Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with a likelihood of afternoon rain, and a high of sixty-one. Sunrise is 5:51 AM and sunset 7:52 PM, for 14h 01m 33s. The moon is a waxing crescent with 5.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred seventy-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

The Downtown Whitewater board of directors is scheduled to meet at 8 AM.

A mutiny on the HMS Bounty takes place on this day in 1789, as “Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian [and] disaffected crewmen seize control of the ship from their captain, Lieutenant William Bligh, and set him and 18 loyalists adrift in the ship’s open launch.” On this day in 1862, the 5th Wisconsin Infantry takes part in a reconnaissance at Lee’s Mill, Virginia.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jacob Carpenter and Dave Umhoefer report that 3 Milwaukee County Jail staffers point fingers at others in dehydration death: “Three Milwaukee County Jail staffers blamed each other Thursday for failing to document the shutoff of an inmate’s water seven days before he died of dehydration. A corrections lieutenant and two officers all said they believed a co-worker had noted in jail logs that staff cut off the water in inmate Terrill Thomas’ solitary confinement cell. Without the notation, other corrections officers and supervisors had no way of knowing Thomas was deprived of water. The testimony came on the fourth day of the inquest into the death of Thomas, 38, whose untreated bipolar disorder rendered him incapable of asking for help. An inquest is a rarely used legal procedure that allows prosecutors to question witnesses under oath in public before they decide whether to criminally charge anybody over a death. A jury hears the testimony and issues an advisory verdict on whether there’s probable cause to file charges.”

Thomas Kaplan and Robert Pear report that Health Bill Vote Scrapped for Now as G.O.P. Support Wanes: “The lost opportunity was perhaps the biggest blow to the future prospects of Reince Priebus, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, who has a long relationship with Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin. Mr. Priebus had pushed aggressively for the House to schedule a vote this week, according to several people who spoke with him within the West Wing and on Capitol Hill. Earlier on Thursday, Mr. Ryan appeared to shy away from pushing for a fast vote. “We’re going to go when we have the votes,” he said, adding that Republicans would not be constrained by “some artificial deadline.” House Democrats, sensing an advantage, pressured Republicans to once again back away from the bill, just as they did a month ago in an embarrassing defeat for Mr. Trump and Mr. Ryan. Democratic leaders threatened to withhold votes from a stopgap spending measure to keep the government open past Friday if Republicans insisted on trying to jam the health care bill through the House on Friday or Saturday, which is Mr. Trump’s 100th day as president.”

Brian Stelter reports an Exclusive: Federal probe of Fox News expands: “The U.S. Justice Department’s investigation of Fox News has widened to include a second law enforcement agency. Financial crimes experts from the United States Postal Inspection Service are now involved, according to four sources connected to the investigation. Mail fraud and wire fraud cases are part of the USPIS purview. Investigators from both the USPIS and the Justice Department have been conducting interviews in recent weeks — including with some former Fox staffers — to obtain more information about the network’s managers and business practices, the sources said….In February the investigation was reported to be focusing on settlements made with women who alleged sexual harassment by former Fox News boss Roger Ailes, and questions about whether Fox had a duty to inform shareholders about the settlement payments. The investigators have been asking “how the shareholder money was spent; who knew; and who should have known,” one of the sources said.”

The Times considers President Trump’s Laughable Plan to Cut His Own Taxes: “the skimpy one-page tax proposal his administration released on Wednesday is, by any historical standard, a laughable stunt by a gang of plutocrats looking to enrich themselves at the expense of the country’s future. Two of Mr. Trump’s top lieutenants — Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, both multimillionaires and former Goldman Sachs bankers — trotted out a plan that would slash taxes for businesses and wealthy families, including Mr. Trump’s, in the vague hope of propelling economic growth. So as to not seem completely venal, they served up a few goodies for the average wage-earning family, among them fewer and lower tax brackets and a higher standard deduction. The proposal was so empty of illustrative detail that few people could even begin to calculate its impact on their pocketbooks. Further, depending on where they live, some middle-class families might not benefit much or at all, because the plan does away with important deductions like those for state and local taxes.”

Chicago Bears fans – and the rest of humanity, really – had trouble understanding why their team would go for a quarterback when a defensive player would be so useful. They expressed their surprise:

Bears fans are absolutely devastated pic.twitter.com/hrVG7VaRvF

— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) April 28, 2017

Good morning.

Whitewater’s Thursday will be rainy with a high of forty-eight. Sunrise is 5:52 AM and sunset 7:51 PM, for 13h 58m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred seventieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

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

Ulysses S. Grant is born this day in 1822. On this day in 1963, Dave Brubeck performs at Beloit College.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jacob Carpenter reports that a Milwaukee County Inmate’s dehydration death came after litany of errors, policy violations, ex-2nd-in-command says: “A litany of egregious errors and policy violations preceded the dehydration death of Milwaukee County Jail inmate Terrill Thomas, the jail’s former second-in-command testified Wednesday…. [Former deputy inspector Kevin] Nyklewicz, who has since retired from the sheriff’s office, said jail staff failed on numerous fronts. A lieutenant violated policy by ordering the shutoff of Thomas’ water and failing to document it. Officers never contacted a psychiatric social worker after Thomas stripped off his clothes and shouted incoherently for days. Shift supervisors never intervened after daily required checks of inmates like Thomas in solitary confinement. “I can’t believe that someone would walk through there and not see or not question anything,” Nyklewicz said. Nyklewicz’s testimony followed questioning of other witnesses about another problem in the case: the failure to preserve surveillance video. Jail staff only recovered video showing the second half of Thomas’ weeklong stint on the solitary confinement wing. The missing portion would have shown who shut off Thomas’ water — though other jail staff members have identified who they believe gave the order and who carried it out.”

Charles Lane observes that Trump has set out to protect lumber workers. Instead, he’s helping lobbyists: “Thus did the president renew a trade dispute that has raged intermittently ever since 1982, when the U.S. softwood-lumber industry complained to the Reagan administration about increasing Canadian imports of this key home-building input. Whatever else this struggle has achieved, it has kept a small army of trade associations and law firms fully employed in the nation’s capital. Fighting Canadian lumber “dumping” is the raison d’être of the U.S. Lumber Coalition, founded in 1985 and headquartered — where else? — on K Street. Meanwhile, Canada’s wood products industry has its own Washington legal representatives, retained to draft contentious memorandums for the bureaucrats who adjudicate such matters at the Commerce Department. The average American’s stake in all of this — or the average Canadian’s, for that matter — is considerably less clear than the Trump administration’s rhetoric would imply.”

Jesse Drucker describes Bribe Cases, a Jared Kushner Partner and Potential Conflicts: “For much of the roughly $50 million in down payments [to purchase New York apartment buildings], Mr. Kushner turned to an undisclosed overseas partner. Public records and shell companies shield the investor’s identity. But, it turns out, the money came from a member of Israel’s Steinmetz family, which built a fortune as one of the world’s leading diamond traders. A Kushner Companies spokeswoman and several Steinmetz representatives say Raz Steinmetz, 53, was behind the deals. His uncle, and the family’s most prominent figure, is the billionaire Beny Steinmetz, who is under scrutiny by law enforcement authorities in four countries. In the United States, federal prosecutors are investigating whether representatives of his firm bribed government officials in Guinea to secure a multibillion dollar mining concession. In Israel, Mr. Steinmetz was detained in December and questioned in a bribery and money laundering investigation. In Switzerland and Guinea, prosecutors have conducted similar inquiries.”

Professor Andrew Reynolds, Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, describes Trump’s self-proclaimed terrorism expert’s likely fraudulent credentials:

“[Sebastian Gorka’s] dissertation is online and includes the ‘evaluations’ of three referees who each presented a page of generalized comments – completely at odds with the detailed substantive and methodological evaluations that I’ve seen at every Ph.D defence I’ve been on over the last twenty years.

Two of the three referees did not even have a Ph.D. One was the US Defense Attaché at the American Embassy in Budapest at the time, while the other was employed at the UK’s Defence Academy and just had a BA from Manchester University awarded in 1969. This ‘neutral’ examiner had published a book in Hungary with Gorka three years previously. While graduate students sometimes collaborate with their advisors the independent external examiners must have no nepotistic ties with the candidate. More important, a basic principle of assessing educational achievement is that your examiners have at least the degree level of the degree they are awarding. Undergraduates do not award Ph.Ds. In Gorka’s case the only examiner who lists a doctorate was György Schöpflin – an extreme right wing Hungarian Member of the European Parliament who recently advocated putting pigs heads on a fence on the Hungarian border to keep out Muslims. I have been told that Schöpflin was a family friend. Both Schöpflin and Gorka’s father[s] fled from Budapest to London in the 1950s and both moved in exile right-wing nationalist circles.

If that is true, we are left in sum with a degree that was awarded in absence – on the basis of a dissertation without basic political science methodological underpinnings – and apparently from an examining committee of two of Gorka’s diplomat friends, with only BA degrees; along with an old family friend, Schöpflin.

In sum, Gorka’s Ph.D is about as legitimate as if he had been awarded it by Trump University. Facts matter, but so does the gathering, synthesizing and creation of knowledge that is what we call ‘education.’ If you fake a Ph.D you are faking your credentials. He delivers provable untruths to the American public but is believed by many because he presents himself as an esteemed scholar of Islam. Gorka would never have got away with such hutzpah in the UK. Experience and scholarship work in harness to produce answers to questions. When you have neither experience nor training you are likely to not merely get the answers wrong, but not even have an inkling of which questions to ask.”

Sometimes a lion’s had enough:

Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will bring thunderstorms and a high of seventy. Sunrise is 5:54 AM and sunset 7:50 PM, for 13h 56m 25s of daytime. We’ve a new moon today. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred sixty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1986, a catastrophic nuclear accident at the occurs at reactor No.4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat, in the Soviet Union. 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. In three years the battery lost only 28 men, three killed in combat and 25 from disease.”

Recommended for reading in full —

M.B. Pell, Joshua Schneyer, and Andy Sullivan report that Hundreds more lead hotspots are identified as Trump prepares to gut programs: “An ongoing Reuters investigation has found another 449 areas around the U.S. with lead exposure rates double those found in Flint. But cities across the country say pending federal budget cuts could imperil efforts to eradicate the toxic metal. “If they go and snatch these funds away, where are we going to get help from?” [Mother of three Laicie] Manzella said. It’s a question being asked in cities across the United States bracing for cuts in programs that identify and eradicate lead poisoning hazards. Awareness of lead poisoning escalated following Flint’s crisis, and more recently from Reuters reporting that has identified more than 3,300 areas with childhood lead poisoning rates at least double those found in the Michigan city. Some of the areas slated to be hit hardest supported Trump in November’s election, though he lost Erie County, where Buffalo is the county seat.”

Lisa Rein reports that the Slow pace of Trump nominations leaves Cabinet agencies ‘stuck’ in staffing limbo: “The Senate has confirmed 26 of Trump’s picks for his Cabinet and other top posts. But for 530 other vacant senior-level jobs requiring Senate confirmation, the president has advanced just 37 nominees, according to data tracked by The Washington Post and the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service’s Center for Presidential Transition. These posts include the deputy secretaries and undersecretaries, chief financial officers, ambassadors, general counsels, and heads of smaller agencies who run the government day-to-day.”

Christine Hauser reports that Chobani Yogurt Sues Alex Jones Over Sexual Assault Report: “The suit, filed on Monday in district court in Twin Falls County, Idaho, named Mr. Jones and the media companies InfoWars and Free Speech Systems as defendants. It called “false” and “defamatory” several reports that appeared on InfoWars alleging that the company’s factory in Idaho, which employs refugees, was connected to a 2016 child sexual assault and a rise in tuberculosis cases. The reports were published April 11 on InfoWars.com and on “The Alex Jones Channel” on YouTube. They were promoted on Twitter under the headline “Idaho Yogurt Maker Caught Importing Migrant Rapists,” and were spread widely online. The founder of Chobani, Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish immigrant of Kurdish descent, has been the target of right-wing threats by people who accuse him of employing too many refugees in his factories, which began as a yogurt business in upstate New York and expanded to Twin Falls, a city of about 46,500 south of Boise.”

Jane Eisner observes that Ivanka And Jared Are Spectacularly Unqualified — And Why That Matters: “To cite a recent New York Times story, they “have emerged as President Trump’s most important advisers, at least for now.” And surely the most unqualified ones to ever hold such august positions. But that last part doesn’t seem to matter. Because beyond everything else — the astonishing conflicts of interest and the continued, brazen self-enrichment — these two represent the end of any expectation that expertise is required for government work. Even in a Cabinet that is viewed as the most inexperienced in American history, the president’s daughter and son-in-law stand out for having neither the knowledge nor the experience to reasonably pursue any of the many missions they have been given. They have never sought or held public office, never worked in the civic sphere, never served in the military, never helped craft policy, never made their own name or their own millions — never done anything, really, but follow in the footsteps of their rapacious fathers and build on what they were bequeathed.”

What it’s like to go to a cherry blossom festival in Japan? It’s like this —

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 5:55 AM and sunset 7:49 PM, for 13h 53m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 1.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred sixty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1507, German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller first publishes a map to use the name “America” (in honor of Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci). On this day in 1996, Thompson signs the W-2 (Wisconsin Works) program into law.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jacob Carpenter reports on the contention of Prosecutors: Inmate’s water cut off for 7 days before his death in the Milwaukee County Jail: “Terrill Thomas spent seven straight days holed up in a solitary confinement cell with no running water, slowly withering away. Thomas started the weeklong stretch at the Milwaukee County Jail belligerent and loud, the result of an untreated mental illness, prosecutors said. But as the days wore on, he grew weak and dehydrated. He lost nearly 35 pounds and turned quiet, never asking for or receiving medical attention. Barely two hours into his eighth day in solitary, jail staff found Thomas, 38, dead on his jail cell floor, the result of profound dehydration.”

Rebecca Ballhaus reports that Americans Back Immigration and Trade at Record Levels: “Six in 10 Americans said immigration helps the nation more than it hurts—up 6 points since the last sounding, in September 2016. One-third of people in the survey said immigration hurts more than it helps. The result, which marks the highest level of support for immigration dating to at least 2005, comes as Mr. Trump is asking lawmakers to fund a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico and has twice signed executive orders, blocked by federal courts, suspending entry from certain countries. Support for free trade rose slightly in the latest survey, with 57% saying it is beneficial for the U.S. and 37% saying it isn’t—a gap of 20 points, and a record level of support. In July 2016, views of free trade as beneficial outweighed those who saw it as harmful by 17 percentage points.”

Amy Goldstein and Scott Clement report that the Public pans Republicans’ latest approach to replacing Affordable Care Act: “In strategy and substance, the American public disagrees with the course that President Trump and congressional Republicans are pursuing to replace the Affordable Care Act with conservative policies, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Large majorities oppose the ideas at the heart of the most recent GOP negotiations to forge a plan that could pass in the House. These would allow states to choose whether to keep the ACA’s insurance protection for people with preexisting medical problems and its guarantee of specific health benefits. Public sentiment is particularly lopsided in favor of an aspect of the current health-care law that blocks insurers from charging more or denying coverage to customers with medical conditions. Roughly 8 in 10 Democrats, 7 in 10 independents and even a slight majority of Republicans say that should continue to be a national mandate, rather than an option for states to retain or drop.”

Nadja Popovich reports that Today’s Energy Jobs Are in Solar, Not Coal: “Last year, the solar industry employed many more Americans than coal, while wind power topped 100,000 jobs. Those numbers come from a Department of Energy report published in January by the Obama administration that provides the most complete picture available of American energy employment. In 2016, 1.9 million Americans were employed in electric power generation, mining and other fuel extraction activities, according to the report – a field we’ll call power creation for short. More than 373,000 Americans worked part or full time in solar energy, and just over 260,000 of them – or about 70 percent – spent a majority of their time on solar projects.”

Great Big Story describes Preserving One Square Inch of Silence:

Preserving One Square Inch of Silence from Great Big Story on Vimeo.

Gordon Hempton is on a personal quest to preserve silence in nature. The “sound-tracker” circles the globe recording vanishing sounds, including the most elusive one of all: silence. In 2005, Hempton resolved to find the quietest place in Washington’s Hoh rainforest, itself a haven of silence. According to Hempton, the area he found is precisely one square inch. But that little area of quiet—which holds incredible value for the Earth—is endangered. Now, Hempton is determined to protect it from noise pollution like overpassing jets, lest we lose one of our country’s last remaining silent places.

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-one. Sunrise is 5:57 AM and sunset 7:48 PM, for 13h 51m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 5.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred sixty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater will hold a public reception for candidates for its open parks & recreation director position from 3:30 – 5:30 PM. Whitewater’s school board meets today beginning at 6 PM in closed session, with an open session beginning at 7 PM.

On this day in 1800, the Library of Congress is established, as part of legislation that “appropriated $5,000 “for the purchase of such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress …, and for fitting up a suitable apartment for containing them….” Books were ordered from London and the collection, consisting of 740 books and 3 maps, was housed in the new Capitol.” On this day in 1977, the Morris Pratt Insititute, dedicated to the study of spiritualism and mediumship, moves from Whitewater to Waukesha.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Rick Barrett reports that Milk plants asked to help save Wisconsin dairy farms: “Mullins Cheese, which says it’s the largest family-owned and operated cheese factory in Wisconsin, has tossed a lifeline to eight dairy farms that were at risk of closing from a trade dispute with Canada. “My field staff looked at them and said, ‘My gosh, these are great, wonderfully kept farms,’” said Bill Mullins, the Mosinee cheese company’s vice president. “I had an opportunity to help a few of them.” But while Mullins has stepped up and signed contracts to buy the milk from eight family-owned dairy operations, dozens of others haven’t been as fortunate. They face a May 1 deadline for when they no longer have a milk processor and could be forced to shut down. Grassland Dairy Products of Greenwood said it’s dropping the farms because the company lost millions of dollars in business when Canada changed its milk pricing policies in a way that favors Canadian farmers to the detriment of U.S. milk producers. State and federal lawmakers in the U.S. have been urgently seeking short-term solutions along with an investigation of trade pacts with Canada.”

Tim Mak reports that the Senate Trump-Russia Probe Has No Full-Time Staff, No Key Witnesses: “The Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe into Russia’s election interference is supposedly the best hope for getting the public credible answers about whether there was any coordination between the Kremlin and Trump Tower. But there are serious reasons to doubt that it can accomplish this task, as currently configured. More than three months after the committee announced that it had agreed on the scope of the investigation, the panel has not begun substantially investigating possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, three individuals with ties to the committee told The Daily Beast. The investigation does not have a single staffer dedicated to it full-time, and those staff members working on it part-time do not have significant investigative experience. The probe currently appears to be moving at a pace slower than prior Senate Intelligence Committee investigations, such as the CIA torture inquiry, which took years to accomplish. No interviews have been conducted with key individuals suspected of being in the Trump-Russia orbit: not Michael Flynn, not Roger Stone, not Carter Page, not Paul Manafort, and not Jared Kushner, according to two sources familiar with the committee’s procedures.”

Ashley Parker and Robert Costa report Inside Trump’s obsession with cable TV: “During a small working lunch at the White House last month, the question of job security in President Trump’s tumultuous White House came up, and one of the attendees wondered whether press secretary Sean Spicer might be the first to go. The president’s response was swift and unequivocal. “I’m not firing Sean Spicer,” he said, according to someone familiar with the encounter. “That guy gets great ratings. Everyone tunes in.” Trump even likened Spicer’s daily news briefings to a daytime soap opera, noting proudly that his press secretary attracted nearly as many viewers. For Trump — a reality TV star who parlayed his blustery-yet-knowing on-air persona into a winning political brand — television is often the guiding force of his day, both weapon and scalpel, megaphone and news feed. And the president’s obsession with the tube — as a governing tool, a metric for staff evaluation, and a two-way conduit with lawmakers and aides — has upended the traditional rhythms of the White House, influencing many spheres, including policy, his burgeoning relationship with Congress, and whether he taps out a late-night or early-morning tweet.”

Uri Friedman observes that Trump Was Wrong About France: “Following Thursday’s terrorist attack on the Champs-Elysees in Paris, which killed one police officer and wounded two others, Donald Trump made a prediction. “The people of France will not take much more of this,” he wrote on Twitter. “Will have a big effect on presidential election!”….Then Trump dispelled any doubt about his message. The attack, for which ISIS has claimed responsibility, will “probably help” Le Pen’s chances, the American president told the Associated Press, “because she is the strongest on borders and she is the strongest on what’s been going on in France.” (This despite the fact that the Champs-Elysees attacker was a French citizen ensconced well within French borders.)….Trump appears to have been proven wrong. On Sunday, in the first round of voting to elect the next French president, Macron eked out a victory against Le Pen and will now face her in a runoff election—results that mirror the way the polls looked just before the attack in Paris on Thursday. It’s too early to determine the extent to which the issue of terrorism influenced the vote. But what’s clearer is that the “big effect” Trump predicted never came.”

John Markoff writes that it’s No Longer a Dream: Silicon Valley Takes On the Flying Car: “CLEARLAKE, Calif. — On a recent afternoon, an aerospace engineer working for a small Silicon Valley company called Kitty Hawk piloted a flying car above a scenic lake about 100 miles north of San Francisco. Kitty Hawk’s flying car, if you insisted on calling it a “car,” looked like something Luke Skywalker would have built out of spare parts. It was an open-seated, 220-pound contraption with room for one person, powered by eight battery-powered propellers that howled as loudly as a speedboat. The tech industry, as we are often told, is fond of disrupting things, and lately the automakers have been a big target. Cars that use artificial intelligence to drive themselves, for example, have been in development for a few years and can be spotted on roads in a number of cities. And now, coming onto the radar screen, are flying machines that do not exactly look like your father’s Buick with wings. More than a dozen start-ups backed by deep-pocketed industry figures like Larry Page, a Google founder — along with big aerospace firms like Airbus, the ride-hailing company Uber and even the government of Dubai — are taking on the dream of the flying car.”