Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of fifty-four.  Sunrise is 6:39 AM and sunset 7:19 PM, for 12h 40m 02s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 27.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1865, the Wisconsinites fight at the Battle at Gravelly Run, Virginia:

The Battle at Gravelly Run erupted east of Petersburg, Virginia. The 6th, 7th and 36th Wisconsin Infantry regiments participated in this battle, which was one of a series of engagements that ultimately drove Confederate forces out of Petersburg. Wisconsin’s Iron Brigade regiments fought at Gravelly Run, and when ordered to fall back before the enemy, they were the last to leave the field.

Recommended for reading in full:

Mariana Zuñiga, Anthony Faiola, and Anton Troianovski report As Maduro confronts a crisis, Russia’s footprint in Venezuela grows:

CARACAS, Venezuela — After two Russian military planes landed near Caracas this month, the Trump administration issued stark warnings over President Nicolás Maduro’s ties to the Kremlin. But a vessel that arrived in the waters off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast a day earlier offered a more telling sign of a deepening relationship that is so alarming to Washington.

Venezuela has the world’s largest known oil reserves, with transport and sales of its thick, sludgy crude long dependent on chemical thinners purchased from the United States. After Washington barred U.S. companies from selling them to Venezuela in January — and warned foreign companies to follow suit — Maduro faced a dire predicament: How would he stave off the industry’s total collapse?

Like manna from Moscow, an answer arrived in the form of a red-and-black tanker, the Serengeti, that loaded a cargo of thinners off the coast of Malta before arriving in Venezuela on March 22. The company that chartered the vessel: Russia’s state-run oil giant Rosneft.

Alina Polyakova writes Want to know what’s next in Russian election interference? Pay attention to Ukraine’s elections:

With Russia’s continued occupation of Crimea and war in the Donbas, Ukraine also remains a key arena of contestation between Russia and the West. Ukraine is a large European country with a population of 45 million people. It is rich in natural resources and human capital, and its success or failure in achieving long-lasting democratic and economic reforms can tip the balance in great power contestation. The Kremlin seeks to prevent Ukraine from moving toward the West by keeping it in a permanent “grey zone.” To achieve that goal, Russia continues to destabilize Ukraine through conventional and nonconventional military means while seeking to undermine Ukraine’s democratic and economic reform process. Deterring an increasingly aggressive Russia must start in Ukraine.

….

There have been at least 15 known Russian-attributed cyberattacks on Ukraine since 2014. A December 2015 cyberattack caused a blackout affecting over 230,000 Ukrainians. The malware used in that attack has been detected in electric utilities in the United States.

  Why Garfield phones have been washing up on French beaches for decades:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-four.  Sunrise is 6:40 AM and sunset 7:17 PM, for 12h 37m 08s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 37.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1865, the Appomattox Campaign begins in Virginia:

When it became clear that the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia, was about to fall, Confederate leaders and troops began moving west toward the town of Appomattox Court House. Union troops, including several Wisconsin regiments, followed close on their heels in a series of battles fought March 29 – April 9, 1865, that became known as the Appomattox Campaign.

Recommended for reading in full:

Domenico Martanaro reports Poll: After Barr Letter, Overwhelming Majority Wants Full Mueller Report Released:

Days after Attorney General William Barr released his four-page summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation report, overwhelming majorities of Americans want the full report made public and believe Barr and Mueller should testify before Congress, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.

Only about a third of Americans believe, from what they’ve seen or heard about the Mueller investigation so far, that President Trump is clear of any wrongdoing.

Ronald Brownstein writes Trump’s Opponents Have One Assignment Now:

Trump has demonstrated that there is a substantial audience in the evolving Republican electoral coalition for a message that combines open appeals to white racial resentments and unrelenting attacks on “elites” with an undiluted commitment to the traditional goals of economic and social conservatives—from cutting taxes and eliminating environmental regulations, to opposing abortion and installing conservative justices on the Supreme Court. The appeal of that formula for significant elements of the GOP base would not disappear even if Trump were forced from office by one of the many investigations still swirling around him. Perhaps the only way other Republicans might be discouraged from following Trump’s volatile path is if voters show them that it’s an electoral dead end by repudiating it in 2020.

….

The GOP’s reliance on the white voters most uneasy about a changing America ensures that there will always be a substantial constituency inside the party for the backward-looking, racially divisive populism that Trump has synthesized. But a sliver of Republicans still share the perspective of the party’s famous “autopsy” report after Barack Obama’s reelection; that analysis concluded that the GOP must seek to engage with America’s growing minority population rather than try to mobilize more white support by portraying that diversity as a threat, as Trump has done. The sheer weight of demographic change could strengthen the “autopsy” position over time, especially if, through the coming years, it becomes clear that Trump’s approach has alienated too many other voters to win elections, as was the case in 2018.

(Fundamentally, this was always the primary assignment of Trump’s opposition: to consign him and his movement to the political outer darkness.)

  Kangaroo rats use lighting-fast ‘ninja-style’ kicks to avoid predators, researchers say:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of fifty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 7:16 PM, for 12h 34m 14s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 47.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1979, there was a partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania.

Recommended for reading in full:

Dan Alexander reports Trump Has Now Shifted $1.3 Million Of Campaign-Donor Money Into His Business:

Donald Trump has charged his own reelection campaign $1.3 million for rent, food, lodging and other expenses since taking office, according to a Forbes analysis of the latest campaign filings. And although outsiders have contributed more than $50 million to the campaign, the billionaire president hasn’t handed over any of his own cash. The net effect: $1.3 million of donor money has turned into $1.3 million of Trump money.

In December, Forbes reported on the first $1.1 million that President Trump moved from his campaign into his business. Since then, his campaign filed additional documentation showing that it spent another $180,000 at Trump-owned properties in the final three months of 2018.

None of this seemed likely when Donald Trump first got into politics. “I don’t need anybody’s money,” he announced on the day he launched his 2016 campaign, standing inside the marble atrium at Trump Tower. “I’m using my own money. I’m not using the lobbyists. I’m not using donors. I don’t care. I’m really rich.”

Drew Harwell and Tony Romm report ICE is tapping into a huge license-plate database, ACLU says, raising new privacy concerns about surveillance:

Immigration agents have been tapping into a vast, privately maintained database of license plate numbers gleaned from vehicles across the United States to track down people who may be in the country illegally, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and released Wednesday.

The database contains billions of records on vehicle locations captured from red-light and speed-limit cameras as well as from parking lots and toll roads that use the nearly ubiquitous and inexpensive scanners to monitor vehicle comings and goings.

Local police forces have long used those scanners to track criminal suspects and enforce traffic laws across the United States. But the records the ACLU obtained from the Department of Homeland Security through a Freedom of Information Act request shed new light on a little-noticed and expanding network of surveillance that has developed over the years and for which there appear to be few legal limitations.

The revelation drew sharp criticism from Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, who said the mere notion of “a massive, for-profit location-tracking database is about the worst idea I have ever heard of when it comes to Americans’ privacy and security.”

“There needs to be strong rules around how sensitive data like this is stored and controlled – location data of millions of Americans is a ripe target for predators, domestic abusers, and foreign spies,” he said in a statement.

  Twilight Zone: The True Story:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 7:15 PM, for 12h 31m 20s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 56.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1939, the University of Oregon defeats Ohio State University 46–33 on this day in 1939 to win the first-ever NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

Recommended for reading in full:

Paul Farhi reports Rachel Maddow, the left’s powerhouse on cable, won’t let the Mueller probe go:

A day after Attorney General William P. Barr said special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III hadn’t found collusion between President Trump’s campaign and Russian agents, Maddow — prime-time TV’s primary and most tenacious proponent of the conspiracy angle — still was not buying it.

Instead, Maddow moved on to two related questions: Did Trump obstruct justice? And did Barr let him get away with it?

“Whatever information [Barr] just received from Robert Mueller about the president’s behavior as it pertains to potential criminal obstruction of justice, Barr could have just passed that information on to [Congress] for them to decide what to do with it,” Maddow said on her MSNBC program Monday night. “But instead, somewhat inexplicably, he decided to take it upon himself to declare definitively, ‘Yeah, you know, I looked at all that stuff, and I can tell you there is no crime there, it’s fine.’?”

She added: “Where did this come from? I mean, on what grounds are you saying that you have concluded there is no crime here?”

Maddow’s monologue suggests that she is unmoved by the many attacks on her for promoting a Russia conspiracy that, at least according to the attorney general, seems to have run aground. Her nightly deconstructions of the case against Trump have made her the signal figure of the anti-Trump left and have abetted her rise to the most popular figure in cable news.

….

As a parallel, she noted that Leon Jaworski, the special prosecutor in the Watergate investigation of President Richard Nixon, turned over his report to Congress in 1974, including damning grand-jury testimony against Nixon, without drawing conclusions about the president’s potential criminality.

She demanded the release of Mueller’s full report and underlying evidence, an idea the House endorsed unanimously earlier this month. She also raised 15 questions about Barr’s conduct, including the last, “Will Trump recognize Russia attacked our election?”

In all, it strongly suggested Maddow is not finished with Trump and the continuing investigations into his presidency.

(Good for her – there’s no reason to yield in the absence of a full and complete disclosure of the reasoned basis of Mueller’s report.)

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 7:14 PM, for 12h 28m 24s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 66.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1881, civil war mascot Old Abe dies:

Old Abe, famous Civil War mascot, died from injuries sustained during a fire at the State Capitol. Old Abe was the mascot for Company C, an Eau Claire infantry unit that was part of the Wisconsin 8th Regiment. During the Capitol fire of 1881, smoke engulfed Old Abe’s cage. One of his feathers survived and is in the Wisconsin Historical Museum. [Source: Wisconsin Lore and Legends, pg. 51]

Recommended for reading in full:

Thomas Heath reports Trump blames Fed for sub-4 percent growth; economists blame Trump:

Economists cast doubt on President Trump’s assertion in an interview aired Friday that the economy would have grown at a faster pace in 2018 — even as high as 4 percent — had the Federal Reserve not raised interest rates last year.

“If we didn’t have somebody that would raise interest rates and do quantitative tightening, we would have been at over 4 instead of a 3.1,” Trump said in a sit-down with anchor Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network.

The comments come just days after the Federal Reserve signaled it would not be raising rates again this year. The president has been critical of Fed Chairman Jerome H. Powell for the central bank’s gradual raising of interest rates — it did so four times last year. The president was reportedly so frustrated with his appointee that he asked internal and external advisers late last year whether he could fire Powell.

Economists say a 4 percent growth rate is difficult to reach.

”Four is just too high,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, referring to the gross domestic product. Even with the Fed’s four rate increases last year, “by any historic standard, monetary policy remains loose.”

….

Holtz-Eakin said Trump’s policies actually contributed to holding economic expansion in check.

“Most people believe that the combination of a government shutdown, trade tensions, things (Trump) is responsible for, caused the slowing economy in the second half of 2018. He can complain all he wants, but I am not sure the evidence is on his side.”

Phillip Swagel, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, said the U.S. economy would have grown faster had Trump had not initiated a trade war with China.

“I don’t know if it would have reached 4 percent, but it would have been stronger,” Swagel said.

  Economist Justin Wolfers writes of Stephen Moore, Trump’s latest nominee to the Federal Reserve:

Here’s my challenge to any informed voter of any partisan leaning: Call your favorite economist. Whether they’re left, right, libertarian or socialist, none of them will endorse Stephen Moore for the Fed. He’s manifestly unqualified.

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of forty-five.  Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 7:13 PM, for 12h 25m 30s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 76.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM.

On this day in 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire kills 146 garment workers in Greenwich Village.

Recommended for reading in full:

Neal K. Katyal – who drafted the special counsel regulations under which Robert Mueller was appointed – writes of The Many Problems With the Barr Letter:

But the critical part of the letter is that it now creates a whole new mess. After laying out the scope of the investigation and noting that Mr. Mueller’s report does not offer any legal recommendations, Mr. Barr declares that it therefore “leaves it to the attorney general to decide whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime.” He then concludes the president did not obstruct justice when he fired the F.B.I. director, James Comey.

Such a conclusion would be momentous in any event. But to do so within 48 hours of receiving the report (which pointedly did not reach that conclusion) should be deeply concerning to every American.

….

His letter says Mr. Mueller set “out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the special counsel views as ‘difficult issues’ of law and fact concerning whether the president’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction.” Yet we don’t know what those “difficult issues” were, because Mr. Barr doesn’t say, or why Mr. Mueller, after deciding not to charge on conspiracy, let Mr. Barr make the decision on obstruction.

….

On the law, Mr. Barr’s letter also obliquely suggests that he consulted with the Office of Legal Counsel, the elite Justice Department office that interprets federal statutes. This raises the serious question of whether Mr. Barr’s decision on Sunday was based on the bizarre legal views that he set out in an unsolicited 19-page memo last year.

That memo made the argument that the obstruction of justice statute does not apply to the president because the text of the statute doesn’t specifically mention the president. Of course, the murder statute doesn’t mention the president either, but no one thinks the president can’t commit murder. Indeed, the Office of Legal Counsel had previously concluded that such an argument to interpret another criminal statute, the bribery law, was wrong.

Mikhaila Fogel, Quinta Jurecic, Susan Hennessey, Matthew Kahn, and Benjamin Wittes consider What to Make of Bill Barr’s Letter: 

In other respects, however, Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report is ominous for the president. While Mueller did not find that Trump obstructed his investigation, he also made a point of not reaching the opposite conclusion: that Trump didn’t obstruct the investigation. Indeed, he appears to have created a substantial record of the president’s troubling interactions with law enforcement for adjudication in noncriminal proceedings—which is to say in congressional hearings that are surely the next step.

  What’s Going On With Tesla?:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see occasional rain and drizzle with a high of fifty-one.  Sunrise is 6:49 AM and sunset 7:12 PM, for 12h 22m 35s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 84.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1989, the Exxon Valdez runs aground and spills 10.8 million gallons (260,000 bbl) of oil into Prince William Sound, Alaska.

Recommended for reading in full:

  David A. Lieb reports GOP redistricting edge moderated Democrats’ 2018 gains, Associated Press analysis finds: 

The AP examined all U.S. House races and about 4,900 state House and Assembly seats up for election last year using a statistical method of calculating partisan advantage that is designed to flag cases of potential political gerrymandering. A similar analysis also showed a GOP advantage in the 2016 elections.

The AP used the so-called “efficiency gap” test in part because it was one of the analytical tools cited in a Wisconsin gerrymandering case that went before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 and is part of a North Carolina case scheduled to be argued on Tuesday before the court. In that case, justices will decide whether to uphold a lower court ruling that struck down North Carolina’s congressional districts as an unconstitutional political gerrymander favoring Republicans.

….

In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has repeatedly found a heavy GOP bias in the way the state’s 99 Assembly districts were drawn after the 2010 Census, using a different way of measuring the gerrymander than the “efficiency gap.”

In each election from 2012 through 2018, the Wisconsin legislative map has all but ensured Republican control of the Assembly even in years when there are significantly more voters voting Democratic statewide.

Under the GOP-drawn map, more than 60 percent of the Assembly seats are more Republican in their makeup than the state as a whole, giving the party a large “baked-in” edge for legislative control.

Some of the map’s partisan tilt reflects the concentration of Democratic voters in urban areas, especially Milwaukee and Madison. But much of the GOP tilt is a direct byproduct of the way the districts were drawn in 2011 to maximize the number of seats with a Republican tilt.

The efficiency gap analysis showed more states with a Republican edge than a Democratic one in their U.S. and state House districts.

Yet “when you look at the nation as a whole, it’s not just a radically tilted map,” said Eric McGhee, a researcher at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California who developed the efficiency gap model. “It’s more that in these certain key states, they’re paving the way for things to be much worse in the future” through gerrymandering.

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