Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-nine.  Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 5:51 PM, for 10h 25m 33s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 91.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM.

On this date in 1892, an exploding oil barrel starts a small fire in Milwaukee’s Third Ward that spreads rapidly and by morning leaves four people dead, 440 buildings destroyed, and more than 1,900 people homeless.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Amanda Holpuch reports Trump aide Stephen Miller preparing second-term immigration blitz:

The former homeland security department chief of staff, Miles Taylor, said this wishlist was reserved for the second term because it included policies that were too unpopular for a president seeking re-election.

This comes as no surprise to those who have watched and worried as legal pathways to US immigration shut under Trump, and who wonder not just about for more years of him as president, but also of four more years with Miller at his side.

The 35-year-old has managed to keep his position as a senior adviser to the president after being outed for having an affinity for white nationalism and becoming synonymous with unpopular Trump administration policies such as family separation – when thousands of children were taken away from their parents at the southern border to deter would-be migrants. Three years later, more than 500 kids are still yet to be reunited with their parents.

Jean Guerrero, author of the Miller biography Hatemonger, told the Guardian: “There’s a number of things they have been cautious about because of the legal and political risks in the first term and I think that in a second term you would see Stephen Miller get much freer rein when it comes to his wishlist of items.”

Those items are expected to include attempting to eliminate birthright citizenship, making the US citizenship test more difficult to pass, ending the program which protects people from deportation when there is a crisis is their country (Temporary Protected Status) and slashing refugee admissions even further, to zero.

David Enrich, Russ Buettner, Mike McIntire, and Susanne Craig report How Trump Maneuvered His Way Out of Trouble in Chicago:

The president’s federal income tax records, obtained by The New York Times, show for the first time that, since 2010, his lenders have forgiven about $287 million in debt that he failed to repay. The vast majority was related to the Chicago project.

How Mr. Trump found trouble in Chicago, and maneuvered his way out of it, is a case study in doing business the Trump way.

When the project encountered problems, he tried to walk away from his huge debts. For most individuals or businesses, that would have been a recipe for ruin. But tax-return data, other records and interviews show that rather than warring with a notoriously litigious and headline-seeking client, lenders cut Mr. Trump slack — exactly what he seemed to have been counting on.

….

Those forgiven debts are now part of a broader investigation of Mr. Trump’s business by the New York attorney general. They normally would have generated a big tax bill, since the Internal Revenue Service treats canceled debts as income. Yet as has often happened in his long career, Mr. Trump appears to have paid almost no federal income tax on that money, in part because of large losses in his other businesses, The Times’s analysis of his tax records found.

 Holiday travel during the coronavirus pandemic:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty.  Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 5:52 PM, for 10h 28m 11s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 85.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1864, Lt. William Cushing of Waukesha successfully leads an expedition to sink the Confederate ram, the Albermarle, which had imposed a blockade near Plymouth, North Carolina and had been sinking Union ships.

Recommended for reading in full — 

David J. Lynch reports Trump’s Carrier deal fades as economic reality intervenes (‘Jobs that were saved are dwarfed by others that left’):

The Carrier plant in Indianapolis is where outsourcing was supposed to have stopped.

Within days of winning the 2016 election, President-elect Donald Trump persuaded the company — in return for $7 million in Indiana state incentives and some presidential goodwill — to keep in the United States most of the 1,100 jobs it had planned to ship to Mexico.

“Companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences. It’s not going to happen,” Trump told cheering Carrier employees when he visited the plant. “We’re not going to have it anymore.”

Trump advertised Carrier’s Dec. 1, 2016, announcement that it would preserve about 800 jobs in Indianapolis as a decisive break from decades of U.S. executives capitalizing on lower labor costs overseas at the expense of blue-collar workers at home.

Four years later, it has proved to be nothing of the sort.

This year alone, Indiana employers have sent more jobs to Mexico, China, India and other foreign countries than were saved at Carrier. Without headlines or presidential notice, at least 17 companies — names like Vibracoustic, Molnlycke Health Care, Allura, Altex, Stanley Black & Decker, Dometic, Johnson Controls and Horizon Terra — have closed plants or otherwise reduced employment in Indiana and moved jobs abroad, according to U.S. Department of Labor filings.

“We have many, many firms making these decisions, and Trump likes to negotiate these deals one at a time. It’s trade policy by press release, and often there’s nothing behind the press release,” said Robert Scott, senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute in D.C. “He makes a deal, smiles for the photographers, and then he walks away.”

 Kelly Meyerhofer reports UW-Madison announces another round of furloughs for most employees in 2021:

Roughly 16,000 university employees will take between three and six unpaid days off between Jan. 1 and June 30, reducing their pay between 2.5% and 4.6%. [Chancellor Rebecca] Blank and vice chancellors will take a 15% salary cut over those same six months. School and college deans will take voluntary 10% salary cuts.

The latest round of furloughs and salary cuts is expected to save $27 million, university spokesman John Lucas said. That’s about the same as what UW-Madison recouped when it imposed its first six-month furlough period that ends Friday.

The university estimates about $320 million in revenue losses and increased costs from March through the end of this fiscal year, which ends June 30. Some of that shortfall has already been made up for through the first round of furloughs, a hiring freeze, travel restrictions and other reductions.

But the budget gap is still “larger than any that we’ve faced in any past year,” Blank said.

 Record rain and flash flooding lash Australia’s east coast:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with a dusting of snow, and a high of forty.  Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 5:54 PM, for 10h 30m 50s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 77.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 7 PM.

 On this day in 1944, America is victorious at the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Lisa Rein, Josh Dawsey, and Toluse Olorunnipa report Trump’s historic assault on the civil service was four years in the making:

President Trump’s extraordinary directive allowing his administration to weed out career federal employees viewed as disloyal in a second term is the product of a four-year campaign by conservatives working from a ­little-known West Wing policy shop.

Soon after Trump took office, a young aide hired from the Heritage Foundation with bold ideas for reining in the sprawling bureaucracy of 2.1 million came up with a blueprint. Trump would hold employees accountable, sideline their labor unions and give the president more power to hire and fire them, much like political appointees.

The plan was a counterweight to the “deep state” Trump believed was out to disrupt his agenda. Coordinating labor policy for the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, James Sherk presented his bosses with a 19-page to-do list titled “Proposed Labor Reforms.” A top category was “Creating a government that serves the people.”

The result this week threatens to be the most significant assault on the nonpartisan civil service in its 137-year history: a sweeping executive order that strips job protections from employees in policy roles across the government. Exactly which roles would be affected will be up to personnel officials at federal agencies, who were tasked on Friday with reviewing all of their jobs and deciding who would qualify.

 Julian Borger reports Republicans closely resemble autocratic parties in Hungary and Turkey – study (Swedish university finds ‘dramatic shift’ in GOP under Trump, shunning democratic norms and encouraging violence):

The Republican party has become dramatically more illiberal in the past two decades and now more closely resembles ruling parties in autocratic societies than its former centre-right equivalents in Europe, according to a new international study.

In a significant shift since 2000, the GOP has taken to demonising and encouraging violence against its opponents, adopting attitudes and tactics comparable to ruling nationalist parties in Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey.

The shift has both led to and been driven by the rise of Donald Trump.

By contrast the Democratic party has changed little in its attachment to democratic norms, and in that regard has remained similar to centre-right and centre-left parties in western Europe. Their principal difference is the approach to the economy.

The new study, the largest ever of its kind, was carried out by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, using newly developed methods to measure and quantify the health of the world’s democracies at a time when authoritarianism is on the rise.

Anna Lührmann, V-Dem’s deputy director, said the Republican transformation had been “certainly the most dramatic shift in an established democracy”.

Belarus protests: Riot police use stun grenades as opposition calls for a general strike:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-four.  Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 5:55 PM, for 10h 33m 30s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 69.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1836, the first legislative session of the Wisconsin territory convenes in Belmont, Wisconsin. (“During this first session, forty-two laws were put in the statute books. At this time, the Territory of Wisconsin included all of present-day Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and part of the two Dakotas.”)

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Ashley Parker reports How Trump claimed credit for an Obama veterans achievement (‘President Trump has told mistruths about the 2014 VA Choice Act more than 156 times, seeking to deny the contributions of rivals including Barack Obama and John McCain’):

The first time President Trump claimed false credit for the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act — which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2014 — was on June 6, 2018. That day, as Trump signed the Mission Act, a modest update to the bipartisan VA Choice legislation, he seemed to conflate the two.

“So it’s now my great honor to sign the VA Mission Act, or as we all know it, the Choice Act, and to make Veterans Choice the permanent law of our great country,” the president said, standing in the Rose Garden. “And nobody deserves it more than our veterans.”

In the coming weeks, Trump began systematically erasing from the legislation’s history not just Obama but also the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), who not only co-sponsored the VA Choice Act but also was so instrumental in passing the Mission Act that he is one of three senators for whom the act is officially named.

That didn’t stop Trump from falsely claiming — as he did at a tank factory in Lima, Ohio, in March 2019 — that McCain, his frequent political rival, failed to make any progress on the VA Choice Act.

“McCain didn’t get the job done for our great vets and the VA, and they knew it,” Trump said.

More than two years after signing the Mission Act, which made limited changes to the much broader Obama veterans law, Trump has repeated some version of his VA Choice Act mistruth more than 156 times, according to an analysis by The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, eventually claiming full credit for the bill codified by his predecessor.

 Chris McGreal reports Many midwest Democrats stayed home in 2016. Will they turn out for Biden?:

A lot of people in Cleveland chose not to vote [in 2016]. Driven by disillusionment with Obama and dislike for Hillary Clinton, turnout fell in the overwhelmingly Democratic city where nearly half the population is black, as it did in others across the midwest, helping to usher Trump to victory.

This year, [Jamal] Collins sees it differently.

“Trump’s presidency, the last four years, have been absolutely horrible. Trump blew life back into white supremacy. Him being so open and unapologetic about the stuff he says, and things that he’s done, really gave that power,” he said.

“Plus coronavirus, because now we have tens of thousands of people, especially in the black community, really suffering from Covid-19. We have an economy decimated to almost the proportions of the depression. The loss of jobs and loss of wealth is worse than I’ve ever seen before.”

Inside The $5 Billion Apple Headquarters:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-three.  Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 5:56 PM, for 10h 36m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 59.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1590, John White, the governor of the second Roanoke Colony, returns to England after an unsuccessful search for the ‘lost’ colonists.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Mary Spicuzza and Molly Beck report Wisconsin Republicans have been facing an outbreak among lawmakers and aides. But they don’t want to talk about it:

Wisconsin Republican lawmakers and top GOP aides have been facing a coronavirus outbreak in recent weeks following a series of in-person events, including a retirement party for a longtime Capitol staffer, a dozen sources told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

But Republican leaders would not disclose how many or which lawmakers have contracted COVID-19, nor would they answer questions about contact tracing efforts — including whether anyone worked at the state Capitol after they were exposed to the virus.

Those affected by the COVID-19 outbreak include Jenny Toftness, chief of staff for Speaker Robin Vos, who got sick after attending the retirement party in September.

….

It’s unclear whether those who were infected notified any Capitol authorities, who could alert others who work in the statehouse.

“We are not aware of any reports from either legislators or legislative staff,” Britt Cudaback, spokeswoman for Gov. Tony Evers, said in an email in response to questions about COVID-19 policies of the Department of Administration, which oversees the Capitol.

 Roger Sollenberger reports Trump Organization renewed the TrumpTowerMoscow.com domain name — this year:

The Trump Organization reregistered the domain name TrumpTowerMoscow.com this June, internet records show, suggesting that contrary to President Trump’s claims, the company has not necessarily abandoned its pursuit of the lucrative real estate deal that figured prominently in multiple investigations into his connections with Russia.

The Trump Organization has re-upped the domain every year of his presidency. This year it renewed its ownership on June 9, under a company called DTTM Operations, which Trump’s financial disclosures show manages more than 100 company trademarks. DTTM Operations appears now to have registered a total of more than 3,000 domains, according to a whois search, including renewals for TrumpRussia.com, TrumpTowerLondon.com and DonaldTrumpSucks.com — 2,000 more than reported in 2017.

The domain was first reported in early July 2017, about two months before the Washington Post’s bombshell report that during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Trump Organization had tried to strike a deal with Russian developers to build the luxury hotel and condo tower. A series of BuzzFeed News reports starting the next year illustrated the significant progress the project had made and the extent of Donald Trump’s involvement.

Initially envisioned as the tallest building in Europe, Trump Tower Moscow was spearheaded on the Trump side by Sater and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, and included the personal involvement of Ivanka Trump. But even with a Russian developer on board, the project needed the blessing of government officials to get off the ground, a responsibility that fell to Cohen.

At one point the company proposed awarding Russian President Vladimir Putin the $50 million penthouse suite for free, a quid pro quo for the green light to break ground, and which had Trump’s approval.

(While most domain renewals are routine, a renewal of this domain is extraordinary – it shows the Trump Organization is willing to persist in visible conflicts of interest even after widespread ethical criticism. Shameless, truly.)

SpaceX Starship SN8 gets its nose cone:

SpaceX attached the nose cone to the Starship SN8 prototype at their Boca Chica, Texas facility on Oct. 22, 2020. They are prepping the rocket for an uncrewed 9 mile (15 km) hop.  

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of sixty.  Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 5:58 PM, for 10h 38m 52s of daytime.  The moon is in its first quarter with 49.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Planning Commission and some city employees will meet today via audiovisual conferencing at 9 AM to discuss amendments to Whitewater’s sign ordinance.

 On this day in 1956, secret police shoot several anti-communist protesters, igniting the Hungarian Revolution.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Julian E. Barnes, Nicole Perlroth, and David E. Sanger report Russia Poses Greater Election Threat Than Iran, Many U.S. Officials Say (‘Russia’s hackers appeared to be preparing to sow chaos amid any uncertainty around election results, officials said’):

While senior Trump administration officials said this week that Iran has been actively interfering in the presidential election, many intelligence officials said they remained far more concerned about Russia, which in recent days has hacked into state and local computer networks in breaches that could allow Moscow broader access to American voting infrastructure.

The discovery of the hacks came as American intelligence agencies, infiltrating Russian networks themselves, have pieced together details of what they believe are Russia’s plans to interfere in the presidential race in its final days or immediately after the election on Nov. 3. Officials did not make clear what Russia planned to do, but they said its operations would be intended to help President Trump, potentially by exacerbating disputes around the results, especially if the race is too close to call.

F.B.I. and Homeland Security officials also announced on Thursday that Russia’s state hackers had targeted dozens of state and local governments and aviation networks starting in September. They stole data from the computer servers of at least two unidentified targets and continued to crawl through some of the affected networks, the agencies said.

Nick Miroff reports Study finds no crime increase in cities that adopted ‘sanctuary’ policies, despite Trump claims:

Cities that have adopted “sanctuary” policies did not record an increase in crime as a result of their decision to limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities, according to a new Stanford University report. The findings appear to rebut the Trump administration’s rhetoric about the policies’ dire effects on public safety.

The study is one of the first to measure those effects by looking at data on violent crime and property crime. Researcher David K. Hausman compared statistics across more than 200 sanctuary counties and jurisdictions between 2010 and 2015, when the policies were adopted in many U.S. cities with a large number of residents living in the country illegally.

The data show that the policies were effective at limiting deportations of nonviolent offenders but did not result in higher crime rates in those cities. And Hausman found that violent criminals continued to be deported at the same pace because the sanctuary policies do little to prevent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials from taking those offenders into custody.

“Sanctuary policies do serve a protective role, but there’s not the cost to public safety that critics claim,” Hausman said in an interview. His findings were published in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

ICE has targeted sanctuary jurisdictions in recent weeks with a campaign called “Operation Rise” that has led to more than 300 arrests and dovetailed with the president’s campaign attacks on Democratic mayors.

Cities and police departments that have adopted the sanctuary measures say they preserve trust between local police officers and immigrants who might be reluctant to report crimes if they fear they could be deported.

 Australian wildlife: 2019 and 2020 bush fires caused unprecedented damage to local fauna: