Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-two.  Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, for 9h 28m 06s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 12.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1924, astronomer Edwin Hubble publishes in the New York Times his then-controversial, but now-confirmed, discovery that the Andromeda ‘nebula’ is actually another island galaxy far outside of our own Milky Way. Before his work, the accepted view was that the universe extended no farther than the Milky Way.

Recommended for reading in full:

Yesterday: Rob Mentzer reports Investigators Lock Down Rhinelander City Hall In Public Misconduct Case. Today: Natalie Brophy reports Rhinelander administrator Dan Guild subject of felony investigation:

RHINELANDER – City Administrator Daniel Guild was the primary subject of two search warrants executed Thursday at Rhinelander City Hall as part of an investigation into tampering with public records and misconduct in office.

The search is part of an investigation by the Oneida County Sheriff’s Office, assisted by the Price County Sheriff’s Office, into allegations that Guild “engaged in various acts including failure to release public records in response to requests by the media and law enforcement, as well as altering email content to present it as the original,” according to search warrants filed in Oneida County Court.

Authorities were looking for emails between Guild and staff from the Wisconsin League of Municipalities, as well as emails with city council members that mention altered emails, walking quorums or open meeting violations, documents state. Law enforcement was also looking for the disciplinary record for the city’s former director of public works, Tim Kingman.

….

This is not the first time Guild has come under public scrutiny. He was previously the city administrator in Weston, but resigned in July 2018 following a 30-day suspension for breaching his employment contract.

Margaret Sullivan writes The death knell for local newspapers? It’s perilously close:

Here’s some of what happened in the past few days.

Gannett and GateHouse, two major newspaper chains, finished their planned merger, and the combined company intends to cut the combined budget by at least $300 million. That will come on top of unending job losses over the past decade in the affected newsrooms of more than 500 papers.

The McClatchy newspaper group — parent of the Herald and Charlotte Observer — is so weighed down by debt and pension obligations that analysts think it is teetering on bankruptcy.

And the storied Chicago Tribune on Tuesday fell under the influence of Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that has strip-mined the other important papers it owns, including the Denver Post and the Mercury News in San Jose.

(Key point: when Sullivan writes about local journalism, she’s writing about serious papers, not the mediocre publications one finds near Whitewater.)

If you’re a UW-Madison student, the robots are coming for you. And they’re bringing food:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 29m 55s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 21.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1963 in Dallas, Pres. Kennedy is assassinated, Texas Governor John Connally is seriously wounded, and Dallas Police officer J. D. Tippit is also killed.

Recommended for reading in full:

Rob Mentzer reports Investigators Lock Down Rhinelander City Hall In Public Misconduct Case:

Officials from the Oneida County Sheriff’s Department are investigating alleged misconduct by a public official and tampering with public records, both of which are felony offenses. At 9:25 a.m., officials from Oneida, Vilas and Marathon countty sheriff’s offices started a search for evidence. They seized paper and digital documents in the search, and were also assisted by the state Department of Justice’s digital forensics support unit.

Michael Gerson writes Stephen Miller and Jim Jordan give us a taste of the Truly Trumpian Man:

Miller is best known as the prime mover behind the Muslim travel ban and the main opponent of any political compromise involving compassion for Dream Act “dreamers.” Now, with the release of a trove of emails sent to Breitbart writers and editors in 2015 and 2016 (soon before Miller became a Trump administration official), we get a glimpse of Miller’s inspirations and motivations. In response to the massacre of nine black churchgoers by a white nationalist in 2015, Miller was offended that Amazon removed merchandise featuring the Confederate flag and was concerned about the vandalization of Confederate monuments. Miller encouraged attention at Breitbart to a “white genocide”-themed novel, featuring sexualized violence by refugees. He focused on crime and terrorism by nonwhites as the basis for draconian immigration restrictions. He complained about the “ridiculous statue of liberty myth” and mocked the “national religion” of “diversity.” He recommended and forwarded stories from a range of alt-right sources.

All this is evidence of a man marinated in prejudice. In most presidential administrations, a person with such opinions would be shown the White House exit. But most of Miller’s views — tenderness for the Confederacy, the exaggerated fear of interracial crime, the targeting of refugees for calumny and contempt — have been embraced publicly by the president. Trump could not fire his alt-right alter ego without indicting himself. Miller is safe in the shelter of his boss’s bigotry.

….

The elevation of Trump to the presidency has given prominence to a certain kind of follower and permission for a certain set of social values. Bolsheviks once talked of creating the New Socialist Man. Miller and Jordan are giving us a taste of the Truly Trumpian Man — guided by bigotry, seized by conspiracy theories, dismissive of facts and truth, indifferent to ethics, contemptuous of institutional norms and ruthlessly dedicated to the success of a demagogue.

New 3D printer makes multi-material robots:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see scattered morning showers with a high of fifty-three.  Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 31m 46s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 31.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1953: “the Natural History Museum in London announces that the ‘Piltdown Man’ skull, initially believed to be one of the most important fossilized hominid skulls ever found, is a hoax.”

Recommended for reading in full:

Benjamin Wittes writes Gordon Sondland Accuses the President of Bribery:

Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution makes the president subject to impeachment and removal for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Normally, we debate impeachment in terms of the last phrase—the mysterious catch-all, “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” But today, Amb. Gordon Sondland, testifying before the House in the ongoing impeachment inquiry, offered a crystal clear account of how President Trump engaged in bribery.

The meaning of the term “bribery” in the impeachment clauses is not coextensive with the meaning of the same word in the criminal code. The impeachment clause predates the federal criminal code, and its contours are decided more by the common law of impeachment than by the terms of specific criminal laws. So I’m not invoking 18 U.S.C. § 201 to evaluate whether Trump committed a crime.

That said, the bribery statute offers a reasonable working definition of what it means to bribe a public official: “Whoever … directly or indirectly, corruptly gives, offers or promises anything of value to any public official … to influence any official act” has committed the offense.

What’s more, the statute also offers a reasonable working definition of what it means for a public official to demand a bribe: “Whoever … being a public official … directly or indirectly, corruptly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value personally … in return for … being influenced in the performance of any official act” also has committed the offense.

….

Remember the words of the statute: Whoever, being a public official, directly or indirectly, corruptly demands anything of value personally in return for being influenced in the performance of any official act has engaged in the crime of bribery.

This exchange [between Rep. Schiff and Amb. Sondland during testimony yesterday] seems to me unambiguously to describe a corrupt demand for something personally valuable (investigations of political opponents) in return for being influenced in the performance of two official acts (granting a White House meeting and releasing hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance).

See Ben Berwick & Justin Florence, The Bad Arguments That Trump Didn’t Commit Bribery (responding to Trump’s defenders’ efforts to rebut the powerful case that Trump committed impeachable bribery).

Amy Goldstein reports Top Trump health official spent $3 million on contractors who helped boost her visibility:

Marked “privileged, pre-decisional, deliberative,” the eight-page proposal, emailed to [Seema] Verma’s deputy chief of staff, was part of an unusual campaign carried out by high-paid contractors Verma brought on at a cost to taxpayers of more than $3 million.

This work over 19 months that provided “strategic communication” services by a network of politically connected contractors and subcontractors, first reported by Politico, came as Verma spoke about the importance of fostering individual responsibility and self-reliance among the nation’s needy.

House Republicans Are Choosing not Run for Reelection:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-four.  Sunrise is 6:53 AM and sunset 4:27 PM, for 9h 33m 41s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 42.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Parks & Rec Board meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1859, Milwaukee sees its first baseball game.

Recommended for reading in full:

Maria Perez reports Wisconsin’s dairy industry would collapse without the work of Latino immigrants — many of them undocumented:

Reliable numbers on immigrants working in the dairy industry are hard to come by. The best known Wisconsin survey, taken more than a decade ago, estimated the hired immigrant workforce at more than 40% of the total. The best known national survey, taken five years ago for the National Milk Producers Federation, estimated it at 51%.

Talk to workers in Wisconsin, and they express little doubt immigrants account for a larger portion of the dairy industry workforce today. And they don’t just work on the biggest farms, but also on operations that grew their herd beyond what a family can handle.

With unemployment low, many farmers fill openings by passing word to Mexican laborers already on-site, and then accepting the new workers who show up without asking too many questions.

Some farmers say they haven’t encountered a U.S.-born applicant in years.

Entry-level jobs may pay $11 to $13 an hour and can include free — albeit modest — housing. The immigrants may have to work nights, milk hundreds of cows every shift, toil in the wind and snow. The job can be dangerous; not everyone makes it back to their family.

Immigrants say the jobs are a ladder to a better life; farmers say the immigrants are the only means of affordable labor. So despite the rancor that surrounds national immigration policy, the workers keep coming and the farms keep hiring.

In dairy barns across Wisconsin, farmers and workers say there is a simple truth: Without the work of Latino immigrants — many, if not most, of them undocumented — the signature industry in America’s Dairyland would collapse.

Danielle Kaeding reports AG Josh Kaul Backs Michigan’s Stance In Lawsuit To Shut Down Enbridge’s Line 5:

Three state attorneys general are supporting Michigan’s stance in its case to shut down an energy firm’s pipeline running through the Straits of Mackinac, including Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul.

In June, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel sued Enbridge Energy and asked a Michigan court to rule the operation of Line 5 under its 1953 easement agreement with the state violates the public trust doctrine. Under the public trust doctrine, states hold land or natural resources in trust for public benefit or use.

In a recent filing, three Democratic attorneys general from Wisconsin, Minnesota and California said Enbridge has no right to interfere with Michigan’s right to preserve its lands for public benefit under the public trust doctrine. They urged a Michigan court to reject claims by Enbridge that the federal government’s authority through the Pipeline Safety Act and U.S. Coast Guard supersedes state authority.

South Dakota’s ‘Meth. We’re on it,’ campaign heavily criticized:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see morning rain or snow showers with a high of forty.  Sunrise is 6:52 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 35m 39s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 54% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1863, Pres. Lincoln delivers his Gettysburg Address.

Recommended for reading in full:

Patrick Marley and Craig Gilbert report In letter to House Republicans, Ron Johnson gives most detailed account yet of his Ukraine involvement:

Johnson wrote that he viewed the inquiry as a “continuation of a concerted, and possibly coordinated, effort to sabotage the Trump administration,” and he questioned the motives of government witnesses who have voiced concerns about Trump’s handling of Ukraine.

Johnson has given his version of events in numerous interviews in recent weeks but provided some new details Monday.

He talked to National Security Adviser John Bolton before calling Trump when he heard allegations that aid to Ukraine was being withheld until Ukraine launched an investigation. He tried, unsuccessfully, to talk to Vice President Mike Pence about it.

Johnson wrote that it “did not register” with him if Trump told his aides to talk to his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, about matters related to Ukraine. And according to Johnson, Trump told Johnson he barely knew Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador who oversaw dealings with Ukraine.

(Johnson’s letter is available online. Representing a state that has had a decade of extreme politics – gerrymandering, union-busting, sweetheart business subsidies, voter suppression, Foxconn — Johnson pushes ahead with a list of crackpot conspiracy theories. For Wisconsin, bad goes to worse.)

Catherine Rampell writes Trump and Republicans are on the hunt for Real Crimes:

For a party that prides itself on being the champion of law and order, the GOP has some peculiar ideas about crime.

Nothing President Trump does, it turns out, is a crime, let alone a “high” one. That’s not only because some crimes are not crimes, according to both Trump and his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. It is also not only because a sitting president is supposedly immune from criminal prosecution — including for shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, per another Trump lawyer.

According to Republicans’ airtight legal reasoning, nothing Trump does can be considered criminal because somebody else somewhere might be doing something worse. And just as O.J. Simpson pledged to search for the real killer, Trump and his fellow Republicans are on the hunt for the Real Crimes.

For instance: The Real Crime isn’t that Trump secretly withheld military aid to extort a desperate ally into announcing a sham investigation into a political rival. Heavens no. The Real Crime is that the public knows that this happened.

At least so says Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who recently railed against the whistleblower’s decision to “leak” information about Trump’s Ukrainian shakedown by reporting it to the intelligence community’s inspector general. That leak, Johnson complained, “exposed things that didn’t need to be exposed.”

Why Spam Calls Are At An All-Time High:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:51 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 37m 39s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 64% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School Board also meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1963, the Bell System in the United States officially launches a push-button telephone.

Recommended for reading in full:

Erik Gunn reports Another New Owner for Journal Sentinel:

The merger announcement produced widespread predictions that further staff cuts are ahead for the new company, which will own about 1 in 6 newspapers across the country. The two predecessor firms have already cut their workforces repeatedly in the last several years.

Besides the Journal Sentinel, Gannett owns daily newspapers in Appleton, Fond du Lac, Green Bay, Manitowoc, Marshfield, Oshkosh, Sheboygan, Stevens Point, Wausau and Wisconsin Rapids. GateHouse owns the Daily Reporter in Milwaukee, which covers construction and development, and the monthly Wisconsin Law Journal.

Under the merger agreement, New Media is buying Gannett for roughly $1.4 billion in cash and stock, financed with a five-year, 11.5% interest loan of $1.8 billion from Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm. The transaction is scheduled to close Tuesday, Nov. 19.

Naveena Sadsivam reports This Pipeline Cuts Across a Reservation. Wisconsin Might Make Tribal Members Felons for Protesting It:

For more than 60 years, one section of Enbridge’s elaborate network of pipelines carrying petroleum across Canada has taken a detour through the Bad River Reservation in northern Wisconsin.

Some of the easements that allowed Enbridge to keep its Line 5 pipeline on the tribe’s land expired in 2013, and negotiations between Enbridge and the tribe to renew the leases fell through. Yet Line 5 is still funneling Enbridge’s petroleum across the Bad River Reservation. The tribe says Enbridge is trespassing, and has sued the company to kick it off their property.

If a bill awaiting Wisconsin’s Democrat Governor Tony Evers’ signature becomes law, members of the tribe protesting Enbridge’s operations on their reservation could face fines of $10,000 and up to six years in jail.

“It provides these illegally operating companies with the right to basically charge someone with a felony for being on their land,” said Philomena Kebec, a citizen of Bad River and former tribal prosecutor. “And this could be an Indian person on Indian land where the company is illegally trespassing.”

….

The Bad River Reservation, an approximately 125,000-acre tract on the south shore of Lake Superior, was established in 1854 by a treaty with the federal government. Although the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians is sovereign, state criminal laws apply within the reservation as a result of a federal law called “Public Law 280,” which grants several states—including Wisconsin—law enforcement authority within tribal nations. As a result, if Governor Evers signs the new bill, it would apply to Native Americans on tribal land.

These Search and Rescue Robots Could Save Your Life:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will bring rain and snow showers with a high of thirty-six.  Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 4:29 PM, for 9h 39m 41s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 74.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 2013, a late-season tornado outbreak plagues the Midwest, with 73 confirmed tornadoes across several states.

Recommended for reading in full:

Amber Phillips writes More testimony raises the question: What did Ron Johnson know about Trump’s intentions with Ukraine?:

What did Sen. Ron Johnson know about President Trump’s intentions with Ukraine? That’s been a question from the start of this impeachment inquiry, ever since the senator himself acknowledged he heard from people there was a quid pro quo.

The Wisconsin Republican’s name keeps popping up in testimony in critical conversations, including with Trump and Ukraine’s president. They are conversations that could help assess whether Ukrainians knew there were conditions on getting their military aid and whether Trump was behind ordering those conditions.

New closed-door testimony Friday folds Johnson in again, this time detailing a September meeting in Ukraine with Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Here’s U.S. diplomat in Ukraine David Holmes saying this in his opening statement, obtained by CNN, about Johnson:

President Zelensky asked about the security assistance. Although both senators stressed bipartisan congressional support for Ukraine, Senator Johnson cautioned President Zelensky that President Trump has a negative view of Ukraine and that President Zelensky would have a difficult time overcoming it. Senator Johnson further explained that he was “shocked” by President Trump’s negative reaction during an Oval Office meeting on May 23, when he and the Three Amigos proposed that President Trump meet President Zelensky and show support for Ukraine.

Why that’s notable: We know that Johnson wanted the security aid, which was mysteriously frozen after Congress approved it this summer, given to Ukraine. He’s the vice chair of the Senate Ukraine Caucus and a key member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who helped shepherd it through Congress.

But Johnson has been publicly very supportive of Trump, giving the president the benefit of the doubt that he was interested in ensuring the money wouldn’t be used corruptly. Yet here’s Johnson in a closed-door setting appearing to say he doesn’t understand why Trump isn’t more supportive of Ukraine.

(Emphasis in original. Phillips’s full article lists other references in public statements showing Johnson’s ongoing role in the Ukraine matter.)

On Wisconsin Public Radio, Kate Archer Kent hosts a discussion on Immigration: Now, And Then:

As the Supreme Court takes up a case challenging efforts to end a program protecting from deportation young immigrants who came to the country illegally, we discuss conditions at the border with a Wisconsinite who saw them firsthand. Then, we take a closer look at the state’s immigration history.
Host(s):
Kate Archer Kent
Guest(s):
Primitivo Torres
Rachel Ida Buff

(Link to audio file.)

Coffee Around the World:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 4:30 PM, for 9h 41m 47s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 83.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1861, the 4th Wisconsin Infantry reconnoiters Virginia’s eastern shore.

Recommended for reading in full:

 Devi Shastri reports Team searching for UW System’s next president has no faculty, no staff, little diversity:

On Nov. 1, a week to the day after Ray Cross, University of Wisconsin System president of five years, announced his intent to retire, faculty representatives from each of the 13 UW campuses sat in a meeting in Madison to discuss the upcoming search for his replacement.

“And literally while we were in the discussion, the email came in to faculty reps announcing the composition of the committee and announcing that they were going to meet in December to take their charge and get working,” said Kathleen Dolan, a distinguished professor at UWM and chair of the faculty senate’s university committee, said at a faculty senate meeting last week.

The search committee had no faculty. No staff. The committee’s sole student, Torrey Tiedeman, already sits on the Board of Regents.

Further, the committee appears to have only one person of color: Edmund Manydeeds III, a regent who is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

That composition has raised skepticism, particularly since it’s tasked with a big job: finding the best candidate to lead the state’s largest producer of college graduates into the ever-uncertain, ever-changing higher education landscape of tomorrow.

 Pema Levy writes Donald Trump Has Had a Lot of Terrible Lawyers. Rudy Giuliani Might Be the Worst:

Giuliani also took on a side portfolio: pushing for the ouster of the US ambassador in Ukraine and trying to get Ukraine to launch investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, as well as into a conspiracy theory about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 elections.

That project has proven a disaster for his client: A lawyer who sets out to defend a president and instead helps create the basis for his impeachment has not been an effective counsel. If that weren’t enough, here are three other ways Giuliani is not helping.

….

Giuliani is failing his most basic task of publicly defending his client. With little evidence that Giuliani is carrying out actual legal work for the president, that public role would seem to be his one job. This week he attempted to do so in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, describing the July 25th phone call during which Trump asked Ukraine’s president to do him “a favor”:

Allegations of Burisma-Biden corruption weren’t even a major part of the conversation. The focus was on Ukrainian corruption broadly speaking and out of a five-page transcript Mr. Trump spent only six lines on Joe Biden.

The line quickly drew derision on Twitter. There is no word-count threshold for crimes or abuses of power.

 Proof Russian Pilots Bombed a Hospital. Then They Did It Again: