Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of 61. Sunrise is 5:30 AM and sunset 8:11 PM, for 14h 40m 58s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 11.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 493, in a shocking breach of table manners, Odoacer, the first barbarian King of Italy after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, is slain by Theoderic the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, while the two kings were feasting together.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Shawn Johnson reports Wisconsin Supreme Court Rejects Proposal To Change Redistricting Rules:

Justices on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court have rejected an effort by conservatives to change the rules for the next round of redistricting, denying a petition that would have required all redistricting lawsuits to run through them.

States redraw their political boundaries every decade after the U.S. Census to make sure districts are roughly equal in population. The high-stakes process carries huge political implications and inevitably leads to lawsuits.

That’s all but certain to happen this year, with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and Republican lawmakers unlikely to agree on a new political map for the next decade.

A petition by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty would have required any redistricting lawsuit to be handled as an “original action” before the Wisconsin Supreme Court, meaning it would bypass lower courts. The governor and Legislature could present their own redistricting plans and outside groups could also intervene.

While justices rejected the proposal, they did not rule out the possibility of hearing a redistricting case.

“Our decision in this rule matter should not be deemed predictive of this court’s response to a petition for review asking this court to review a lower court’s ruling on a redistricting challenge or a request that we assume original jurisdiction over a future redistricting case or controversy,” wrote the court. “It remains well-settled that redistricting challenges often merit this court’s exercise of its original jurisdiction.”

 Helen Sullivan reports US Target stores to stop selling Pokémon cards after rising value prompts threats to staff:

US retail giant Target will stop selling Poke?mon playing cards out of an “abundance of caution” for its staff and other shoppers. The re-sale value of the cards has increased dramatically during the coronavirus pandemic, prompting chaos and threats to staff. Target will also stop selling MLB, NFL and NBA sports playing cards.

The decision comes after man pulled a gun during a fight over trading cards in a Target parking lot in Brookfield, Wisconsin on 7 May. Police said the 35-year-old man produced the gun when he was assaulted by four men aged 23-35 as he left the store, ABC reported.

A shopper who was at the Target during the parking lot incident told Fox news at the time: “It’s just kind of sad for the kids. It just sounds kind of ridiculous that adults got into a fight in the parking lot about trading cards.”

(Emphasis added.)

 Michael Gerson writes Meet Kevin McCarthy, political hollow man:

Instead of dealing with reality, McCarthy mouths partisan pablum that the actions of his own party have rendered ridiculous. “Democrats,” he says, “are destroying this nation” — when only the GOP is actively undermining the U.S. system of government. Democrats are responsible for “the greatest expansion of government” — when Trump in power spent money like a drunken socialist. The damage done by Democrats, insists McCarthy, will be irreversible — when it is Republicans who seek to make Trump’s malignant hold on the country permanent.

Entrepreneur Builds Community of Rock Climbing Women:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 71. Sunrise is 5:31 AM and sunset 8:10 PM, for 14h 38m 54s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 6.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1973, Skylab, the United States’ first space station, is launched.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Craig Gilbert writes Two former congressmen from Wisconsin join group of disaffected Republicans unhappy with Trump Era GOP:

Two former Wisconsin congressmen have joined a national group of Republicans who say they’re dismayed by the GOP’s direction in the Trump era and want to either “re-imagine” their party or create a new one.

The two are Reid Ribble, who represented Wisconsin’s 8th Congressional District from 2011 to 2017, and Tom Petri, who represented the 6th District from 1979 to 2015.

They are among more than 100 disaffected Republicans (and ex-Republicans), many of them former government officials or former members of Congress, who signed an open letter Thursday rejecting populism, “fear-mongering, conspiracism and falsehoods.”

“Our nation’s future should not be dictated by a single person but by principles that bind us together. That’s why we believe in pushing for the Republican Party to rededicate itself to founding ideals — or else hasten the creation of an alternative,” the letter said.

 Adam Goldman and Mark Mazzetti report Activists and Ex-Spy Said to Have Plotted to Discredit Trump ‘Enemies’ in Government:

A network of conservative activists, aided by a British former spy, mounted a campaign during the Trump administration to discredit perceived enemies of President Trump inside the government, according to documents and people involved in the operations.

The campaign included a planned sting operation against Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, H.R. McMaster, and secret surveillance operations against F.B.I. employees, aimed at exposing anti-Trump sentiment in the bureau’s ranks.

The operations against the F.B.I., run by the conservative group Project Veritas, were conducted from a large home in the Georgetown section of Washington that rented for $10,000 per month. Female undercover operatives arranged dates with the F.B.I. employees with the aim of secretly recording them making disparaging comments about Mr. Trump.

The campaign shows the obsession that some of Mr. Trump’s allies had about a shadowy “deep state” trying to blunt his agenda — and the lengths that some were willing to go to try to purge the government of those believed to be disloyal to the president.

 Catherine Rampell writes Don’t freak out about inflation yet:

It could well be true that parts of the Biden fiscal agenda will have some inflationary effects; based on the limited data available, we don’t know yet, and I don’t want to suggest there is no risk of that outcome. But it’s also too early to freak out. So far it looks like prices are picking up not because there’s too much money sloshing around, but rather because of a bunch of temporary, idiosyncratic shocks and supply chain issues that seem unlikely to lead to self-sustaining inflation.

For instance: Among the biggest drivers of consumer price increases in April was the category for used cars and trucks, which rose a whopping 10 percent from the previous month. That was the largest month-over-month spike since the federal government began keeping track in 1953. Yet this spike is less reflective of broad-based trends in inflation than factors unique to the car market.

Would You Eat Lab-Grown Fish?:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 68. Sunrise is 5:32 AM and sunset 8:09 PM, for 14h 36m 49s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s  Community Development Authority meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM and there will be a Tax Increment District Planning Town Hall via audiovisual conferencing at 7 PM.

On this day in 1862, the USS Planter [briefly the CSS Planter], a steamer and gunship, steals through Confederate lines and is passed to the Union, by a southern slave, Robert Smalls, who later was officially appointed as captain, becoming the first black man to command a United States ship.

Recommended for reading in full — 

David Leonhardt writes Why Cheney Matters:

If even a small portion of Republicans insist that the party supports democracy, they can succeed. As several experts have pointed out — including Anne Applebaum, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — the most successful strategy for beating back a political party’s authoritarian shift has depended on defections among people who otherwise agree with that party. That’s why Cheney, Jeff Flake, Mitt Romney and other Republicans criticizing Trump’s big lie are significant.

The same experts advise Democrats to welcome the courage of those Republicans and not obsess over their many other disagreements. Cheney’s stance matters because she is a pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-regulation, deeply conservative Republican.

“The Republican Party is sliding into authoritarianism at a terrifyingly rapid clip,” Jonathan Chait has written in New York magazine. “That fate of American democracy is the biggest issue in American politics.”

For more:

The ouster of Cheney may embolden her and allow “a household-name conservative to take her case against Trumpism far beyond a Capitol conference room,” The Times’s Jonathan Martin writes.

(The ongoing defense of liberal democracy relies, as did the defeat of Trump in 2020, on a large but disparate coalition. That Cheney and her father are not libertarians, for example, does not prevent their opposition to Trump from serving a purpose useful for those committed to a constitutional, liberal democratic order. Churchill: “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”)

 Maggie Astor reports ‘A Perpetual Motion Machine’: How Disinformation Drives Voting Laws:

Former President Donald J. Trump’s monthslong campaign to delegitimize the 2020 election didn’t overturn the results. But his unfounded claims gutted his supporters’ trust in the electoral system, laying the foundation for numerous Republican-led bills pushing more restrictive voter rules.

The bills demonstrate how disinformation can take on a life of its own, forming a feedback loop that shapes policy for years to come. When promoted with sufficient intensity, falsehoods — whether about election security or the coronavirus or other topics — can shape voters’ attitudes toward policies, and lawmakers can cite those attitudes as the basis for major changes.

The embrace of the falsehoods also showcases the continuing power of Mr. Trump inside the Republican Party, which has widely adopted and weaponized his election claims. Many Republicans, eager to gain his support, have raced to champion the new voting laws. Those who have stood up to his falsehoods have paid the price.

(Having lost decisively, these Trumpists are committed to winning dishonestly.)

Dracula’s Castle Becomes COVID-19 Vaccine Site:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 65. Sunrise is 5:33 AM and sunset 8:08 PM, for 14h 34m 42s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Alcohol Licensing Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4:45 PM.

On this day in 1551, the National University of San Marcos, the oldest university in the Americas, is founded in Lima, Peru.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Danny Hakim reports In Rebuke to N.R.A., Federal Judge Dismisses Bankruptcy Case: 

The National Rifle Association’s attempt to evade a legal challenge from New York regulators was tossed out by a federal bankruptcy judge on Tuesday, in a ruling that cast further doubt on whether the group’s embattled chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, would remain at the helm after three decades in power.

The ruling was a victory for Letitia James, the New York attorney general, whose office is seeking to remove Mr. LaPierre and shut down the gun rights group amid a long-running corruption investigation.

Mr. LaPierre, the face of the American gun lobby, now battered by the N.R.A.’s internecine warfare and revelations of luxuriant personal spending, had sought to end-run Ms. James by relocating to Texas and filing for bankruptcy there. But the gambit instead proved a strategic blunder: The testimony over a 12-day trial only buttressed Ms. James’s contentions of corruption, and led the judge, Harlin D. Hale, to declare, “The N.R.A. is using this bankruptcy case to address a regulatory enforcement problem, not a financial one.”

Judge Hale, the chief of the federal bankruptcy court in Dallas, also said Mr. LaPierre’s move to file for bankruptcy without telling the group’s board of directors, or his own chief counsel or chief financial officer, was “nothing less than shocking.”

 Neil MacFarquhar reports Efforts to Weed Out Extremists in Law Enforcement Meet Resistance:

Legislators in California negotiated compromise language for the bill with the main police unions in Los Angeles, San Jose and San Francisco, which then endorsed the change. The settled-upon language says, “No member of a hate group should be in law enforcement and if you are a member of one of these groups don’t apply, you have no place in our profession.” Still, some police officers and unions in California reject the modified legislation because of issues of civil rights and freedom of speech.

Some legal experts agree. The proposed measures are all bound to prompt challenges on constitutional grounds, said Philip M. Stinson, a former police officer who is now a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University. It would be preferable to prohibit certain types of behavior rather than to focus on membership in an organization, he said. “The idea that we can systematically reform policing through a bevy of legislative actions in short order, I don’t think that is possible,” he said.

Florida Keys releasing lab-engineered mosquitoes:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 59. Sunrise is 5:34 AM and sunset 8:07 PM, for 14h 32m 32s of daytime.  The moon is new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6 PM.

On this day in 1990, Lithuania declares independence from the Soviet Union.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Molly Beck reports Speaker Robin Vos, Assembly official denied immunocompromised lawmaker’s request to work virtually during COVID pandemic:

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, and the Legislature’s human resources director, Amanda Jorgenson, have rejected requests from Rep. Jodi Emerson, D-Eau Claire, to participate in floor sessions and committee hearings from her office.

The requests were made by Emerson and her doctor to reduce Emerson’s risk of contracting the virus until she became fully vaccinated because of a medication she takes to suppress her immune system to manage an autoimmune disease Emerson was diagnosed with years ago.

“As you are aware, COVID-19 is not an airborne transmitted disease,” Jorgenson wrote to Emerson on April 4 rejecting the request. “Therefore, protection for you is based on limiting particulate exposure.”

Jorgenson and Vos offered Emerson a portable plexiglass barrier instead.

….

Patrick Remington, a former CDC epidemiologist and director of the Preventive Medicine Residency Program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, agreed.

“I don’t know what research they are reading. But COVID-19 can clearly be transmitted via airborne spread,” Remington said. “It might not be the predominant mode of transmission, but it is clearly able to be transmitted via small particles through the air.”

James Downie writes of The big myth about Cheney, Trump and the GOP:

The reason there’s no battle is that while Cheney, Hogan and others want to argue that their vision of the Republican Party competes with Trump’s, that’s simply not the case. I’ve written previously that the GOP is still Trump’s GOP. But the reverse is also true: Trump’s GOP is the GOP as it’s ever been.

Others have noted that the distance between Cheney’s GOP and Trump’s GOP is far smaller than she’d admit. As the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd notes in a new column, Cheney’s father, Richard B. Cheney, as vice president, “spread fear, propaganda and warped intelligence” to push the United States into the disastrous Iraq War, while encouraging President George W. Bush to shred the Constitution in expanding presidential and surveillance powers. And long before Trump became president, Liz Cheney was reluctant to criticize birtherism, only describing it on CNN as “people [being] uncomfortable with having for the first time ever, I think, a president who seems so reluctant to defend the nation overseas.”

AJ Vicens and Ali Breland report How HBO Helped the Guy Hosting QAnon Dodge a Serious Accusation:

Over the course of his new six episode HBO documentary, Into The Storm, filmmaker Cullen Hoback exhaustively details the intrigue and shadowy players involved in the QAnon conspiracy theory. As CNN’s Brian Lowry explains, “Hoback appears determined not to leave any stones unturned.”

The documentary is comprehensive and does flip a lot of stones. Hoback leverages sustained access to key players in the QAnon movement to tell a story about one of the most consequential disinformation operations of the Trump era. He does, however, pass on overturning one rather large stone: chief Q-enabler Jim Watkins’ history of running an internet company that has profited off child porn themes. The omission deprives HBO’s audience of key information on Watkins’ past, especially given his prominent role in movement seeking vengeance against a supposed cabal of elite liberal pedophiles.

Is a Yukon road trip the ultimate wild ride?:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will see intervals of clouds and sunshine with a shower in places, and a high of 55. Sunrise is 5:36 AM and sunset 8:06 PM, for 14h 30m 20s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 1.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater School Board meets in closed session at 6 PM and open session at 6:15 PM.

On this day in 1869, the First Transcontinental Railroad, linking the eastern and western United States, is completed at Promontory Summit, Utah with the golden spike.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Emma Brown, Aaron C. Davis, Jon Swaine, and Josh Dawsey report The making of a myth (‘Russell J. Ramsland Jr. sold everything from Tex-Mex food to light-therapy technology. Then he sold the story that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump’):

ADDISON, Tex. — Key elements of the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump took shape in an airplane hangar here two years earlier, promoted by a Republican businessman who has sold everything from Tex-Mex food in London to a wellness technology that beams light into the human bloodstream.

At meetings beginning late in 2018, as Republicans were smarting from midterm losses in Texas and across the country, Russell J. Ramsland Jr. and his associates delivered alarming presentations on electronic voting to a procession of conservative lawmakers, activists and donors.

Briefings in the hangar had a clandestine air. Guests were asked to leave their cellphones outside before assembling in a windowless room. A member of Ramsland’s team purporting to be a “white-hat hacker” identified himself only by a code name.

….

The enduring myth that the 2020 election was rigged was not one claim by one person. It was many claims stacked one atop the other, repeated by a phalanx of Trump allies. This is the previously unreported origin story of a core set of those claims, ideas that were advanced not by renowned experts or by insiders who had knowledge of flawed voting systems but by Ramsland and fellow conservative activists as they pushed a fledgling company, Allied Security Operations Group, into a quixotic attempt to find evidence of widespread fraud where none existed.

To assemble a picture of the company’s role, The Washington Post obtained emails and company documents and interviewed 12 people with direct knowledge of ASOG’s efforts, as well as former federal officials and aides from the Trump White House. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters or out of fear of retribution. Three individuals who were present in the hangar for those 2018 meetings spoke about the gatherings publicly for the first time.

 Laura Silver writes Ideological divisions over cultural issues are far wider in the U.S. than in the UK, France and Germany:

When it comes to key cultural issues, Americans are significantly more divided along ideological lines than people in the United Kingdom, France and Germany, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of surveys conducted in the four countries in fall 2020.

Across 11 questions on cultural subjects ranging from nationalism to political correctness, the gap between the ideological left and right in the United States – or liberals and conservatives, in the common U.S. parlance – is significantly wider than the ideological gaps found in the European countries surveyed. In some cases, this is because America’s conservatives are outliers. In other cases, it’s because America’s liberals are outliers. In still other cases, both the right and left in the U.S. hold more extreme positions than their European counterparts, resulting in ideological gaps that are more than twice the size of those seen in the UK, Germany or France.

Heaven or sacrilege? Italy’s pizza vending machine stirs controversy:

Good morning.

Mother’s Day in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 59. Sunrise is 5:37 AM and sunset 8:05 PM, for 14h 28m 06s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 4.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1815, Francis Ronalds describes the first battery-operated clock in the Philosophical Magazine.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Philip Bump writes Time has only weakened the argument that the Russia probe was a victory for Trump:

For example, in early February 2019, a member of Mueller’s team argued to a federal judge that an August 2016 meeting between Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign manager, and a man named Konstantin Kilimnik went “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating” — that is, the question of possible coordination. In the final Mueller report, though, the investigators admitted that they couldn’t answer key questions about that meeting.

At that meeting, Manafort had shared campaign data with Kilimnik, though Mueller’s team “could not reliably determine Manafort’s purpose in sharing internal polling data with Kilimnik during the campaign period.” This was hampered by Manafort offering false information to his team and to the grand jury and by Manafort’s using encrypted messaging apps.

“Because of questions about Manafort’s credibility and our limited ability to gather evidence on what happened to the polling data after it was sent to Kilimnik,” the Mueller report reads, his team, referred to as “the Office,” “could not assess what Kilimnik (or others he may have given it to) did with it. The Office did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort’s sharing polling data and Russia’s interference in the election, which had already been reported by U.S. media outlets at the time of the August 2 meeting.”

Only last month was the question of what happened more fully answered: Kilimnik — who had been previously identified as a Russian intelligence agent (including casually by Manafort’s number two at the campaign) — “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.”  

 Adam Gopnik writes What Liberalism Can Learn from What It Took to Defeat Donald Trump:

The first lesson, and vindication, for those of that liberal turn of mind is the continuing demonstration of the superiority, both moral and pragmatic, of pluralism to purism. That truth has been demonstrated twice by that improbable liberal hero Joe Biden, first in the Democratic primaries and then in the general election. There was an extended moment, in 2018 and 2019, when a dominant belief on the left was that the only way to counter the extreme narrowness of Trumpism was with an equally pointed alternative. Bernie Sanders, whose values and programs—Medicare for All, breaking up the banks, a Green New Deal—have long appeared admirable to many, still seemed to rest his campaign on a belief that one could win the Democratic nomination without a majority, as long as the minority was sufficiently motivated and committed, and as long as the rest of the field remained fragmented.

But the inflamed flamed out. Biden, despite his uninspiring social-media presence and his generally antediluvian vibe, shifted, like his party, to the left, yet managed to pull together a broad coalition to win the nomination, and then did it again against Donald Trump. The pluralism of that coalition stretched from its base, among African-American women, to those suburban white women who turned on Trump, to disaffected McCain Republicans, in Arizona, to Latinos—who, warningly, in some areas voted less Democratic than in the past, but still voted Democratic. (And not to forget those neocon Never Trumpers who seem to have played a small but significant role in turning key votes in key places.)

How 7 Million Flowers Are Planted At Keukenhof Every Year:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 58. Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset 8:04 PM, for 14h 25m 50s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 9.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1945, the German Instrument of Surrender signed at Reims comes into effect.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Ben Tractenberg writes of Fighting the Last Free Speech War:

As legal scholar Heidi Kitrosser put it in a 2017 article in the Minnesota Law Review, there has been “tremendous imprecision” in the campus speech debate. “Many commentators,” she explained, “decry political correctness as a threat to free speech but leave unclear whether, by political correctness, they mean campus speech codes, informal social pressures, or something else.”

In other words, the incidents often cited as evidence of the “free-speech crisis” usually don’t involve censorship of speech. In fact, when it comes to actual censorship, today there is little appetite or support for it on either the left or the right. Thus, a recent National Review piece allowed that campus activists on the left no longer “disinvite” speakers with whom they disagree—but accomplish the same thing by not inviting them in the first place.

In The Big Lebowski, the Dude cuts to the chase: It’s “not a First Amendment thing, man.” If you express your ideas and people respond by laughing at you or even calling you a racist, they may be rude or unkind—but no one has trampled on your rights.

Alla Katsnelson reports A Novel Effort to See How Poverty Affects Young Brains:

It’s well established that growing up in poverty correlates with disparities in educational achievement, health and employment. But an emerging branch of neuroscience asks how poverty affects the developing brain.

Over the past 15 years, dozens of studies have found that children raised in meager circumstances have subtle brain differences compared with children from families of higher means. On average, the surface area of the brain’s outer layer of cells is smaller, especially in areas relating to language and impulse control, as is the volume of a structure called the hippocampus, which is responsible for learning and memory.

These differences don’t reflect inherited or inborn traits, research suggests, but rather the circumstances in which the children grew up. Researchers have speculated that specific aspects of poverty — subpar nutrition, elevated stress levels, low-quality education — might influence brain and cognitive development. But almost all the work to date is correlational. And although those factors may be at play to various degrees for different families, poverty is their common root. A continuing study called Baby’s First Years, started in 2018, aims to determine whether reducing poverty can itself promote healthy brain development.

“None of us thinks income is the only answer,” said Dr. Kimberly Noble, a neuroscientist and pediatrician at Teachers College, Columbia University, who is co-leading the work. “But with Baby’s First Years, we are moving past correlation to test whether reducing poverty directly causes changes in children’s cognitive, emotional and brain development.”

Dr. Noble and her collaborators are examining the effects of giving poor families cash payments in amounts that wound up being comparable to those the Biden administration will distribute as part of an expanded child tax credit.

Cat carried away from Scottish polling station: