Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of ninety-one. Sunrise is 5:25 AM and sunset 8:31 PM, for 15h 11m 18s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 94.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1981, President Reagan appoints Sandra Day O’Connor to become the first female member of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Recommended for reading in full —

Ken Ward Jr. reports Companies Owned by This Billionaire Governor Received up to $24 Million in Bailout Loans:

Companies owned by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice and his family received up to $24 million from one of the federal government’s key coronavirus economic relief programs, according to data made public Monday.

At least six companies from Justice’s empire showed up on the list of Paycheck Protection Program aid recipients released by the Small Business Administration.

The Greenbrier Hotel Corporation, Justice’s firm that owns and operates the iconic luxury resort, received a loan of between $5 million and $10 million.

That made it one of only nine companies in West Virginia to receive a loan of that size. Treasury Department officials did not specify the exact amount of the loans, and made public only the identities of companies that received more than $150,000.

In all, Justice companies received between $11.2 million and $24.4 million in PPP money. The Greenbrier Sporting Club, a Justice company that runs an upscale residential development adjacent to the hotel, received between $1 million and $2 million.

Blackstone Energy LTD and Bluestone Coke LLC, two coal companies owned by Justice’s family, each received $2 million to $5 million. Ranger Fuel Coal Corp. received $1 million to $2 million. Justice Energy Company Inc. received $150,000 to $350,000.

Justice’s companies received PPP money from a mixture of small local banks and regional financial institutions. Previous reporting has shown banks were favoring their existing, regular customers when processing PPP applications.

Justice is ranked by Forbes as a billionaire and West Virginia’s richest man.

Ryan Tracy, Chad Day and Heather Haddon report Small Business Loans Helped the Well-Heeled and Connected, Too:

Congress designed the Paycheck Protection Program to help small businesses weather fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, but the program’s $521 billion in loans also went to well-heeled and politically connected firms across the economy, including law offices, charities, restaurant chains and wealth managers.

….

On the list: Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, the law firm headed by antitrust litigator David Boies; Newsmax Media Inc., the media company run by Trump donor Christopher Ruddy; and an Indianapolis service provider to charities part-owned by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Max Rivlin-Nadler reports Drive-Through Naturalizations Make New U.S. Citizens In The COVID-19 Era:

Immigration officers in El Cajon held drive-through ceremonies every weekday since early June to play catch-up for the three months that there were no ceremonies in Golden Hall.

“Golden Hall is a great ceremony, but this makes it a lot more personal almost,” said Madeline Kristoff, the USCIS field officer for San Diego. “The officers get to participate in ways they normally don’t get to in Golden Hall. And it’s really fun to talk to people who are driving through and get to hear a little of their stories.”

 ‘I Can Barely Keep Track’: Inside a Texas Hospital Battling Coronavirus:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of ninety-one. Sunrise is 5:24 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 11m 21s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1885, Louis Pasteur successfully tests his vaccine against rabies on Joseph Meister, a boy who was bitten by a rabid dog.

Recommended for reading in full —
Shawn Boburg and Dalton Bennett writes Militias flocked to Gettysburg to foil a supposed antifa flag burning, an apparent hoax created on social media:

For weeks, a mysterious figure on social media talked up plans for antifa protesters to converge on this historical site on Independence Day to burn American flags, an event that seemed at times to border on the farcical.

“Let’s get together and burn flags in protest of thugs and animals in blue,” the anonymous person behind a Facebook page called Left Behind USA wrote in mid-June. There would be antifa face paint, the person wrote, and organizers would “be giving away free small flags to children to safely throw into the fire.”

As word spread, self-proclaimed militias, bikers, skinheads and far-right groups from outside the state issued a call to action, pledging in online videos and posts to come to Gettysburg to protect the Civil War monuments and the nation’s flag from desecration. Some said they would bring firearms and use force if necessary.

On Saturday afternoon, in the hours before the flag burning was to start, they flooded in by the hundreds — heavily armed and unaware, it seemed, that the mysterious Internet poster was not who the person claimed to be.

Biographical details — some from the person’s Facebook page and others provided to The Washington Post in a series of messages — did not match official records. An image the person once posted on a profile page was a picture of a man taken by a German photographer for a stock photo service.

Jennifer A. Kingson reports The impending retail apocalypse:

Why it matters: Malls are going belly up. Familiar names like J.C. Penney, Neiman Marcus and J. Crew have filed for bankruptcy. Increasingly, Americans’ shopping choices will boil down to a handful of internet Everything Stores and survival-of-the-fittest national chains.

Driving the news: A research report from UBS predicts that 100,000 brick-and-mortar U.S. retail stores will close by 2025, in a trend that started before the pandemic and has accelerated amid coronavirus-related shutdowns.

Indoor malls — which were turning into ghost towns even before the pandemic — are being converted into apartment complexes.

E-commerce has surged, even as stores reopen, as people are afraid of catching the virus in crowds and public spaces.

Ahn Do reports ‘You started the corona!’ As anti-Asian hate incidents explode, climbing past 800, activists push for aid:

Hate incidents directed at Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are exploding this year, according to advocates pushing for California Gov. Gavin Newsom to boost funding for programs fighting bias and add a cultural representative to his new COVID-19 task force. 

Supporters and organizers of Stop AAPI Hate have documented 832 incidents across the Golden State in the last three months, with assaults and verbal tirades “becoming the norm” since the pandemic started, instigated by people following the inflammatory rhetoric of the nation’s highest-profile leader, they say. 

What Does The Future Of Air Travel Look Like?:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of ninety-one. Sunrise is 5:23 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 12m 24s of daytime.  The moon is full with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1775, the Second Continental Congress adopts the Olive Branch Petition.

Recommended for reading in full —

Mariana Atencio writes The America of Hamilton, not Trump, is the one I chose to become a citizen of this year:

My country of origin [Venezuela] was torn apart by corruption, division and lack of leadership. We cannot let that happen — let alone encourage it — here. You could say I come from the future and know what pandering and misleading tactics can do to a prosperous, democratic nation, like Venezuela used to be.

We don’t need a president who tosses paper towels and poses with a Bible, but one that provides precise information and solutions and promotes empathy. During my reporting trips, I’ve seen Trump be insensitive, like on his visit to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, but I’ve also seen him be comforting, as he did in going to the Florida Panhandle after Hurricane Michael.

Now more than ever, we need that comfort — and a message of unity. That means not referring to COVID-19 as a “Chinese virus” or “kung flu,” since that term could encourage hate crimes against Asian Americans; surreptitiously enacting rules that will hurt refugees and immigrants; and calling protesters “thugs,” which literally means “ruffian” or “criminal” and is considered code for a racial slur.

Despite all of these actions and the crises this country is going through, I still decided to become an American because I know this nation is bigger than any of these ills. I am choosing to live under Trump, even though he’s so disparaging of immigrants, because we are more than four or eight years of turmoil. America is still very young!

 Anne Applebaum writes Trump Is Turning America Into the ‘Sh-thole Country’ He Fears (‘The president’s mindless nationalism has come to this: Americans are not welcome in Europe or Mexico’):

The numbers of American sick and dead are a source of wonder and marvel all over the world. They also inspire fear and anxiety. The European Union has decided to allow some foreigners to cross its borders now, but not Americans. Uruguayans and Rwandans can go to Italy and Spain, but not Americans. Moroccans and Tunisians can go to Germany and Greece, but not Americans. For the first time in living memory, Canada has kept its border closed with the United States. On July 3, the governor of the Mexican state of Sonora delivered the coup de grace: She announced the temporary closure of the border with Arizona and banned Americans from Sonoran beaches.

How will American nationalists cope with this new situation? I’m guessing many will pretend, like the president, that this isn’t happening: Months into the crisis, he has once again expressed the belief that the virus will magically “disappear.” But for some, it will be difficult to prevent the intrusion of reality: The stupid and pointless competition among nations continues in their heads—and they are losing. A major reckoning is coming. It can’t arrive too soon.

5 Canine Heroes:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of ninety. Sunrise is 5:22 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 13m 22s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 It’s the 244th year since America declared independence.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jonathan O’Connell reports Treasury, SBA appear to miss deadline to disclose small business loan data:

The Treasury Department and Small Businesses Administration appear unlikely to release information on hundreds of thousands of Paycheck Protection Program loans this week as planned, a setback in the Trump administration’s promises to be transparent about one of the largest economic stimulus packages ever created by the federal government.

After offering contradictory statements on how much information they would release about more than 4.8 million forgivable loans issued from the $660 billion program, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza announced last week that they would release the names of borrowers who received at least $150,000 in funds before the holiday weekend.

But as of Friday afternoon — a government holiday — the Treasury Department and SBA did not indicate any plans to release the data. Congressional aides, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to brief the press, said they don’t expect the data to be released before Monday

David Rothkopf asks ‘The Most Ignorant and Unfit’: What Made America’s Worst Ever Leader?:

The worst among American presidents prior to Trump—Buchanan, Johnson, and Pierce, for example—were all produced by the Democratic Party of the nineteenth century—a party that sought to defend or forgive slavery, and that tolerated and promoted a divided nation. Since President Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” the modern Republican Party increasingly taken on that mantle. Trump is often said to have commandeered the GOP. But properly viewed in historical terms, the reverse is also true: President Trump could not exist without the post-Nixonian GOP that has Mitch McConnell patrolling the Senate and Bill Barr providing legal cover for the virtually unlimited power of the “unitary executive.”

….

Ending Trump’s misrule and restoring confidence in the presidency demands the undoing of impediments to free and fair elections. That will entail root-and-branch campaign finance reform, an end to voter suppression, new defenses against foreign interference in elections, and reining in the digital disinformation engines. These are perhaps only the minimum demands for restoring American democracy.

Trump is a sign that we as a nation have lost our way. Just as Hamilton warned, a confusion of celebrity for leadership, fame for accomplishment, and popularity for genius has given us “a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune.” Seizing the opportunity, unscrupulous “insolent men” have pandered to the lowest common denominators of fear and greed to win power and exploit it for a small elite. November’s election is a judgment day for this nation’s form of republican government. Or else, only “civil commotion” awaits us.

How ‘Hamilton’ Started Movement to Diversify Broadway:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with scattered afternoon thundershowers and a high of eighty-nine. Sunrise is 5:22 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 14m 17s of daytime.  The moon is waxing gibbous with 96.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1863, the Union is victorious on the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Recommended for reading in full —

Catherine Rampell writes The U.S. job market is still in very bad shape. Just wait until the fiscal time bomb goes off:

First, even with these [June reported] gains, U.S. payrolls are still deeply in the hole. Second, these official government numbers are based on a snapshot from mid-June, and more recent data suggest the recovery has either stalled or deteriorated since then. And, third, a major fiscal time bomb is about to detonate.

You may have a sense that things are still quite bad, given that the unemployment rate remains higherthan it ever was during the Great Recession. To help visualize just how far in the red the country is, take a gander at the Scariest Jobs Chart You’ll See All Day. It plots the trajectory of job changes in this recession alongside those from previous postwar downturns (and subsequent recoveries).

The horizontal axis shows months since the most recent employment peak of a given business cycle. The teal line plots the Great Recession. Until recently, the depth, duration and sluggish recovery from the Great Recession had put all other postwar downturns to shame.

Now look at the red line, which represents the awful situation the country is experiencing.

Things are so much worse than even the Great Recession that the red line almost doesn’t fit on the same chart as the others. It starts with a near-vertical downward drop, followed by a short spike upward.

Again, it’s fantastic that the hiring trend has, in fact, turned upward. But there are still 14.7 million, or about 10 percent, fewer payroll jobs than there were at the start of the pandemic recession. And as you can see, even if job growth continues at what President Trump calls “rocket ship” pace, the economy still has a long way to go before reaching an acceptable altitude — that is, until U.S. payrolls are anywhere near pre-pandemic levels.

Jeremy Schwartz and Perla Trevizo report He Built a Privately Funded Border Wall. It’s Already at Risk of Falling Down if Not Fixed:

Tommy Fisher billed his new privately funded border wall as the future of deterrence, a quick-to-build steel fortress that spans 3 miles in one of the busiest Border Patrol sectors.

Unlike a generation of wall builders before him, he said he figured out how to build a structure directly on the banks of the Rio Grande, a risky but potentially game-changing step when it came to the nation’s border wall system.

Fisher has leveraged his self-described “Lamborghini” of walls to win more than $1.7 billion worth of federal contracts in Arizona.

But his showcase piece is showing signs of runoff erosion and, if it’s not fixed, could be in danger of falling into the Rio Grande, according to engineers and hydrologists who reviewed photos of the wall for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. It never should have been built so close to the river, they say.

How Twitter Evolved From Startup To President Trump’s Megaphone: