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:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon thundershowers with a high of eighty-seven. Sunrise is 5:19 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 18m 29s of daytime.  The moon is waxing gibbous with 51.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1846, Adolphe Sax patents the saxophone.

Recommended for reading in full —

Joshua Partlow and Josh Dawsey report Workers removed thousands of social distancing stickers before Trump’s Tulsa rally:

In the hours before President Trump’s rally in Tulsa, his campaign directed the removal of thousands of “Do Not Sit Here, Please!” stickers from seats in the arena that were intended to establish social distance between rallygoers, according to video and photos obtained by The Washington Post and a person familiar with the event.

The removal contradicted instructions from the management of the BOK Center, the 19,000-seat arena in downtown Tulsa where Trump held his rally on June 20. At the time, coronavirus cases were rising sharply in Tulsa County, and Trump faced intense criticism for convening a large crowd for an indoor political rally, his first such event since the start of the pandemic.

As part of its safety plan, arena management had purchased 12,000 do-not-sit stickers for Trump’s rally, intended to keep people apart by leaving open seats between attendees. On the day of the rally, event staff had already affixed them on nearly every other seat in the arena when Trump’s campaign told event management to stop and then began removing the stickers, hours before the president’s arrival, according to a person familiar with the event who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

….

They also told us that they didn’t want any signs posted saying we should social distance in the venue,” [executive vice president of the venue’s owners, ASM Doug] Thornton said.

Derek Willis and Yeganeh Torbati report A Company Run by a White House “Volunteer” With No Experience in Medical Supplies Got $2.4 Million From the Feds for Medical Supplies:

A company created by a former Pentagon official who describes himself as a White House volunteer for Vice President Mike Pence won a $2.4 million dollar contract in May — its first federal award — to supply the Bureau of Prisons with surgical gowns.

Mathew J. Konkler, who worked in the Department of Defense during the George W. Bush administration, formed BlackPoint Distribution Company LLC in August 2019 in Indiana, state records show, but had won no federal work until May 26. The Bureau of Prisons chose the company with limited competition for a contract to supply surgical gowns to its facilities.

It is at least the second contract awarded to a company formed by an individual who had worked in or volunteered for the Trump administration; a company formed by Zach Fuentes, a former White House deputy chief of staff, won a $3 million contract just days after forming to supply face masks to the Indian Health Service. The masks did not meet FDA standards for use in health care settings, and an IHS spokesman said this week that the agency is trying to return the masks to Fuentes. Members of Congress called for investigations into the contract, and the Government Accountability Office now plans to review the deal “in the coming few months, as staff become available,” spokesman Charles Young said last week.

A Decade of Sun:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will see scattered thundershowers with a high of eighty-six. Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 18m 29s of daytime.  The moon is waxing crescent with 40.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1937, Solomon Juneau founds the Milwaukee Sentinel.

Recommended for reading in full —

Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, and Michael Schwirtz report Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says (‘The Trump administration has been deliberating for months about what to do about a stunning intelligence assessment’):

American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials briefed on the matter.

The United States concluded months ago that the Russian unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats, had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.

Islamist militants, or armed criminal elements closely associated with them, are believed to have collected some bounty money, the officials said. Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

 Philip Bump describes The ridiculous coronavirus denialism of Trump’s top economic adviser:

Larry Kudlow came to President Trump’s National Economic Council by way of a stint on cable television, a not-uncommon path for members of Trump’s team. His job is straightforward: He is responsible for ensuring that the administration enacts policies aimed at bolstering the economy, a central concern for the president as his reelection looms.

Kudlow’s most obvious efforts at massaging the economy, though, seem to echo those of Trump: assuring Americans and U.S. businesses that the coronavirus pandemic is under control.

That’s been his role for a while. In late February, Kudlow appeared on television to assure the country that the virus was contained “pretty close to airtight.” It wasn’t: The virus was already spreading without detection and the first case of that spread would be reported less than 48 hours later. It’s not just that Kudlow was incorrect. It’s that he was obviously incorrect at the time he made the claim he made.

….

“There are some hot spots. We’re on it,” Kudlow reiterated Monday. “We know how to deal with this stuff now, we’ve come a long way since last winter and there is no second wave coming.”

That was Monday, when the seven-day average of new cases in the United States was 27,645, according to a Washington Post analysis. That was already up 28 percent from the average June 15. Since Monday, that average has climbed another 12 percent, leading to one of the highest averages the country has seen since the pandemic emerged.

How Laser Cleaning Works:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will see afternoon thundershowers with a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 18m 58s of daytime.  The moon is waxing crescent with 29.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1963, Pres. Kennedy deliver his Ich bin ein Berliner speech in West Berlin.

Recommended for reading in full —

Neil Paine and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux write New research explores how conservative media misinformation may have intensified the severity of the pandemic (‘The three studies paint a picture of a media ecosystem that entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking steps to protect themselves and others’):

In recent weeks, three studies have focused on conservative media’s role in fostering confusion about the seriousness of the coronavirus. Taken together, they paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others.

The end result, according to one of the studies, is that infection and mortality rates are higher in places where one pundit who initially downplayed the severity of the pandemic — Fox News’s Sean Hannity — reaches the largest audiences.

….

In April, Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and Dolores Albarracin of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign published a peer-reviewed study examining how Americans’ media diets affected their beliefs about the coronavirus.

Administering a nationally representative phone survey with 1,008 respondents, they found that people who got most of their information from mainstream print and broadcast outlets tended to have an accurate assessment of the severity of the pandemic and their risks of infection. But those who relied on conservative sources, such as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories or unfounded rumors, such as the belief that taking vitamin C could prevent infection, that the Chinese government had created the virus, and that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exaggerated the pandemic’s threat “to damage the Trump presidency.”
….

A working paper posted by the National Bureau of Economic Research in May examined whether these incorrect beliefs affected real-world behavior.

The authors used anonymous location data from millions of cellphones to explore how the popularity of Fox News in a given Zip code related to social distancing practices there. By March 15, they found, a 10 percent increase in Fox News viewership within a Zip code reduced its residents’ propensity to stay home, in compliance with public health guidelines, by about 1.3 percentage points.
….

Another recent working paper, by economists at the University of Chicago and other institutions, similarly finds that Fox News viewers are less likely to comply with public health guidelines than consumers of other media. But their paper takes the analysis two steps further: It finds that Fox viewers aren’t a monolith, with fans of some media personalities acting distinctly from others. It also provides evidence that those behavioral differences are contributing to the spread of the coronavirus and mortality rate of covid-19 the disease it causes, in certain areas.

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