Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-five.  Sunrise is 6:16 AM and sunset 7:34 PM, for 13h 17m 12s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 46.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1861, the Civil War begins as Confederates fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor.

Recommended for reading in full:

Colby Itkowitz and Matt Zapotosky report Rosenstein defends Barr’s handling of Mueller report:

Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein came to his boss’s defense Thursday, saying it was “bizarre” for anyone to claim Attorney General William P. Barr is “trying to mislead people” by not immediately releasing the special counsel’s report.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, his first since Robert S. Mueller III concluded the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Rosenstein tried to tamp down criticisms of Barr’s handling of the report and the time it is taking him to release it.

“He’s being as forthcoming as he can, and so this notion that he’s trying to mislead people, I think is just completely bizarre,” Rosenstein said in the interview.

Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller to lead the investigation after President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey, helped Barr review the final report, which did not find that anyone on the Trump campaign conspired with Russians. However, Mueller declined to reach a conclusion on whether the president obstructed justice. Barr and Rosenstein then decided they could not make a criminal case that the president obstructed justice.

Daniel Hemel sees The Tragedy of Rod Rosenstein:

But over the past two years—and especially in the past week—this success story has turned into a cautionary tale. Rosenstein’s refusal to recuse himself from the special counsel’s obstruction of justice probe—notwithstanding a conflict of interest so blatant as to be almost blinding—has done irreparable damage to his own reputation and perhaps to the department that until now has been his only professional home.

It is difficult to understand how Rosenstein ended up in such a compromised position. Perhaps he will one day write a reflective memoir—as his two nemeses, Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, already have. Until then, we can reconstruct the timeline easily enough, but we can only speculate as to Rosenstein’s motives at each step of the way.

….

The Russia probe was, among other things, a test of whether the department could conduct and conclude an impartial investigation of a sitting president by following its own special counsel rules. While it is too early to reach a final verdict on that question, the serious conflict of interest affecting the man who oversaw that inquiry casts a continuing shadow over the enterprise.

David Frum observes Trump’s ability to lead people like Rosenstein into moral compromises:

While discussing Barr and Rosenstein @davidfrum shares his view with @Lawrence on how Trump takes someone’s “moral weakness” and “grinds them into dust.” #lastword #msnbc

Watch SpaceX Launch And Land the Falcon Heavy rocket:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of forty-five.  Sunrise is 6:18 AM and sunset 7:32 PM, for 13h 14m 23s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 35.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1965, Palm Sunday tornadoes ravage the Midwest:

Six tornadoes, part of the “Palm Sunday” outbreak, ripped across Southern Wisconsin, causing 3 deaths and 65 injuries. The outbreak of 51 tornadoes was responsible for 260 deaths and over $200 million in damages throughout the states of Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio.

Recommended for reading in full:

Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig report Retiring as a Judge, Trump’s Sister Ends Court Inquiry Into Her Role in Tax Dodges:

President Trump’s older sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, has retired as a federal appellate judge, ending an investigation into whether she violated judicial conduct rules by participating in fraudulent tax schemes with her siblings.

The court inquiry stemmed from complaints filed last October, after an investigation by The New York Times found that the Trumps had engaged in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the inherited wealth of Mr. Trump and his siblings. Judge Barry not only benefited financially from most of those tax schemes, The Times found; she was also in a position to influence the actions taken by her family.

Judge Barry, now 82, has not heard cases in more than two years but was still listed as an inactive senior judge, one step short of full retirement. In a letter dated Feb. 1, a court official notified the four individuals who had filed the complaints that the investigation was “receiving the full attention” of a judicial conduct council. Ten days later, Judge Barry filed her retirement papers.

The status change rendered the investigation moot, since retired judges are not subject to the conduct rules. The people who filed the complaints were notified last week that the matter had been dropped without a finding on the merits of the allegations. The decision has not yet been made public, but copies were provided to The Times by two of the complainants. Both are involved in the legal profession.

Sarah Ellison and Marc Fisher report National Enquirer expected to be sold imminently as parent company faces pressure:

American Media Inc. is actively seeking to sell off the National Enquirer, according to three people familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The decision to sell came after the hedge fund manager whose firm controls American Media became “disgusted” with the Enquirer’s reporting tactics, according to one of these people.

American Media has been under intense pressure because of the Enquirer’s efforts to tilt the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump, who is a longtime friend of American Media’s president and CEO, David Pecker. Pecker and his supermarket tabloid have also been embroiled in recent months in an unusually public feud with Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post.

The Lion King Official Trailer:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see a bit of snow with a high of forty-one.  Sunrise is 6:20 AM and sunset 7:31 PM, for 13h 11m 34s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 25.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1861, Sauk County volunteers join the Union Army:

On this date 26 volunteers from Sauk County departed for Madison where they became part of the First Wisconsin Infantry, Company F. By the end of the war, over one thousand men served in the Union Army from Sauk County.

Recommended for reading in full:

Eric Levitz writes If You Are Defending Stephen Miller, You Are an Ally of Anti-Semitism:

It is true that Stephen Miller is Jewish, and that white nationalists have historically targeted Jews for persecution. But this does not mean that Miller cannot be a white nationalist. There was a time in the U.S. when white supremacists were virulently anti-Catholic, and considered the Irish to be a subhuman race. That has not made it impossible for an Irish Catholic like Steve Bannon to openly endorse white-nationalist novels and thinkers.“White people” is not a coherent biological or ethnic category. It is a social caste with semi-porous borders. And by all appearances, Miller identifies with that caste. More to the point, there is no evidence whatsoever that [Democratic congresswoman Ilhan] Omar directed her criticism toward Miller because of his Jewish heritage and not because of his (undisputed) status as the White House’s most influential and hardline immigration adviser.

But the GOP’s decision to brand Omar’s comments as anti-Semitic is something much worse than unfair or unsupportable. It is confirmation that the party sees anti-Semitism less as a scourge to be combatted than as a political cudgel to be exploited.

….

It is worth noting that even if Trump’s revanchist nativism didn’t contain traces of anti-Semitism, it would remain a form of politics that endangers Diaspora Jews. Jewish reactionaries like Stephen Miller might be able to assimilate to the form of Americanism that Trump champions. But the vast majority of American Jews are liberal, cosmopolitan, and secularist. Which is to say: They are the “globalist” villains in Trumpism’s Manichaean fable of American decline.

And even if Trump’s politics did not endanger Jews, anyone who has ever uttered “never again” in earnest would still be obliged to oppose him. If you are a Jew who has “zero tolerance” for anti-Semitism — but infinite tolerance for a president who describes immigrants as an “infestation,” and directs extrajudicial cruelty at their children — then you aren’t so different from the Nazis’ apologists. You share their conviction that some populations are entitled to basic rights, while others are not.

You just believe the führer should have included your people among the chosen.

Watch a Community Police Itself:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-four.  Sunrise is 6:21 AM and sunset 7:30 PM, for 13h 08m 44s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 16.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.

On this day in 1865, the Confederate Army under Lee surrenders:

Union forces led by General Ulysses S. Grant caught up with Confederate forces commanded by General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. The 5th, 6th, 7th, 19th, 36th, 37th and 38th Wisconsin Infantry regiments were among the troops that had helped corner the enemy there. The 36th were present at the court house and witnessed the formal surrender ceremony.

Recommended for reading in full:

Amber Phillips describes Kirstjen Nielsen’s ignominious end:

As The Fix’s Aaron Blake has chronicled, Nielsen has blatantly contradicted or ignored findings by the State Department, the U.S. intelligence community and her own agency to toe the president’s line on a number of issues:

— Her agency’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border. She once argued “we do not have a policy of separating families at the border, period,” even though it was her agency’s interpretation of existing law that separated the families. Trump implicitly acknowledged as much when he abruptly ended it, shortly after Nielsen tweeted that.

— Whether border crossings rise to a national emergency. When Trump went around Congress and declared a national emergency at the border to build his wall earlier this year, Nielsen had to go before lawmakers and defend that legally questionable move. But she was undercut by her boss when Trump said he didn’t have to declare this emergency.

— Trump’s worldview on race. She refused to confirm whether Trump called Haiti, El Salvador and African nations “shithole countries,” even though she was present at the meeting where it happened. Then, when asked by members of Congress why Trump said he wanted more immigrants from Norway instead of these majority-minority countries, she feigned ignorance that Norway is a mostly white country so as to avoid having to talk about the undeniable racial component of Trump’s comments.

— Whether terrorists are crossing the border. During the government shutdown fight over the border this year, Nielsen more than any other Trump official insisted on repeating a falsehood that terrorists have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. The State Department has said there’s “no credible evidence” that terrorists are in Mexico trying to cross the border, let alone have made it across.

— Basic facts about Russian election interference. She has said she didn’t know if Russia interfered in the 2016 president election to help Trump win, despite a thorough intelligence report declaring as much. “That the specific intent was to help President Trump win? I’m not aware of that,” she said as recently as summer of 2018, more than two years after the report was released to the public.

Five Stories About Funky Foods:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-one.  Sunrise is 6:23 AM and sunset 7:29 PM, for 13h 05m 54s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 9.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6 PM.

On this day in 1865, Battle of Spanish Fort, Alabama, ends:

While the main Union army was chasing Robert E. Lee across Virginia, other Union forces, including the 8th, 11th, 14th, 20th, 23rd, 27th, 28th, 29th, 33rd, and 35th Wisconsin Infantry regiments, captured Spanish Fort and seized control of Mobile Bay, Alabama.

Recommended for reading in full:

John Weaver, a Republican opposed to Trump, observes of departing Trump cabinet officer Kirstjen Nielsen:

Under no circumstances feel sorry for @SecNielsen She defended the policy desires of two psychopaths: Trump & that Miller, upping the ante to keep her job by putting children in cages, losing them in a “system,” & separating families. No major company can or should hire her.

(Her only economic and social prospects will come from disreputable organizations and people; she will live the rest of her life despised by normal society.)

Stephanie Baker reports Where Rudy Giuliani’s Money Comes From (“While he represents the president for free, he travels the world consulting, giving speeches, and building his brand”):

Long lauded as the prosecutor who skewered the New York Mafia and once known as “America’s mayor” for leading New York after Sept. 11, Giuliani is still courting clients for security contracts such as the one in Kharkiv. He’s made millions of dollars while acting as Trump’s unpaid consigliere—$9.5 million in 2017 and $5 million in 2018, according to disclosures from his ongoing divorce proceedings with his third wife, Judith Nathan. At the age of 74, Giuliani has eschewed a quiet retirement in favor of life in the limelight. “If I retired, I would shrivel up,” he said. “What I do is enormously exciting.” In addition to Ukraine, in the past two years he’s given speeches and done consulting and legal work in Armenia, Bahrain, Brazil, Colombia, Turkey, and Uruguay, among other countries.

Much about the Trump presidency is unprecedented, but Giuliani’s role is particularly unusual. His work abroad led seven Democratic senators in September to request that the U.S. Department of Justice review whether he should be disclosing his activities under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires registration by individuals and organizations acting as agents of foreign principals “in a political or quasi political capacity.” FARA was rarely a hot topic until 2017, when Mueller indicted former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his associate Rick Gates for failing to register as foreign agents as required.

“As President Trump’s personal attorney, Mr. Giuliani communicates in private with the president and his senior staff on a regular basis,” the senators wrote to the Justice Department. “Without further review, it is impossible to know whether Mr. Giuliani is lobbying U.S. government officials on behalf of foreign clients.”

What’s the Deal with the Goodyear Blimp?: