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:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-nine. Sunrise is 5:21 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 15m 09s of daytime.  The moon is waxing gibbous with 90.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Fire Department meets at 6:30 PM via audiovisual conferencing.

On this day in 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg continues into a second day:

Union forces repulsed a series of attacks. That night, Union Major General George Meade held a council of leaders to decide what to do next. Lieutenant Frank Haskell, of Madison, was present when they voted to “allow the Rebel to come up and smash his head against [their position] to any reasonable extent he desired, as he had to-day. After some two hours the council dissolved, and the officers went their several ways.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Hannah Denham reports Top CEOs say business fallout from coronavirus will extend through 2021:

Business Roundtable surveyed 136 members about their projected sales, capital spending and hiring for the next six months. The CEO Economic Outlook Survey fell to 34.3 in the second quarter, the lowest reading for the composite index since the same three months of 2009, according to a report released Monday. But it’s well above the all-time low of -5.0, set during the first quarter of 2009 at the height of the Great Recession.

The group’s members include the CEOs of Apple, JPMorgan Chase and Chevron, among others. The poll, taken from June 1 to June 22, reflected the economic fallout of the novel coronavirus, which ushered the United States into recession as businesses and factories were forced to shut down or curtail operations to stem its spread. More than 47.3 million Americans have filed jobless claims since March.

 Justin Lahart writes Brace for an Autumn of Discontent:

That much has become more clear over the past week, as new Covid-19 cases surged in several states that had been among the earliest to begin reopening their economies. The possibility that the novel coronavirus will be well enough contained by the end of the summer that there can be a general return to business-as-usual is looking slim.

Investors need to recalibrate their expectations of what the economy will look like through the end of the year. This goes beyond debating whether the recovery will be a V, a W or a U, and considering instead the details of what everyday life could look like. Consider what might happen across three dimensions: Work, school and social gatherings.

It is difficult for people in many jobs to work together safely, and that will still be true in the fall. Sitting cheek-to-jowl in an office, for example, is too risky now, and will likely be viewed as such by many employers and employees, possibly until there is a vaccine. So desks will be reconfigured, partitions will go up, and many business places won’t be able to accommodate as many workers as before, leading to staggered shifts and work-from-home arrangements where people will only come in a few times a week.

Wisconsin family saves a swimming bear who got its head stuck in a cheese ball tub:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-eight. Sunrise is 5:21 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 15m 56s of daytime.  The moon is waxing gibbous with 83.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg begins.

Recommended for reading in full —

Heather Long and Andrew Van Dam report Pay cuts for millions of U.S. workers worsen the pain of pandemic:

At least 4 million private-sector workers have had their pay cut during the pandemic, according to data provided to The Washington Post by economists who worked on a labor market analysis for the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute.

Workers are twice as likely to get a pay cut now than they were during the Great Recession, according to the group’s analysis of data from the payroll processor ADP. Salary cuts are spreading most rapidly in white-collar industries, which suggests a deep recession and slow recovery since white-collar workers are usually the last to feel financial pain.

Companies have also trimmed employee hours, leaving many hourly wage workers with leaner paychecks as well. More than 6 million workers have been forced to work part time during the pandemic even though they want full-time work, Labor Department data show.

“I have Fridays off but I would rather have the money,” said Iezzi, who has seen her weekly paycheck at a New Jersey air conditioning business fall from $720 to $576.

Widespread pay cuts are highly unusual. In downturns, firms typically lay off workers rather than dealing with the administrative challenges and morale effects of slashing pay across the board. But as the United States faces the worst economic crisis since the Depression era, some business leaders have tried to save jobs by cutting pay between 5 and 50 percent. The median wage reduction was 10 percent, economists who worked on the Becker Friedman Institute study found.

Lauren Bauer, Wendy Edelberg, Jimmy O’Donnell, and Jay Shambaugh write Who are the potentially misclassified in the Employment Report?:

The potential misclassification issue has arisen because the number of workers who are “absent from work due to other reasons” has spiked in an unusual way since March 2020. Observers have noted that many of those people should probably have been recorded as “on temporary layoff” and thus be counted as among the unemployed. To the degree that is the case, a more accurate measure of the unemployment rate is higher than the official measure.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) categorizes people as employed or unemployed based on how they answer questions about their work status during a single reference week. The agency counts people as employed if they worked during the week or were employed but absent from work due to vacations or illness or “other reasons.” In a typical month, a small fraction of people report being “absent from work due to other reasons.” The misclassification issue has arisen as the survey instruments deployed by BLS to collect data on labor market conditions have largely remained unchanged.

To improve the quality of the data, BLS has taken steps in recent months to improve the accuracy of recorded responses. However, it is important to note that historically, BLS has not edited responses post hoc and has always declined to reclassify respondents, which would amount to interference with the data.

 Tonight’s Sky for July:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with scattered afternoon thundershowers and a high of eighty-nine. Sunrise is 5:20 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 16m 41s of daytime.  The moon is waxing gibbous with 73.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 3 PM. 

On this day in 1864, Pres. Lincoln grants Yosemite Valley to California for “public use, resort and recreation.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Elizabeth Spiers writes Trump’s ‘silent majority’ isn’t a majority, and it’s far from silent:

The Trump team’s declaration that a silent majority lurks, ready to return Trump to the White House, is at odds with almost everything else the president says and does. His efforts to make it harder to vote by opposing voting by mail in the middle of a pandemic, and his repeated claims that Democrats are plotting election fraud, suggest a distinct nervousness about the majority’s true will. He appears to be laying the groundwork for explaining away a Democratic victory in November, as the result of deception and trickery. On June 22 he tweeted, in typical fashion: “RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!” In a system where success usually depends on grasping what a majority of the electorate wants, the sound strategy might be to reach out from one’s base to voters in the middle. Trump instead is heavily invested in the assumption that his enthusiastic minority will determine the outcome — even if it means that the people who don’t like him are prevented from voting.

The rhetoric serves a purpose. Even a few hardcore Trump supporters must be wondering now about the 13.3 percent unemployment rate, for example. By assuring his core supporters that they represent a large, cohesive group of Americans who share similar grievances — and, more importantly, common enemies, notably Democrats and the media — he helps to keep his base in line. Silent-majority rhetoric makes the grievances seem more legitimate.

Trump’s gambit for the election, in the face of falling support, is to convince the extremists that they are the true voice of the nation, even though every bit of empirical evidence indicates otherwise. He’s gaslighting his base. That explains why he’s still brandishing county-level maps of the 2016 electoral college results drenched in red and relying on misinterpretation to make it look like a mandate. (Trump won a majority of America’s acres, not votes.) Trump’s core supporters don’t need overwhelming evidence that they’re a majority to believe it; they just need to see a few good omens to maintain the faith.

 Carl Bernstein reports From pandering to Putin to abusing allies and ignoring his own advisers, Trump’s phone calls alarm US officials:

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America’s principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials — including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff — that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.

Lazy Dog Finds Cozy Spot, Refuses to Move:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will see afternoon thundershowers with a high of eighty-eight. Sunrise is 5:19 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 17m 20s of daytime.  The moon is waxing gibbous with 63.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1975, Steve Wozniak tests his first prototype of Apple I computer.

Recommended for reading in full —

Elizabeth Dwoskin, Craig Timberg, and Tony Romm report Zuckerberg once wanted to sanction Trump. Then Facebook wrote rules that accommodated him:

Facebook has constrained its efforts against false and misleading news, adopted a policy explicitly allowing politicians to lie, and even altered its news feed algorithm to neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers, according to more than a dozen former and current employees and previously unreported documents obtained by The Washington Post. One of the documents shows it began as far back as 2015, when as a candidate Trump posted a video calling for a ban of Muslims entering the United States. Facebook’s executives declined to remove it, setting in motion an exception for political discourse.

The concessions to Trump have led to a transformation of the world’s information battlefield. They paved the way for a growing list of digitally savvy politicians to repeatedly push out misinformation and incendiary political language to billions of people. It has complicated the public understanding of major events such as the pandemic and the protest movement, as well as contributed to polarization.

And as Trump grew in power, the fear of his wrath pushed Facebook into more deferential behavior toward its growing number of right-leaning users, tilting the balance of news people see on the network, according to the current and former employees.

Facebook is now confronting a mounting advertiser boycott that has pushed down its stock price as companies demand stricter policies against hate speech. Starbucks became the latest on Sunday to say it would hit pause on social media advertising.

J. David McSwane reports He Removed Labels That Said “Medical Use Prohibited,” Then Tried to Sell Thousands of Masks to Officials Who Distribute to Hospitals:

“He kind of takes us on this tour of his facility, which is essentially a shelled out warehouse,” Rensko, 36, told me over the phone, detailing how Rivera described the work at the warehouse. “He was saying they were designated for personal or residential use, not for medical. And so what he was doing was basically putting them into other packaging where the city of San Antonio and the state of Texas are able to look at them and then sell them for medical purposes.”

Rensko knew something wasn’t quite right and walked away from the TaskRabbit gig. He told his wife, who told a friend, who told another friend, who told me.

Over weeks of reporting, I’d learn that Rensko had scratched the surface of a larger scheme involving a Silicon Valley investor named Brennan Mulligan to sell what Texas health officials later flagged as “fraudulent” masks to the agency directing protective equipment to hospitals. Mulligan had enlisted Rivera, who was desperate for money after the pandemic had sapped his primary source of income, building furniture and manual labor via TaskRabbit. As countless others have, the two had a chance to make money off of the country’s public health nightmare.

What Makes These Potatoes Stretchy: