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.)

  Spinning Water Droplets That Seemingly Defy Physics:

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.

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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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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of fifty-three.  Sunrise is 6:51 AM and sunset 7:11 PM, for 12h 19m 39s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 91.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1865, Wisconsinites defending the Union finish fighting in North Carolina:

On this date, the 21st Wisconsin Infantry, made up mostly of soldiers from the Oshkosh area, finished fighting their way through the South during Sherman’s March to the Sea and reached Goldsboro, N.C., where the campaign in the Carolinas ended. Its veterans reunited 40 years later in Manitowoc.

Recommended for reading in full:

  In February, Mikhaila Fogel, Susan Hennessey, Quinta Jurecic, and Benjamin Wittes offered Four Principles for Reading the Mueller Report:

First, in the absence of some glaring or obvious reason to reject them, people should be prepared to accept Mueller’s prosecutorial judgments. Mueller and his team are not 13 angry Democrats today, and they will not be 13 corrupt Republicans tomorrow. They are professionals who have had access to the best factual record anyone is likely to see. The determination of whether to charge—or not to charge—a given person is an informed professional judgment entitled to the presumption of regularity. The indictments that the special counsel has brought to date are all cases in which other reasonable prosecutors in Mueller’s shoes would have likewise pursued charges. To the extent the cases have been litigated, Mueller has prevailed; there is no indication that he has brought cases that were not substantially merited.

….

Second, people should also accept the factual record described in the report in the absence of specific reason to doubt it. This does not mean that Mueller is some kind of deity, whose word on factual matters is infallible. It is, however, a recognition that Mueller has had the benefit of an elite staff of lawyers and investigators who have had access to an array of witnesses and documents and intelligence available to nobody else. This means, quite simply, that he knows more than everyone else does and is thus in a position to change the working factual record dramatically, whereas onlookers can only argue about the existing record or—in the case of investigative reporters and congressional committees—inch it forward at the margins.

….

Third—and this point significantly qualifies the previous one—the report only covers what it covers. There may be many lines of inquiry the public feels are relevant to L’Affaire Russe, or to ethical and legal questions about the president and his family more generally, that are not within the scope of the Mueller report. The report itself will likely address a far narrower set of questions.

….

Fourth, a decision not to prosecute does not necessarily resolve questions of morality, ethics or impeachability.

(Emphasis in original.)

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of forty-five.  Sunrise is 6:53 AM and sunset 7:09 PM, for 12h 16m 43s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1765, Britain passes the Stamp Act with an effective date of November 1, 1765:

an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain that imposed a direct tax on the British colonies and plantations in America and required that many printed materials in the colonies be produced on stamped paper produced in London, carrying an embossed revenue stamp.[1][2] Printed materials included legal documents, magazines, playing cards, newspapers, and many other types of paper used throughout the colonies. Like previous taxes, the stamp tax had to be paid in valid British currency, not in colonial paper money.[3]

Recommended for reading in full:

In a comment last night, Joe highlights the big developments on Thursday in Wisconsin politics (and law, truly).  The first of those was developments was an injunction against legislation from last year’s lame-duck session.  A story and the decision and order in that case (one of four challenging the lame-duck session) appear below.

  Mark Sommerhauser reports Judge blocks GOP lame-duck laws limiting Tony Evers’ powers; Evers seeks to remove Wisconsin from Obamacare challenge:

In a rebuke to Republican legislators, a Dane County judge on Thursday blocked enforcement of laws enacted in December that curtailed the powers of the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general.

Immediately after the ruling, Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul sought to do at least one thing the laws had barred: withdrawing Wisconsin from multi-state legal challenges to the federal health care law known as Obamacare.

Republican legislative leaders promised to swiftly appeal the ruling, issued Thursday morning by Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess. They contend it throws state government into chaos by raising questions about the validity of laws passed in prior extraordinary sessions.

….

But such sessions are not authorized by the state Constitution or state law, Niess wrote in his ruling. The Legislature adopted a joint rule permitting them in the 1977 session, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau.

“There can be no justification for enforcement of the unconstitutional legislative actions emanating from the December 2018 ‘extraordinary session’ that is consistent with the rule of law,” Niess wrote.

In addition to the lame-duck laws, Niess’ ruling also vacates, during the session, 82 nominees and appointees to state boards and councils made by former Gov. Scott Walker.

Hours after the ruling on Thursday afternoon, Kaul asked federal judges to dismiss Wisconsin from two anti-Obamacare lawsuits the state backed under former GOP Attorney General Brad Schimel. It remained unclear late Thursday when federal courts might grant Kaul’s requests.

See Decision and Order:

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of fifty-one.  Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 7:08 PM, for 12h 13m 48s of daytime.  The moon is full with 99.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1965, the third Selma to Montgomery civil rights march begins:

On Sunday, March 21, close to 8,000 people assembled at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church to commence the trek to Montgomery.[90] Most of the participants were black, but some were white and some were Asian and Latino. Spiritual leaders of multiple races, religions, and creeds marched abreast with Dr. King, including Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Greek Orthodox Archbishop Iakovos, Rabbis Abraham Joshua Heschel and Maurice Davis, and at least one nun, all of whom were depicted in a photo that has become famous.[68]

Recommended for reading in full:

Patrick Marley reports In Wisconsin gerrymandering case, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos refuses to testify:

MADISON – Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is refusing to testify in Wisconsin’s gerrymandering case, opening a new front in a long-running legal battle over how election maps are drawn.

The Rochester Republican and his attorneys refused to accept a subpoena, turn over documents and agree to have him sit for a deposition because they maintain he is immune from civil legal actions. Democrats suing over the maps filed court documents late Tuesday asking a panel of federal judges to force Vos to testify.

“Assembly members, including Speaker Vos, have waived any claim to legislative immunity in this case by intervening as a defendant and actively participating in the litigation, including filing motions and discovery requests,” attorney Ruth Greenwood wrote in her filing.

An attorney for Vos rejected that argument.

“Subpoenaing Speaker Vos diverts time, energy, and attention away from legislative tasks and disrupts the important work of the Wisconsin Legislature,” attorney Kevin St. John wrote in a letter to Greenwood last month.

(Vos is too busy to discuss the gerrymandering that sustains his political power.)

Anna Andrianova reports Russia Ditches Income Data That Has Slumped for Five Years:

Russia will stop publishing monthly data that’s shown a slump in disposable incomes for five straight years after the indicator was criticized for using methodology that’s decades out of date.

The Federal Statistics Service will start releasing quarterly income data starting next month and historical numbers will be recalculated going back to 2013, head Pavel Malkov said at a briefing with journalists in Moscow. The new methodology will include data on online sales and sales from smaller retailers among other things, he added.

The statistics service, known as Rosstat, comes under regular fire for the quality of its data, especially after growth numbers for 2018 released last month massively outstripped economist estimates. The Economy Ministry took control nearly two years ago and Malkov, a former economy ministry official, was appointed head late last year to address issues including the collection of primary data.

‘Particle’ robots: The bio-inspired bots that move with no brain: