Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with occasional afternoon thundershowers and a daytime high of eighty-one.  Sunrise is 5:58 AM and sunset 8:00 PM, for 14h 02m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 91.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand seventh day.

The Whitewater Unified School District Board meets at 6 PM in closed session, with an open session beginning at 7 PM.

Item 2A on the agenda for the meeting describes the purpose of the closed session: “Adjourn into closed session, pursuant to the provisions of Sec. 19.85(1)(c), Wis. Stats., considering employment, promotion, compensation or performance evaluation data of any public employee over which the governmental body has jurisdiction or exercises responsibility; specifically, to discuss the middle school principal candidate and contract. (Action Item).”

Item 4E describes names the candidate: “Employment – ADMINISTRATOR – Middle School Principal. Motion to approve the employment of Chris Fountain, middle school principal effective ???” [Question marks in original.]

The agenda includes a staff background sheet on Chris Fountain (.pdf), who is now principal of Turtle Creek Elementary School in the Delavan Darien School District, with additional background available in a 2016 news release from that district at the time of his original hiring as a middle school associate principal.

Item 5A on the agenda lists Staffing and Programming Recommendations (Possible Action Item): “Motion to approve the 2019-20 staffing and programming recommendations, as presented.”

The agenda lists these recommendations:

Whitewater’s Planning Commission also meets at 6:00 PM.

On this day in 1939, the Wizard of Oz has its world premiere in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin.

Recommended for reading in full:

Eric Fanning, former Secretary of the Army, remembers When Children at the Border Got Compassion (‘The United States has a moral responsibility for unaccompanied children—and took it seriously, at least in 2014’):

In the spring of 2014, a sudden surge of unaccompanied children began crossing the southern border from Mexico into the United States. I was the undersecretary of the Air Force at the time, and the Pentagon had been tasked with finding facilities and funds so that the Department of Health and Human Services could shelter children until they were reunited with family. It was my job to review the housing that the Air Force would provide. So, with a few others from the Pentagon, I flew down to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, to see for myself that these children were being cared for and protected…..

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see scattered thundershowers with a daytime high of eighty.  Sunrise is 5:57 AM and sunset 8:02 PM, for 14h 04m 40s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 86% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand sixth day.

On this day in 1919, the Green Bay Packers are founded.

Recommended for reading in full:

David Frum observes The Shame and Disgrace Will Linger:

Today [8.10], President Trump accused his predecessor, Bill Clinton—or possibly his 2016 campaign opponent, former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—of complicity in the death of the accused sex-trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein

Many seem to have responded with a startled shrug. What do you expect? It’s just Trump letting off steam on Twitter.

Reactions to actions by Trump are always filtered through the prism of the ever-more-widely accepted view—within his administration, within Congress, within the United States and around the world—that the 45th president is a reckless buffoon, a conspiratorial racist moron, whose weird comments should be disregarded by sensible people.

….

The certainty that Trump will descend ever deeper into sub-basements of “new lows” after this new low should not numb us to its newness and lowness.

Neither the practical impediments to impeachment and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment process, nor the foibles and failings of the candidates running to replace him, efface the fact that this presidency shames and disgraces the office every minute of every hour of every day. And even when it ends, however it ends, the shame will stain it still.

Joshua Partlow and David A. Fahrenthold report How a Trump construction crew has relied on immigrants without legal status:

For nearly two decades, the Trump Organization has relied on a roving crew of Latin American employees to build fountains and waterfalls, sidewalks and rock walls at the company’s winery and its golf courses from New York to Florida.

Other employees at Trump clubs were so impressed by the laborers — who did strenuous work with heavy stone — that they nicknamed them “Los Picapiedras,” Spanish for “the Flintstones.”

For years, their ranks have included workers who entered the United States illegally, according to two former members of the crew. Another employee, still with the company, said that remains true today.

President Trump “doesn’t want undocumented people in the country,” said one worker, Jorge Castro, a 55-year-old immigrant from Ecuador without legal status who left the company in April after nine years. “But at his properties, he still has them.”

While the Trump family benefits from undocumented workers at their properties, Trump uses federal power to torment undocumented workers and their families in other parts of the country:

Adam Serwer is right to contend that cruelty is the point; this is a policy by the worst for the worst.

America will need an accounting of those who used the state power in this way, down to the last person. We are, fortunately, an advanced society in which records are easily compiled.

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will see morning showers with a daytime high of seventy-eight.  Sunrise is 5:56 AM and sunset 8:03 PM, for 14h 07m 09s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 77.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand fifth day.

On this day in 1846, Pres. Polk signs legislation to establish the Smithsonian Institution as “an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge.”

Recommended for reading in full:

Todd Richmond reports Expert: More than 500 Wisconsin elections clerks use outdated systems:

Election officials across the country have stepped up efforts to block hackers from wreaking havoc during the 2020 contests after Russians interfered with the 2016 presidential election. Congress has been warned that there could be more foreign interference next year, when Wisconsin is expected to be a presidential swing state again.

But Wisconsin Elections Commission Election Security Lead Tony Bridges said in a memo to commissioners released Friday that some local clerks are still logging into the state election system using Windows XP or Windows 7.

Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP in 2014 and said it will stop providing free security updates for Windows 7 in January. Bridges wrote that it’s safe to assume a large percentage of clerks won’t upgrade before the deadline or pay for updates. Even clerks with current operating systems often fail to install security patches, he said.

The failure to maintain current operating systems exposes state elections to tremendous risk, Bridges wrote. He pointed to an incident in March in which a ransomware variant called Ryuk shut down vital systems in Jackson County, Georgia, including computers supporting emergency dispatch. Ransomware is software designed to shut down computer systems or data until a ransom is paid.

Ryuk gained access to the systems through a file-sharing vulnerability in older networks. An update that eliminated the vulnerability had been available since 2017, but no one had bothered to install it. The county ended up paying a $400,000 ransom to unlock the system.

Lawrence Andrea reports Wisconsin election officials consider lending new equipment to towns with outdated systems:

Wisconsin elections officials are considering spending more than $800,000 to replace outdated equipment, update software and further address computer security as the state prepares for the 2020 presidential election.

Among the proposals in a Wisconsin Elections Commission plan is to establish a program that would lend new computers to municipalities with outdated operating systems.

More than 500 state elections system users are on computer systems that have reached the end of their life or will do so in the next six months, according to a commission memo. Some of these users have plans to update their systems, but the commission is proposing lending 250 devices to municipalities unable to replace them.

The loans will be free and distributed on a first-come, first-served basis. The equipment is expected to cost up to $300,000.

How Trucking Companies Master Data Collection:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-nine.  Sunrise is 5:55 AM and sunset 8:05 PM, for 14h 09m 35s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 68.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand fourth day.

On this day in 1862, the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin Infantry regiments fight at the Battle of Cedar Mountain, Virginia.

Recommended for reading in full:

Catherine Rampell writes For Trump and his cronies, draining the swamp means ousting experts:

The latest, most egregious example involves the Economic Research Service, an independent statistical agency at the Agriculture Department.

….

The small-but-mighty ERS is arguably the world’s premier agricultural economics agency. It produces critical numbers that farmers rely on when deciding what to plant and how much, how to price, how to manage risk; and that other stakeholders and public officials use to evaluate agricultural policy.

However, because it is independent, the ERS produces research that the Trump administration sometimes finds inconvenient, such as who has really been helped by his tax cuts, how climate change might affect agriculture or how his trade wars hurt farmers.

The administration’s solution to these inconveniences? Blowing up the agency altogether.

In June, the Agriculture Department informed employees at the ERS and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which manages $1.7 billion in scientific funding, that they were moving to “the Kansas City Region,” precise location TBD. Employees had 30 days to decide whether to uproot their families or lose their jobs.

As of July 26, only 116 employees agreed to relocate, according to a USDA spokesperson. That’s about 20 percent of those initially asked. Representatives from the employees’ union, the American Federation of Government Employees, told me they expect even fewer to ultimately move, since some employees who said they’d relocate are searching for other opportunities.

John Fritze reports A USA TODAY analysis found Trump used words like ‘invasion’ and ‘killer’ at rallies more than 500 times since 2017:

Invasion. Aliens. Killers. Criminals.

Those are among the words President Donald Trump repeatedly uses while discussing illegal immigration during his campaign rallies, according to a USA TODAY analysis of the transcripts from more than five dozen of those events.

Trump, who traveled Wednesday to Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, to meet with victims and family members reeling from mass shootings, is facing pressure from critics who say his language has fed a climate of anger toward immigrants, raising the risk of violence. A manifesto authorities believe was written by the El Paso gunman before his attack decries “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

But “invasion” is just one of several incendiary terms Trump regularly embraces.

A USA TODAY analysis of the 64 rallies Trump has held since 2017 found that, when discussing immigration, the president has said “invasion” at least 19 times. He has used the word “animal” 34 times and the word “killer” nearly three dozen times.

How Americans Learned to Love Their Front Lawns:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-nine.  Sunrise is 5:54 AM and sunset 8:06 PM, for 14h 12m 02s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 58.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand third day.

On this day in 1974, Pres. Nixon announces his resignation, to take effect the next day at noon.

Recommended for reading in full:

Molly Beck reports Nearly everyone supports universal background checks for gun buyers. Here’s why Wisconsin is unlikely to make it law:

The vast majority of people in Wisconsin agree on making that policy change, according to 2018 polling by Marquette University Law School. Nationally, 96% of Democrats, 84% of Republicans and 89% of Independents support the measure, according to a recent Marist poll.

Despite overwhelming support, the move likely won’t be made here anytime soon.

“For any Republican to say ‘I support universal background checks’ would be career suicide,” Clemson University political scientist Steven Miller said.

The National Rifle Association’s political arm likely would help elect a primary opponent of any Republican candidate who seeks or supports such restrictions, Miller said, and support for the added safeguard, while wide, isn’t that intense.

“Most people think that’s a good idea, but most people don’t care too much and the people who oppose that are really serious about that,” he said. “Because the minority is much more mobilized, they are more likely to get what they want.”

  VOX-Pol released its latest report in the VOX-Pol publication series, titled The Alt-Right Twitter Census: Defining and Describing the Audience for Alt-Right Content on Twitter, authored by J.M. Berger, on 15 October 2018:

Key Findings

There were four overlapping themes apparent that dominated the alt-right network in this study:

• Support for US President Donald Trump, support for white nationalism, opposition to immigration (often framed in anti-Muslim terms), and accounts primarily devoted to transgressive trolling and harassment.

• @realdonaldtrump was the most influential Twitter account among all users analysed in this study; @richardbspencer was the most influential account within the specific network of users who followed accounts that contained the phrase ‘alt-right’ in their Twitter profiles.

• Support for Trump outstripped all other themes by a wide margin, including references to his name and various campaign slogans in hashtags and user self-descriptions. The most common word in user profiles was ‘MAGA’ (short for Make America Great Again, Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan), and the most common word pair in user profiles was ‘Trump supporter’.

• The alt-right network was most consistently ‘for’ Trump, but users frequently defined themselves by what they were ‘against’. Top word pairs in user self-descriptions included ‘anti-EU’, ‘anti-Islam’, ‘anti-globalist’, ‘anti-feminist’ and ‘anti-Zionist’.

• While the alt-right’s presence on Twitter was substantial, probably encompassing more than 100,000 users as a conservative estimate, the sample analysed here showed extensive evidence of manipulation, including manipulated follower counts, follower tracking, and automated tweeting. Neither the source nor the exact scope of these efforts could be conclusively determined.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched the Amos-17 communications satellite for Spacecom Ltd. of Israel on Aug. 6, 2019:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with evening thunderstorms, and a high of eighty-two.  Sunrise is 5:53 AM and sunset 8:07 PM, for 14h 14m 26s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 47.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand second day.

On this day in 1782, Gen. Washington creates the order of the Purple Heart.

Recommended for reading in full:

 Thomas Kaplan reports How the Trump Campaign Used Facebook Ads to Amplify His ‘Invasion’ Claim:

President Trump’s re-election campaign has harnessed Facebook advertising to push the idea of an “invasion” at the southern border, amplifying the fear-inducing language about immigrants that he has also voiced at campaign rallies and on Twitter.

Since January, Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign has posted more than 2,000 ads on Facebook that include the word “invasion” — part of a barrage of advertising focused on immigration, a dominant theme of his re-election messaging. A review of Mr. Trump’s tweets also found repeated references to an “invasion,” while his 2016 campaign advertising heavily featured dark warnings about immigrants breaching America’s borders.

Mr. Trump’s language on immigration — particularly his use of the word “invasion” — is under scrutiny after the mass shooting in El Paso on Saturday. The suspect in that shooting, which left 22 people dead, appeared to be the author of a manifesto declaring that “this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Seema Metha and Melanie Mason report Orange County, longtime GOP stronghold, now has more registered Democrats than Republicans:

Orange County, long a Republican stronghold, has officially turned blue.

The county that nurtured Ronald Reagan’s conservatism and is the resting place of Richard Nixon is now home to 547,458 registered Democrats, compared with 547,369 Republicans, according to statistics released early Wednesday morning by the county Registrar of Voters. And the number of voters not aligned with a political party has surged in recent years, and now tops 440,770, or 27.4% of the county’s voters.

Democratic leaders attributed the shift to changing demographics, aggressive recruitment efforts and President Trump.

“Trump’s toxic rhetoric and exclusionary policies alienate women, millennials, suburban voters, immigrants and people of color — critical components of the electorate in Orange County,” said Katerina Ioannides, chairwoman of the Orange County Young Democrats, which conducted voter registration drives aimed at young voters, one of several groups that worked to increase party registration. “The Republican Party’s platform no longer resonates in a rapidly diversifying, increasingly college-educated Orange County.

Jennifer Rubin writes It’s increasingly obvious how just getting rid of Trump will help:

Even if we get a Democratic president Americans don’t like all that much, or whose limitations are obvious, we’ll be in a better spot than we would be with President Trump. That’s an unsurprising assumption by Democrats. But, increasingly, independents and disaffected Republicans — as seen from their praise of former president Barack Obama’s remarks on the mass murders in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio — know this to be true. “Anyone but Trump” should be the goal for all Americans, even Republicans.

Why Best Buy Failed In The U.K.… Continue reading

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-two.  Sunrise is 5:52 AM and sunset 8:09 PM, for 14h 16m 49s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 36.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand first day.

Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1945, the United States detonates an atomic bomb over Hiroshima.

Recommended for reading in full:

Video games are not the cause of mass shootings or supremacist ideology:

Helanine Olsen writes Trump’s speech was like a hostage video:

 “We are sickened by this monstrous evil,” said the president on Monday. We need, he said, to “find the courage to answer hatred with unity, devotion and love.”

Nice sentiments. Too bad Trump said them in a flat voice, like he was recording a hostage video. And then, on the final reference, he referred to the city where the second shooting occurred as Toledo. Nothing shows how much you care more than misstating the name of the city where nine people died in a mass shooting, especially after you read it right from the teleprompter only minutes earlier.

Trump is literally the last person who can bring comfort to the grieving, never mind solve the problem of gun violence in the United States. Our president is a failure as both a human being and a leader. We’ve seen it demonstrated time and time again.

Trump has spent the better part of a decade inciting anger and hate. He’s our bully in chief. He went from pushing racist birther theories about President Barack Obama to calling Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants “rapists” and “animals” and “thugs.” He referred to migration to the United States as an “infestation” and “invasion.”

At a rally in the Florida Panhandle in May, Trump asked the crowd, “How do you stop these people?” A man in the crowd answered, “Shoot them.” Trump didn’t miss a beat. “Only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement.” The crowd cheered widely.

Kelly Weill writes From El Paso to Christchurch, a Racist Lie Is Fueling Terrorist Attacks:

In El Paso this weekend and across the globe this year, white supremacists have left manifestos referencing a racist conspiracy theory to justify slaughtering religious and ethnic minorities.

Alleged killers in Christchurch, New Zealand; Poway, California; and El Paso, Texas believed a theory that claims white people are being “replaced” by people of color through mass immigration. Conspiracy theorists often falsely claim this is a deliberate effort by any number of groups demonized on the far right: liberals, Democrats, Jews, Muslims. It’s the theory peddled by white-supremacist groups seeking recruits and the torch-bearing marchers in Charlottesville two years ago.

….

In name alone, the conspiracy theory began in 2011, with the book The Great Replacement by French author Renaud Camus. The anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant text likened the growth of non-white populations to the genocide of white people in European countries. This supposed genocide is nonexistent.

Why Silicon Valley Is Eyeing The Infant Formula Industry: