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Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.29.21

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of twenty-seven.  Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset 5:05 PM, for 9h 54m 12s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1980, the Rubik’s Cube makes its international debut at the Ideal Toy Corp. in Earl’s Court, London.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 David E. Sanger reports Biden Team Rushes to Take Over Government, and Oust Trump Loyalists (‘President Biden named nearly all of his cabinet secretaries and their immediate deputies before he took office, but his real grasp on the levers of power has come several layers down’):

When President Biden swore in a batch of recruits for his new administration in a teleconferenced ceremony late last week, it looked like the country’s biggest Zoom call. In fact, Mr. Biden was installing roughly 1,000 high-level officials in about a quarter of all of the available political appointee jobs in the federal government.

At the same time, a far less visible transition was taking place: the quiet dismissal of holdovers from the Trump administration, who have been asked to clean out their offices immediately, whatever the eventual legal consequences.

If there has been a single defining feature of the first week of the Biden administration, it has been the blistering pace at which the new president has put his mark on what President Donald J. Trump dismissed as the hostile “Deep State” and tried so hard to dismantle.

David Smith reports ‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy:

Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.

Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.

Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

“This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.

Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship.

(Trump could be wholly sympathetic [to Russia] without being either an agent or an asset.)

 David Folkenflik reports Trumpism At Voice Of America: Firings, Foosball And A Conspiracy Theory:

(Michael) Pack’s seven-month tenure offered a near-perfect encapsulation of Trumpism. Once confirmed by the Senate, Pack announced his charge was “to drain the swamp, to root out corruption, and to deal with these issues of [anti-Trump] bias,” as he put it on The Federalist Radio Hour, a conservative podcast. Pack obsessed over staff loyalty, embraced conspiracy theories and refused to allow visa extensions for his foreign journalists.

….

“I have dealt with federal agencies for almost 30 years, through both Democrat and Republican leadership,” said Mark S. Zaid, an attorney who has been representing several USAGM and VOA senior leaders who filed formal whistleblower complaints against Pack. “I have never encountered as many senior political officials to be so petty, vindictive, arrogant, egotistical and mean-spirited, epitomizing the worst of Trump, as I did since Michael Pack arrived at USAGM as CEO.”

Dominion to Sue More People Over Election Misinformation:

America, Culture, Freedom of Speech, Justice, Local Government, Race

‘A New Generation Challenges the Heartland’

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 Last July, Tim Craig and Aaron Williams reported A new generation challenges the heartland (‘Big changes in small towns are fueling a racial justice movement across the Midwest’). They wrote last summer that

The number of young people of color living in the Midwest has surged over the past decade, as the older white population has nearly stalled. Forty percent of the nation’s counties are experiencing such demographic transformations — a phenomenon fueling the Black Lives Matter protests that have swept the country and forced racial reckonings in communities, colleges and corporations nationwide.

A Washington Post review of census data released last month [June 2020] showed that minorities make up nearly half of the under-30 population nationwide compared to just 27 percent of the over-55 population, signaling that the United States is on the brink of seismic changes in culture, politics and values.

The protests reflect demographic changes that social scientists have long predicted would hit America around 2020 as the country moves closer toward becoming majority-minority. As this young, diverse cohort enters adulthood, it’s challenging the cultural norms and political views of older white Americans, said Stefan M. Bradley, a historian and professor of African American studies at Loyola Marymount University.

A few remarks —

The story from July strikes me as sad, as there is so much progress to be made, yet hopeful, as there’s a better chance for progress with national support now than there was last July.

I’m not part of a local organization advancing these issues (as it’s easier to write from a remove — different people play different roles in a community). Needless to say, I’ve watched with interest and attention the rise of racial justice organizations in Whitewater (as there’s more than one group oriented this way).

On language: of course Black Lives Matter, and the expression is plainly inclusive (that is, ‘Black lives matter as much as any other lives’). Opponents’ efforts to turn the expression into an exclusionary one are either semantic ignorance or bad-faith arguing.

Not every local Black Lives Matter group will advance the same goals. Within a local group, there will be differences in policy positions. Some local groups’ goals are ones with which one could agree, and others disagree.

Not all small towns will be as receptive as others. A first formula: the greater the grip of conspiracy theories & fears about radicals, antifa, socialists, etc., the less receptive the town. A second formula: the greater the grip of conspiracy theories & fears, the worse off the town.

The argument that small towns should not address national issues descends into divorcing small towns from the nation. Addressing national concerns only in code (where one uses euphemisms for fear of upsetting someone) or avoiding certain topics entirely sends the message that national concerns should be restricted from open local discussion. Repeated nebulous complaints about Whitewater as too political or too partisan cast aspersions not only on debate about trivial matters but on vital matters, too.

No, and no again: a free people should – and must – be able to advance their concerns about justice without officials’ hushing and shushing.

As for this new generation challenging the heartland, one hopes they keep going.

See also Local ‘Apolitical’ Isn’t Apolitical and Never Was.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.28.21

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighteen.  Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 5:03 PM, for 9h 51m 54s of daytime.  The moon is full with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

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

On this day in 1959, Vince Lombardi is named Packers coach.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Alex Ward reports Biden had his first call with Putin. He said everything Trump wouldn’t: 

Biden pressed Putin on the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, which many suspect was an assassination attempt ordered by the Kremlin, as well as the government’s arrest of hundreds of protesters who demonstrated in support of Navalny last weekend.

Earlier on Tuesday, the US and six other G7 nations released a statement condemning the Kremlin for the poisoning, the protest crackdown, and for detaining Navalny last week on seemingly bogus charges.

During the call, Biden also affirmed America’s support for Ukraine’s sovereignty, which has been under threat since Russia invaded the country in 2014. During his confirmation hearing to be secretary of state last week, Antony Blinken told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Biden administration would continue to support Kyiv with lethal aid.

Biden also brought up three major issues related to Moscow’s belligerence toward the United States: Russia’s interference in the 2020 election; its alleged ties to the hacking of dozens of US government agencies and Fortune 500 companies by infiltrating SolarWindssoftware; and reports that Russia had offered cash bounties to Afghan militants to kill American troops in Afghanistan.

See also Whitehouse.gov, Readout of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

Oliver Darcy writes of Zuckerberg’s Big Decision:

Mark Zuckerberg built one of the world’s most powerful — if not the most powerful — radicalization engines in history. For years and years, his platform has algorithmically pushed people into ideological political bubbles and reinforced their existing worldviews. It has enabled and rewarded media organizations profiting off of hyper-partisan trash and outright disinformation. And it has looked the other way as conspiracy theories, such as QAnon, flourished on the site

All the while, Zuckerberg was aware. But he defended his platform’s practices, while making a fortune, repeatedly hiding behind a commitment to free expression as reason to allow for poison to be injected into the American political conversation. But on Wednesday, Zuckerberg announced what can only be viewed as an about-face.

The Facebook chief observed on a call with investors — in which the company posted an $11.2 billion profit in Q4, an increase of more than 50% from the year prior — that “there has been a trend across society that a lot of things have become politicized and politics have had a way of creeping into everything.” (Hmm, I wonder what might have contributed to this!) “One of the top pieces of feedback that we’re hearing from our community right now is that people don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services,” Zuckerberg added.

As a result, Zuckerberg said Facebook is now considering steps it can take to reduce the volume of political content shown to users in News Feed. Additionally, Facebook will continue a practice of not recommending civic and political groups to users, a move that had been implemented ahead of the 2020 presidential election…

(Emphasis in original.)

Teacher Cathy Cluck goes on road trip to teach students from historical sites across U.S.:

America, Authoritarianism, Congress, Documentary, Never Trump, Politics, Trump, Trumpism

Frontline: Trump’s American Carnage

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In the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, FRONTLINE investigates how Donald Trump’s presidency laid the groundwork for bitter divisions, violence and ultimately insurrection.

“Trump’s American Carnage” investigates Trump’s siege on his enemies, the media and even the leaders of his own party, who for years ignored the warning signs of what was to come.

The documentary is from veteran FRONTLINE filmmaker Michael Kirk, who with his team has made five installments of FRONTLINE’s election-year series The Choice and nearly 20 documentaries about the Trump and Obama eras.

Culture, Local Government, Politics

Local ‘Apolitical’ Isn’t Apolitical and Never Was

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One sometimes hears that local politics should be purely local, without regard to state or (especially) national issues. Local politics has never been purely local, and in any event purely local is a stunted standard.

For decades, in small cities like Whitewater, the disingenuous claim of an apolitical local atmosphere belied a center-right politics. Which candidates ran, what they felt about economic policy, their stands on social issues: these were all political positions falsely presented as apolitical, as though conservative positions weren’t about politics but merely an expression of the natural order of the known universe.

One sometimes heard that the only goal was to have adults in the room. Most of these adults tuned out to be comfortable champions of the right, pushing their views while insisting there were no other legitimate views.

Since Walker in Wisconsin, when state politics became more divided along ideological lines, and increasing under Trump across the nation, a new generation of critics of Walker’s and Trump’s positions has come on the scene, including locally. In response to that rising local opposition, the right cries out: don’t be so political, that’s not how we talk around here.

The same small-town conservatives who advanced decades of right-leaning policies in a Trojan horse of supposed apolitical common sense now bemoan open, candid efforts to advance a contrary politics of the center or center-left.

(Whitewater’s not a libertarian city, and isn’t likely to become one. An alternative politics in Whitewater is arising along center-left, not libertarian, lines. Whitewater is also not a radical city. Claims about radicalism in Whitewater are as credible as Bigfoot sightings: someone may have seen something, but if so it was an oversized raccoon.)

In any event, the quality of local politics these past decades has been poor: riddled with dodgy data, weak reasoning, and self-promotion. A more competitive local political scene will compel better effort all around. These changes will, of course, be unsettling to those who’ve lived self-satisfied and self-promoting.

Too bad. No one is conscripted into politics, as elected or appointed officials. If a more competitive local political scene, with a greater range of ideological choices, is too hard for the right, there’s always life in the private sector. If the center-left doesn’t try to make its case, then they’ve squandered the moment.

In all of this, if it’s too troublesome for elected or appointed officials to advance open political principles, then they’re not suited to political office.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.27.21

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of twenty.  Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 5:02 PM, for 9h 49m 37s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets via audiovisual conferencing at 10:30 AM, and the Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4:30 PM.

On this day in 1967, Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee are killed in a fire during a test of their Apollo 1 spacecraft at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 David Leonhardt writes Why is there a big debate over the filibuster? Because it benefits one political party much more than the other: 

If you examine the history of the filibuster — a Senate rule requiring a supermajority vote on many bills, rather than a straight majority — you will quickly notice something: It has benefited the political right much more than the left.

In the 1840s (before the term “filibuster” existed), Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina used the technique to protect slavery.

Over the next century, Southern Democrats repeatedly used the filibuster to prevent Black Americans from voting and to defeat anti-lynching bills.

From the 1950s through the 1990s, Senate Republicans, working with some conservative Democrats, blocked the passage of laws that would have helped labor unions organize workers.

Over the past two decades, the filibuster has enabled Republicans to defeat a long list of progressive bills, on climate change, oil subsidies, campaign finance, Wall Street regulation, corporate offshoring, gun control, immigration, gender pay equality and Medicare expansion.

Jennifer Rubin writes 50 things that are better already:

1. You can ignore Twitter

2. The White House briefing room is not an Orwellian nightmare of lies

3. We are now confronting white domestic terrorism

4. We are not paying for golf trips

5. There are no presidential relatives in government

6. The tenor of hearings is sober and serious

7. Qualified and knowledgeable nominees have been selected for senior spots

8. We have a first lady who engages with the public

9. We have not heard a word from presidential children

10. We are now tough on Russian human rights abuses

11. We get normal readouts of sane conversations between the president and foreign leaders

12. The White House philosophy is to underpromise and overdeliver, not the other way around

How Dala Horses Are Handmade in One of the Last Factories in Sweden:

Coronavirus, Education, School District

Whitewater School Board Meeting, 1.25.21: 6 Points

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Updated 1.27.21 with meeting video, embedded above.

Original post follows —

Monday night’s school board open session saw, among other items, language translation of the meeting, a report on special education open enrollment, mention of an initiative to restructure and expand athletic programs, mention of a recruiting effort to attract more students, review of the student population count, and change of title for Dr. Pate-Hefty from district administrator to superintendent.

The full agenda for the meeting is available (the board removed item 10B from consideration).

A few remarks —

 1. Live Translation into Spanish During a Zoom Meeting.  For many years, public boards and commissions have mentioned the importance of communication, communication, and more communication. A significant portion of that communication depends on translation. Offering a simultaneous Spanish language translation through a feature of a live audio-visual session is one of the best communication decisions any public body in Whitewater could make.

A live session in English, and a live session in Spanish, available via the web: the Whitewater Schools should continue this way. If there should be glitches, then they can be overcome through patient effort.

Whitewater’s new superintendent, here for less than a year, has done what we who have lived here far longer have never done.

 2. Athletic Programs.  A review of athletic programs, conferences to which Whitewater belongs, intramural possibilities, and an expanded role for an athletic director district-wide, makes sense. There was no proposal last night, merely mention of drafting one. It’s a big project, but as athletics are an important part of a school district’s offerings, the district should undertake the review.

 3. Special Education Open Enrollment.  Open enrollment is available to all regular students in Whitewater, but open enrollment for special education students is naturally limited to the number of teachers certified accordingly. (Special education for resident students, unlike that for open enrollment prospects, is not limited in the same way; the district has an obligation to provide special education services to residents for whatever number of residents qualify under the law.) The board approved recommended special education open-enrollment limits. See Graph for OE presentation January 2021 and 2021-22 Motion to approve the following space limitations for OE applicants.

 4. Overall Enrollment. Student populations may shift through slow-moving demographics or fast-moving events (like school-selection during a pandemic). There are perhaps a few who are worried about trends, but concern about these shifts yet seems ill-founded. Budget assumptions about enrollment should be conservative, but needn’t be worrisome. See 2nd Friday Enrollment Comparison.

 5. Recruiting New Students. Updates to the district website, new flyers, etc., will be part of an upcoming recruitment effort. There was no presentation of that recruitment plan last night, but rather advance notice that there will be a future board presentation. All worthy recruitment begins with this: plain and honest descriptions. This small community presents itself worthily (and effectively) when it presents itself accurately, realistically, and sensibly.

6. Superintendent. For many years, the Whitewater Schools have had a district administrator while superintendent has been the more common title elsewhere. Last night, the board adopted (restored, truly) the title of superintendent for Whitewater. This change is long overdue. There’s no legal impediment to the change (and in any event, legal realism would hold that the law should adopt conventional terms and practices where possible).

Now, the harder work: Whitewater should resume calling a school library a library, rather than an IMC, LMC, Run-DMC…whatever. Libraries store books, pictures, recordings, etc. There’s no need to describe that collection as instructional materials. If they’re in the school library, then one should know plainly that they’re instructional materials.

See Library of Congress, University of Chicago Library, Little Free Library Project…

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.26.21

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see morning snow with a high of twenty-eight.  Sunrise is 7:13 AM and sunset 5:01 PM, for 9h 45m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 94.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4:30 PM.

It’s a snow day for the Whitewater Schools. Play responsibly.

On this day in 1915, an act of Congress establishes Rocky Mountain National Park.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Antonia Noori Farzan reports Wealthy couple chartered a plane to the Yukon, took vaccines meant for Indigenous elders, authorities said:

Located deep in Canada’s Yukon, the remote community of Beaver Creek is home to only about 100 people, most of them members of the White River First Nation.

So when an unfamiliar couple who claimed to work at a local motel showed up at a mobile clinic to receive coronavirus vaccines, it didn’t take long for locals to become suspicious. Authorities soon found that the couple were actually wealthy Vancouver residents who had chartered a private plane to the isolated outpost so that they could get shots intended to protect vulnerable Indigenous elders.

….

Canadian media outlets have identified the couple as casino executive Rodney Baker, 55, and his wife, Ekaterina Baker, a 32-year-old actress whose recent credits include the 2020 films “Fatman” and “Chick Fight.” Each faces fines totaling the equivalent of about $900 for violating quarantine guidelines. Neither could immediately be reached for comment late Monday, and it was not clear if they have attorneys.

Investor disclosures show that Baker earned more than $10.6 million in 2019 as CEO and president of the Great Canadian Gaming Corporation, which owns more than 20 casinos across Canada and isthe subject of a separate money laundering probe. He resigned Sunday after charges were filed. A spokesman said that Great Canadian “has no tolerance for actions that run counter to the company’s objectives and values.”

Ramenda Cyrus writes A Year Ago Today, Trump Said COVID Would “All Work Out Well”:

One year ago, on the same day that the CDC announced a test for COVID-19 and a day after Wuhan had gone into lockdown, Donald Trump tweeted the following:

China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!

The relevant context for this tweet isn’t just the disease that would soon become a pandemic. Trump had struck a trade deal with China just days before, and this tweet was part of the political effort to maintain an air of sunny relations with a country that only four months earlier he’d called “threat to the world,” a country he would be demonizing again by spring.

It will all work out well. The English language is not yet evolved enough to accurately describe what Trump managed to do on Twitter during his presidency. He loved walking the line between lying and misleading, between sincerity and insincerity, the bullshitter-in-chief who sometimes seemed to bullshit himself most of all. This case was no different. His optimism was unfounded, unrealistic, and ultimately self-serving, and that was clear even then, when we had no idea how the coronavirus would unfold.

Harriet Tubman $20 Bill in the Works Under Biden Admin:

Government Spending, Lobbyists, Television

Overreaching: WisconsinEye Wants a Paywall and Government Funding

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WisconsinEye is an online and cable network that broadcasts and publishes videos of state government meetings. It’s a useful nonprofit service, that has run on private donations.

As donations are drying up, WisconsinEye president Jon Henkes has a two-part plan: erect a paywall (for content older than a day) and seek state funding. Patrick Marley summarizes the plan in WisconsinEye to put up paywall and seek state funding as donations dry up:

Under its new plan, WisconsinEye will continue to provide its live coverage for free, but subscriptions will be required to watch events that are more than 24 hours old. Access to all content will cost $9.99 a month.

….

In addition, the network wants to get money from the state in two ways.

First, it is asking lawmakers to provide it with annual payments, which Henkes described as a fee for its services. He did not say how much he wants and legislative leaders did not answer questions on whether they were willing to provide the network with direct funding.

Second, WisconsinEye is urging lawmakers to increase the fees lobbyists pay to help fund its operations. Many organizations and their lobbyists pay $750 or more every two years to try to influence the Legislature.

This is a bad idea, chiefly because a publisher that seeks a paywall (fair enough) shouldn’t also receive government subsidies. A private nonprofit that wants a paywall should always be free to offer its publication that way; to ask for government subsidies on top of a paywall is overreaching. (The WisconsinEye plan shows the organization knows that the paywall will not generate enough money, and looks suspiciously like an effort to make government subsidies more palatable by claiming they’re trying everything. If that should be true, then the paywall would take away access to government information while giving little in revenue in return.)

Using a portion of increased lobbying fees as a part of government funding is additionally (if not more) troublesome: when lobbyists know that part of their fees go to a publication, they’ll begin to lobby that publication and the government that allocates those fees for more favorable coverage.

Henkes’s WisconsinEye funding plan would limit access to non-subscribers while expecting government to subsidize those private limits, and would draw government funds from the group in the state ecosystem that’s closest to suckerfish and barnacles.

It’s a bad idea all around. If private donations won’t suffice (and how hard they’ve sought new donors one can’t tell), and if legislators still feel WisconsinEye merits government funding, then almost any government revenue source would be better than using a portion of lobbyists’ fees.

City, Film

Rescheduled: Thursday, January 28th, 1 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Seraphim Falls

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This Thursday, January 28th at 1 PM (having been rescheduled from 1.26 due to expected inclement weather), there will be a showing of Seraphim Falls @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:

(Western/Action/Thriller/Chase)
Rated R (Violence, extreme action)

1 hour, 55 minutes (2007)

Now for something totally different—-a two-fisted, good old Western!

Five years after the end of the Civil War, a former Confederate colonel (Liam Neeson), seeking vengeance for a wartime atrocity, leads a posse into the snowy mountains of Oregon on a relentless hunt for the Union officer (Pierce Brosnan) he holds responsible. Breathtaking scenery, exciting stunts and superb acting. They just don’t make movies like this anymore!

Masks are required and you must register for a seat either by calling, emailing or going online at https://schedulesplus.com/wwtr/kiosk. There will be a limit of 10 people for the time slot. No walk-ins.

One can find more information about Seraphim Falls at the Internet Movie Database.

Enjoy.

Music

Monday Music: Junior Mance, Georgia on my Mind (Live in Concert, Germany 2002)

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See also Junior Mance, jazz pianist whose chords were built on the blues, dies at 92:

“Living in Chicago, that was Bluesville,” he told Newsday in 1987. “There were people around like Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Memphis Slim; boogie-woogie players like Jim Yancey, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons. When I was a kid, my mother loved the blues and bought nothing but blues records. When I started making gigs with horn players, I didn’t turn my back on the blues.”

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.25.21

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty.  Sunrise is 7:14 AM and sunset 4:59 PM, for 9h 45m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 88.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4:30 PM, Downtown Whitewater’s board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM in closed session and 7 PM in open session.

On this day in 1945, the Battle of the Bulge ends in an Allied (principally American) victory. 

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jacqueline Alemany writes Distance from the Jan. 6 Capitol riots may ultimately prove to be a double-edged sword:

It can provide GOP leaders with some space to navigate tricky terrain, but it also gives Democrats more time to investigate.

“As the days go on, more and more evidence comes out about the president’s involvement in the incitement of this insurrection, the incitement of this riot, and also his dereliction of duty once it was going on,” House impeachment manager Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) told NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro.

“I think we’re going to get more and more evidence over the next few weeks, as if it’s not enough that he sent an angry mob down the Mall to invade the Capitol, didn’t try to stop it and a police officer was killed,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said, pointing to the bombshell New York Times story about Trump’s desire to install an attorney general sympathetic to nullifying Biden’s legitimate election. “I don’t really know what else you need to know. The facts were there.”

 Glenn Kessler writes Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims as president. Nearly half came in his final year:

For more than 10 years, The Fact Checker has assessed the accuracy of claims made by politicians in both parties, and that practice will continue. But Trump, with his unusually flagrant disregard for facts, posed a new challenge, as so many of his claims did not merit full-fledged fact checks. What started as a weekly feature — “What Trump got wrong on Twitter this week” — turned into a project for Trump’s first 100 days. Then, in response to reader requests, the Trump database was maintained for four years, despite the increasing burden of keeping it up.

The database became an untruth tracker for the ages, widely cited around the world as a measuring stick of Trump’s presidency — and as of noon Wednesday it was officially retired.

Whether such a tracker will be necessary for future presidents is unclear. Nonetheless, the impact of Trump’s rhetoric may reverberate for years.

“As a result of Trump’s constant lying through the presidential megaphone, more Americans are skeptical of genuine facts than ever before,” presidential historian Michael Beschloss said.

How Bioplastic Is Made From Avocado Waste:

Film

Film: The Fast & Furious Art of the Car Chase

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In the movies, there’s nothing quite like the thrill of the car chase. The best ones create the same adrenaline rush in their audiences as they do in their characters. Generating that heightened, you-are-there energy is a feat that involves meticulous preparation, including dozens of decisions about camera placement, vehicle speed and so much more.

So how to get it all just right? We went to a Hollywood expert for answers. With five “Fast & Furious” films to his credit (including the delayed but anticipated “F9”), the director Justin Lin has helped craft some of the most elaborate and exciting chases in recent cinema.

In this video, we asked Lin to break down five breathtaking chases from movie history (including one from his own “Fast Five”) and explain what makes them so effective.