Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will see rain and snow with a high of forty-two.  Sunrise is 5:53 AM and sunset 7:51 PM, for 13h 57m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 44.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1963, Dave Brubeck performs at Beloit College.  Here’s The Dave Brubeck Quartet – Take Five – at Carnegie Hall from that same year:

Recommended for reading in full:

Adam Serwer, from 2017, offers a reminder of The Myth of the Kindly General Lee (“The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed”):

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.

….

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.

But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”

Patrick Marley and Kevin Crowe report Overtime for state workers tops $80 million, with some Wisconsin employees more than doubling their pay:

MADISON – Overtime for state employees jumped 12% last year under a system that allowed dozens of employees to more than double their pay by routinely working long hours.

The state spent $80.9 million on overtime in 2018, or $8.7 million more than the $72.2 million it spent in 2017, according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis of payroll data released under the state’s open records law.

More than three-fourths of the overtime — $63.6 million — was rung up at the Department of Corrections and Department of Health Services, which have struggled to keep employees at facilities that must be staffed around the clock.

That meant big paydays for employees willing to work long hours week in and week out, including a nurse who made nearly $217,000 last year.

(Scott Walker was as a fiscal conservative in the same way he was a ballerina.)

Inside One Of The Last Pinball Factories In The US:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-one.  Sunrise is 5:54 AM and sunset 7:50 PM, for 13h 55m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 54.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1865, the 10th Wisconsin Light Artillery musters out:

It had fought in the battles of Stones River, Resaca, Jonesboro, and Bentonville, the sieges of Corinth and Nashville, the Atlanta Campaign, and Sherman’s March to the Sea.

Recommended for reading in full:

Tom Hamburger reports House panel moves to hold former White House official in contempt after he obeys Trump administration’s instruction not to testify:

“The White House and [Trump Admin official] Mr. Kline now stand in open defiance of a duly authorized congressional subpoena with no assertion of any privilege of any kind by President Trump,” [Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Elijah] Cummings said in a statement. “Based on these actions, it appears that the President believes that the Constitution does not apply to his White House, that he may order officials at will to violate their legal obligations, and that he may obstruct attempts by Congress to conduct oversight.”

Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler write Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too (“A Twitter employee who works on machine learning believes that a proactive, algorithmic solution to white supremacy would also catch Republican politicians”):

In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.

The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.

There is no indication that this position is an official policy of Twitter, and the company told Motherboard that this “is not [an] accurate characterization of our policies or enforcement—on any level.” But the Twitter employee’s comments highlight the sometimes overlooked debate within the moderation of tech platforms: are moderation issues purely technical and algorithmic, or do societal norms play a greater role than some may acknowledge?

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Twitter has not publicly explained why it has been able to so successfully eradicate ISIS [from the platform] while it continues to struggle with white nationalism. As a company, Twitter won’t say that it can’t treat white supremacy in the same way as it treated ISIS. But external experts Motherboard spoke to said that the measures taken against ISIS were so extreme that, if applied to white supremacy, there would certainly be backlash, because algorithms would obviously flag content that has been tweeted by prominent Republicans—or, at the very least, their supporters. So it’s no surprise, then, that employees at the company have realized that as well.

Why Did We Just Shoot A “Bullet” At An Asteroid?:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with an occasional afternoon shower and a high of seventy-one.  Sunrise is 5:56 AM and sunset 7:48 PM, for 13h 52m 33s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 64.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM and the Fire Department Board in closed session at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1996, Gov. Tommy Thompson signs W-2 (Wisconsin Works) into law.

Recommended for reading in full:

The Washington Post editorial board writes Sorry, Mr. President. Congress has every right to investigate you: 

“THERE IS no reason to go any further, and especially in Congress,” President Trump told Post reporters Tuesday, explaining why he was preparing to stonewall congressional requests for administration documents and testimony, possibly by invoking executive privilege. “We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” Trump said on Wednesday. “These aren’t like impartial people.”

If that were the standard, then Congress could never investigate anything. Mr. Trump’s Republican colleagues must remember the battles they fought with President Barack Obama over transparency only a few years ago when they ran the House. Mr. Obama asserted executive privilege to prevent then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. from turning over documents on the “Fast and Furious” gun-running scheme. Republicans held Mr. Holder in contempt of Congress.

As we said at the time, “No doubt a lot of congressional investigations are partisan fishing expeditions. For better or worse, that comes with the democratic territory. Absent very strong countervailing considerations — stronger than some of those the administration has asserted in this case — Congress is generally entitled to disclosure.” Democrats, too, are entitled to disclosure, particularly as they ask weighty questions about the potentially severe abuse of power in the top reaches of the White House.

Law professor J.W. Verret writes The Mueller Report Was My Tipping Point (“I was a Trump transition staffer, and I’ve seen enough. It’s time for impeachment”):

Depending on how you count, roughly a dozen separate instances of obstruction of justice are contained in the Mueller report. The president dangled pardons in front of witnesses to encourage them to lie to the special counsel, and directly ordered people to lie to throw the special counsel off the scent.

This elaborate pattern of obstruction may have successfully impeded the Mueller investigation from uncovering a conspiracy to commit more serious crimes. At a minimum, there’s enough here to get the impeachment process started. In impeachment proceedings, the House serves as a sort of grand jury and the Senate conducts the trial. There is enough in the Mueller report to commence the Constitution’s version of a grand-jury investigation in the form of impeachment proceedings.

The Founders knew that impeachment would be, in part, a political exercise. They decided that the legislative branch would operate as the best check on the president by channeling the people’s will. Congress has an opportunity to shape that public sentiment with the hearings ahead.

India’s Elections Last For 39 Days. Here’s Why:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of sixty-six.  Sunrise is 5:57 AM and sunset 7:47 PM, for 13h 49m 55s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 73.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Parks & Rec Board meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1977, the Morris Pratt Institute of Spiritualism Moves from Whitewater to Waukesha.

Recommended for reading in full:

Margaret Sullivan writes Mueller’s report proves why Trump loves Fox News — and why he needs it now more than ever:

It’s no secret that Fox News and the Trump administration are deeply entwined: They are the conjoined twins of misinformation.

So it hardly raised an eyebrow when the president took to Twitter on Thursday to urge everyone to tune in to Fox for Attorney General William P. Barr’s (misleading) prelude to the release of the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

The results were predictable: Fox’s early news coverage was somewhat straight — kept so largely by the presence of Fox’s designated truth-teller, Chris Wallace.

The follow-up coverage and commentary, though, was outlandishly one-sided, led by Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was allowed to spin frenetically for what seemed like endless minutes, offering such gems as “there’s not a single surprise” in the report.

….

Trump will need Fox News more than ever to fend off the undeniable truths of the report, which Dahlia Lithwick in Slate called a “highlights reel of things even the most casual observer already knew.”

To wit: “The Russians tried to steal the election. Some members of his campaign were happy to help. The president wanted to protect Michael Flynn. The president wanted to kill the special counsel investigation. The president materially and significantly tampered with witnesses to that investigation. The president lied and told others to lie.”

We knew this. As my colleague Paul Farhi documented, the Mueller report “largely validated news accounts that Trump dismissed or disparaged,” often with his favorite insult — that those accounts were nothing but fake news.

Jay Rosen describes the kind of ecosystem Trump wants – needs:

“It’s as if one-third of the public has been broken off from the rest of the electorate and isolated in an information system of its own.” @JayRosen_NYU calls this an “authoritarian news system” and says “we don’t always have the language we need to talk about it.”

How an Abandoned Whaling Station Turned Into a Penguin Paradise:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-four.  Sunrise is 5:59 AM and sunset 7:46 PM, for 13h 47m 17s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 81.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 7 AM and the Whitewater Board of Review meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1934, the FBI rousts gangster John Dillinger from the Little Bohemia Lodge in Vilas County.

Recommended for reading in full:

Bess Levin reports Dow Chemical Donates $1 Million to Trump, Asks Administration to Ignore Pesticide Study:

Chlorpyrifos, diazinon, and malathion are a group of pesticides that are a big money-maker for Dow Chemical, with the company selling approximately 5 million pounds of chlorpyrifos in the U.S. each year, according to the Associated Press. Dow Chemical, however, has a small problem on its hands, and it’s not the fact that the pesticide was “originally derived from a nerve gas developed by Nazi Germany,” per the AP, though that’s certainly not great for marketing materials. In this case, it’s the fact that studies by federal scientists have found that chlorpyrifos, diazinon, and malathion are harmful to almost 1,800 “critically threatened or endangered species.” Historically, groups like the Environmental Protection Agency would want to avoid killing frogs, fish, birds, mammals, and plants, which is why the regulator and two others that it works with to enforce the Endangered Species Act are reportedly “close to issuing findings expected to result in new limits on how and where the highly toxic pesticides can be used,” the AP reports.

Luckily for Dow, the E.P.A. is now run by climate-change skeptic and general enemy of living things Scott Pruitt, who last month said he would reverse “an Obama-era effort to bar the use of Dow’s chlorpyrifos pesticide on food after recent peer-reviewed studies found that even tiny levels of exposure could hinder the development of children’s brains.” Plus, Dow Chemical C.E.O. Andrew Liveris is good buddies with President Donald Trump. So, you can see how the company, which the AP reports also spent $13.6 million on lobbying last year, might feel like it is in the clear.

According to the AP, lawyers representing Dow and two other companies that manufacture the pesticides in question (known as organophosphates) have sent letters to the heads of the E.P.A, the Department of Commerce, and the Fish and Wildlife Service, asking them to “set aside” the results of the studies, claiming that they are “fundamentally flawed.” Not surprisingly, the scientists hired by Dow “to produce a lengthy rebuttal to the government studies” have come up with diverging results.

….

Dow also donated $1 million to underwrite Trump’s inaugural festivities, the AP reports, but God help the person who dares to wonder aloud if the check was some sort of an attempt to curry favor with the administration. As Rachelle Schikorra, Dow’s director of public affairs, told the AP, any such suggestion is “completely off the mark.”

How Pinterest Makes Money:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will see afternoon thunderstorms with a high of seventy-seven.  Sunrise is 6:00 AM and sunset 7:45 PM, for 13h 44m 37s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 89.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

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

On this day in 1954, the televised portion of the Army-McCarthy hearings begins:

Chaired by Senator Karl Mundt, the hearings convened on March 16, 1954, and received considerable press attention, including gavel-to-gavel live television coverage on ABC and DuMont (April 22–June 17). The media coverage, particularly television, greatly contributed to McCarthy’s decline in popularity and his eventual censure by the Senate the following December.

Recommended for reading in full:

Abigail Tracy reports The “Red Line” Investigations that Will Haunt Trump’s Presidency:

For Donald Trump, perhaps the most chilling moment in the Mueller report occurs on page 446, where the special counsel reveals that he has referred a total of 14 potential cases to other prosecutors. Because while Robert Mueller was given a limited mandate to investigate the Trump-Russia affair, special counsel investigations have a habit of unearthing other, unrelated criminality in the process. Perhaps that is why, when Trump first learned that Mueller had been appointed, according to the report, he slumped back in his chair and exclaimed, “I’m fucked.”

What flashed through Trump’s mind in that moment—his sprawling business empire, his byzantine taxes, his hush-money payments to a porn star—is unknown. Indeed, 12 of the 14 referrals that Mueller outsourced were redacted and remain shrouded in secrecy. (The two public referred cases involve Michael Cohen, the president’s former fixer, and a false-statement case against Democratic attorney and lobbyist Gregory Craig.) But, with investigations churning in Congress, in New York, and in Washington, D.C., it is clear that Trump’s nightmare is just beginning. Below is an accounting of the known legal threats Trumpworld has yet to grapple with. [Tracy lists all 14.]

Lachlan Markay reports Russian State Media Binges on Fox Prime Time and Sean Hannity Reruns:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report implicated the Russian government in a widespread campaign of hacking and political disinformation during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Russian state media is nonetheless trumpeting the reaction of U.S. conservativesto the report, which found that the Trump campaign was not complicit in those election-meddling efforts, as evidence of a broad anti-Russian conspiracy in the U.S. And it’s using at least one prominent American conservative voice to do so.

The Russian government-owned Rossiya 1 news channel recently broadcasted excerpts from Fox News primetime host Sean Hannity’s on-air monologue, which hammered “media hysteria” over the report and allegations of campaign “collusion” with the Russian government.

In its own editorializing, Rossiya 1 described the report as “bestseller about the absence of collusion between Trump and Russia,” and blamed the political press and U.S. intelligence agencies for “hounding Trump” over the allegations, according to a translation by journalist and Daily Beast contributor Julia Davis.

 Protecting the Future of Rock Lobster Fishing: