storefronts. The pandemic has ravaged dine-in eateries, and companies that have focused on delivery could come out on top if the current trends continue.