Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-nine.  Sunrise is 5:41 AM and sunset 8:21 PM, for 14h 39m 29s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 38.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1775, the office that would later become the United States Post Office Department is established by the Second Continental Congress.

Recommended for reading in full —

 David A. Fahrenthold, Joshua Partlow, and Jonathan O’Connell report Spin, deride, attack: How Trump’s handling of Trump University presaged his presidency:

The judge was out to get him, he said. So was that prosecutor in New York, whom he called a dopey loser on a witch hunt. So were his critics, who he said were all liars. Even some of his own underlings had failed him — bad people, it turned out. He said he didn’t know them.

Now, he was trying to attack his way out, breaking all the unwritten rules about the way a man of his position should behave. The secret to his tactic: “I don’t care” about breaking the rules, Trump said at a news conference. “Why antagonize? Because I don’t care.”

That was 2016. He was talking about a real estate school called Trump University.

Trump University, which shut down in 2011 after multiple investigations and student complaints, was treated as a joke by many of Trump’s political opponents — much as they treated Trump Steaks or Trump Vodka. But to those who knew the school well, it wasn’t a joke.

The saga of Trump University showed how far Trump would go to deny, rather than fix, a problem, they said — a tactic they have now seen him reuse as president many times, including now, in the face of a worsening pandemic. For months, President Trump promised something wonderful but extremely unlikely — that the virus would soon disappear.

John Cassidy writes America Is a Country Besieged by Its Own President:

On Wednesday, Tom Ridge, a veteran Republican who served as the governor of Pennsylvania and as the first Secretary of Homeland Security, said that the agency wasn’t established “to be the President’s personal militia.” Ridge added, “Had I been governor even now, I would welcome the opportunity to work with any federal agency to reduce crime or lawlessness in any of the cities. But . . . it would be a cold day in hell before I would consent to a unilateral, uninvited intervention into one of my cities.”

In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said that the city would gladly accept federal assistance in fighting crime, but she also issued a warning. “We welcome actual partnership, but we do not welcome dictatorship,” she said. “We do not welcome authoritarianism, and we do not welcome the unconstitutional arrests and detainments of our residents, and that is something I will not tolerate.”

These developments suggest that America as a whole isn’t failing—not yet, anyway. But its system of government, its stated values, and its claims to greatness are all under siege by a President who lacks the moral compass, self-doubt, and respect for historical norms that would restrain another leader.

Why One Man Is Walking Around the World With His Dog:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-eight.  Sunrise is 5:40 AM and sunset 8:22 PM, for 14h 41m 31s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 27.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1999, Robin Yount becomes the first player inducted to the Baseball Hall of Fame in a Brewer’s jersey.

Recommended for reading in full —

Luke Nozicka, Bryan Lowry, and Cortlynn Stark report Barr’s claim of 200 arrests in Kansas City is debunked (‘KC arrests Barr wrongly cited were made months earlier, led to no new federal charges’):

When U.S. Attorney General William Barr announced Wednesday the expansion of federal anti-crime initiatives, he baffled officials in Kansas City with a single statement.

“Just to give you an idea of what’s possible, the FBI went in very strong into Kansas City and within two weeks we’ve had 200 arrests,” Barr said of apprehensions made as part of a new effort called Operation Legend.

But after inquiries from The Star and pushback from local officials, a senior Justice Department official clarified Barr’s comments, saying the 200 figure included state and FBI arrests in joint operations dating back to December as part of another operation, Relentless Pursuit.

Barr’s false claim, livestreamed by the White House, raised questions about the Justice Department’s trustworthiness. And the point Barr apparently was illustrating only grew shakier Thursday as officials in Kansas City clarified further that the arrests that did occur resulted in no new federal charges — with the exception of one case announced earlier this week.

 Dan Alexander and Michela Tinera report How Donald Trump moved millions from his campaign donors to his private business:

Donald Trump has not given a dime to his reelection campaign, opting instead to fund the entire effort with his donors’ money. His business, meanwhile, has continued to charge the campaign for things like food, lodging and rent. The result is that $2.2 million of contributions from other people has turned into $2.2 million of revenue for Trump.

And that’s just counting the money flowing directly through the president’s campaign. His reelection apparatus also includes two joint fundraising committees, which work with the Republican Party to raise money for Trump. Since he took office, those entities—named Trump Victory and the Trump Make America Great Again Committee—have funneled another $2.3 million into the president’s private business, according to a review of Federal Election Commission records. Then there’s the Republican National Committee, which has spent an additional $2.4 million at Trump properties. Add it all up, and the president, working in concert with the party he leads, has helped push $6.9 million into his businesses since taking office.

It’s a meaningful sum, even for a large business. Consider the payments to Trump National Doral, the president’s golf resort in Miami. In 2017, Trump’s first year leading the country, revenues at Doral dropped from $88 million to $75 million, dragging profits (measured as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) down from $12.4 million to just $4.3 million. The next year, the RNC, which had spent just $3,000 at the property in 2017, upped its expenditures to $603,000. That helped give a slight boost to the business, which recorded 2018 profits of $9.7 million, according to a spokesperson for the Trump Organization.

Video from Space – Weekly Highlights for the Week of July 19, 2020:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-four.  Sunrise is 5:39 AM and sunset 8:23 PM, for 14h 43m 30s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 17.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1969, Apollo 11 splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean.

Recommended for reading in full —

Anne Applebaum writes The president is deploying the kind of performative authoritarianism that Vladimir Putin pioneered:

The very idea seems, on the face of it, sheer madness. In Portland, Oregon, federal security officers dressed for combat—wearing jungle-camouflage uniforms with unclear markings, carrying heavy weapons, using batons and tear gas—are patrolling the streets, making random arrests, throwing people into unmarked vans. The officers do not come from institutions that specialize in political crowd control. Instead, they come from Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Coast Guard. These are people with experience patrolling the border, frisking airline passengers, and deporting undocumented immigrants—exactly the wrong sort of experience needed to carry out the delicate task of policing an angry political protest.

….

Students of modern dictatorship will find these tactics wearily familiar. Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Trump admires, has deployed performative authoritarianism, alongside other tools, in order to keep himself in power for many years now. In 2014, during a political crisis in Ukraine, he created an elaborate media narrative that equated Ukrainian democracy protesters with 1940s fascists. Russian state television showed scenes of violence over and over again—scenes that Putin himself had helped create, first by encouraging the former Ukrainian president to shoot at demonstrators, and then by invading the country. He sent troops in unmarked uniforms—the infamous “little green men”—into Crimea and eventually eastern Ukraine to “dominate” the situation, to use Trump’s own word for his tactics in Portland. Or at least that was the way it was meant to look on TV.

Lt. Gen. (retired) Mark Hertling writes I helped build a police force in Iraq. We refused to dress them in camo:

We were rapidly expanding our recruiting and training of future Iraqi police officers so we could put thousands in the cities quickly, but the interior minister — the Baghdad official charged with growing the nascent police force — couldn’t get us the large number of uniforms we needed for those we were graduating. The minister asked if we would accept camouflage outfits instead of police uniforms for the graduates, and he asked if we would also accept unmarked pickup trucks for service as police cruisers.

“Tell him, ‘Hell, no,’” the MP commander told me emphatically. When I asked why, he explained the history of the blue police uniform, as well as the psychological role that a uniform plays in law enforcement. The traditional “blues” started with the London “bobbies” of the early 1800s, whose uniforms were designed to distinguish the British police force from the British military. Our nation’s first organized police, in New York, continued this tradition in the 1850s, numerous other American cities followed suit, and now most nations associate the police officer with blue uniforms.

Myriad studies have shown interesting results: For example, some research shows citizens adjust behaviors when someone wearing a police uniform is nearby; others show that police uniforms are most likely to “induce feelings of safety” when compared to other uniforms or civilian clothes, and those wearing a blue uniform receive a high rate of cooperation when asked to perform a task. Wearing camouflage uniforms, our division MP commander said, would send the wrong message, especially in a society where neither the U.S. nor the Iraqi military was yet trusted by the population.

How CBS News covered the Apollo 11 splashdown:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-six.  Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset 8:24 PM, for 14h 45m 27s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 9.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

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

 On this day in 1903, Ford Motor Company sells its first car.

Recommended for reading in full —

Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes write Nothing Can Justify the Attack on Portland:

So why is the Trump administration sending into American cities officers who aren’t appropriately trained for the mission, are acting on legal authority that will require litigation to defend, and are being deployed to address a problem that the federal government could address by means far less provocative and in a fashion far less likely to escalate disorder?

The answer is unfortunately obvious. Having given up on controlling the pandemic that has now killed more than 140,000 Americans, and faced with dimming reelection prospects, Trump is doing his best to substantiate the tough-guy vision of the presidency that has always appealed to him. During earlier stages of his administration, he played out this fantasy along the southern border of the United States by deploying troops to the American Southwest and warning about “caravans” of travelers illegally entering the country. Now, as officers typically tasked with enforcing the border have been deployed into Portland, Trump’s apocalyptic warnings about the need for a brutal response to any perceived threat have also moved from the edge of the country into American cities.

Josh Barro writes The Economy Won’t Be Recovering Anytime Soon:

Real-time data from the Opportunity Insights Economic Tracker, sponsored by Harvard and Brown universities and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, shows that consumer spending remains far above the levels from March and April but stopped rising in mid-June and remains below last year’s levels. The recent retrenchment has been national — consumer-spending growth has stalled not just in COVID hot spots like Texas and Arizona but also in states like New York that are performing much better. That suggests consumers are looking at the big picture rather than reacting to outbreaks in their own area. And the grim outlook for schools’ reopening in the fall will serve as a further drain on the economy, making it tough for parents to resume normal work schedules.

The “V-shaped recovery” that Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow forecast as recently as July 8 is not in the cards. A double-dip recession is possible, but the most probable outcome right now looks like treading water, with the fast recovery of the late spring turning into a long, slow slog. Fewer jobs will be created, and many businesses will find themselves unable to stay afloat until conditions improve. Exactly how rough the economic recovery will be depends on many variables, but three will be key: the extent and persistence of COVID outbreaks, whether and how robustly Congress extends additional economic aid to workers and businesses, and whether and when an effective vaccine is widely distributed.

COVID19 – The big questions 6 months on:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty.  Sunrise is 5:37 AM and sunset 8:25 PM, for 14h 47m 21s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Tax Incremental Finance Joint Review Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 10 AM, and the Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6 PM.

 On this day in 1943, Allied forces capture Palermo during the Allied invasion of Sicily.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Ryan McCarthy reports “Outright Lies”: Voting Misinformation Flourishes on Facebook (‘While the social media giant says it opposes voter suppression, the data shows a stark picture: Nearly half of all top-performing posts that mentioned voting by mail were false or misleading’):

Facebook’s community standards ban “misrepresentation of who can vote, qualifications for voting, whether a vote will be counted, and what information and/or materials must be provided in order to vote.” But an analysis by ProPublica and First Draft, a global nonprofit that researches misinformation, shows that Facebook is rife with false or misleading claims about voting, particularly regarding voting by mail, which is the safest way of casting a ballot during the pandemic. Many of these falsehoods appear to violate Facebook’s standards yet have not been taken down or labeled as inaccurate. Some of them, generalizing from one or two cases, portrayed people of color as the face of voter fraud.

The false claims, including conspiracy theories about stolen elections or outright misrepresentations about voting by mail by Trump and prominent conservative outlets, are often among the most popular posts about voting on Facebook, according to a review of engagement data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool.

On Facebook, interactions — the number of comments, likes, reactions and shares that a post attracts — are a proxy for popularity. Of the top 50 posts, ranked by total interactions, that mentioned voting by mail since April 1, 22 contained false or substantially misleading claims about voting, particularly about mail-in ballots.

 Shamane Mills reports Wisconsin Cities Getting $6.3M In Grants To Help With Elections During Pandemic:

Five Wisconsin cities will get a total of $6.3 million in grants to help administer elections during the coronavirus pandemic.

The money comes from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit voting advocacy group, and will be distributed to Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Kenosha and Racine.

“We’re obviously thrilled,” said Racine Mayor Cory Mason. “The big winners in all of this are the voters who are going to be able to vote safely this year in the midst of the pandemic.”

Long lines at some Wisconsin polling places during the state’s April election, which was conducted under a statewide stay-at-home order, drew national attention as voters and poll workers weighed potential safety risks against civic duty.

Ecologists Dig Prairie Dogs, And You Should Too:

Prairie dogs are ecosystem engineers. As they go about their lives, they change their surroundings in ways that provide shelter, food and even nurseries for other species. On the grasslands of Montana, prairie dog colonies are islands of biodiversity.