Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see morning snow with a high of forty.  Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, for 9h 25m 01s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 72.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1859, Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Sheera Frenkel reports How Misinformation ‘Superspreaders’ Seed False Election Theories:

New research from Avaaz, a global human rights group, the Elections Integrity Partnership and The New York Times shows how a small group of people — mostly right-wing personalities with outsized influence on social media — helped spread the false voter-fraud narrative that led to those rallies.

That group, like the guests of a large wedding held during the pandemic, were “superspreaders” of misinformation around voter fraud, seeding falsehoods that include the claims that dead people voted, voting machines had technical glitches, and mail-in ballots were not correctly counted.

“Because of how Facebook’s algorithm functions, these superspreaders are capable of priming a discourse,” said Fadi Quran, a director at Avaaz. “There is often this assumption that misinformation or rumors just catch on. These superspreaders show that there is an intentional effort to redefine the public narrative.”

Across Facebook, there were roughly 3.5 million interactions — including likes, comments and shares — on public posts referencing “Stop the Steal” during the week of Nov. 3, according to the research. Of those, the profiles of Eric Trump, Diamond and Silk and Mr. Straka accounted for a disproportionate share — roughly 6 percent, or 200,000, of those interactions.

While the group’s impact was notable, it did not come close to the spread of misinformation promoted by President Trump since then. Of the 20 most-engaged Facebook posts over the last week containing the word “election,” all were from Mr. Trump, according to Crowdtangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool. All of those claims were found to be false or misleading by independent fact checkers.

The baseless election fraud claims have been used by the president and his supporters to challenge the vote in a number of states. Reports that malfunctioning voting machines, intentionally miscounted mail-in votes and other irregularities affected the vote were investigated by election officials and journalists who found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

 Annette McGivney reports Trump officials rush to mine desert haven native tribes consider holy:

Last month tribes discovered that the date for the completion of a crucial environmental review process has suddenly been moved forward by a full year, to December 2020, even as the tribes are struggling with a Covid outbreak that has stifled their ability to respond. If the environmental review is completed before Trump leaves office, the tribes may be unable to stop the mine.

In a meeting with environmental groups, local officials said that the push was occurring because “we are getting pressure from the highest level at the Department of Agriculture,” according to notes from the meeting seen by the Guardian. The department oversees the US Forest Service, which is in charge of Oak Flat.

As the curtain closes on the Trump era, officials are hurrying through a host of environmentally destructive projects that will benefit corporate interests. These include opening the Arctic national wildlife refuge to oil and gas drilling and rolling back protections on endangered gray wolves.

In Oak Flat, the beneficiaries will be a company called Resolution Copper and its two Anglo-Australian parent firms, the mining conglomerates Rio Tinto and BHP.

Italy’s hospital relief: Hotels repurposed to accommodate coronavirus patients:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of thirty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:58 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, for 9h 26m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 62.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Schools’ board will meet in closed session at 6:15 PM, and in open session via audiovisual conferencing at 7 PM. 

On this day in 1992, the first smartphone, the IBM Simon, is introduced at COMDEX in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Rosalind S. Helderman and Dan Simmons report In last-gasp maneuver, Trump campaign tries to invalidate thousands of votes as Wisconsin recount gets underway:

President Trump’s campaign is seeking to use a recount of the presidential election in Wisconsin to attempt to invalidate tens of thousands of votes in the state, making sweeping challenges to whole categories of ballots cast in the state’s two Democratic-leaning counties in his last-gasp effort to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s win.

As a recount began on Friday in Dane and Milwaukee counties — home to the cities of Madison and Milwaukee — Trump lawyers argued that officials should not merely retabulate all the votes cast in the Nov. 3 election to reconfirm they’d been counted properly.

Instead, they argued that large batches of ballots had been improperly accepted and counted in the first place. In both Dane and Milwaukee, they sought to disqualify all absentee ballots that had been cast before Election Day in person, rather than by mail.

….

Rick Esenberg, a conservative election law expert and president of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, said he did not believe the Trump campaign would fare better on the issue in court.

While he said there are “legitimate” questions about the state’s rules for people to declare themselves indefinitely confined that the state might examine in the future, he did not believe a court would be inclined to throw out the ballots given that it would be difficult to determine quickly whether any specific voters had unfairly taken advantage of the provision.

“I think it’s highly unlikely that the issue could result in a change in the outcome,” he said.

Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti report Republicans Rewrite an Old Playbook on Disenfranchising Black Americans
(‘As they try to somehow reverse Joe Biden’s victory, President Trump and his allies have targeted heavily Black cities, painting them as corrupt and trying to throw out huge numbers of votes’):

In Pennsylvania, President Trump and Republicans loyal to him have sought to overturn his defeat by making false claims about widespread voting fraud in Philadelphia.

In Georgia, they have sought to reverse his loss by leveling similar accusations against Atlanta.

In Michigan, Republicans have zeroed in on Detroit, whose elections system the president has falsely portrayed as so flawed that its entire vote should be thrown out.

Lost on no one in those cities is what they have in common: large populations of Black voters.

And there is little ambiguity in the way Mr. Trump and his allies are falsely depicting them as bastions of corruption.

“‘Democrat-led city’ — that’s code for Black,” said the Rev. William J. Barber II, the president of the civil rights group Repairers of the Breach. “They’re coupling ‘city’ and ‘fraud,’ and those two words have been used throughout the years. This is an old playbook being used in the modern time, and people should be aware of that.”

Big Tech, Vaccine Winners, Black Friday: 3 Things in Markets:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-five.  Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, for 9h 28m 32s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 53.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

At 10 AM, Whitewater will conduct an audit, as a random selection of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, of Ward 12, Jefferson County, Wisconsin.

On this day in 1963, President Kennedy is assassinated and Texas Governor John Connally is seriously wounded by Lee Harvey Oswald, who also kills Dallas Police officer J. D. Tippit after fleeing the scene.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Danny Hakim, Mike McIntire, William K. Rashbaum, and Ben Protess report Trump Tax Write-Offs Are Ensnared in 2 New York Fraud Investigations:

Two separate New York State fraud investigations into President Trump and his businesses, one criminal and one civil, have expanded to include tax write-offs on millions of dollars in consulting fees, some of which appear to have gone to Ivanka Trump, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The inquiries — a criminal investigation by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and a civil one by the state attorney general, Letitia James — are being conducted independently. But both offices issued subpoenas to the Trump Organization in recent weeks for records related to the fees, the people said.

The subpoenas were the latest steps in the two investigations of the Trump Organization, and underscore the legal challenges awaiting the president when he leaves office in January. There is no indication that his daughter is a focus of either inquiry, which the Trump Organization has derided as politically motivated.

The development follows a recent New York Times examination of more than two decades of Mr. Trump’s tax records, which found that he had paid little or no federal income taxes in most years, largely because of his chronic business losses.

Adam Winkler writes Trump’s wildest claims are going nowhere in court. Thank legal ethics:

Trump’s legal strategy has run aground — in no small part because of legal ethics. While lawyers are often cast as unscrupulous and immoral, they are required to follow a strict code of professional responsibility established by state bars. The famous duty of lawyers to keep a client’s confidences, for instance, comes from these ethical codes. Law students must take a course in legal ethics, the bar exam includes a section on ethical rules, and continuing-education requirements emphasize lawyers’ duties to clients and to the courts.

Two ethical rules have been fatal to Trump’s election lawsuits in state after state: the lawyer’s duty of candor to a court and the lawyer’s duty to avoid frivolous claims. The president can spew all the theories he wants, and his advocates can say whatever they like on television, but because of these two ethical duties, Trump’s lawyers can make claims before courts only if they can back them up with actual evidence.

….

The duty of lawyers to avoid making frivolous claims has also hurt Trump’s efforts to use the courts to overturn the election. Lawyers are prohibited from making assertions in court or in their filings “unless there is a basis in law and fact for doing so that is not frivolous,” in the words of the ABA’s Model Rules. Lawyers have to be especially careful about this one, because judges can impose monetary sanctions against them on the spot. A whole section of the rules of federal civil proceedings specifies the duties lawyers have to ensure that the factual claims they’re making are supported by evidence and that the legal ones have a sound basis, too.

Animal Stories You Might’ve Missed During Election Week:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-four.  Sunrise is 6:55 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 30m 22s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 43.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1969, the first permanent ARPANET link is established between UCLA and SRI.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Richard Fausset, Nick Corasaniti, and Maggie Haberman report Georgia and Michigan Deliver Blows to Trump’s Efforts to Undo the Election:

President Trump’s attempt to undo the election results was undercut twice by fellow Republicans on Friday, as Georgia became the first contested state to certify Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory and Michigan lawmakers — after meeting with the president — said they would not intervene in their state’s election certification process.

After steady complaints by Mr. Trump about the Georgia vote count and a methodical hand recount, Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, bluntly declared on Friday, “I live by the motto that numbers don’t lie,” and made official the final tally showing Mr. Biden had defeated Mr. Trump by 12,670 votes, out of roughly five million cast. Gov. Brian Kemp, also a Republican, tersely stated that he would sign the certification.

Hours later, a delegation of seven Michigan Republicans, who had met with Mr. Trump at the White House at his request, said they had no information “that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan.” Mr. Biden beat Mr. Trump in the state by nearly three percentage points.

“We will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors, just as we have said throughout this election,” the state’s top two Republican leaders said in a statement issued by the State Legislature.

“The candidates who win the most votes win elections and Michigan’s electoral votes,” the statement said. Mr. Trump’s outreach to state Republicans amid the ongoing vote certification process was condemned by Democrats and election law experts as a dangerous intrusion into the election process.

White House aides declined to respond to questions about the meeting.

 Kyle Swenson reports ‘Can’t eat a gift card’: Rural food banks fight to put turkeys on the table:

Like similar organizations anchored in cities and suburbs, food banks in rural areas have seen a spike in demand since the pandemic hit in March. But rural pantries run into their own unique challenges, according to Blue Ridge’s [chief executive Michael] McKee.

“The pantries we are working with are in rural areas, so they’re smaller and they rely entirely on volunteers mostly in their 60s and 70s, so when the pandemic hit, we were quite concerned about the ability of our partner agencies to stay open,” he said. “A lot of these areas, they are 40 minutes or more away from the nearest towns. Therefore, for the people in these communities, there are no other pantries nearby. They may have nothing else.”

Blue Ridge’s distribution jumped from 106,000 individuals in February to 141,000 in May, McKee said. But despite the demand coupled with the pandemic, few of Blue Ridge’s partner agencies closed down during the virus’s first wave, mainly because the volunteers recognized they were all that was standing between their clients and hunger. “We had no more than 7 percent of our network closed, whereas in other cities your pantry closure rates were at 30 or 40 percent,” he said.

Is it getting crowded on the space station with SpaceX Crew-1 arrival?:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of fifty-four.  Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 32m 14s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 33.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1945, trials against 24 Nazi war criminals start at the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 David E. Sanger writes Trump’s Attempts to Overturn the Election Are Unparalleled in U.S. History:

Mr. Trump has said little in public apart from tweets endorsing wild conspiracy theories about how he was denied victory. Yet his strategy, if it can be called that, has become clear over two days of increasingly frenetic action by a president 62 days from losing power.

In just that time, Mr. Trump has fired the federal election officialwho has challenged his false claims of fraud, tried to halt the vote-certification process in Detroit to disenfranchise an overwhelmingly Black electorate that voted against him, and now is misusing the powers of his office in his effort to take Michigan’s 16 electoral votes away from Mr. Biden.

In many ways it is even more of an attempted power grab than the one in 1876. At the time, Hayes was governor of Ohio, not president of the United States. Ulysses S. Grant was, and when Hayes won — also by wrenching the vote around in three states — he became known as “His Fraudulency.”

“But this is far worse,” said Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian and author of “Presidents of War.” “In the case of Hayes, both sides agreed that the outcome in at least three states was in dispute. In this case, no serious person thinks enough votes are in dispute that Donald Trump could have been elected on Election Day.”

David A. Fahrenthold, Beth Reinhard, Elise Viebeck, and Emma Brown report Trump’s escalating attacks put pressure on vote certification process:

On Thursday, legal experts said Trump’s pressure campaign was unlikely to actually change the electoral college’s vote. But, they said, the fact that Trump was trying it posed a historic level of danger for American democracy — by raising the prospect that a presidential election could be stolen from the inside.

“We have never had anything comparable in the history of the country to the level of interference with democracy that the Trump people are asking these legislatures to do,” said Paul M. Smith, vice president for litigation and strategy with the Campaign Legal Center. “With the political pressure on the legislatures, that really is a scary thing.”

Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich), who represents a district outside of Detroit, said that although Trump’s threats may not have legal standing, they should be taken seriously.

“My personal view of this is, yes, it’s pathetic, yes it’s ridiculous,” Levin said. “However if you look at history, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes are born often when there’s some exit ramp out of democracy. And I’m sure a lot of the people involved at those times said, ‘Oh whatever, obviously they’re so completely breaking the rules that they’ll be stopped.’ But they aren’t.”

He said that a range of Michigan’s top elected officials have been meeting constantly to talk about the issue.

“We are not going to let Donald Trump hijack Michigan’s democratic structures,” he said.

Trump’s effort to pressure GOP officials amounts to a kind of Plan C for his reelection effort. After losing at the ballot box, Trump and his allies sought to overturn the election results in court — but lost, repeatedly, because they could not supply proof for their allegations of widespread voter fraud.

 How NASA Tests New Spacesuits:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of sixty-four.  Sunrise is 6:53 AM and sunset 4:27 PM, for 9h 34m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 23.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Community Involvement & Cable TV Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:00 PM, and the Community Development Authority via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1863, President Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg Address at the dedication ceremony for the military cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Arom Rostom reports U.S. investigators were told to take ‘no further action’ on Caterpillar, ex-client of Barr:

Before William Barr became President Donald Trump’s choice to lead the U.S. Department of Justice, he represented Caterpillar Inc, a Fortune 100 company, in a federal criminal investigation by the department.

Much was at stake for Caterpillar: Since 2018, the Internal Revenue Service has been demanding $2.3 billion in payments from the company in connection with the tax matters under criminal investigation. The company is contesting that finding.

A week after Barr was nominated for the job of attorney general, Justice officials in Washington told the investigative team in the active criminal probe of Caterpillar to take “no further action” in the case, according to an email written by one of the agents and reviewed by Reuters.

The decision, the email said, came from the Justice Department’s Tax Division and the office of the deputy attorney general, who was then Rod Rosenstein.

“I was instructed on December 13, 2018,” wrote the agent, Jason LeBeau, “that the Tax Division and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General jointly came to the decision that no further action was to be taken on the matter until further notice.” LeBeau, an inspector general agent at the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, declined interview requests from Reuters.

Since then, a source close to the case says, the investigation has “stalled.” The order to freeze the Caterpillar investigation has not been previously reported.

Christopher Pulliam, Richard V. Reeves, and Ariel Gelrud Shiro write The middle class is already racially diverse:

There are myriad definitions of the middle class based on cash, credentials, or culture. Even if we focus just on income, there are at least a dozen definitions. In the work of the Future of the Middle Class Initiative, we define the middle class as the middle 60 percent of the income distribution.

For the analysis here, we further restrict our definition to individuals aged 25-54, what economists often call “prime age.” We do this as a crude control for dynamics around age and income – specifically as these dynamics differ between racial groups.[1]

AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS IS NOW FAR MORE DIVERSE 

Below we show the racial composition of the middle class in 1979 compared to 2019. Information on race is somewhat limited in earlier years of the Current Population Survey. For example, “Asian or Pacific Islander” was not an option until 1988. In order to compare trends over time, then, we are restricted to the categorization of earlier survey years. 

Four decades ago, the vast majority of the middle class was white. In 1979, the middle class was 84 percent white, nine percent Black, five percent Hispanic, and two percent “other.” Over time, the middle class has become much more race–plural. In 2019, the middle class was 59 percent white, 12 percent Black, 18 percent Hispanic, and ten percent “other.” 

Japanese town deploys robot wolves to ward off bear attacks:

See Robotic ‘Monster Wolf’ Protects Japanese Town From Bears (‘No bear interactions have been recorded in the town since the robots’ installation in September’). more >>