As it turns out, while testing her microphone before going live at the first night of the Democratic National Convention, Gov. Whitmer of Michigan used a spicy test line:
Gov. Whitmer (D-MI) jokes before going live: "It's not just Shark Week … it's Shark Week *mouths expletive*" pic.twitter.com/KSndbTvLZi
So, the Democrats held the first night of their audiovisual convention Monday night. There were, watching, millions of us who are not Democrats, but are yet resolved and confirmed against Trump his autocratic nativism. Although some like us have melted away, for the remnant of which we are a part Never Trump means never Trump. We find ourselves, fortunately and happily, part of a grand coalition of opposition and resistance, against a true threat to the American constitutional order. It is, necessarily, around the large, established Democratic Party that this grand coalition will fight this fall. No one of us can assure victory; without the Democrats we would be assured of defeat.
For all the prominent speakers at the first night of the Democratic convention, perhaps no one will remain so long in memory as Kristin Urquiza, speaking of her late father, Mark Anthony Urquiza:
Kristin Urquiza, who recently lost her father to COVID-19, addressed Democrats on Aug. 17 during the first night of the Democratic National Convention. Urquiza’s father died this year at the age of 65 as a result of the coronavirus. She said her dad was healthy, but by trusting President Donald Trump’s assurances that the coronavirus was under control, he “paid with his life.” “Donald Trump may not have caused the coronavirus, but his dishonesty and irresponsible actions made it so much worse,” Urquiza said, calling for a leader with a national, data-driven response to COVID-19. Urquiza’s remarks were part of the convention’s first night of programming. The coronavirus pandemic upended both parties’ traditional conventions. Instead, the program each night featured a number of speakers and musical performances virtually across the country.
At last night’s meeting of the Whitewater Unified School District’s board, the board heard (and approved on a 6-0 vote) the online platform for students choosing the virtual instruction and required staffing. (Video, 43:50.) Some students have chosen a purely virtual format, and much of the board discussion was about an all-virtual provider. The district chose Edgenuity as its wholly virtual model, a model that will include district employee oversight over students’ virtual instruction on that platform. Many other students will take classes through a format that that includes face-to-face meetings and online instruction from district teachers.
Embedded above is the video of the meeting; at the bottom of this post is a district description of the choices between the two options for 9.1 to 9.25. (Some parents will perhaps remain with the virtual option through the school year; others may change from one format to another as public health conditions change.)
A few remarks —
1. The Description of Instructional Options. Beginning early in the discussion, the district’s administrator described the main purpose of the meeting as explaining the preferred platform for those students choosing a virtual option. (Video, 7:00.) The curriculum director described that virtual platform offering (Video, 7:50), and how the virtual model for elementary school students will be different from virtual instruction for students in grades 6 to 12. (Video, 11:30.)
2. Complicated. Beginning about a half hour into the meeting, a board member bemoans how complicated all these options will be for parents. (Video, 28:10.) It’s not notably complicated at all. It only becomes complicated when one drifts from the main line of discussion into peripheral matters: JEDI options (Video, 24:54), or a question about picking and choosing between virtual options that anyone listening to the prior presentation with attention would know is not part of the district’s preferred method (Video, 12:55).
Most people are very sharp, and perform equally complicated tasks daily: reading labels, making purchases, using technology. These matters are only too complicated if one underestimates others (while perhaps overestimating oneself by proud comparison). There’s vanity in supposing that only some can grasp these choices.
Anyone who can compare prices that include shipping costs (Video, 56:09) should manage this discussion without feeling it’s notably hard to do so.
3. Good Order. This board is in the habit of allowing questions at any point in a presentation, even when it’s not topical. (Video, 25:00.) Board members should exhibit greater personal discipline, and wait until presentations are done before interrupting to ask a question (including, of course, tangential ones). When a presentation is done, everyone should have a chance – in a guided round robin – to ask questions. If a board member has no questions on that topic, he or she need only say ‘no questions at this time.’ One could always return for a second round, in the same guided way, to see if new questions have emerged when the first round is done.
Perhaps a tolerance for interruption seems to this board as mere courtesy to one of their own. All of this comes at the cost of clarity of communication. Allowing a conversation to be sidetracked is less at the the board’s expense than at the community’s expense. A public body that manages its meetings this way creates its own problems, and worse problems for those it claims to serve.
4. Confidence. Early in the district administrator’s presentation, she observes that the school administration has grown more confident in its approach. (Video, 4:40.) That’s evident across these meetings, whatever one thinks of the particulars of these plans. I’ve no prediction about the course of the pandemic in Whitewater, but the collapsing athletic programing in districts beyond the city at least suggests a difficult autumn. It’s simply not the case that leaders of all those programs – many of them near but outside Whitewater – wanted to cancel, or were timid. The public health conditions of this country are notably worse than any rational person would have hoped, and ignoring our circumstances will not make them ago away.
5. Translations. I’m a native English speaker who lives in a multilingual community: Whitewater, Wisconsin. The district’s English-language summary sheet, embedded below, should also be published by the district in Spanish.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 6:05 AM and sunset 7:50 PM, for 13h 44m 46s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1868, French astronomer Pierre Janssen discovers helium.
Over the past several weeks, the coronavirus has killed Americans at six times the average rate in other rich countries. And we’re recording about eight times more infections.
Why it matters: The virus burned through the rich world like wildfire in the spring, but this new data confirms that the U.S. is one of very few wealthy countries that have failed to suppress it since then.
Breaking it down: The World Bank’s list of “high-income economies” includes 83 countries and territories, ranging from Austria to Bermuda to Chile. Their populations add up to 907 million — 2.7 times America’s.
As of July 1, they’d collectively recorded virtually the same number of cases as the U.S., and 1.6 times as many deaths.
Since then, however, 75% of all new cases and 69% of all deaths recorded anywhere in the rich world came in the U.S., which accounts for 27% of the group’s population.
The U.S. is conducting more testing than many other countries. But that’s only a small part of the story.
How it happened: Other rich countries saw pandemic peaks that were just as terrifying as America’s. But while they climbed down afterwards, the U.S. remained trapped near the summit.
Italy, for example, had recorded 34,767 deaths as of July 1 but has seen just 458 since.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Tuesday slapped down Donald Trump’s talk of an out-of-control coronavirus “surge” in New Zealand as “patently wrong”:
She expressed dismay after the U.S. president exaggerated the new virus outbreak in New Zealand as a “huge surge” that Americans would do well to avoid.
“Anyone who is following,” Ardern said, “will quite easily see that New Zealand’s nine cases in a day does not compare to the United States’ tens of thousands.”
Despite the increasing use of “Latinx” in the news media and by some politicians, the gender-neutral word to describe people of Latin American descent is not the preferred term among that group. Less than a quarter, 23 percent, of those who identify as Hispanic or Latino have even heard of the term “Latinx,” a new Pew Research Center survey found.
Some groups within those who identify as Latino are more likely to use the term than others, said Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of global migration and demography research at Pew.
“Younger people, college-educated Hispanics and notably young Hispanic women were the ones most likely to say that they used the term ‘Latinx’ themselves to describe their identity,” Lopez said.
Overall, “Hispanic” is preferred by a 61 percent majority of people of Latin American descent, followed by “Latino,” which is preferred by 29 percent, Pew found. Left-leaning people seemed to be more likely to have heard the term “Latinx.”
(Best to use the terms that a majority of a group wishes be used to describe itself than to apply a term to them.)
The president has tried to turn DHS, the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, into a tool used for his political benefit. He insisted on a near-total focus on issues that he said were central to his reelection — in particular building a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. Though he was often talked out of bad ideas at the last moment, the president would make obviously partisan requests of DHS, including when he told us to close the California-Mexico border during a March 28, 2019, Oval Office meeting — it would be better for him politically, he said, than closing long stretches of the Texas or Arizona border — or to “dump” illegal immigrants in Democratic-leaning sanctuary cities and states to overload their authorities, as he insisted several times.
Trump’s indiscipline was also a constant source of frustration. One day in February 2019, when congressional leaders were waiting for an answer from the White House on a pending deal to avoid a second government shutdown, the president demanded a DHS phone briefing to discuss the color of the wall. He was particularly interested in the merits of using spray paint and how the steel structure should be coated. Episodes like this occurred almost weekly.
Foxconn Technology Group gave no money to UW-Madison over the past year, renewing questions about the company’s commitment to its $100 million pledge to the university nearly two years ago.
UW-Madison received $700,000 in the first of a five-year agreement — less than 1% of the company’s overall commitment. Records show the university has received no additional money in the second year of the agreement.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 6:04 AM and sunset 7:52 PM, for 13h 47m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 3.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM in closed session and at 7 PM in open session.
On this day in 1936, the state of Wisconsin issues the first unemployment compensation check in the United States for the amount of $15.
As Facebook faced criticism in recent months about the way its policies can harm Black people, Mark Zuckerberg pointed to his investments in criminal justice reform through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the philanthropic company he co-founded with his wife as a vehicle to funnel 99 percent of their Facebook stock, now worth roughly $80 billion, into charitable causes.
….
To many Black employees at CZI, however, the organization’s goal of advancing justice has been compromised both by its internal practices and its approach to giving, according to recordings of company meetings, employee surveys, email, and interviews with current and former employees, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak for CZI. Some Black employees say that their voices have been marginalized and their expertise discounted. They also say CZI’s grant-making has left Black leaders and Black communities unsupported.
“The failure of leadership from the Trump Administration is resulting in a rationing of health care in Wisconsin and it is unacceptable,” [Sen. Tammy] Baldwin wrote in the letter sent on Tuesday, addressing Pence in his capacity as head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. “Months into this crisis, and we do not have enough supplies available in the state of Wisconsin for the widespread testing that is needed to monitor and contain the virus.”
Baldwin’s letter was prompted by reports that Milwaukee-based Advocate Aurora Health, which operates hospitals and clinics in Wisconsin and northern Illinois, has had to curtail testing as “the federal government redirects testing supplies to COVID-19 hotspots across the U.S.”
The challenge, therefore, isn’t just flattening the curve but keeping it flat—holding the line not for months but for years. In a study published in Science in April, researchers at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health estimated that, in the absence of a vaccine for the coronavirus, periods of social distancing would be necessary into the year 2022. (Their analysis was, in its own way, optimistic: it incorporated the possibilities of new treatments for covid-19, increases in I.C.U. capacity, and the spread of durable immunity over time.) The researchers noted that, even after social distancing lets up, governments will need to continue tracking the virus and addressing occasional outbreaks. In that sense, there’s a good chance that the pandemic may not be over until 2024.
Cowboys are among the most iconic figures of the American West. They’re mythologized as strong, independent people who live and die by their own terms on the frontier. And in movies, the people who play them are mostly white. But as with many elements of Americana, the idea of who cowboys are is actually whitewashed — scholars estimate that in the pioneer era, one in four cowboys were black. The historian Quintard Taylor writes about how before then, enslaved people “were part of the expansion of the livestock industry into colonial South Carolina, passing their herding skills down through the generations and steadily across the Gulf Coast states to Texas.”
In Dillon Hayes’s “All I Have to Offer You Is Me,” we meet Larry Callies, who comes from a long line of cowboys. Growing up in Texas, Callies dreamed of becoming like Charley Pride, the first African-American inductee in the Country Music Hall of Fame. As with the cowboy, there’s an assumption of who makes up country music, despite its diverse history. The breakthrough of artists like Lil Nas X, Jimmie Allen and Kane Brown has returned attention to the contributions of black artists to the genre. Callies’s journey shows what we lose when we don’t acknowledge the full breadth of history.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 6:03 AM and sunset 7:53 PM, for 13h 50m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 8.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1930, the first color sound cartoon, Fiddlesticks, is released.
A new Pew Research Center survey released this week provides the most compelling evidence yet that turnout this November will be massive and that states will be challenged to complete timely counts of a record number of mail-in ballots.
During the past two decades, Pew has used multiple indicators to gauge voters’ interest and intensity as the presidential election approaches. Here are some key findings:
Prior to the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, just 50% of the voters thought that it really mattered who won, versus 44% who thought that things would be pretty much the same, whoever won. This year, a record 83%—including 85% of Democrats, 86% of Republicans—say that it really matters.
Although divergent reactions to President Trump are driving some of this intensity, clashes on the issues are playing a role as well. Prior to the 2000 election, 51% of the voters believed that the major party candidates were articulating differing positions on the issues, compared to 33% who saw them as taking similar positions. This year, 86% perceive the candidates as differing on the issues, while only 9% see similarities.
Craig Brown started to notice it about three weeks ago when a customer who should have gotten a package within three days called to say it still hadn’t arrived after nearly two weeks. Brown, the owner of Steve’s Curling Supplies — named for his father — has since seen the same thing happen with other packages he’s shipped through the U.S. Postal Service.
One package, he said, is still “in limbo.”
“It normally takes two days, and it’s been a month,” he said.
Thankful that it’s not the busy season, when he normally ships 30 to 50 packages a day, he’s looking with trepidation to the future.
“If this was October through Christmas, when I’m shipping 30 to 50 packages a day, I’d either have to switch everybody to UPS and charge them two to three times as much for shipping, or I’d have to field 20 calls a day from unhappy customers complaining that they haven’t got their stuff yet,” he said.
It’s not business as usual. Last year he shipped more than 3,000 packages and had issues with 10 at most.
Guards in an immigrant detention center in El Paso sexually assaulted and harassed inmates in a “pattern and practice” of abuse, according to a complaint filed by a Texas advocacy group urging the local district attorney and federal prosecutors to conduct a criminal investigation.
The allegations, detailed in a filing first obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, maintain that guards systematically assaulted at least three people in a facility overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — often in areas of the detention center not visible to security cameras. The guards told victims that no one would believe them because footage did not exist and the harassment involved officers as high-ranking as a lieutenant.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 6:02 AM and sunset 7:55 PM, for 13h 52m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 15.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1944, in Operation Dragoon, Allied forces land in southern France.
While President Donald Trump forthrightly acknowledged only yesterday [8.13] that weakening the Post Office will help him obstruct mail balloting this fall, postal workers in the key swing state of Michigan say his mission has been clear for weeks.
Delayed mail, a consequence of battles over funding for the United States Postal Service and of the agency’s staffing shortages, affects many aspects of American life—the delivery of millions of prescriptions, paychecks, bills. But recentfunding cuts, overtime reductions, and other changes imposed by Louis DeJoy, the man Trump recently appointed as head of the postal service, have left postal workers warning about new multi-day delays—and that a deliberate effort to slow down the mail and interfere with the election is underway.
“I think it’s absolutely true,” said Steve Wood, a mail clerk who works at the Michigan Metroplex, a massive mail sorting center near Detroit. He says he was convinced in recent weeks as he and his colleagues saw the removal of almost a quarter of the facility’s mail sorting machines, a lack of substitute employees to replace workers missing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and a general lack of urgency to locate and send along ballots that have piled up in bins.
The leading contender is already taking shape and working its way into the GOP: the lunatic conspiracy theory known as QAnon. It already has its first soon-to-be member of Congress, along with a raft of candidates who have captured Republican nominations for a number of offices, including in the U.S. Senate. And it has establishment Republicans confused and uncertain, aghast at what it represents but too cowardly to purge it from their ranks.
In case you’re not familiar, QAnon began a few years ago with posts on 4chan claiming that an anonymous government insider (“Q”) was revealing the hidden forces behind all current events. The theory posits that Trump is a messianic figure at war with an international cabal of satanic, cannabalistic pedophiles; at any moment, the president (who in some tellings was partnering in this effort with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III) will expose his enemies and cart them all off to Guantanamo Bay. The FBI believes QAnon poses a domestic terrorism threat.
At Trump rallies, you could see signs and T-shirts promoting QAnon, and the Trump campaign has courted the movement’s adherents. For a president who is, himself, both a consumer and an advocate of all manner of conspiracy theories, it was an easy fit.
