Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see afternoon thunderstorms with a high of  78.  Sunrise is 6:24 AM and sunset 7:28 PM, for 13h 04m 31s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 19.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1827, John Walker, an English chemist, sells the first friction match that he had invented the previous year.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Michael S. Schmidt, Maggie Haberman, and Nicholas Fandos report Matt Gaetz, Loyal for Years to Trump, Is Said to Have Sought a Blanket Pardon:

Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, was one of President Donald J. Trump’s most vocal allies during his term, publicly pledging loyalty and even signing a letter nominating the president for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the final weeks of Mr. Trump’s term, Mr. Gaetz sought something in return. He privately asked the White House for blanket pre-emptive pardons for himself and unidentified congressional allies for any crimes they may have committed, according to two people told of the discussions.

Around that time, Mr. Gaetz was also publicly calling for broad pardons from Mr. Trump to thwart what he termed the “bloodlust” of their political opponents. But Justice Department investigators had begun questioning Mr. Gaetz’s associates about his conduct, including whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old that violated sex trafficking laws, in an inquiry that grew out of the case of an indicted associate in Florida.

Alexandra Petri writes This should not happen more than once:

There are several details of the Matt Gaetz story that keep sticking in my head, but the one that sticks in it most is the report that the Florida Republican used to wander around and show his colleagues nude photos of people he had slept with. There’s a kind of grim weirdness to the idea of these interactions (which Gaetz denies) — a very “I Read On eHow.com That Men Bond Over Conquests” bewilderment. The callousness and the violation involved are enough of a sock to the gut. But the fact that this was allegedly known about him is what keeps getting to me. The fact that this, or something in this neighborhood of bad, occasioned senior staff from then-House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s (R-Wis.) office to have a talk with Gaetz about professional behavior.

….

To me, this is something you do, ideally, zero times. You never experience the impulse to do it, and you lead a pleasant life. You travel. You eat lunchmeat sandwiches. Maybe you do a marathon, or climb something. You lead a blithe existence for many decades, you die in your bed in your mid-nineties surrounded by your cherished relatives, and in all that time, you never walk up to a colleague on the floor of the House of Representatives and out of nowhere present him with a nude photograph of someone you claim to have had sex with.

But if you can’t do it zero times, then ideally it happens only once. It happens only once, because the moment you do it, the person you show it to responds the way a person should respond. You produce your photograph to your colleague, and your colleague looks at you and says, “Never show that to anyone, ever again. Go home and rethink your life. I do not feel closer to you. If anything, I want to have you removed forcibly from my presence by strong gentlemen whose biceps are tattooed with ‘MOM.’The fact that you thought this would make us closer makes me question every decision in my life that has led me to this point. Leave now and never come back.”

How NZ Farmers Shear 25,000 Sheep In 10 Days:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 78.  Sunrise is 6:26 AM and sunset 7:27 PM, for 13h 01m 40s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 28.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1831, many of the Sauk leave Wisconsin and Illinois: “On this date, in the spring of 1831, the Sauk Indians led by Chief Keokuk left their ancestral home near the mouth of the Rock River and moved across the Mississippi River to Iowa to fulfill the terms of a treaty signed in 1804. Many of the tribe, however, believed the treaty to be invalid and the following spring, when the U.S. government failed to provide them with promised supplies, this dissatisfied faction led by Black Hawk returned to their homeland on the Rock River, precipitating the Black Hawk War.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

David Leonhardt writes of Low expectations, good results:

Shortly after President Biden took office, I began asking his aides why their publicly announced goal for Covid-19 vaccine distribution — an average of one million shots a day — was so unambitious. The pace wasn’t much faster than what the Trump administration had achieved in its final days, and it was far short of the rate at which vaccine makers would be delivering doses to the government. Based on that delivery schedule, a reasonable goal seemed to be three million shots a day.

White House officials responded by talking about the logistical challenges in giving so many shots. But they never explicitly denied that three million daily shots was realistic. The response left me suspecting that their true goal was closer to three million than one million, but that they wanted to set a public goal they could comfortably clear.

Whatever you think of the P.R. strategy (and I tend to prefer transparency over artificially low expectations), the administration has now reached three million shots a day. And it deserves credit for getting there so quickly.

Doing so has required a campaign that resembles wartime mobilization in its speed and complexity. It has involved state and local governments as well as the private sector. It has combined existing infrastructure like pharmacies with brand-new mass-vaccination clinics at sports stadiums and amusement parks.

Alyssa Rosenberg asks The only question about QAnon that really matters:

Mulling Q’s identity is in fact the easiest question to ask about the so-called QAnon movement. It’s also the wrong one.

….

For the scores of families who have lost relatives to obsessions with QAnon’s paranoid worldviews, a Q revelation might give them someone to blame. But that doesn’t mean it would provide any real accountability. What are grieving people going to do? Sue someone for spinning a fantasy on an anonymous message board?

Unmasking Q might not even be a point of leverage in arguments with believers. After all, this is a movement that believes many powerful people have been replaced with body doubles, either because they actually died years ago or have been arrested as part of Trump’s crusade against the “deep state.”

In this context, [HBO documentary filmmaker] Hoback’s hope that QAnon followers will stop choosing “to devote their lives to a cause propagated by a cynic, who treats the whole world like it’s a game” seems sweetly naive.

(I’ve enjoyed the HBO documentary Q: Into the Storm, but share Rosenberg’s doubts that those beclouded by conspiracy theories will easily return to reason.)

Tonight’s Sky for April:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 74.  Sunrise is 6:27 AM and sunset 7:26 PM, for 12h 58m 49s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 38.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

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

On this day in 1792, President Washington exercises, for the first time in American history, the constitutional authority to veto a bill.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Isaac Stanley-Becker reports Inside a stealth ‘persuasion machine’ promising Republican victories in 2022:

A Facebook page shows a child scampering down a school corridor, alerting Ohio families to a scholarship program.

Chatter fills the same page with news ranging from a state anti-corruption bill to the vibrant local real estate market. “It’s a great time to be selling a home in Columbus,” one post celebrates.

Titled Arise Ohio, the Facebook page is the creation of the American Culture Project — a nonprofit whose website says its mission is to “empower Americans with the tools and information necessary to make their voices heard in their local communities, statehouses and beyond.”

Undisclosed on the Facebook page is the nonprofit’s partisan goal. Arise Ohio and similar sites aimed at other politically pivotal states are part of a novel strategy by a little-known, Republican-aligned group to make today’s GOP more palatable to moderate voters ahead of the 2022 midterms by reshaping the “cultural narrative” on hot-button issues.

That goal, laid out in a private fundraising appeal sent last month to a Republican donor and reviewed by The Washington Post, relies on building new online communities that can be tapped at election time, with a focus on winning back Congress in 2022.

“We’ve created a persuasion machine that allows conservatives to reach, engage and move people to action like never before,” the solicitation states. “Now is the time to expand and capitalize on this machine, setting the political playing field in advance of the 2022 election.”

Steve Elbow reports Parents’ hesitancy could impede efforts to vaccinate school kids:

Vaccines could be available for children as early as this summer, but hesitancy among parents could be an obstacle to making schools COVID-free.

Pfizer announced this week that its COVID-19 vaccine is 100% effective in children ages 12 to 15, and the company plans to seek emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for that age group “in the coming weeks.”

The company launched a vaccine trial last week for children between 6 months and 11 years old.

But a survey this week by Indiana University researchers found that more than a quarter of U.S. parents don’t intend to get their kids vaccinated. Opposition is especially pronounced among Republican or Republican-leaning women, 54% of whom said they plan to have their kids skip the vaccine.

UW epidemiologist Ajay Sethi calls the potential eligibility of 12- to 15-year-olds “a very important step to increase immunity to the virus in our community.”

Why Americans Are Eating So Many Snacks:

Good morning.

Easter in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 74.  Sunrise is 6:29 AM and sunset 7:25 PM, for 12h 55m 57s of daytime.  The moon is in its third quarter with 49.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1865, a day after Union forces capture Richmond, Virginia, President Lincoln visits the Confederate capital.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Shane Goldmacher reports How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations:

Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500.

It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help.

What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.

“It felt,” Russell said, “like it was a scam.”

But what the Blatts believed was duplicity was actually an intentional scheme to boost revenues by the Trump campaign and the for-profit company that processed its online donations, WinRed. Facing a cash crunch and getting badly outspent by the Democrats, the campaign had begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week until the election.

Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.

As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.

Tom McCarthy reports JD Vance eyes Ohio’s Senate seat as a working-class man – with millions in tech funds:

Before he has even confirmed that he will run for office, Vance has built a campaign slush fund worth at least $10m on the strength of donations from the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a formerly ardent Trump supporter, and the hedge fund heiress-slash-Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, Forbes magazine first reported.

….

The conventional wisdom among political strategists has long been that the Republican party, whose supporters are disproportionately white, faces a demographic timebomb as the US electorate diversifies. Trump knocked down the theory a bit last year by making inroads among Latinos and, to a lesser extent, African American men.

The “working-class” pitch is partly an appeal to those new Republican-curious voters. But Trump also pointed to another, powerful way for the Republican party to extend its reach: by winning an ever-greater share of working-class white voters, the kind who might have once belonged to a union and voted Democratic, but who backed Trump in both 2016 and 2020 by a margin 40 points greater than the national spread.

Republican strategists are brainstorming about how to retain those voters. An internal Republican memo revealed this week by Axios, called Cementing GOP as the Working Class Party, advised that “House Republicans can broaden our electorate, increase voter turnout, and take back the House by enthusiastically rebranding and reorienting as the Party of the Working Class.”

Christians celebrate Easter for second year during COVID pandemic restrictions:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 68.  Sunrise is 6:31 AM and sunset 7:24 PM, for 12h 53m 05s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 60.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1865, the Union Army liberates Richmond: “When Petersburg, Virginia, fell on the night of April 2, 1865, Confederate leaders hastily abandoned Richmond. The 5th, 6th, 7th, 19th, 36th, 37th and 38th Wisconsin Infantry participated in the occupation of Petersburg and Richmond. The brigade containing the 19th Wisconsin Infantry was the first to enter Richmond on the morning of April 3rd. Their regimental flag became the first to fly over the captured capital of the Confederacy when Colonel Samuel Vaughn planted it on Richmond City Hall.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Marisa Iati reports Cocaine, a submarine and cash: CEO killed in plane crash was bankrolling drug empire, feds say:

On the surface, Marty Tibbitts led a charmed life.

The CEO of a Michigan-based telecommunications company, he lived in a historic waterfront mansion with his high school sweetheart and co-founded the now-shuttered World Heritage Air Museum. Family and friends remembered his “big smile and fun demeanor” after he was killed in a plane crash in July 2018.

But behind the scenes, prosecutors allege, Tibbitts was quietly designing an underwater drone meant to shuttle large amounts of cocaine to Europe as part of a massive drug trafficking organization that they say he was financing.

A freshly unsealed federal indictment, first reported by the Detroit News, details a six-year investigation into the trafficking ring whose reach ensnared more than a dozen countries, including the United States, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico. The complaint brings criminal charges against an alleged drug baron arrested in North Carolina and portrays Tibbitts, 50, as a high-level co-conspirator.

  The Capital Times reports Cap Times’ Evjue Foundation donates $375,000, much of it to support food programs:

The board of the Evjue Foundation, the charitable arm of The Capital Times, recently approved $375,000 in grants to support seven local food programs and seven other local causes.

The biggest single grant, for $85,000, went to the Second Harvest Foodbank of Southern Wisconsin.

“We are incredibly grateful for the ongoing generosity of the Evjue Foundation,” said Michelle Orge, Second Harvest president and CEO.

“This funding is a critical component in our ability to meet the food needs of so many in our community who will need support in the coming months as we recover from the pandemic.”

The Evjue board also approved grants to other programs that provide food assistance, including $15,000 for NewBridge, and $10,000 each for the Badger Prairie Needs Network, the River Food Pantry, the Middleton Outreach Ministry, St. Vincent DePaul and the Mellowhood Foundation.

 Watch an Underwater Brawl in ‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ | Anatomy of a Scene: 

Good morning.

Good Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 50.  Sunrise is 6:32 AM and sunset 7:23 PM, for 12h 50m 13s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 70.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1865, defeat at the Third Battle of Petersburg forces the Army of Northern Virginia and the Confederate government to abandon Richmond, Virginia.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 David Smith writes Biden’s cabinet meeting proves the reality TV presidency wasn’t renewed:

Poor old Joe Biden. He might have won the electoral college and the popular vote but he’ll never feel the love of his underlings like Donald Trump did.

The former president’s first full cabinet meeting in June 2017 remains an unparalleled opera of oleaginousness. Secretary after secretary all but flung themselves at his feet, sang songs of praise and paid homage to the divine emperor of the universe.

Has any parent ever known such undying adoration from their child? Only King Lear from Goneril and Regan, perhaps. And most telling was the fact that the world was allowed to see it. Trump made sure it was one more chapter in his reality TV presidency.

Not really Biden’s style. His first cabinet meeting on Thursday was relocated to the East Room because of coronavirus restrictions – the 16 permanent members wore face masks and sat in a giant square with empty chairs between them – but was otherwise a return to the staid old way of doing things.

The main item on the agenda was not the American president’s sculpted handsomeness, nor his towering intellect, nor his indubitable virility, nor his ability to hit holes in one, but merely his freshly announced $2tn infrastructure plan.

Flanked by the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and the defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, with the vice-president, Kamala Harris, opposite, Biden said he was asking five cabinet members to “take special responsibility to explain the plan to the American public.”

  Brian Resnick writes Where billions of cicadas will emerge this spring (and over the next decade), in one map: 

For 17 years, cicadas do very little. They hang out in the ground, sucking sugar out of tree roots. Then, following this absurdly long hibernation, they emerge from the ground, sprout wings, make a ton of noise, have sex, and die within a few weeks. Their orphan progeny will then return to the ground and live the next 17 years in silence.

Over the next several weeks, billions of mid-Atlantic cicadas will hear the call of spring and emerge from their cozy bunkers. This year’s group, born in 2004, is known as Brood X. They’ll start their journey to the surface when soil temperatures reach around 64 degrees Fahrenheit.

While they’ll emerge in biblical numbers, they’ll be blanketing only a small slice of the country.

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 40.  Sunrise is 6:34 AM and sunset 7:22 PM, for 12h 47m 20s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 81.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 3:30 PM, and the Whitewater Fire Department is holding a business meeting via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1970, the Milwaukee Brewers are founded.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jesse McKinley, Danny Hakim, and Alexandra Alter report As Cuomo Sought $4 Million Book Deal, Aides Hid Damaging Death Toll:

As the coronavirus subsided in New York last year, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had begun pitching a book proposal that would center on his image as a hero of the pandemic. But by early last summer, both his book and image had hit a critical juncture.

Mr. Cuomo leaned on his top aide, Melissa DeRosa, for assistance. She attended video meetings with publishers, and helped him edit early drafts of the book. But there was also another, more pressing edit underway at the same time.

An impending Health Department report threatened to disclose a far higher number of nursing home deaths related to the coronavirus than the Cuomo administration had previously made public. Ms. DeRosa and other top aides expressed concern about the higher death toll, and, after their intervention, the number — which had appeared in the second sentence of the report — was removed from the final version.

The revisions occurred as the governor was on the brink of a huge payoff: a book deal that ended with a high offer of more than $4 million, according to people with knowledge of the book’s bidding process.

 Jessica Brandt writes Washington Needs a Plan for Pushing Back on Autocratic Advances:

The United States and other liberal democracies are engaged in a persistent, asymmetric competition with autocracies—one that is playing out far from traditional military battlefields, in interlocking domains of politics, economics, technology and information. Authoritarian challengers seeking to preserve their grip on power at home have pursued deliberate, though at times subtle, strategies designed to exploit the vulnerabilities of liberal democracies while compensating for vulnerabilities of their own, as they endeavor to fashion a world safe for, if not converted to, their worldview.

….

The United States has been slow to recognize this contest and to develop a national strategy to push back, allowing autocrats to seize the initiative by taking advantage of the openness of its systems. But it is awakening to the challenge. “We’re at an inflection point between those who argue that, given all the challenges we face … autocracy is the best way forward … and those who understand that democracy is essential to meeting those challenges,” President Biden argued in a speech before the Munich Security Conference in February.

Working with its partners and allies, Washington must regain the initiative, and quickly. Fortunately, there are steps the new administration can take to reset the competition on favorable terms, including several that can be implemented without an act of Congress early in Biden’s presidency. That’s important given the urgency of the task and the likelihood that legislative progress, crucial though it may be, is likely to be slow going—even as unified Democratic control opens up new possibilities to make headway.

With that in mind, the Biden administration should start by organizing itself to integrate technology considerations into policy deliberations, recognizing that technology is the most intense domain of competition today—one that underpins all others. Power and influence are being exercised in new places—from social media platforms on American smartphones to international technical standards-setting bodies that once seemed arcane—and that has challenged policy processes and bureaucratic structures.

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 39.  Sunrise is 6:36 AM and sunset 7:20 PM, for 12h 44m 26s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 89.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1889, the Eiffel Tower officially opens.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Shelley K. Mesch reports Alliant Energy proposes $515 million solar developments; MGE buys into wind farm:

Alliant Energy plans to buy and construct six more solar farms for $515 million to meet its goal of 1,000 megawatts of solar power in Wisconsin by 2023, the company announced Wednesday.

The six projects would add 414 megawatts — enough to power about 100,000 typical homes for a year — to the company’s grid, pending regulatory approval from the Public Service Commission.

With approval, Alliant would develop solar farms in Dodge, Grant, Green, Rock and Waushara counties and would purchase another plant — being developed by National Grid Renewables — in Dodge County.

Alliant requested approval last year to purchase six other projects under development by other companies totaling 675 megawatts in the state for about $900 million. That proposal is still awaiting the PSC’s response.

 AFP reports Antony Blinken says the US will ‘stand up for human rights everywhere’:

The United States will speak out about human rights everywhere including in allies and at home, secretary of state Antony Blinken has vowed, turning a page from Donald Trump as he bemoaned deteriorations around the world.

Presenting the state department’s first human rights report under President Joe Biden, the new top US diplomat took some of his most pointed, yet still veiled, swipes at the approach of the Trump administration.

“Some have argued that it’s not worth it for the US to speak up forcefully for human rights – or that we should highlight abuse only in select countries, and only in a way that directly advances our national interests,” Blinken told reporters in clear reference to Trump’s approach.

“But those people miss the point. Standing up for human rights everywhere is in America’s interests,” he said.

“And the Biden-Harris administration will stand against human rights abuses wherever they occur, regardless of whether the perpetrators are adversaries or partners.”

 Michael Gerson writes The GOP is facing a sickness deeper than the coronavirus: