Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-one.  Sunrise is 5:32 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 14h 57m 51s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 18.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 1:30 PM.

 On this day in 1941, the Horicon National Wildlife Refuge is established.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jonathan O’Connell, Emma Brown, Steven Rich, and Aaron Gregg report Faulty data collection raises questions about Trump’s claims on PPP program:

A trove of data on $517 billion in emergency small-business loans contains numerous errors that cast doubt on the Trump administration’s jobs claims and obscure the real economic impact of the program, according to a Washington Post analysis and interviews with bankers and borrowers.

A Post analysis of data on 4.9 million loans released last week by the Small Business Administration shows that many companies are reported to have “retained” far more workers than they employ. Likewise, in some cases the agency’s jobs claim for entire industries surpasses the total number of workers in those sectors.

And for more than 875,000 borrowers, the data shows that zero jobs were supported or no information is listed at all, according to the analysis.

The flaws raise questions about the claims by the Trump administration that 51 million jobs were “supported” by the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which has been a rare bright spot for the administration at a time of a surging coronavirus pandemic and a suddenly stalling economic recovery. Many economists credit the program with helping staunch the deep wounds in the job market by offering forgivable loans to small businesses that rehire or keep workers on their payroll.

(Emphasis added.)

Rob Mentzer reports Voter Participation Declining In Wisconsin, Civic Health Measures Mixed (‘A New Study Of Civic Engagement In Wisconsin Finds Trends Toward Disconnectedness’):

Wisconsin has seen a “dramatic” decline in voting rates in recent years, and Wisconsinites are less likely than the national average to say they volunteer or do favors for their neighbors, a new study of the state’s civic health finds.

The new “Civic Health in Wisconsin” study by the Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison represents the first time civic engagement data has been tracked statewide, said Mary Beth Collins, the center’s director and one of the study’s principal authors. It looks at data on Wisconsinites’ connectedness to their communities using a range of measures, from volunteerism and voting to the amount of time spent with neighbors and friends.

Civic engagement is important, Collins said, because it represents the way people relate to those around them and our ability to come together to improve our communities.

….

In local government, rural Wisconsin has seen an especially acute decline in the number of candidates willing to contest elections to village boards or city councils. From 2008 to 2018, more than 44 percent of these boards became less competitive, the report finds. Collins called it one measure of how engaged people feel in their communities.

Doctors Debunk Mask Wearing Myths:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with afternoon showers and a high of seventy-nine.  Sunrise is 5:31 AM and sunset 8:30 PM, for 14h 59m 27s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 26.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM.

 On this day in 1815,  Napoleon surrenders aboard HMS Bellerophon.

Recommended for reading in full —

Pema Levy reports Jeff Sessions Ends His Political Career in a Blaze of Racism:

Jeff Sessions’ political career came to an end on Tuesday. Sessions had sought to recapture the Senate seat he held for 20 years before becoming President Donald Trump’s attorney general. In his stead, Alabama Republicans nominated Tommy Tuberville, a former college football coach. The former prosecutor, senator, and attorney general went out the same way he entered the national stage more than three decades ago: in a blaze of racism.

Racism defined Sessions’ entire career, but racism is not what ended it. In fact, it was Trump’s patronage that put Sessions and the white grievance he long embodied at the center of American politics. Sessions’ political career is over now because he realized too late that Trumpism isn’t just about the worldview; it’s also about Trump himself, a cult of loyalty that Sessions ran afoul of before it was clear how easily Trump cast people aside.

Sessions was the first senator to endorse Trump in 2016, and he served as a trusted campaign adviser. The attorney general position was his reward—the zenith of his career where he could finally make his reactionary fever dreams a reality. Sessions got to work rolling back federal oversight of police departments, orchestrating Trump’s family separation policy at the border, targeting sanctuary cities, deporting asylum seekers, and supporting voter suppression schemes.

….

Here lies the political career of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, named for two confederate heroes like his father and grandfather before him—the only monument to the Confederacy that Trump was eager to remove.

 Philip Bump writes A month later, Pence’s wildly optimistic view of the pandemic has proved almost entirely wrong:

Even at the time it was written, the fundamental proposition offered by Vice President Pence in his Wall Street Journal piece on June 16 was dubious. No second wave of the coronavirus pandemic was emerging, he wrote — an obviously true claim only because the first wave had not ended.

But that wasn’t Pence’s point. His point was that the numbers showed that the United States had the pandemic well in hand and that there was no reason to believe anything but that things would keep getting better. He dropped a number of data points about case growth, test rates and deaths to reinforce his optimistic point.

Nearly a month later, Pence has been proved wrong in nearly every way on every bit of data he offered. The vice president, as the head of the government’s response to the pandemic, presented a case for his own success that was shown to be inaccurate often only days after his article was published.

Rosie the Riveters of Today are Fighting COVID:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-three.  Sunrise is 5:30 AM and sunset 8:31 PM, for 15h 00m 59s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 35.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 9:30 AM.

 On this day in 1960, Jane Goodall arrives at the Gombe Stream Reserve in present-day Tanzania to begin her famous study of chimpanzees in the wild.

Recommended for reading in full —

Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes write The Roger Stone Commutation Is Even More Corrupt Than It Seems:

Stone did, indeed, refuse to provide testimony adverse to Trump. And while his precise relationship to WikiLeaks and Assange was never fully explained, he stood trial for lies to Congress denying his efforts to contact WikiLeaks, and for intimidating another witness who could have contradicted those lies. As the judge in Stone’s case put it: “He was prosecuted for covering up for the President.”

Now, with Trump’s commutation, Stone has received the precise reward Trump dangled at the time his possible testimony was at issue.

“Roger Stone is a victim of the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump Presidency,” the White House said Friday evening. In the White House’s telling, Stone was targeted by out-of-control Mueller prosecutors for mere “process” crimes when their “collusion delusion” fell apart. He was subject to needless humiliation in his arrest, and he did not get a fair trial. “[P]articularly in light of the egregious facts and circumstances surrounding his unfair prosecution, arrest, and trial, the President has determined to commute his sentence. Roger Stone has already suffered greatly. He was treated very unfairly, as were many others in this case. Roger Stone is now a free man!”

Indeed he is. But the story may not be over.

“Time to put Roger Stone in the grand jury to find out what he knows about Trump but would not tell. Commutation can’t stop that,” tweeted Andrew Weissman, one of Mueller’s top prosecutors, following the president’s action.

That’s most unlikely while the Justice Department remains in the hands of Attorney General William Barr. But it’s far from unthinkable should Trump leave office in January. What’s more, the commutation means that the story Mueller tells about potential obstruction vis-a-vis Stone did not end with the activity described by the Mueller report. It is a continuing pattern of conduct up until the present day.

Charles Ornstein and Ash Ngu write No, President Trump, Testing Is Not Causing Case Counts to Rise. The Virus Is Just Spreading Faster:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told reporters on Saturday that testing alone does not account for the increase in COVID-19 cases in his state. “Even with the testing increasing or being flat, the number of people testing positive is accelerating faster than that,” DeSantis said at a briefing at the state Capitol. “You know that’s evidence that there’s transmission within those communities.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott acknowledged Wednesday that the state is experiencing a “massive outbreak” and that additional restrictions may be needed to ensure hospitals don’t become overloaded. On Thursday, he paused the state’s reopening and ordered a halt to elective surgeries in four large counties.

Why Ambulance Rides Are So Expensive In The United States:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighty-one.  Sunrise is 5:29 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15h 02m 28s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 45.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6 PM via audiovisual conferencing.

 On this day in 1787, Congress establishes the Northwest Territory, encompassing present day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, parts of Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Eli Rosenberg reports Workers are pushed to the brink as they continue to wait for delayed unemployment payments:

The issue has spilled back into public view in recent weeks, as thousands of frustrated workers awaiting payments have camped out, sometimes overnight, in front of unemployment offices in states like Oklahoma, Alabama and Kentucky.

The Department of Labor does not track the percentage of unemployment benefits that have been processed, an agency spokeswoman said in an email. The agency did not offer a comment on the issue of delays in processing benefits.

But previously unreleased data compiled by Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, illustrates the scope. By the end of May, about 18.8 million out of 33 million claims — 57 percent — had been paid nationwide. That number has steadily improved from 47 percent of paid claims at the end of April and 14 percent at the end of March.

In Wisconsin, where about 13 percent of claims remained unprocessed as of July 7, residents told local reporters that they had waited 10 weeks or longer for their claims to be processed, leaving some on the brink of bankruptcy and eviction. The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development said through a spokesman that the average time from application to payment is 21 days. In Pennsylvania, another 15 percent of claims were still in review as of mid-June.

David Folkenflik reports Fresh Scrutiny For Fox’s Tucker Carlson As Top Writer Quits Over Bigoted Posts:

The revelation that Fox News prime-time star Tucker Carlson’s top writer had posted racist, sexist and homophobic sentiments online for years under a pseudonym has led to renewed scrutiny of Carlson’s own commentaries, which have inspired a series of advertising boycotts.

On Monday, Carlson is set to address the growing controversy, which led to the resignation of the writer, Blake Neff, after questions were raised by CNN’s Oliver Darcy. It also led to a condemnation of Neff’s views by the network’s chief executive.

In an internal memo, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and President and Executive Editor Jay Wallace called the postings “horrific racist, misogynistic and homophobic behavior.” Neff had, among other things, assailed the intelligence of Black Americans, African immigrants and Asian Americans, according to CNN. He also repeatedly demeaned a woman, posting details about her dating life and mocking her on personal terms.

Carlson has publicly cited the importance of the value of Neff’s work on his show and for Carlson’s earlier book. The host has courted criticism repeatedly for severe rhetoric, especially toward people of color, immigrants and women.

Dog Delivers Groceries During COVID-19: