Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-four.  Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 6:22 PM, for 11h 20m 40s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 65.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

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

 On this day in 1871, Peshtigo, Wisconsin suffers the Peshtigo Fire: “devastated by a fire which took 1,200 lives. The fire caused over $2 million in damages and destroyed 1.25 million acres of forest. This was the greatest human loss due to fire in the history of the United States. The Peshtigo Fire was overshadowed by the Great Chicago firewhich occured on the same day, killing 250 people and lasting three days. While the Chicago fire is said to have started by a cow kicking over a lantern, it is uncertain how the Peshtigo fire began.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Astead W. Herndon and Adam Nagourney report 6 Standout Moments From Harris and Pence at the Debate:

The [Biden] campaign believes the pandemic response encapsulates every unpopular part of Mr. Trump’s administration, and Ms. Harris opened the debate by focusing on the federal government’s response to the virus. She was unrelenting, evoking memories of the Democratic presidential primary race, when she promised to “prosecute the case against Donald Trump.”

The early attack on the virus was also significant for media markets. With the debate starting at 9 p.m. Eastern, both campaigns will have known that the early moments are critical for newspaper deadlines and audience ratings, because live viewership tends to drop as the evening goes on.

With Ms. Harris making the pandemic response her first answer, she focused her energy on the issue her campaign is zeroed in on.

Andrew Prokop asks Who does Trump owe hundreds of millions of dollars to?:

The New York Times’s blockbuster report on President Trump’s tax records has drawn new attention to the fact that Trump is hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, with much of that debt coming due in the next four years.

This has led to much speculation about to whom the president might owe so much money, and why.

But in fact, the answer — or at least, part of the answer — has long been known. Trump owes hundreds of millions of dollars each to two financial institutions: Deutsche Bank and Ladder Capital.

Trump revealed this in his financial disclosure forms when he first ran for president in 2016, and journalists like Russ Choma of Mother Jones have been writing about it since. Choma wrote another piece on this earlier this summer, making the case that Trump’s half a billion in loans coming due “may be his biggest conflict of interest yet.”

Trump’s loans from Deutsche and Ladder were all linked to particular properties — they were either mortgages on the properties themselves, or loans to fund the development of a property. Still, there have long been questions about why Deutsche and Ladder would loan Trump so much, given his history of stiffing his creditors.

But overall, these loans are less mysterious than another aspect of Trump’s financial history — that from 2006 to 2014, he spent more than $400 million in cash on buying or developing various properties. Some journalists have long questioned how Trump got the money for all this, wondering whether he has other sources of funds he hasn’t disclosed. And the Times’s first story on the new tax records doesn’t clear this up.

Pilot And Architect Answer Google’s Boeing 747 Brain Teaser:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-eight.  Sunrise is 7:00 AM and sunset 6:24 PM, for 11h 23m 31s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 74.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1774, Britain passes the Quebec Act, making Wisconsin part of the province of Quebec.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Siobhán O’Grady reports In a few days, more people in Trump’s orbit tested positive for coronavirus than in all of Taiwan:

More than a dozen White House officials have recently tested positive for the novel coronavirus, including some who are among the at least nine guests and two journalists who tested positive after they attended Amy Coney Barrett’s Sept. 26 Supreme Court nomination event in the Rose Garden.

Trump announced his positive test early Friday, and was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center later that day. He returned Monday to the White House, where he removed his mask, despite doctors saying he was still contagious.

Meanwhile, Taiwan — the self-ruled island home to 23 million people — reported just eight new cases in the past week.

Patrick Radden Keefe reports The Sackler Family’s Plan to Keep Its Billions (‘The Trump Administration is poised to make a settlement with Purdue Pharma that it can claim as a victory for opioid victims. But the proposed outcome would leave the company’s owners enormously wealthy—and off the hook for good’):

Behind the scenes, lawyers for Purdue and its owners have been quietly negotiating with Donald Trump’s Justice Department to resolve all the various federal investigations in an overarching settlement, which would likely involve a fine but no charges against individual executives. In other words, the deal will be a reprise of the way that the company evaded comprehensive accountability in 2007. Multiple lawyers familiar with the matter told me that members of the Trump Administration have been pushing hard to finalize the deal before Election Day. The Administration will likely present such a settlement as a major victory against Big Pharma—and as another “promise kept” to Trump’s base.

If the deal goes forward, it would mark a stunning turn in the decades-long saga of trying to hold Purdue and the Sacklers responsible for their role in the opioid crisis. But even more stunning is the projected outcome of the bankruptcy proceeding in White Plains. At a recent hearing, the judge, Robert Drain, became defensive when a lawyer representing creditors suggested that the Sacklers might “get away with it.” But, if the Sacklers achieve the result that the family’s legal team is quietly engineering, they seem poised to do just that.

 Tory Newmyer reports The $4 trillion federal bailout missed its mark, leaving millions struggling:

Washington seemingly pulled out all the stops in shoveling about $4 trillion into its response to the coronavirus pandemic, more than it spent on 18 years of war in Afghanistan.

But more than half of that sum, roughly $2.3 trillion, has gone to businesses that in many cases didn’t need the help or weren’t required to show they used the taxpayer funds to keep workers on the job.

By contrast, about a fifth, $884 billion, went to help workers and families. And even less aimed at the health crisis itself, with 16 percent of the total going toward testing and tracing, vaccine development, and helping states provide care, among other health-related needs.

(Emphasis in original.)

Elephant seal stranded on street returned to ocean with help from residents in Chile:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-one.  Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 6:25 PM, for 11h 26m 23s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 82.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

 On this day in 1927, The Jazz Singer, the first prominent “talkie” movie, has its premiere.

Recommended for reading in full — 

David Leonhardt writes of the coronavirus that only cancer and heart disease will kill more Americans this year than Covid:

Only cancer and heart disease will kill more Americans this year than Covid. Already, the virus has killed more than twice as many Americans as either strokes or Alzheimer’s disease, about four times as many as diabetes and more than eight times as many as either gun violence or vehicle accidents.

Most other rich countries have been much more successful in fighting the virus than the U.S. A chart is the simplest way to see this:

Outbreaks are again increasing in the U.S. The number of new cases per day has risen more than 25 percent since mid-September. “Covid-19 is spreading again across most of the U.S., hammering rural America and smaller cities and raising anxiety in New York,” Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The outbreak connected to the White House is responsible for about 30 known cases so far — more than the average daily number of new cases recently in all of Australia.

The virus is genuinely terrifying for thousands of people. In addition to the more than 200,000 deaths — and all of the Americans mourning those deaths — many other people have spent weeks battling fatigue, shortness of breath, cardiac problems and more.

Tim Walker reports Trump’s breathless White House return:

A still-contagious Donald Trump returned to the White House from Walter Reed military hospital on Monday evening, and immediately removed his mask for a photo op on the Truman balcony, where he appeared to be short of breath as he posed for cameras. In a campaign video shot moments later, however, the president insisted he was better following three days of hospital treatment for Covid-19 – and perhaps even “immune” to the disease.

Trump’s reported desperation to leave hospital and get back to campaigning while still in the throes of the illness is a sign of his willingness to sacrifice anyone – even those closest to him – to spare himself the humiliation of a one-term presidency, writes Julian Borger: “He has produced a toxic workplace to the point of potential lethality.”

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has tested positive for Covid-19, she announced on Monday.

Another guest from the Rose Garden event for Amy Coney Barrett has also tested positive. Mega-church pastor Greg Laurie said in a Facebook post that his symptoms were so far “mild”.

Trump’s team and the wider world might have hoped the president would learn something from his personal experience of the virus, writes Francine Prose:

We’d like to believe that suffering instructs and ennobles; that our grief, fear and pain increases our sympathy for the grief, fear and pain of others. But again, Donald Trump seems to be ineducable, impervious to shame, guilt, or any sense of personal responsibility, unaffected by anything except vanity, selfishness and reckless self-regard.

(Emphasis in original.)

Belarus: Tens of thousands protest eight weeks after election:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of fifty-eight.  Sunrise is 6:58 AM and sunset 6:27 PM, for 11h 29m 15s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 88.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1846, Wisconsin’s first state Constitutional Convention meets in Madison.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Christopher Rugaber and Alexandra Olson report Long-term jobless caught in a squeeze that imperils recovery:

On Friday, the government reported that employers added 661,000 jobs in September, normally a healthy gain. Yet it marked the third straight monthly slowdown in hiring. The nation has regained barely half the 22 million jobs that were lost to the pandemic and the widespread business shutdowns it caused in March and April.

In a worrisome trend, a rising proportion of job losses appear to be permanently gone. When the virus erupted in March and paralyzed the economy, nearly 90% of layoffs were considered temporary, and a quick rebound seemed possible. No longer. In September, the number of Americans classified as permanently laid off rose 12% to 3.8 million. And the number of long-term unemployed rose by 781,000 — the largest increase on record — to 2.4 million.

“We have a real chance of there being massive long-term unemployment,” said Till Von Wachter, an economics professor at UCLA.

The nation now has 7% fewer jobs than in February. Yet the damage is far deeper in some sectors. The performing arts and spectator sports category, which includes Valiente’s industry, has lost 47% of its jobs. It hasn’t added any net jobs since the coronavirus struck.

Hotels are down 35%, restaurants and bars 19%, transportation 18%. Advertising, one of the first expenses that companies cut in a downturn, is down 9%.

Higher education has lost 9% of its jobs. Many classes have been delayed or moved online, reducing the need for janitors, cafeteria workers and other administrators. Normally during recessions, the education sector adds jobs to accommodate people returning to school to seek marketable skills or education. Not this time.

Aaron C. Davis reports How Trump amassed a red-state army in the nation’s capital — and could do so again:

The call that came into state capitals stunned governors and their National Guard commanders: The Pentagon wanted thousands of citizen soldiers airlifted to the nation’s capital immediately to help control crowds outside the White House in the wake of the death of George Floyd.

Presidents have routinely activated Guard troops to fight foreign enemies, and in extraordinary circumstances have federalized them to quell civil unrest, using the vast power of the commander in chief.

But the June 1 appeal to states was different. President Trump was drawing instead on an obscure law, changed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that made it easier for governors to voluntarily send guardsmen across state lines for counterterrorism missions. His action was not an order but a request, essentially inviting states to augment the D.C. National Guard, which he controls, in a potential clash with civilian protesters.

The request had the effect of cleaving state militias along partisan lines, according to interviews and internal Guard documents. While red states jumped to answer the president’s call, governors and Guard commanders in blue states were incredulous. The result was a deployment to the nation’s capital that military historians say appears to have been without precedent: Over 98 percent of the 3,800 troops that arrived in the District came from states with Republican governors.

How Lobbying Became A $3.5 Billion Industry:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of fifty-two.  Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 6:29 PM, for 11h 32m 06s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 93.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1582, the Gregorian Calendar is introduced by Pope Gregory XIII.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Catherine Rampell writes The U.S. is still ‘missing’ more jobs than it did at the worst point of prior postwar recessions:

Here’s the bad news: The nation’s payrolls are still down 10.7 million jobs, or about 7 percent, since their peak in February, when the recession began. That’s enormous. In fact, a higher net share of jobs is still “missing” today, relative to pre-recession times, than was the case even at the worst period of anyprior postwar downturn.

The chart below shows percentage changes in employment since the recession began, and how recent trends compare with other postwar downturns and recoveries. The black line plots the Great Recession and its aftermath. At the very worst point for the job market in that business cycle, payrolls were down about 6.3 percent. Now, however, the magnitude of those Great Recession job losses looks slightly less “great” when compared with more recent changes in employment, plotted by the red line.

From Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center — Benkler, Yochai, Casey Tilton, Bruce Etling, Hal Roberts, Justin Clark, et al. Mail-In Voter Fraud: Anatomy of a Disinformation Campaign, 2020:

Our findings here suggest that Donald Trump has perfected the art of harnessing mass media to disseminate and at times reinforce his disinformation campaign [on the dangers of mail-in voting] by using three core standard practices of professional journalism. These three are: elite institutional focus (if the President says it, it’s news); headline seeking (if it bleeds, it leads); and balance, neutrality, or the avoidance of the appearance of taking a side. He uses the first two in combination to summon coverage at will, and has used them continuously to set the agenda surrounding mail-in voting through a combination of tweets, press conferences, and television interviews on Fox News. He relies on the latter professional practice to keep audiences that are not politically pre-committed and have relatively low political knowledge confused, because it limits the degree to which professional journalists in mass media organizations are willing or able to directly call the voter fraud frame disinformation. The president is, however, not acting alone. Throughout the first six months of the disinformation campaign, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and staff from the Trump campaign appear repeatedly and consistently on message at the same moments, suggesting an institutionalized rather than individual disinformation campaign. The efforts of the president and the Republican Party are supported by the right-wing media ecosystem, primarily Fox News and talk radio functioning in effect as a party press. These reinforce the message, provide the president a platform, and marginalize or attack those Republican leaders or any conservative media personalities who insist that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud associated with mail-in voting.

(Full study linked above.)

How the pandemic distorted time:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of fifty-five.  Sunrise is 6:55 AM and sunset 6:30 PM, for 11h 34m 58s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1919, Cincinnati Reds pitcher Adolfo Luque becomes the first Latino player to appear in a World Series.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Stanley Lupkin reports How Operation Warp Speed’s Big Vaccine Contracts Could Stay Secret:

The Trump administration has compared Operation Warp Speed’s crash program to develop a COVID-19 vaccine to the Manhattan Project. And like the notoriously secretive government project to make the first atomic bomb, the details of Operation Warp Speed’s work may take a long time to unravel.

One reason is that Operation Warp Speed is issuing billions of dollars’ worth of coronavirus vaccine contracts to companies through a nongovernment intermediary, bypassing the regulatory oversight and transparency of traditional federal contracting mechanisms, NPR has learned.

Instead of entering into contracts directly with vaccine makers, more than $6 billion in Operation Warp Speed funding has been routed through a defense contract management firm called Advanced Technologies International, Inc. ATI then awarded contracts to companies working on COVID-19 vaccines.

As a result, the contracts between the pharmaceutical companies and ATI may not be available through public records requests, and additional documents are exempt from public disclosure for five years.

John Cassidy writes How Boeing and the F.A.A. Created the 737 MAX Catastrophe:

The basic outlines of the Boeing 737 max tragedy are already well known—or should be well known. Even so, a detailed new report that the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure released on Wednesday morning is a remarkable document. In two hundred and thirty-eight pages of clearly written prose, it goes a long way toward explaining not only what went so wrong at Boeing but what has gone badly askew with the American corporation in general, and with American governance.

With the connivance of the Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing developed, built, and delivered hundreds of passenger jets that were a potential danger to anyone who stepped onto them. It wasn’t until after there had been two deadly crashes, which killed three hundred and forty-six people, that the U.S. government grounded these planes. Even then, Boeing claimed it had done nothing wrong. In fact, it had rushed an unsafe passenger plane into service, failing to alert its airline customers and their flight crews to the existence of a new piece of safety software that could override the pilots and push down the nose of the plane. This software—known as a Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or mcas—was designed to head off possible stalls, but it also had the potential to cause a catastrophe.

Thanks to the official crash reports and some excellent investigative journalism, this much we already knew. Based on an eighteen-month investigation, the new report adds a wealth of new details—and it points the finger in the right places. It illustrates how Boeing’s management prioritized the company’s profitability and stock price over everything else, including passenger safety. Perhaps even more alarmingly, the report shows how the F.A.A., which once had a sterling reputation for independence and integrity, acted as a virtual agent for the company it was supposed to be overseeing.

Video from Space for the Week of Sept. 27, 2020: