Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-nine.  Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 6:56 PM, for 11h 43m 49s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater School District’s Policy Review Committee meets at 8 AM, and Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6 PM.

  On this day in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson successfully test bi-directional telephone transmission of clear speech.

Recommended for reading in full —

David Frum writes Trump Is Counting on the Supreme Court to Save Him:

Sometime before June 29, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court will either plunge the United States into the severest constitutional crisis of the Trump years—or save Americans from that crisis.

Three different committees of Congress, as well as New York State prosecutors, have issued subpoenas to President Donald Trump’s accountants and bankers for his tax and business records. Trump has sued to stop the accountants and bankers from complying. He has lost twice at the district-court level and twice at the appeals-court level. Now he is looking to the conservative majority on the Supreme Court to rescue him.

On March 31, the court will hear oral arguments in the cases of Trump v. Mazars and Trump v. Deutsche Bank. The decision will be rendered sometime between then and the court’s summer break.

Although Trump is suing his accountants and his bankers as a private citizen, his case has been joined by the Department of Justice. Solicitor General Noel Francisco has signed an amicus brief on behalf of the United States. It is an astonishing document. It invites the Supreme Court to junk two centuries of precedent—and to substitute an entirely new system of judicial review of congressional subpoenas that involve a president.

A legislative subpoena must therefore satisfy heightened requirements when it seeks information from the President. At the threshold, the full chamber should unequivocally authorize a subpoena against the President. Moreover, the legislative purpose should be set forth with specificity. Courts should not presume that the purpose is legitimate, but instead should scrutinize it with care. And as with information protected by executive privilege, information sought from the President should be demonstrably critical to the legislative purpose. A congressional committee cannot evade these heightened requirements merely by directing the subpoena to third-party custodians, for such agents generally assume the rights and privileges of their principal, as this Court has recognized in analogous cases.

All the requirements in that above paragraph were devised for purposes of this litigation. None of them has ever been enforced—none of them has ever been imagined—in the previous 230 years of skirmishing between Congresses and presidents. Every must and should and cannot was invented in this very brief, for the immediate legal purposes of this president in this dilemma. The solicitor general might as well have said that subpoenas must be delivered by a sled pulled by flying reindeer, for all the connection between these demands and the previous constitutional history of the United States.

SpaceX Dragon spacecraft captured by Space Station in time-lapse video:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of fifty-two.  Sunrise is 7:14 AM and sunset 6:55 PM, for 11h 40m 54s of daytime.  The moon is full with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6 PM.

  On this day in 1954,  CBS television broadcasts the See It Now episode, “A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy.”

Excerpt – Murrow on McCarthy —

Recommended for reading in full —

Margaret Sullivan writes The media is blowing its chance to head off an Election Day debacle:

Political reporters scrutinize every public-opinion poll as if it were the I Ching. Cable pundits blather about the potential impact of the candidates’ latest gaffes, despite how notoriously bad they are at such prognostications.

What they are not obsessed with, sadly, is the very core of Election Day: voting itself.

“The media has a huge role to play in helping things to go well,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine and the author of “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust and the Threat to American Democracy.”

But, Hasen said, that has to happen now, not in September or October when it’s too late.

If journalists turn their searchlights on potential problems, Hasen told me, they can help prevent “situations where losers don’t accept the results as legitimate.”

They can do this by reporting stories that put pressure on local and state officials to take remedial action.

There’s no shortage of potential targets for journalists: malfunctioning equipment, insufficient or poorly run polling places, unfair or discriminatory voter registration, and flawed methods of doing recounts.

Many experts are convinced that the gold-standard method for casting votes is the old-fashioned hand-marked paper ballot, which Hasen calls “the least hackable and the most audit-able.” But, as Sue Halpern wrote in the New Yorker last year, vendors of fancy new voting systems have been aggressive in their efforts to sell municipalities on their frequently opaque products.

David Knowles reports Trump’s mental state — not Biden’s — is the real concern, mental health professionals say:

Mental health professionals who have expressed concern over what they see as Donald Trump’s declining faculties say that similar fears about Joe Biden’s are overblown.

“A few stumbled words are not the same as the extreme danger that result from a list of signs that Donald Trump has shown,” Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist on the faculty at the Yale School of Medicine, told Yahoo News, “and none of them apply to Joe Biden.”

Lee edited a collection of essays written by 27 mental health professionals titled “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” which detailed what the authors see as the risks posed by a leader who they regard as mentally and emotionally unfit for the most powerful office in the world.

Yet since Biden’s reemergence as a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Lee has been flooded by requests to assess the former vice president’s string of stumbles in public appearances. In response, she published a piece on Medium correcting what she sees as the false equivalence between Trump’s “mental instability” and Biden’s occasional gaffes.

….

Biden “digresses and gets tangential, that’s not cognitive decline,” Lynne Meyer, a California psychologist told Yahoo News. “Trump’s cognitive decline or problems are that he doesn’t even seem to have comprehension of reality. That’s what it looks like.”

The Daredevil Aviatrix That History Forgot:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-one.  Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 6:54 PM, for 11h 37m 59s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1862, the 1st Wisconsin Cavalry musters in: “It would go on to fight in the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863 and in the Atlanta Campaign the following year. It also helped capture Confederate President Jefferson Davis on May 10, 1865. The 1st Cavalry lost about half its men in three years: six officers and 67 enlisted men were killed in combat and seven officers and 321 enlisted men died from disease.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Philip Ewing reports Russian Election Trolling Becoming Subtler, Tougher To Detect:

Russia’s trolling specialists have evolved their disinformation and agitation techniques to become subtler and tougher to track, according to new research unveiled on Thursday.

A cache of Instagram posts captured by researchers showed that the Russians were “better at impersonating candidates” and that influence-mongers “have moved away from creating their own fake advocacy groups to mimicking and appropriating the names of actual American groups,” wrote Young Mie Kim, a University of Wisconsin professor who analyzed the material with her team.

Kim, who is also affiliated with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, discussed the analysis in a new report that also included images of some of the posts.

Kim and her team identified 32 Instagram accounts they said appeared to be linked to Russia’s now-infamous Internet Research Agency, of which 31 later were confirmed to be IRA-linked by an analysis commissioned by Facebook, which owns Instagram.

….

Russian influence operations are aimed at sowing chaos and amplifying division as much as bringing about a specific political result, national security officials say.

To that end, influence specialists posed as American grassroots or community activists and targeted populations with the intent to divide them or convince them not to vote, Kim wrote.

“The IRA is well-versed enough in the history and culture of our politics to exploit sharp political divisions already existing in our society,” Kim wrote. “American nationalism/patriotism, immigration, gun control and LGBT issues were the top five issues frequently discussed in the IRA’s campaigns.”

Josh Gerstine reports Feds: Mystery witness will implicate ‘Putin’s chef’ in election interference:

U.S. prosecutors say they have a witness who will directly implicate a Russian businessman known as “Putin’s chef” in schemes to carry out election interference overseas.

The mystery witness is prepared to testify at a criminal trial set to open in Washington next month in a case special counsel Robert Mueller brought accusing three Russian companies and 13 Russian individuals of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a prosecutor declared at a recent court hearing.

The anticipated testimony will focus on the most prominent Russian national charged in the indictment, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a St. Petersburg restaurateur who enjoys close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and who has expanded his business empire to become a key contractor for the Russian military.

Prosecutors say Prigozhin ran the Internet Research Agency, a Russian firm that allegedly sponsored and coordinated online troll activity during the 2016 U.S. election.

How to Make a Record-Setting Paper Plane:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty.  Sunrise is 6:17 AM and sunset 5:53 PM, for 11h 35m 12s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 92.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1811, naturalist and longtime Wisconsin resident Increase Allen Lapham is born.

Recommended for reading in full —

David Nakamura reports Trump plays medical expert on coronavirus by second-guessing the professionals:

“I like this stuff. I really get it,” Trump boasted to reporters during a tour of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where he met with actual doctors and scientists who are feverishly scrambling to contain and combat the deadly illness. Citing a “great, super-genius uncle” who taught at MIT, Trump professed that it must run in the family genes.

“People are really surprised I understand this stuff,” he said. “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.”

But for members of the general public alarmed by more than 300 diagnosed cases in the United States — including at least 21 that his administration announced Friday were discovered on a cruise ship off the San Francisco coast — Trump’s performance during an impromptu 45-minute news conference at CDC was not necessarily reassuring.

Sporting his trademark red 2020 campaign hat with the slogan “Keep America Great,” the president repeatedly second-guessed and waved off the actual medical professionals standing next to him. He attacked his Democratic rivals — including calling Washington Gov. Jay Inslee a “snake” for criticizing his response — and chided a CNN reporter for smiling and called her network “fake news.”

And he described coronavirus testing kits — which his administration has been criticized for being slow to distribute — as “beautiful” and said they were as “perfect” as his Ukraine phone call last summer that led him to be impeached.

Anastasia Tsioulcas reports Publisher Drops Woody Allen’s Book After Ronan Farrow Objects, Employees Walk Out:

On Thursday afternoon, dozens of employees of the publishing imprints Grand Central Publishing and Little, Brown staged a walkout in both New York and Boston to protest Grand Central’s decision to publish Allen’s book.

Both imprints are owned by Hachette Book Group, the same house that published journalist Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill. The walkout comes after Farrow announced on Tuesday that he felt he could no longer work with HBG after the Allen acquisition.

On Friday evening, Farrow tweeted of the decision: “Grateful to all the Hachette employees who spoke up and to the company for listening.”

Farrow is Allen’s son with actress Mia Farrow; his sister, Dylan Farrow, has accused Allen of having sexually abused her as a child. Allen has long denied her allegations.

In his statement, Farrow wrote in part that HBG “concealed the decision from me and its own employees while we were working on Catch and Kill — a book about how powerful men, including Woody Allen, avoid accountability for sexual abuse.”

(A private firm has no insuperable obligation to publish an author’s work against the better judgment of critics and its own employees. Hachette Book Group made the right decision to abandon Allen’s book.)

Asteroid approaching Earth will not annihilate humanity:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:19 AM and sunset 5:51 PM, for 11h 32m 17s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 85.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1967, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva defects to the United States.

Recommended for reading in full —

Casey Michel reports It Looks Like a News App in the Apple Store. It’s Really Russian Propaganda:

Over the past few years, Russian-funded propagandists have tried a number of ways to reach American audiences without revealing their links to the Kremlin, from claiming to be “grassroots” start-ups to cycling their funding through cut-outs that obscure their Russian origins.

Now, Russian propagandists have a new trick: Pushing a “news” app that poses as a “free streaming service,” but which is linked directly to the Russian propaganda outlet RT. Of course, the app doesn’t bother to disclose this.

Dubbed “Portable.TV,” the new app went live a few months ago, according to its Apple Store history. Billing itself as a “one-of-a-kind free streaming service & TV library of news programs, talk shows, business updates, professional sports highlights and comedy,” the app claims to allow users to “stay informed & up to date” via Portable.TV’s “uniquely global perspective [that] foregrounds marginalized or dissident viewpoints to give you a clearer picture of the world.” As the app says, “Truth shouldn’t have limits: You can take Portable.TV wherever you go.”

One problem, though: The only shows available on Portable.TV are produced by RT America, including shows like Redacted Tonight with self-proclaimed comedian Lee Camp and The World According to Jesse with former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura.

Garrett Epps writes Trump Is at War With the Whole Idea of an Independent Judiciary:

How will history view Trump’s four most important judicial enablers—Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh? If the Court’s conservatives really do care about their historical legacy, they should take heed that Trump has pushed them and the Court onto very dangerous ground, and shows no sign that he will stop pushing.

As I’ve noted before, the conservative majority—those four justices plus Chief Justice John Roberts—has taken on the role of Trump’s enforcer, ensuring that controversial priorities such as the border wall and the immigration “public charge” rule take effect even before they can be fully considered by lower courts. In a dissent from the decision granting a stay in the immigration case last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “the Court’s recent behavior on stay applications has benefited one litigant [the government] over all others.”

Will anything cause the conservatives to rethink? Will they, for example, become less eager to salivate at the president’s bell if he intensifies his assault on the independence of the courts?

Let’s hope so—because in recent weeks he has done exactly that, opening two new fronts in this sordid war. He is at swords’ points with the federal courts generally, with individual judges who have displeased him, with private citizens who as jurors defy his preferences, and now with the Supreme Court. If the nation were not numb from the shocks of the past three years, this remarkable vendetta would be prompting an uproar.

The Rise Of The Drive-Thru:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-six.  Sunrise is 6:21 AM and sunset 5:50 PM, for 11h 29m 22s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 76.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM.

  On this day in 1946, Winston Churchill’s Sinews of Peace address at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri uses the term “iron curtain” in the context of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe.

Recommended for reading in full —

David Welna reports Freedom House Report Finds Freedom On The Wane Worldwide:

Twenty five of the 41 “established democracies” identified by Freedom House saw net losses in democracy since 2006. “The most common areas of decline,” says Repucci, “took place in functioning of government, freedom of expression and belief, and rule of law.”

A decade ago, Freedom House rated freedom in the United States on a par with nations such as Switzerland and the United Kingdom. In its latest report, the U.S. ranking has dropped 8 points, behind Slovakia and Mauritius and just ahead of Argentina and Croatia.

Much of the blame for the slide in the U.S. standing gets placed on President Trump.

“The Trump administration has failed to exhibit consistent commitment to a foreign policy based on the principles of democracy and human rights,” the report states. “[Trump] has also given a pass to tyrannical leaders whom he hopes to woo diplomatically, including Vladimir Putin of Russia and Kim Jong-un of North Korea.”

“Fierce rhetorical attacks on the press, the rule of law, and other pillars of democracy coming from American leaders, including the president himself,” are also noted by Freedom House, which relies on federal funding for most of its $38 million annual budget.

“An ongoing decline in fair and equal treatment of refugees and asylum seekers,” the report adds, “is also particularly worrisome for a country that takes pride in its traditional role as a beacon for the oppressed.”

See Freedom in the World 2020: A Leaderless Struggle for Democracy.

Molly Beck reports Wisconsin joins border wall lawsuit, says diversion of defense funds hurts Oshkosh Corp.:

Wisconsin and 18 other states are suing President Donald Trump’s administration over diverting $3.8 billion in public funds to help pay for the construction of a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico.

The lawsuit comes after Oshkosh Corp. learned in February it was poised to take a $101 million hit from the Defense Department’s plan to divert nearly $4 billion from elsewhere in its budget to build 177 miles of a border wall.

“This diversion by the Trump Administration is a wasteful use of taxpayer dollars and neglects the needs of our state National Guard units,” Gov. Tony Evers said in a statement. “There is simply no justification for the president’s continued desire to create a crisis at the border, and this move negatively impacts not only Wisconsin’s economy but the safety of our communities.”

Evers on Wednesday authorized Attorney General Josh Kaul to join the multi-state lawsuit, which was filed by California’s attorney general.

A first look at the planned cuts related to the border wall shows that $101 million will be moved from the production of vehicles known as Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Trucks that the U.S. Army has relied on to carry munitions and other critical supplies.

Curiosity Mars Rover Snaps 1.8 Billion-Pixel Panorama (narrated video):