Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of twenty-eight.  Sunrise is 6:32 AM and sunset 5:42 PM, for 11h 09m 11s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 13.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

  The Whitewater Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.

  On this day in 1967, a cabin fire during a launch rehearsal kills all three Apollo 1 crew members—Command Pilot Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White, and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee—and destroys their command module.

Recommended for reading in full —

Briana Reilly reports Several Wisconsin counties take initiative to test wells for contamination:

Local officials across Wisconsin are gearing up to test wells this year as they seek to gather more data about potential contaminants and how groundwater quality may have changed over time.

The testing comes in the wake of Gov. Tony Evers’ labeling of 2019 as “The Year of Clean Drinking Water” and a series of public hearings around the state held by the Water Quality Task Force that resulted in more than a dozen bills aiming to curb contamination and bolster conservation efforts.

Amid the state-level push, three southwestern counties have banded together to fund the area’s first expansive groundwater survey called the Driftless Area Water Study, while at least four others across the state are working independently on their own efforts.

Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith write How to Reform the Pardon Power:

President Trump is reportedly “obsessed” with the pardon power, which he apparently understands to be the unbounded constitutional authority to dispense forgiveness as he pleases. In his recent rash of 11 pardons and commutations, Trump dispensed with the Department of Justice process for vetting pardon applications and relied instead on the advice of friends and allies, and on his own judgments about redressing “unfairness.” He has also argued he has an “absolute right to PARDON myself” (while at the same time denying the need to do so). Trump revels in the belief that his pardon and commutation decisions are his alone: His critics might not like his choices, but they have to live with them.

…

So, it appears, lawmakers unhappy with grants of clemency are left to voice dissatisfaction and to press the president to explain. And in the past, that is what they have done. After pardoning Richard Nixon, President Gerald Ford made an extraordinary appearance on the Hill to defend his decision. The Senate and House inquired into Bill Clinton’s history of controversial pardons and, in some cases, voted resolutions of bipartisan disapproval. But, barring a constitutional amendment, many people appear to believe that Congress can do nothing more to regulate the president’s “absolute” pardon power.

We disagree. As we discuss in detail in a forthcoming book on institutional reforms of the presidency, there are limits Congress may and should impose on at least some exercises of the pardon power. And by prescribing those limits, the legislature can prevent or deter the most egregious abuses, while encouraging future presidents to adhere more closely to norms of process and restraint.

Citizenship Amendment Act: Millions in India Could End Up in Modi’s New Detention Camps:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of twenty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:34 AM and sunset 5:40 PM, for 11h 06m 19s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 7.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1815, Napoleon escapes from exile on Elba.

Recommended for reading in full —

Keri Blakinger reports Newsrooms Rethink a Crime Reporting Staple: The Mugshot:

Online mugshot galleries, where news organizations post rows of people who were arrested, once seemed like an easy moneymaker for struggling newsrooms: Each reader click to the next image translated to more page views and an opportunity for more advertising dollars.

But faced with questions about the lasting impact of putting these photos on the internet, where they live forever, media outlets are increasingly doing away with the galleries of people on the worst days of their lives.

Last month, the Houston Chronicle became the latest major paper to take that plunge. At an all-hands staff meeting, the paper’s editors announced their decision to stop posting slideshows of people who have been arrested but not convicted—and who are still presumed innocent under law.

“Mugshot slideshows whose primary purpose is to generate page views will no longer appear on our websites,” Mark Lorando, a managing editor at the Chronicle, later explained in an email to The Marshall Project. “We’re better than that.”

….

A 2016 survey of 74 papers by Univision’s Fusion channel found that 40 percent published mugshot galleries. There’s no comprehensive tracking of such media practices so it’s not clear how much that figure has changed.

Sam Gringlas reports With An Election On The Horizon, Older Adults Get Help Spotting Fake News:

At the Schweinhaut Senior Center in suburban Maryland, about a dozen seniors gather around iPads and laptops, investigating a suspicious meme of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Plastered over her image, in big, white block letters, a caption reads:

“California will receive 13 extra seats in Congress by including 10 million illegal aliens in the 2020 U.S. Census.”

The seniors are participating in a workshop sponsored by the nonprofit Senior Planet called “How to Spot Fake News.” As instructed, they pull up a reputable fact-checking site like Snopes or FactCheck.org, and within a few minutes, identify the meme is peddling fake news.

“It’s right there!” 86-year-old Marlene Cianci tells the class. “Just a two-step thing and there it was!”

Researchers say classes like this one should be more widely offered, especially with the 2020 election approaching.

After Russia launched a massive disinformation campaign on social media during the 2016 election, many middle and high schools rushed to add digital literacy courses to their curriculums. Now, U.S. officials say Russia is again interfering in U.S. elections. But experts say older adults may struggle the most with identifying fake news, and classes designed to teach these skills to seniors aren’t yet common nationwide.

A recent study suggests these classes could be increasingly important. Researchers at Princeton and New York University found that Facebook users 65 and over posted seven times as many articles from fake news websites, compared to adults under 29.

Single fox rescue turns into a whole litter rescue:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-six.  Sunrise is 6:36 AM and sunset 5:39 PM, for 11h 03m 28s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 3.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 5:30 PM.

  On this day in 1991, the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact is declared disbanded at a meeting of defense and foreign ministers from remaining Pact countries meeting in Hungary.

Recommended for reading in full —

Samantha Weller writes ‘One big crony boondoggle’: Trump’s border wall is now just a gigantic grift for his campaign donors:

The company, Atlas Tube, is run by Barry Zekelman, who donated $1.75 million to a pro-Trump PAC in 2018 to urge Trump to place tariffs and quotas on steel.

The New York Times says that there is enough evidence to suspect that he violated the law. Brendan Fischer, a lawyer at the Campaign Legal Center, put it simply:

“Foreign nations have no right to interfere in U.S. elections and certainly do not have the right to buy the policies that benefit them.”

The other company, Fisher Sand and Gravel, is under review by the Department of Defense, who says there are “concerns about the possibility of inappropriate influence on USACE’s contracting decision,” according to ABC News.

The Washington Post says Trump has continuously pressured the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to award border wall contracts to firms that are pro-Trump.

Simon Tisdale writes Putin, a criminal and incompetent president, is an enemy of his own people:

In any free and fair election, his criminal legacy of economic incompetence, abuse of power and shameless venality would be sure to sink him without trace. But free and fair elections now look ever more remote, especially following the brutal suppression of pro-democracy protesters in Moscow last summer.

On the contrary, Putin grows ever more intolerant of any form of actual or suspected opposition, whether it be in the form of civil society organisations, the media, or courageous, much persecuted activists such as Alexi Navalny.

Thanks to Putin’s mismanagement and neglect, Russia’s economy is in terrible shape, over-reliant on energy exports, lacking foreign investment and suffering chronic capital flight. That’s because businesses cannot rely on the rule of law to safeguard their dealings or prevent attempts at extortion, kickbacks and bribery.

Putin’s supposedly transformative national spending projects worth an eye-watering $390bn have largely failed to materialise. His promises of economic modernisation and raised living standards must be set against a consecutive five-year fall in real wages and cuts to state pensions.

At the same time, it is crystal clear Putin fears the sort of political liberalisation that might facilitate greater economic competitiveness and international investment. On the contrary, his latest proposals seek to further limit foreign influence.

The continuing drag on Russia’s development caused by western sanctions, imposed after the illegal annexation of Crimea, symbolises the broader, negative aspects of perpetual Putinism.

Putin not only refuses to get out of Crimea but actively fuels the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine. And this conflict is but a smaller version of the murderous mayhem wrought by Russian forces in Syria since 2016, where killing and mass displacement continue in Idlib.

China Is Censoring Coronavirus Stories. These Citizens Are Fighting Back:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:37 AM and sunset 5:38 PM, for 11h 00m 38s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater School Board at 6 PM in closed session, with an open session beginning at 7 PM.

  On this day in 1863, the 28th and 29th Wisconsin Infantry regiments and 12th Wisconsin Light Artillery take part in an expedition to Yazoo Pass by Moon Lake in Mississippi.

Recommended for reading in full —

Kelly Meyerhofer reports 18 months into UW merger, small, rural campuses still struggling to find students:

The UW System’s 12 other branch campuses face a similar storm of challenges: rising costs, repeated budget cuts and a tuition freeze for 12 of the past 14 years. Mostly, though, the problem centers on enrollment, which is what [director for student enrollment at UW-Richland Center John] Poole spent his 42-year career on campus worrying about before retiring in 2013.

Seven of the System’s branch campuses this fall, including Richland Center, tallied their lowest enrollment in nearly half a century, according to preliminary data. Total enrollment at the branch campuses, about 7,300 students, marked a 46-year low.

The demographic trend shows little sign of reversing during the next decade. Projections based on the state’s birth rate show the number of students graduating from Wisconsin high schools this spring will be the lowest since 2000, according to a UW-Madison report.

Nationally, the contraction in college enrollment will worsen as an even smaller pool of students born during the Great Recession enters college between 2025 and 2030.

Dominic Rushe reports ‘America’s Dairyland’: Wisconsin’s farmers see bleak future:

Wisconsin still styles itself the dairy state. Car number plates come with the slogan “America’s Dairyland”. Last year it was also the state with the highest number of farming bankruptcies – 57, its highest total in a decade. The number of dairy farms across the state has fallen by 49% over the past 15 years.

The decline is fundamentally changing Wisconsin’s rural landscape as schools and small businesses collapse taking the rural communities that supported them with them. Wisconsin is an avatar of a wider problem in the dairy industry. America’s largest milk producer, Dean Foods, filed for bankruptcy last November. Borden, founded in 1857, filed for bankruptcy in January.

The milk industry’s woes have been a long time in the making and no single factor accounts for them. Collapsing prices, the rise of mega farms in warmer states such as Texas and Arizona, the increasingly international trade in dry milk products like whey protein, Trump’s tariffs, the fluctuations in international trade and shifting consumer habits have all played a part.

The irony is that as the number of farms in bankruptcy rises, milk sales and prices are also on the rise. Per-capita dairy consumption reached 646 pounds per person in 2018, the most popular year for dairy in the US since 1962.

How One Group Is Restoring Thousands Of Oysters To The New York Harbor:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of forty-five.  Sunrise is 6:39 AM and sunset 5:36 PM, for 10h 57m 48s of daytime.  The moon is new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1945, during the Battle of Iwo Jima, a group of United States Marines and a U.S. Navy hospital corpsman reach the top of Mount Suribachi on the island and are photographed raising the American flag.

Recommended for reading in full —

Greg Sargent writes Trump’s corruption will get worse. His own advisers just showed how:

Trump publicly attacked the Russia investigation as a witch hunt for years, expressly to justify his efforts — also undertaken in plain sight — to obstruct it.

True, there are things Trump didn’t want publicly revealed — like his campaign’s 2016 efforts to encourage and benefit from Russian electoral sabotage.

But this is precisely where the public corruption comes in. Trump’s insight has been that unabashedly attacking and obstructing law enforcement in plain view makes it seem less shady, reverse-reinforcing his original claim that efforts to ferret out the wrongdoing he does want concealed are illegitimate.

Trump just pardoned a string of white-collar criminals and political allies, claiming they were unfairly prosecuted by the “same people” who investigated him. This reportedly came not after a serious procedural vetting of their prosecutions, but after recommendations from friends, celebrities and campaign donors.

Trump didn’t hide this. Here again the public and unabashed declaration of the power to confer impunity on the guilty — to declare the guilty innocent simply because they were investigated for wrongdoing just as he was, meaning he is one of them — is the whole point of it.

Bess Levin writes Trump’s “Phase One” Trade Deal [with China] Is Another Classic Trump Scam:

For one thing, as the New York Times notes, just 16% of the $200 billion in purchases will be of goods produced by farmers, who were hit extremely hard by the trade war (banks, the energy industry, and drug companies are major beneficiaries), and whose recovery won’t happen overnight. For another, as Vox’s Jen Kirby points out, China desperately needs agricultural products like soybeans and pork, so it was already prepared to buy such items, and might have done so anyway. And there’s the question of whether U.S. farmers can even produce the amount China says it will purchase, which some experts believe may not be achievable.

While the U.S. has halted additional tariffs on Chinese goods that were scheduled to go into effect in December 2019 and will halve tariffs on $110 billion in goods announced last September, duties will remain on approximately $360 billion in Chinese goods, which of course U.S. companies and consumers will continue to pay for. In addition, China refused demands to include a clause promising not to hack American firms and will continue to heavily subsidize many of its state-run and private companies, a major point of contention that Trump cited as recently as September as a reason to reject a proposed deal. Despite the administration’s claims, what was agreed on today is not exactly a lot to write home about, particularly considering the carnage Trump has caused over the last two years in order to get it.

Life Through the Eyes of a Sea Turtle:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-one.  Sunrise is 6:40 AM and sunset 5:45 PM, for 10h 54m 59s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 1.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1980, it’s a Miracle on Ice at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, NY, as the US hockey team defeats the Soviets, 4-3.

Recommended for reading in full —

Toluse Olorunnipa, Ashley Parker, and Josh Dawsey report Trump embarks on expansive search for disloyalty as administration-wide purge escalates:

President Trump has instructed his White House to identify and force out officials across his administration who are not seen as sufficiently loyal, a post-impeachment escalation that administration officials say reflects a new phase of a campaign of retribution and restructuring ahead of the November election.

Johnny McEntee, Trump’s former personal aide who now leads the effort as director of presidential personnel, has begun combing through various agencies with a mandate from the president to oust or sideline political appointees who have not proved their loyalty, according to several administration officials and others familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The push comes in the aftermath of an impeachment process in which several members of Trump’s administration provided damning testimony about his behavior with regard to Ukraine. The stream of officials publicly criticizing Trump’s actions frustrated the president and caused him to fixate on cleaning house after his acquittal this month.

“We want bad people out of our government!” Trump tweeted Feb. 13, kicking off a tumultuous stretch of firings, resignations, controversial appointments and private skirmishes that have since spilled into public view.

The National Security Council, the State Department and the Justice Department are targets of particular focus, according to two administration officials, and there have recently been multiple resignations and reassignments at each of those agencies.

Sally Yates writes Trump thinks the Justice Department is his personal grudge squad:

The imperative of Justice Department independence from political influence has deep roots. After the Watergate scandal, Attorney General Griffin Bell sought to reestablish Justice’s independence and ensure that the department would be “recognized by all citizens as a neutral zone, in which neither favor nor pressure nor politics is permitted to influence the administration of the law.” The nation had lost faith in the Justice Department and the rule of law, so during the Carter administration Bell instituted strict limits on communications between the White House and Justice to prevent any “outside interference in reaching professional judgment on legal matters.”

While the policy is ostensibly still in effect, it is a hollow ode to bygone days. From virtually the moment he took office, President Trump has attempted to use the Justice Department as a cudgel against his enemies and as a shield for himself and his allies. He ran off Jeff Sessions after Sessions’s recusal in the Russia investigation rendered Sessions useless to protect him. The president has attempted to order up investigations of his perceived political enemies and enlist the department to protect his friends. With every blow, the wall of Justice independence has wobbled a bit more. This week, it teetered on the verge of collapse.

Moon ‘eclipses’ Mars in Arizona’s early morning sky: