Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-eight.  Sunrise is 6:32 AM and sunset 4:44 PM, for 10h 12m 36s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 96.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1960, Penguin Books is found not guilty of obscenity in the trial R v Penguin Books Ltd, the Lady Chatterley’s Lover case.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 The Atlantic presents The Case Against Donald Trump:

Donald Trump is the worst president this country has seen since Andrew Johnson, or perhaps James Buchanan, or perhaps ever. Trump has brought our country low; he has divided our people; he has pitted race against race; he has corrupted our democracy; he has shown contempt for American ideals; he has made cruelty a sacrament; he has provided comfort to propagators of hate; he has abandoned America’s allies; he has aligned himself with dictators; he has encouraged terrorism and mob violence; he has undermined the agencies and departments of government; he has despoiled the environment; he has opposed free speech; he has lied frenetically and evangelized for conspiracism; he has stolen children from their parents; he has made himself an advocate of a hostile foreign power; and he has failed to protect America from a ravaging virus. Trump is not responsible for all of the 220,000 COVID-19-related deaths in America. But through his avarice and ignorance and negligence and titanic incompetence, he has allowed tens of thousands of Americans to suffer and die, many alone, all needlessly. With each passing day, his presidency reaps more death.

Meryl Kornfield reports Ahead of election, experts on authoritarianism warn in joint letter of democracy’s potential collapse:

Fearing the end of democracy as we know it, more than 80 international and American scholars in authoritarianism and fascism wrote an open letter to the public, forecasting a “frightening regression” if safeguards are not put in place.

“Whether Donald J. Trump is a fascist, a post-fascist populist, an autocrat, or just a bumbling opportunist, the danger to democracy did not arrive with his presidency and goes well beyond November 3rd, 2020,” the experts in 20th-century authoritarian populism, fascism and political extremism wrote in a post published Saturday. Scholars from universities in the United States, as well as the United Kingdom, Israel and Italy, criticize Trump but do not endorse Joe Biden in the letter, instead arguing that injustices surfaced by the coronavirus pandemic and heightened nationalism are concerning, no matter the election’s outcome.

The experts, who have knowledge of what led to the rise of past authoritarian and fascist regimes, say democracy is at stake.

“We have seen all of these patterns in our study of the past, and we recognize the signs of a crisis of democracy in today’s world as well,” the group writes. “The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed profound inequalities of class and race across the globe. As the last four years have demonstrated, the temptation to take refuge in a figure of arrogant strength is now greater than ever.”

In a list of sweeping recommendations, the group urges the public to protect science, journalism, the electoral process and pluralism, and denounce misinformation, political violence and greed.

“We need to turn away from the rule by entrenched elites and return to the rule of law,” they write. “We must replace the politics of ‘internal enemies’ with a politics of adversaries in a healthy, Democratic marketplace of ideas.

“Because if we don’t,” the letter concludes, “we will indeed face dark days ahead.”

Inside The $4 Million All-Electric Plane:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:30 AM and sunset 4:45 PM, for 10h 15m 06s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1870, the United States Weather Bureau (later renamed the National Weather Service) makes its first official meteorological forecast.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Economist Jospeh Stiglitz writes Republicans, Not Biden, Are About to Raise Your Taxes (‘President Trump built in tax increases beginning in 2021, for nearly everyone but those at the very top’):

The Trump administration has a dirty little secret: It’s not just planning to increase taxes on most Americans. The increase has already been signed, sealed and delivered, buried in the pages of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

President Trump and his congressional allies hoodwinked us. The law they passed initially lowered taxes for most Americans, but it built in automatic, stepped tax increases every two years that begin in 2021 and that by 2027 would affect nearly everyone but people at the top of the economic hierarchy. All taxpayer income groups with incomes of $75,000 and under — that’s about 65 percent of taxpayers — will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019.

….

By 2027, when the law’s provisions are set to be fully enacted, with the stealth tax increases complete, the country will be neatly divided into two groups: Those making over $100,000 will on average get a tax cut. Those earning under $100,000 — an income bracket encompassing three-quarters of taxpayers — will not.

At the same time, Trump has given his peers, people with annual incomes in excess of $1 million dollars, or the top 0.3 percent in the country, a huge gift: The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the average tax rate in 2019 for this group to be 2.3 percentage points lower than before the tax cut, saving the average taxpayer in this group over $64,000 — more than the average American family makes in a year.

The tax loss and benefit estimates just described were calculated before the pandemic. Now, incomes for almost everyone but top earners have taken a hit, so the loser group will likely be considerably larger than anticipated; and with people like Jeff Bezos, the billionaire chief executive of Amazon, doing even better than expected, Trump’s gift to him is even bigger.

Jeremy Barr reports The Atlantic gave Ruth Shalit a ‘second chance’ 25 years after a journalism scandal. It ended with an ugly correction:

Two weeks after publishing a long, juicy and instantly viral story about the world of competitive niche sports and the wealthy parents who push their children to play them, the Atlantic on late Friday appended a nearly 800-word editor’s note informing readers that it was “deceived” by the story’s author, Ruth Shalit Barrett.

In particular, the magazine said Barrett incorrectly asserted that the story’s main character, who was identified by her middle name (Sloane), had a son in addition to three daughters in an attempt to blur her identity, and gave a misleading and highly exaggerated description of a fencing injury allegedly sustained by the woman’s daughter. The author had described the incident at a 2019 competition as a “massacre,” in which the girl was stabbed in the neck; in the Atlantic’s updated version of the story, the injury is now portrayed as “not severe.”

In the most scathing and self-flagellating part of the note, the Atlantic said it was wrong to have assigned the story to Barrett, who had earned acclaim as a very young rising-star political writer at the New Republic magazine in the 1990s before her career was derailed by the discovery of major errors and instances of plagiarism in her work.

Tonight’s Sky for November:

Good morning.

Halloween in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty-four.  Sunrise is 7:29 AM and sunset 5:47 PM, for 10h 17m 46s of daytime.  The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1968, the Milwaukee Bucks claim their first victory, a 134-118 win over the Detroit Pistons.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Steven Greenhouse reports ‘I regret voting for him’: Ohioans hit by GM plant closure reflect on Trump:

In July 2017, Trump spoke in Youngstown and told the crowd that on his way in from the airport, he had seen the carcasses of too many factories and mills. He bemoaned Ohio’s loss of manufacturing jobs, but then boldly assured the crowd: “They’re all coming back!” He next told his audience, many of them workers worried about plant closings: “Don’t move! Don’t sell your house!”

….

Asked whom she supported in 2016, [Trisha] Amato told me: “I backed Trump,” but she followed that with a quick, nervous laugh. “I thought he stood for more of what I stood for.”

She, too, felt that Trump was the lesser of two evils. Hillary Clinton was an excellent first lady, she said, but to her mind, Clinton, by 2016, had become yet another career politician. “She just changed,” Amato said. “It comes down to character, and I wanted to believe Trump has a better character.”

Amato admits that she woefully misjudged Trump. “After he was elected, he really opened his mouth. He started tweeting and saying things that I feel are crazy. He doesn’t know when to stop.”

Upset at herself for backing Trump, she said: “I feel like I’m living in a reality TV show.” She added: “Trump, he’s a clown.”

She had thought it would be good to have a businessman as president. “But maybe he’s not such a good businessman,” she acknowledged, pointing to his numerous bankruptcies. “He doesn’t understand where the blue-collar workers are coming from. I don’t think any of the big politicians understand that. Trump, especially, doesn’t understand what it is to struggle.”

Christopher Rowland, Debbie Cenziper, and Lisa Rein report White House sidestepped FDA to distribute hydroxychloroquine to pharmacies, documents show. Trump touted the pills to treat covid-19:

The White House decision to set aside the mandatory safety controls put in place by the Food and Drug Administration fueled one of the most disputed initiatives in the administration’s response to the pandemic: the distribution of millions of ineffective, potentially dangerous pills from a federally controlled cache of drugs called the Strategic National Stockpile.

….

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the stockpile, confirmed in an email to The Post that the pills were supposed to go to retail pharmacies but that the agency does not know where the pills ultimately ended up. Through a spokeswoman, the agency said the drugs were supposed to be used for patients with lupus, who encountered shortages early in the pandemic.

The FDA withdrew its emergency authorization in June, after it found hundreds of adverse events linked to the drug’s use in covid-19 patients, including dozens of deaths. In June, two months after the White House’s urgent orders to ship the millions of doses of hydroxychloroquine, health officials told holders of the pills in a general notice they could destroy them.

See also Hydroxychloroquine’s false hope: How an obscure drug became a coronavirus ‘cure’:

500m ‘skyscraper’ coral reef discovered off Cape York:

Australian scientists have discovered a massive detached coral reef just off Cape York on the Great Barrier Reef that’s taller than the Empire State Building. The 500m high reef was discovered while a team from James Cook University were mapping the northern Great Barrier Reef seabed.

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-two.  Sunrise is 7:28 AM and sunset 5:48 PM, for 10h 20m 21s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 9 AM.

 On this day in 1938, Orson Welles broadcasts his radio play of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, causing anxiety in some of the audience in the United States.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Tory Newmyer reports Executives pocketed big bonuses before declaring bankruptcy, firing thousands:

“Since the pandemic took hold in March, at least 18 large companies have rewarded executives with six- and seven-figure payouts before asking bankruptcy courts to shield them from landlords, suppliers and other creditors while they restructured,” Abha Bhattarai and Daniela Santamariña report. “They collectively meted out more than $135 million, documents show, while listing $79 billion in debts.”

The payouts preceded layoffs of tens of thousands of workers. Hertz, for one, awarded “$16.2 million three days before its Chapter 11 filing in May;” then won court approval to hand executives another $8.2 million tied to meeting financial goals as it fired 11,000 workers.

The story is the latest in a series of Washington Post investigations into an economic recovery concentrating its benefits among the wealthiest, while piling pain onto workers.

The situation is primed to deteriorate further.

Coronavirus cases are spiking across the country, notching new daily highs. And emergency aid from Washington has largely expired, as lawmakers head home until the election without providing more relief. Those developments prompted stocks to tank on Monday.

But small businesses and millions of jobless workers are facing more acute pain as winter sets in. The pandemic is “exacerbating existing disparities in labor market outcomes,” Lael Brainard, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, said in a speech last week. She noted that the pace of the job market’s recovery is slowing down and likely to continue doing so, threatening to leave permanent scars without another major spending package from Washington.

(Emphasis in original.)

Keziah Weir reports Is the GOP Gaming the New York Times Best-Seller Lists?:

In November 2019, Donald Trump Jr.’s book Triggered debuted at the top of the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. A week later, the paper’s books desk released a report that a nearly $100,000 bulk purchase of the book by the RNC had contributed to the ranking.

Trump Jr. wasn’t the first in his family to discover the joy of bulk sales—three decades earlier, as the New Republic reported in 2017, his dad encouraged owners of Trump properties to buy thousands of copies of The Art of the Deal, helping it ride the list for 48 weeks. Since then, dozens of nonfiction books each year—including by politicians like Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, and Sarah Palin—have appeared on the list with an assist from bulk buys. Many of those authors used campaign funds to finance the purchases, which the FEC allows as long as the author doesn’t keep the royalties.

In 2020, 17 books on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list have scored their spots by dint of bulk buys. All but two have been written by Trumpworld superstars: Trump Jr.; founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk; Glenn Beck; conservative commentator Dave Rubin; Fox News host Pete Hegseth; Dinesh D’Souza; Newt Gingrich; Freedom Center founder David Horowitz; Ben Shapiro; Sean Hannity; Sarah Huckabee Sanders; Candace Owens; Jeanine Pirro; the American Conservative editor Rod Dreher; and Ted Cruz. Of these 15, nine appeared on the list for three weeks or less.

(Emphasis in original.)

Orson Welles – War Of The Worlds – Radio Broadcast 1938 – Complete Broadcast:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-four.  Sunrise is 7:27 AM and sunset 5:49 PM, for 10h 22m 56s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 95.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Fire Department board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

 On this day in 1812, the USS Constitution, under the command of Captain William Bainbridge, captures HMS Java off the coast of Brazil after a three-hour battle.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Greg Miller and Isaac Stanley-Becker report Trump’s attacks on political adversaries are often followed by threats to their safety:

The CIA’s most endangered employee for much of the past year was not an operative on a mission abroad, but an analyst who faced a torrent of threats after filing a whistleblower report that led to the impeachment of President Trump.

The analyst spent months living in no-frills hotels under surveillance by CIA security, current and former U.S. officials said. He was driven to work by armed officers in an unmarked sedan. On the few occasions he was allowed to reenter his home to retrieve belongings, a security team had to sweep the apartment first to make sure it was safe.

The measures were imposed by the CIA’s Security Protective Service, which monitored thousands of threats across social media and Internet chat rooms. Over time, a pattern emerged: Violent messages surged each time the analyst was targeted in tweets or public remarks by the president.

“The president was tweeting, ‘Where’s the whistleblower? Where’s the whistleblower?’?” said a former senior U.S. official involved in overseeing the protection of the analyst, whose name has not been disclosed by the government. The analyst was never in direct danger, the official said, but some threats were so serious that without security, “there is a strong possibility that grave harm would have come to him.”

 Tova O’Brien reports My ‘feral’ [viral] interview with Covid-19 denier Jami-Lee Ross didn’t go as he planned:

We are in a global pandemic that is at least 15 times more fatal than seasonal influenza.

When people argue otherwise it puts more lives at risk; more families will mourn. Covid-19 conspiracies are dangerous. In New Zealand those conspiracies were driven by arguments against lockdowns and misinformation about the seriousness of the virus.

As our country was gearing up for an election, those fringe theories were mainstreamed and amplified by a sitting MP, Jami-Lee Ross. Ross had plummeted from grace this parliamentary term: a high-profile implosion and resignation from the centre-right National party, with allegations of bullying and harassment as well as facing fraud charges in the high court.

….

On election night I was in the studio co-presenting five hours of live coverage. We came off-air somewhere around midnight and I returned to the newsroom the next morning for our post-election special. That’s when I found out we had Ross on the show and I was interviewing him. His party had received 0.9% of the vote, nowhere near enough to return to parliament. The interview was legitimate, capping off an extraordinary and destructive political career but nonetheless I asked my producer to give him half the time we had allotted.

I have been asked about my strategy going into that interview which has since had a dizzying response – what my mentor and former bureau chief Gordon “Flash” McBride would call “feral” (he meant viral). There was no strategy. It was about giving this guy an exit interview and trying to understand why he made some of the choices he made.

 How Popeyes’ Chicken Sandwich Changed Fast Food:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-nine.  Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 5:51 PM, for 10h 25m 33s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 91.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM.

On this date in 1892, an exploding oil barrel starts a small fire in Milwaukee’s Third Ward that spreads rapidly and by morning leaves four people dead, 440 buildings destroyed, and more than 1,900 people homeless.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Amanda Holpuch reports Trump aide Stephen Miller preparing second-term immigration blitz:

The former homeland security department chief of staff, Miles Taylor, said this wishlist was reserved for the second term because it included policies that were too unpopular for a president seeking re-election.

This comes as no surprise to those who have watched and worried as legal pathways to US immigration shut under Trump, and who wonder not just about for more years of him as president, but also of four more years with Miller at his side.

The 35-year-old has managed to keep his position as a senior adviser to the president after being outed for having an affinity for white nationalism and becoming synonymous with unpopular Trump administration policies such as family separation – when thousands of children were taken away from their parents at the southern border to deter would-be migrants. Three years later, more than 500 kids are still yet to be reunited with their parents.

Jean Guerrero, author of the Miller biography Hatemonger, told the Guardian: “There’s a number of things they have been cautious about because of the legal and political risks in the first term and I think that in a second term you would see Stephen Miller get much freer rein when it comes to his wishlist of items.”

Those items are expected to include attempting to eliminate birthright citizenship, making the US citizenship test more difficult to pass, ending the program which protects people from deportation when there is a crisis is their country (Temporary Protected Status) and slashing refugee admissions even further, to zero.

David Enrich, Russ Buettner, Mike McIntire, and Susanne Craig report How Trump Maneuvered His Way Out of Trouble in Chicago:

The president’s federal income tax records, obtained by The New York Times, show for the first time that, since 2010, his lenders have forgiven about $287 million in debt that he failed to repay. The vast majority was related to the Chicago project.

How Mr. Trump found trouble in Chicago, and maneuvered his way out of it, is a case study in doing business the Trump way.

When the project encountered problems, he tried to walk away from his huge debts. For most individuals or businesses, that would have been a recipe for ruin. But tax-return data, other records and interviews show that rather than warring with a notoriously litigious and headline-seeking client, lenders cut Mr. Trump slack — exactly what he seemed to have been counting on.

….

Those forgiven debts are now part of a broader investigation of Mr. Trump’s business by the New York attorney general. They normally would have generated a big tax bill, since the Internal Revenue Service treats canceled debts as income. Yet as has often happened in his long career, Mr. Trump appears to have paid almost no federal income tax on that money, in part because of large losses in his other businesses, The Times’s analysis of his tax records found.

 Holiday travel during the coronavirus pandemic:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty.  Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 5:52 PM, for 10h 28m 11s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 85.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1864, Lt. William Cushing of Waukesha successfully leads an expedition to sink the Confederate ram, the Albermarle, which had imposed a blockade near Plymouth, North Carolina and had been sinking Union ships.

Recommended for reading in full — 

David J. Lynch reports Trump’s Carrier deal fades as economic reality intervenes (‘Jobs that were saved are dwarfed by others that left’):

The Carrier plant in Indianapolis is where outsourcing was supposed to have stopped.

Within days of winning the 2016 election, President-elect Donald Trump persuaded the company — in return for $7 million in Indiana state incentives and some presidential goodwill — to keep in the United States most of the 1,100 jobs it had planned to ship to Mexico.

“Companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences. It’s not going to happen,” Trump told cheering Carrier employees when he visited the plant. “We’re not going to have it anymore.”

Trump advertised Carrier’s Dec. 1, 2016, announcement that it would preserve about 800 jobs in Indianapolis as a decisive break from decades of U.S. executives capitalizing on lower labor costs overseas at the expense of blue-collar workers at home.

Four years later, it has proved to be nothing of the sort.

This year alone, Indiana employers have sent more jobs to Mexico, China, India and other foreign countries than were saved at Carrier. Without headlines or presidential notice, at least 17 companies — names like Vibracoustic, Molnlycke Health Care, Allura, Altex, Stanley Black & Decker, Dometic, Johnson Controls and Horizon Terra — have closed plants or otherwise reduced employment in Indiana and moved jobs abroad, according to U.S. Department of Labor filings.

“We have many, many firms making these decisions, and Trump likes to negotiate these deals one at a time. It’s trade policy by press release, and often there’s nothing behind the press release,” said Robert Scott, senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute in D.C. “He makes a deal, smiles for the photographers, and then he walks away.”

 Kelly Meyerhofer reports UW-Madison announces another round of furloughs for most employees in 2021:

Roughly 16,000 university employees will take between three and six unpaid days off between Jan. 1 and June 30, reducing their pay between 2.5% and 4.6%. [Chancellor Rebecca] Blank and vice chancellors will take a 15% salary cut over those same six months. School and college deans will take voluntary 10% salary cuts.

The latest round of furloughs and salary cuts is expected to save $27 million, university spokesman John Lucas said. That’s about the same as what UW-Madison recouped when it imposed its first six-month furlough period that ends Friday.

The university estimates about $320 million in revenue losses and increased costs from March through the end of this fiscal year, which ends June 30. Some of that shortfall has already been made up for through the first round of furloughs, a hiring freeze, travel restrictions and other reductions.

But the budget gap is still “larger than any that we’ve faced in any past year,” Blank said.

 Record rain and flash flooding lash Australia’s east coast: